Different directions and some of the worst tragedies on the planet, but you chose to really focus on a small town in oregon. Why . We were running around the world covering humanitarian crises and then we would periodically go back to my beloved hometown where my mom is still on the family farm and we saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding there. A quarter of the kids on my old Number Six School bus are now gone from drugs and alcohol and suicide and carolyn i tried to process that. The guys who got on the bus right after me were the map kid kids. Nathan and keelan and their sister regina, smart, talented kids. One died in a house fire passed out drunk, another blew himself up cooking math and regina died from hepatitis from shooting up. So for a while we wondered is there something about my bus, about yamhill and then we realize this is a National Problem that we have been in despair and the Life Expectancy has been falling for three years of a row and its a microcosm to see that panic and champagne across america. You saw this through the lens of visiting home and i think this could be entitled school bus six. So many memories were drawn from your time there and you grew up in manhattan on the Upper West Side and thats a whole different world and early in your relationship you got to see yamhill and you saw it unfolding over these past couple decades. How did the lens from what you saw it differ from what nick was seeing. First of all i dont think you can get further from yamhill then manhattan. I grew up on the Upper West Side and it really is smack in the urban world. So when i first approached yamhill i was a little bit, what are these people like. [inaudible] it was hard the first time she came on the farm. But it was basically listen to whats going on right now is a tale of two americas. On the top deck of the vote theres a party going on. On the bottom is where all these people are struggling trying to figure out what to do and how to stay afloat. I think manhattan, in many ways, the people of manhattan, many of them are in that party and they just dont know whats going on in the lower deck. For me it took a while, once i started learning these people and meeting them in learning about their backgrounds and talking to them, i realize they are very complicated human beings and the stories that we learned about their household in the background and the journeys they took, really was so alarming and so touching and heartbreaking that we just couldnt help. [inaudible] so you moved between the upper deck and the lower deck and whats going on below and your book uses another analogy, the tight rope. In some of my speeches and in congress i talk about trying to pave a wide path for families to thrive, and here its not just a narrow path, but a tight rope. What are you conveying by that. Absolutely. The whole point is that some of those of us in the uppermiddleclass and above who are very well educated, at least graduated from high school and some college, we have a path, fairly wide path ahead of us. So if we fall we can pick ourselves up, but these people at yamhill in the small towns around america and the rural areas around america, people are walking on a tight rope and one missing they fall. Theres no safety net. And their falling into a chaz him that you describe in this book as involving drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, suicide and its a pretty bleak picture. There is a dynamic that you wrestle with about well, is this personal responsibility, do we need to walk that tight rope better or is that there they got on the tight rout rope instead of a nice walking path so personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. What have you concluded. So, look, personal responsibility is absolutely real. I think we can make the case that progressives like myself sometimes dont fully appreciate that personal responsibility is real, that one has to give agency to people, but i think that over the last 50 years we have vastly overdone it and become kind of obsessed with this personal responsibility narrative, blaming the people who fall off the tight rope for the catastrophes that follow. At this point you can predict, with some accuracy, the outcomes of a newborn infant, and when you can do that, its not because that infant is making bad choices or showing irresponsibility, and so, look, we can have a personal responsibility conversation but if we do that lets have a conversation about our collective responsibility to try and help those who were on my bus number six. There are so many ways that can help them and benefit society. Paul ryan who you quote in the book says in our country the conditions of your birth do not determine the outcome of your life. In the book you introduced this term, or you share this term adverse childhood experiences, and what youre basically saying is if you have several adverse childhood experiences, your odds of succeeding drop dramatically, which you portray as the odds of being in poverty increased substantially, so explain how these childhood adversities really impact your personal life. Its pretty well documented by scientists who have analyzed the situation so many of us have had adverse childhood experience. Parents get divorced, theres a big move things that are traumatic for a child but when you pile up six, seven, eight, that can have a Significant Impact on a child specifically if they are between the age of zero and five. That is when the brain is developing at its most rapid pace for the rest of that persons life. Thats when our brain develops quickly. We think of children as being resilient, but you know something theyre not as resilient as we think. In fact, when there is stress in the house and violence and yelling and abuse, that create stress in the baby, and that means the cortisol hormone is coursing through that brain, and as that brain is growing, this cortisol impacts the develop of the brain architecture for this little baby so if this is not corrected, that babys brain is not going to develop properly. If we can address these issues early on, and there are treatments, there are ways using therapy, counseling, we can actually put that baby, that young child onto a better course so that we dont see them two decades later in poverty or in drugs or dropping out of college. Or high school even. Its not just that. Its also not just the psychological trauma and troubles, its also health so, in fact, people who have stacked up aces are much more likely, later off in life, to have heart disease, chronic disease like diabetes. That is the huge cost on society as well. [inaudible] in thinking about the personal responsibility narrative or the trajectory that carol mentions, usually we talk about the success sequence, and its true, if somebody does three things they largely o avoid poverty. If they graduate from high school, get a fulltime job and then they have kids only after marrying and only 2 live in poverty if. If they do none of those. [inaudible] clearly those involve an element of bad choices, personal responsibility, but they also reflect what we as a society do. One reason, so American Kids have sex at the same rate as european but have babies three times more often because we dont make comprehensive Sex Education available and dont make Birth Control available. Our High School Graduation rates are substantially lower than those in many other countries because we dont place a premium on it. There are certainly ways we can shift this. Its not because American Kids are dumber than others are less diligent, and so, i think this obsession has neglected the public side of the equation, the policy side of the equation. So the odds are stacked against folks who are raised with these various stressors in childhood. I wanted to go back for just a moment to your conversation about how the brain is actually rewired. In what ways is that rewiring compromised when successes altered. A lot of it has to do with the development of the brain architecture. The cortisol, the stressor hormone, most of us as adults it happens for a little bit, then it goes away, it flows right through us but because the babys brain is developing rapidly at that time, and also because its so long, its much more fragile than we think that it really does impair the development. Does it make those children more susceptible to addiction, less able to have, if you will, a committed relationship or just multiple effects. Multiple effects, and they do show later on that all of these things that you talk about are also more likely to not graduate from high school. More likely to have things like adhd. A number of ailments that just make it harder for the child growing up to actually succeed so thats why pediatricians are so focused on trying to address aces and the new Surgeon General in california, thats. [inaudible] is there evidence from the university of oregon that all this cortisone. [inaudible] on the blackboard because they are being trained to look for potential threats behind them, and so that seems to be one pathway in which this cortisol impairs education and concentration. I believe that you note that warren buffett, the ovarian lottery and ive heard them speak if he had been born under different circumstances he wouldnt be a multibillionaire both because of the infrastructure that others established and because of the circumstances of his birth that is a path for him to do well so, its disturbing that in so many ways the United States, as a developed country, seems to be doing a poor job than other democracies, other republics that could have similar problems, and you note that with Drinking Water and Child Mortality and 61st on High School Enrollment and that we suffered more stress than the average person in venezuela and our Life Expectancy is dropping so heres the United States with our Congress Working on these issue, our state legislator and county commissioner is working on these issues. How is it that were having such terrific outcome. It is a tale of america. So on one hand we have all these Economic Statistics showing us gdp is doing well, stock market is rocket high so we look at these measures, inflation is low and we think were doing really, really well, but then if you actually peel behind the statistics and also look at other broader statistics you can see thats not the full picture. A lot of men, for instance have dropped out of the workforce so they wont even be counted. These men may be selfmedicating, they could be out of a job for a while, they dont have the confidence to jump back in and we interviewed a number of them in yamhill. You know that is whats happening. Theyre not even looking, and so theyre not going to be counted as looking. Then if you look at the Life Expectancy statistics, as nick mentioned, that is another broader measure, its because of these depths of despair which are three types of despair that are characterized by two economists at princeton and they looked at the census data and they saw that the depths of despair were related to alcoholism and Drug Overdose and suicide, record high suicide rates since world war ii, and yes they dropped a little bit, the Drug Overdose deaths dropped a little bit in 2018 so thats a good sign, but is still 58000 people who died from Drug Overdose. Thats not a small figure. That weighs on the entire nation average Life Expectancy. It was pretty dramatic. So we are seeing a very dramatic. [inaudible] to pave those good outcomes. Why is the United States not doing a better job in getting the ball off the tight. Getting people onto a solid paved road. I think this is really a 50 year erroneous course that the u. S. Took. I think it has something to do with nixon strategy in 1968 and a tendency to stigmatize investments in Human Capital and in benefit programs on the basis that there would be africanamericans who disproportionately benefit. I think that leads to underinvestment in Human Capital and in benefits across the u. S. I think it also relates to president reagans narrative where government can do no good and is invariably part of the problem, and glorification of business taking of power from labor unions, corporations, coupled with the war on drugs, mass incarceration. I think a few of these trends came together and so until the 1970s, the u. S. Was essentially in line with other countries. Our Life Expectancy was actually higher than the median, and then since 1970s, the other countries have surpassed us and i think the root cause is an underinvestment in american citizens. Developed countries similar to our own, and i only throw out a little bit of a thought because i see this through the lens of trying to change policy and government. What i am seeing that her institutions have been changing in ways that create power for the powerful. You do touch on this in your book. You know that one point that when you have high wealth divisions, the wealthy then have disproportionate political power which leads to rules that benefit the wealthy. Now if we think about America Today and the inequality that we are seeing between the rich and the poor, we are at a very high racial compared to these other countries. Is it possible that our inequality and wealth is influencing the clinical system in ways that is preventing us, if you will, investing in resources of fundamentals that paved the path for success were ordinary families. I think thats exactly right. You create this inequality that in itself perpetuates through the mechanism of economic power turning into political power. I think its a little bit similar to what happened in the golden age in american history, and i hope so because of course then aggressive ism followed. It took a world war and thats a little scary that it took that type of intervention to put us back on a path where really for the three decades after world war ii we had an investment in programs that really did lift up the middle class, not everyone, discrimination was still rampant in other sectors but we made some progress in that realm as well. In order to implement some of the various policy proposals that we will get to in a moment, do we need to change the structure of political power . While i do think that we need more enlightenment when it comes to the segment of society, and i think they are being totally ignored him apparently because everybody can point to the high gdp and theres no need to change anything because on average everything is going well, but if jeff walks into a room of a hundred people, everyone will have a higher level of wealth. [laughter] it doesnt make any different to the people who are not jeff. Thats the problem, just recognizing that there is this need to lift up all americans, and i think also its really important that maybe it helps policymakers to recognize that if the u. S. Wants to compete against the rest of the world, other countries with the billion plus people in power, we dont have that people power, especially we have much lefless if we dont try to lift up all americans and have as many as possible reaching their full potential to be productive and innovative and really bring america back to number one. I know my parents really talked about the sense of unity coming out of world war ii and they relayed how, in their lifetime they experienced this great leap forward. My mother came from extraordinary level of poverty. Her mother with her first three children, loss of three children to the county in the middle of the great depression, who could imagine my grandmother realizing that a grandson might serve in the u. S. Senate. Extraordinary change for both sides of the family. You describe in this book how the community saw much of this impact of moving forward during those years and how in roughly the mid 70s started to stall out and then decline. What happened in the mid 70s that started to drive this reversal. First of all, i think many people and probably in your hometown would attribute their past success to rugged individualism and certainly a lot of that, but frankly, historically, it was also a certain amount of brilliant government plans, the reason people came to places like yamhill was the homestead programs. Then places like that were transformed. The g. I. Bill of rights, likewise so i think those programs to invest in people and communities certainly helped. When things, potentially the root cause of things going downhill was good jobs going away. Biggest local employer in yamhill, greater yamhill area was a glove factory. It closed down and there were some new jobs that came in but the people that worked at the glove factory were not able to get those new jobs. Men in particular felt the loss of jobs not only in monetary sense but psychologically as well. Local institutions like churches were not able to handle the trauma, people self medicated, they got criminal records which made them less employable and less marriageable, Family Structure collapsed quite quickly and it unraveled very quickly. So we have the white manufacturing, we had gloves and we had the consequences you mentioned, the bill of rights and the Mortgage Program for veterans returning and behavin able to buy a house, have equity in savings. I think youre absolutely right about jobs being critical to the strength of the family because it does give structure, it gives dignity and it gives resources. When you are unemployed, bad things start to happen. Weve seen this in towns across oregon when for example a lumber town loses its sawmill, you see some people move right away. You see others who dwell in domestic violence, alcoholism, drug use increases. So jobs are critical. I think in yamhill and probably a lot of communities in the u. S. Back in the 1990s, there were a lot of comments made about africanamerican communities that were struggling at that time and there was a lot of sanctimonious talk about how the problem was black culture which was a byword for what we call deadbeat dad or people making bad choices, et cetera. Meanwhile they said no its about jobs leaving. He was exactly right. When jobs left appalachia and maine, when they left parts of ohio, the same things unfolded. This wasnt about culture, this was about job. Also in the u. S. We are not as resilient a country when it comes to job loss. You can see that very easily with comparison to what happens in canada. After this crisis happened, when auto makers laid off a lot of autoworkers, they laid them off in detroit and windsor ontario, often by the same company and you could see the difference so for example in the u. S. Partly because it was this financial crisis they are next expanded Unemployment Crisis and they also lost their dog and their healthcare which is a huge stressor on a family pet over in canada, they lost their job but they didnt lose their healthcare because canada has universal healthcare, and then the government intervene and looked around for where the demand was for other types of jobs, and they found out that nursing had a demand so they actually arranged for Training Programs for autoworkers to retrain to go into the nursing field and yes, its not their dream job, but they were able to get assured back into the working world and years later theyre not selfmedicating, theyre not depressed or isolated the way people in the u. S. Where. I want to discuss for a moment the loss of jobs. This is an area where we might all have different opinions. When, what i saw happening in the mid 70s, the opening of our market to basically chinese production and chinese benefited from competing with americans with lower wages, lower labor standards so they can make things more cheaply. You had a glove factory and not glove factory mightve said we cant compete with the chinese making gloves or, maybe we can right now, but lets move our factory to china because we will benefit and our cost of production will be less well our sales prices are roughly the same and will make more money. We have seen a lot of factories go overseas and some of the, maybe we made a mistake about being so quick to open our market in the way we did, helping to drive this job loss. I think on the one hand globalization could have been a force that we couldnt compete, we couldnt prevent from happening because individual factories are going to make their decisions based on the best return. So if they were going to latin america or asia, theyre gonna make that decision on their own unless theres a decision that says you cant but i do think there wouldve been competition from other countries going overseas. I think its a force that actually may have been slower, but nonetheless, we didnt adjust very well, and overall it kept down on inflation because costs were lower. The benefits were spread among 320 million americans rather than just the workers losing their job which felt, i think other countries also have globalization and automation. They havent suffered to the same degree that the u. S. Has partly because of the policies that the u. S. Has taken. We dont adapt quickly to job loss. We dont actually, as a society try to help with nudges to people who have been laid off. You gotta find your own job now. Other countries, they also have universal healthcare and they do much better job retraining in helping laidoff workers retrain for other types of jobs. Do you want to touch on that. I think a lot of us didnt appreciate, how we talked about creative destruction, that is great in a textbook, but what i think we hadnt appreciated was those people who lost their jobs in the Old Industries might self medicate i might cook mouth and their families might break down and it became, while the trade might benefit the size of the u. S. As a whole, it became all the more important to make sure we supported those who as part of that might lose their jobs and invest in their education so they could adapt to new jobs. We blew it. The winners did not compensate the losers at all. I remember very well as i was studying economics, the argument was if you have a trade deficit the Exchange Rates will adjust over time and so the trade deficit will adjust and therefore you wont have a net loss of jobs. That turned out to be wrong for a different conversation but one we were slow to respond to so in the situation youre describing with universal healthcare, you mention that in the book as one of the remedies, and i often talk about the foundations of a family to thrive and i picture house and the foundation and you have healthcare and housing and education and good paying jobs. In your final chapter of the book you start to adjust various issues and they pretty much fall into those four categories and starting with health universal healthcare and eliminating unwanted pregnancy which goes back to having access to healthcare and the familyplanning and why is the United States doing so poorly on pregnancies versus other countries and of course you have noted already that is one of the three factors that has a huge impact on the next generation of having children outside a structure of a family or having them early in life. I want to stress this, we have to make progress. For instance routine pregnancy people in the 1990s when there was so much teen pregnancy and then we sort of recognize this problem and we have addressed it a lot. Its come down a lot, its still higher than other countries but its come down a lot so it shows when we put our mind to something we can make a difference. It absolutely does. We actually have made progress on things including homelessness. We reduced veteran homelessness by nearly half in six years and its continuing to go down under the administration as well so when do you want to make change . We really can do it very well. Its a matter of having the clinical will. I do agree with all those for foundations, they are really critical anything healthcare is very important and i just hope that policymakers will remember that it should be available to everybody if you want to lift all americans so they can actually help america compete against the rest of the world. Its really pretty important. As i travel around rural oregon, ive heard a lot of people know that the expansion of medicaid has really helped in rural areas. For one thing it doesnt have a deductible. It means you have to pay thousands in the beginning therefore you avoid going to the doctor, and because they can pay bills to this local clinic which has expanded in size and taken on things like drug addiction and mental health, i wondered if any of the strengthening of rural healthcare might have been something that affected or improved healthcare. Absolutely. We have talked to a lot of people who say they are so grateful that there healthcare is paid for. Including one of our friends who ended up dying but died in the hospital and was in the hospital several times before he passed away. His family was very grateful that he could be in hospital have some more time. And so some of those families that were struggling, they been able to get help. Absolutely. Im not sure they make the connection that okay, oregon wasnt expanded medicaid and therefore they got it, i dont think they make those connections. I am starting to see a little bit of keep your government hands off my healthcare reaction and certainly the premises of the exchange which means you can get a policy at the same price, even if you have a preexisting condition that becomes highly valued factors. We make the case that politics on some of these issues may be changing, but youre on the front lines, youre the ones that has to go to some of these folks, but we argue that has some of these social problems have become associated in the public mind not with africanamericans but with. [inaudible] the training of them has made it easier politically to address in a way thats hypocritical but perhaps more compassionate as well and on issues like medicaid, for example, the politics may now be, and lifting minimum wage, the white classes socially conservative but maybe more so economically. Certainly on healthcare, absolutely. People used to come to my town halls and say im just trying to get to 65 and stay alive so i can stay on medicare. I do not hear that anymore. In the most rural parts of oregon, those are the places where medicaid has had the biggest impact. I think you would have a hard time crying that out of their hands because it really has been a very positive thing. In the community for jobs, healthcare jobs is a significant contribution to the community as well. The things i hear about now are, well, why am i getting the high cost of drugs and why is it a situation that it is so stressful. I choose jobs. [inaudible] how do i get healthcare in the middle of the year. My spouse has healthcare but im not on their plan, what about my kids. How do i get Health Insurance program so the complexity of our system, and i hear people saying the other challenge and i just hear this throughout rural is why do i have to fight with the insurance company. So at the very time youre sick, maybe youre struggling with cancer or some other major disease. You are trying to figure out how to pay the deductible, and then, shouldnt this be covered. This stress is much higher on our system so healthcare is one piece, and by the way 80 of americans are ready to say we should get the same fair price that everyone gets. If congress cant get it done thats another sign of the damage to our institution and the lobby can exercise put occult power, both the super majority in the senate and through a level of lobbying that meet a very fundamental problem affecting people across the spectrum. Its troubling. Lets go from healthcare to education. Early childhood education and trying to seek High School Graduation. How can we do better on education. Right. So the u. S. Has actually pioneered mass education and what used to be number one in high school education. It was the pride of country and thats how we became number one in terms of the economy, but we also have slipped over the years to number 61 in one year end we might be improving, they actually use different data so we might be up to number 30, but were still very far from number one. What can we do . Right now only one in seven or one in six students read joint from high school. Thats appalling. We could, some states do this, require kids to stay in school until the age of 18, hopefully they will graduate from high school by then or we could tell them if you want a drivers license you have to be enrolled in high school, we could do things like that. Its sort of like theres no one silver bullet, theres a lot of buck shots that you have to incrementally get at in many different ways and its kind of like the way we improved car driving safety. We first implemented seatbelts, i remember when my parents got a car, we didnt use seatbelts at all but that was very dangerous. To improve safety we added seatbelts and airbags and padded dashboards, but this personal responsibility, this narrative is basically equivalent of saying okay, lets start. [inaudible] i think what we need to do instead is add these little Safety Measures to keep nudging kids to stay in school. You mentioned the structure and we learned a lot about that and you all touch on how Early Education can have a huge multiplier effect. Some studies, seven times the return the investment. Ive actually seen some that are 42 times because we reduce prison cost and more taxes are paid and so forth. Bus crimes are committed so when you see it laid out like that as you all have laid out, shouldnt we just ration and say we are going to invest a lot more on Early Childhood. Absolutely. That is the highest recurring investment available in the u. S. Just about every other country is able to provide it. They can afford Early Childhood programs and i would argue that the big reason to do it is benefits to the children, but theres also huge benefits to the parents, especially singleparent in terms of providing an ability to work. I must say when we were raising our kids there were two of us and we could barely figure out how to drop the kids off and pick them up. I thought how does the singleparent do it. Its incredibly hard. Then you mention the High School Graduation, keeping kids in high school. It took me back to when i was in high school and are high school was expelling students who smoked, and so i went to the administration and i said, is this really the right thing to do . These kids are not going to get a high school education. There are some high schools in the area, i told administrators that have decided to go and have a smoking room for students figuring it was better to keep them in school then graduating and if they want. [inaudible] there was an interesting thing. Theres something you didnt mention, when i was in school i didnt have to pay any fees for the sports. Crosscountry, tennis, speech team, chest team, i wasnt on the chess team, but now my kids have graduated from the same school and everything has fees attached which really reduces student engagement. If i could raise a magic wand i would get rid of those things. I think thats a real issue. I think they know these are the kids we want to keep in school on other hand we need to make ends meet and if its disrupting the teacher entirely so she cannot teach 20 other kids, its that group as well, they have to navigate and if we dont charge, then how are we going to pay for these other afterschool, they need to get paid for their time. Lets quickly touch on two other areas you talk about in the book. Eliminating homelessness for children, the housing factor, and jobs, right to work. How do we improve in those two areas. Well homelessness, we know the cost of homelessness, especially for children are anonymous, the impact because of these aces that we talked about earlier, and homelessness as cheryl mentioned earlier, we were able to reduce veteran homelessness by half between 2010 and 2016 because we found it unconscionable that veterans were out in the street. If we similarly found it unconscionable that in America Today we have, on any given night more than a hundred thousand kids who are homeless then we could reduce that by half. If we dont eliminate it we could dramatically reduce it through vouchers, shelters, priority, et cetera and so again it comes down to political will and the president s budget proposes cutting housing budget. Youre saying raise taxes to help somebody else out, why cant they figure it out for themselves. Its easy to make that argument about adults. In the case of these kids thoug though, these kids have not made any bad choices. They havent been irresponsible. They are homeless because of that ovarian lottery that you mentioned earlier, and we also know in the case of those Homeless Children that if we dont pay at the front end, we will pay at the backend many times over. So if they want to save tax dollars and invest in getting these peoples housed. Well then maybe you have the mortgage deduction so youre getting a little bit of a subsidy there but maybe for instance at the case of the Hedge Fund Mogul who paid 238 million for a condo in the heart of new york city and paid properties taxes, your get subsidy then. So there is a lot of unevenness in our tax code and lealoopholes that you can drive a truck through. Absolutely. You are so right. The tax code has all kinds of subsidies to the very welloff. Back when i was with. [inaudible] and i saw the impact of a home for a child, i knew about the chille need for children to have a home was absolutely right. A stable home changes life of a child. I remember being able to have a friend over. They had been living in a car or a tent or basement with their parents and then those children started to do better in school and theyre going to contribute more in taxes and as citizens so lets make that happen. There was one last set of ideas, it doesnt fall immediately into these four areas but that is a monthly child allowance. How should we look at that. So britain was able to reduce Child Poverty in half under tony blair beginning in 1999. One of the key elements they provide is child allowance, Monthly Payment that can be done through tax credit. Michael bennett has cosponsored a bill that would do something along those lines. Just like every other industrial country does it. They suggested that and some other strategies would reduce poverty in the u. S. By half and cost about hundred billion dollars a year. We can afford a 2 trilliondollar tax cut but we cant afford to reduce Child Poverty by half. So it reverberates in the ability to do, maybe it enables them to have a child. [inaudible] the baby bonds, it was als often called individual accounts and they involved payment to the child that would be in a savings account, often matched and could only be used when the savings were put in and could only be used for buying housing and starting a business, things like this. You also probably dont know this but i started a program in oregon so in q4 highlighting that and it came about because of my work at habitat for humanity and then i developed rental Affordable Housing and i said how can people get some stake in this. I had an intern with the matching rent to buy home and she discovered the program. [inaudible] so i started a program and i became state legislator and we have the biggest subsidiary. We need to have bipartisan support on that bill. We need to improve poverty of the middle class. I so much appreciate you all engaging in this conversation and exploring the challenges we have in america through the lens of a struggling rural community. What happens next. I hear there might be a film coming out associated with this. Thats right. Theres a film version that we hope will be on tv in the fall. So stay tuned. What things should we make sure viewers know about the experience you have gone through in examining the challenges. I think you focus on jobs and that is at the heart of so much pain and suffering, certainly the ones we interviewed and also around the rest of the country, i think it seems to be a common theme. Job creation is really key so everybody has to contribute to that and policymakers can be very influential when it comes to job creation. Since your examination of these issues, it reminded me very much of Robert Kennedy going to appalachia and saying here in america such poverty and such stresses and then realizing that these situations were on par with countries we think of as so much poorer than the United States of america and cant we do better. That is examination that can help launch a lot of thinking toward making our country work better for all americans. Thank you for exploring this. It has been a pleasure to converse with you about it. Its timely in the sense that we are in the middle of a policy discussion and campaign year. Thank you very much. Youre watching a special edition of book tv airing now during the week while members of congress are working in their districts because of the coronavirus pandemic. Beginning friday at 8 00 p. M. Highlights from our indepth program, we begin with the author of a number of books including a history of the black National Anthem and brief. Followed by novelists jody pico including her novel a spark of light. Then journalist and Science Fiction novelist cory discusses his book and activism. Please enjoy book tv now and also watch over the weekend on cspan2. Cspan began 41 years ago but our Mission Continues to provide an unfiltered view of government. Already we have brought you primary election coverage, the president ial impeachment process, and now the federal response to the coronavirus. You can watch all of cspans Public Affair programming on television online, or listen on our free radio app. Be part of the National Conversation through cspans daily washington journal program, or through our social media next, Tara Westover recalls growing up in the mountains at the age of 17. She talks about the writers festival in california