Why . Guest we were running around covering humanitarian crises and then we would periodically go back to my beloved hometown of yamhill where my mom is still on the family farm. We saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding there. A quarter of the kids who were on my old Number Six School bus are now gone from drugs and alcohol and suicide. Sheryl and i tried to process that. The kids got on the bus right after me were the napa kids. Smart, talented kids. One died of drug and alcohol abuse. Another died in a house fire was passed out drunk. Another blew himself up cooking meth. Regina died from hepatitis from drug use. Once by because seeds in the Oregon State Penitentiary 13 years. For a while we wander is a something about my bus, about yamhill . We realized this is a National Problem that we have death and despair. The Life Expectancy is falling or was falling for three years in a row in america, and that yamhill, michael bus, kind of a microcosm to see that pain across america. Host you saw this through the lens of returning home. It couldve been titled cool bus number six. Silbury stories are drawn from the french had growing up and expanding from there. Sheryl, you grew up in manhattan, Upper West Side and thats a whole different world. Im really, early in your relationship you got to see yamhill and just not unfolding over these last couple decades. How did the lens through which you saw differ from what nick was seeing . Guest first of all i dont think you can get farther from yamhill than manhattan. I grew up on the Upper West Side. Its smack in the middle of the urban world. When i first approached yamhill i was a little bit what are these people like . Guest sheryl locked the car door the first time she came on the farm. Guest we think of tale of two americas. On the top deck of the vote there is the party going on. On the bottom deck is where the, its all happening and spirit are struggling 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. So for me it took a while. Once i started learning these people and beating them and learning about their backgrounds talking to them i realized they are very complicated human beings. The stories that we learned about their household, about their backgrounds and journeys they took really were so alarming and so touching and heartbreaking, that we just couldnt help but say weve got to tell the rest of the world. Host you use the analogy of the ship of the upper deck and lower deck and whats going on below. Your book uses another analogy in the title, tight rope. In some a by speeches and in congress i talk about trying to pave a a wide solid path for families to thrive, and here is not just a narrow path that a tight rope. What are you conveying by that . Guest the whole point is for those of us who are in the upper middle class and above four very well educated, at least graduate from high school, from college, we have a path a fairly wide path ahead of us and so if we follow we can pick ourselves up. But maybe if these people in yamhill and small towns around american in the rural areas around america, people are walking on a tight rope. One missed in the fall. Theres a safety net. Host . Their falling into it cast before describing about involving drugs, alcohol, domestic violence, suicide. Its a pretty oblique picture and theres a dynamic that you wrestle with about this is personal responsibility . To the just need to walk that tightrope better or is it their fault . Personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. What have you concluded . Guest look, personal responsibility is real. I think we can make the case that progressives like myself sometimes dont fully appreciate that personal responsibility is real. When hesiod agency to people but i think over the last 50 years we have vastly overdone and we become obsessed with his personal responsibility narrative, playing with the people who fall off the tightrope 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 are showing their responsibility. Look, by all means lets have a personal responsibility conversation. If we do that with also have the conversation about our collective responsibility to try to help the people who are on my number six bus. There are so many ways we can help that benefit them at a benefit society. Host 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. But in the book you introduce this term or you shared this term Adverse Childhood Experience and which are basically saying if you have collected several adverse childhood expenses your odds of succeeding drop dramatically which you portray as the odds of being in poverty increased substantially. Explain this come how these childhood adversities really impact your personalized. Guest its prewar document by document by scientists with an lysis situations so many of us have an Adverse Childhood Experience. Hence get divorced, is a big move from one state to the next that is dramatic for a little child but when you start piling up seven, eight, even three before that could have a really dramatic experience. Partly depending on the age of the child specifically if the child is up to five, thats when the brain is developing at its most rapid pace for the rest of that persons life. Thats when our brain develops quickly. Inc. Of children is really resilient but you know something theyre not as result as we think. In fact, when there were stressed and house, violence, yelling and abuse and chaos in the house that creates stress in the baby and that means hormones are coursing through that brain and as that brain is growing, this will impact the development of the brain architecture for this little baby. If this is not corrected that babies brain is not going to develop really properly. If we can address these issues early on and there are treatments, ways of using therapy, counseling, we can put that young child onto a better course so that we dont see them two decades later in poverty or in drugs are dropping out of college. High school even. Its not just that its also not just a psychological trauma and troubles. Its also help. In fact, people who have stacked up aces are much more likely itn in life unless there corrected to have heart disease, to a chronic diseases like diabetes. Thats a huge cross on society as well. Guest one way thinking about the personal responsibility narrative is theres the success sequence that conservatives sometimes mention. Its true if somebody does three things, they largely avoid poverty. If the graduate from high school, if they get a fulltie job, and then if they have kids only after marrying. In only 2 live in poverty. If they do none of those three things, 79 live in poverty. Clearly those involve an element of bad choices and 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 kids but have babies as teenagers three times as often because we as a society dont make Sex Education available until make Birth Control so available. Our High School Graduation rates are substantially lower than those in many other oecd countries because we dont place the same premium on it. There are ways we can shift this. Its not because American Kids are dumber than others or less diligent. I think this obsession has neglected the public side of the equation, the policy side of the equation. Host so the odds are stacked against folks who are raised with these various stressors in childhood. I wanted to go back for a moment, sheryl, to your about how the brain is rewired. In what ways is that rewiring compromised one success in adult it . Guest a lot of it has to do with involvement of the brain architecture. The cortisol, the stressor hormone, most of us as adults it happens for for a little bit at goes away, flows right to us but because the baby spring is evolving so rapidly at the time and also its so young, babies brain much more fragile, it can stunt or impair the development. Host doesnt make those children more susceptible to addiction, less able to have come if you will, a committed relationship or just multiple effects . Guest multiple effects and additional later on that all of these things you talk about also more likely to not graduate from high school, more likely to have suffered from things like adhd, a number of ailments that just make it harder for the child growing up to actually succeed. Thats why pediatricians are so focused on trying to address aces and certainly in california a new Surgeon General there, that is one of her missions. Host from the universe of organ all this and cortisol the thing it does is it prepares children for a violent, turbulent, dangerous environment and it puts them therefore on a hair trigger fight or flight response. One consequence is that it makes it hard to concentrate on the blackboard because they are being trained to look for potential threats behind them. That seems to be one pathway in which this cortisol impairs education and concentration. Host i believe in the book you note that Warren Buffett referred to something i think the ovarian lottery, and ive heard him speak about how it had been born under certain circumstances he would be a multibillionaire, both because of infrastructure that others established but also because of the circumstances of his birth set the path for him to do well. Its disturbing that in so many ways the United States as the developed country seems to be doing a poor job and other democracies, other republics, that could have similar problems. Problems. You note we are 30 night on clean Drinking Water and 40th on child locality, and 61st on high school enrollment. And that we suffer more stress than the average person in venezuela and that our Life Expectancy is dropping. Heres the United States with our congress, so brickyard is issues, state legislatures are working on these issues, county commissions. How is it we are having such horrific outcomes . Guest on the one hand, weve got all all the Economic Statistics that are showing that gdp is doing well. Stock market is rocket high. We look at these measures, inflation is low, we say were doing really, really well. Then if you peel behind the statistics and also look at other broader statistics you can see thats not the full picture. A lot of man, for instance, have dropped out of the workforce. They wont even be counted and these men may be selfmedicating. A bit out of a job for a while. They dont have the confidence to jump back in. We interviewed a number of them in yamhill so we know thats what is happening. They are not even looking so it wouldnt be counted as looking. If you look at the Life Expectancy statistics as nick mentioned, that is another broader measure by which its because of these depths of despair which are three types of depths of despair the recharacterize by economists at princeton, and they looked at the census data and the south the depths of despair were really religious alcoholism, thats related to Drug Overdose and deaths from suicide. We are at record high suicide rates since world war two. Yes, they dropped a little bit Drug Overdose deaths toppled in 20 quinta thats a good sign but it still 67,000, 60,000 people who 2000 people who died from Drug Overdoses. Thats not a small figure. That weighs on the entire nations average Life Expectancy. Its pretty dramatic. Guest wincing every dramatic failure if you will to pay the good road here in the during those outcomes. Why is the United States not doing a better job in getting people off the tight rope, getting people onto a solid paved road . Guest i think that this is really a 50 year erodes cores that the u. S. It took. I think it has something to do with nixons southern strategy in 1968, and a tendency to stigmatize investment in Human Capital and in benefit programs on the basis that it would be africanamericans who disproportionally benefit. I think that leads into an underinvestment in Human Capital and in benefits across the u. S. It also relates to president reagans narrative where government can do no good and is invariably part of the problem. And its a glorification of business taking of power from labor unions to corporations, coupled with the war on drugs, mass incarceration. A few of these trends came together, and so until the 1970s the u. S. Was essentially in line with other oecd countries. Our Life Expectancy was higher than the oecd median, and then since the 1970s the other oecd countries have surpassed us. I think the root cause is an underinvestment in american Human Capital and american citizens. Host oecd countries many developed countries similar to our own, and so let me throughout a little bit of a thought here because i i see ts through the lens of tried to change policy in government. What i am seeing that our institutions have been changing in ways that create power for the powerful. You do touch on this indie book. You note where you have high wealth divisions, the wealthy and have disproportionate political power which leads to rules that benefit the wealthy. If we think about America Today and the inequality that we are seeing between the rich and the poor, we are at a very, very high ratio compared to these other countries. Is it possible our inequality and wealth is influencing the medical system in ways that is preventing us if you will from investing the resources on the fundamentals that paved the path for success for ordinary families . Guest i think thats another prison to which to look and youre right, you create this inequality that can self perpetuates through the mechanism of economic power turning into political power. Its similar to what happened in the gilded age in american history. And and i also because of course then aggressive is and followed. Host but it took a a great depression. It took a world war. Thats a little scary that it took that type of intervention to put us back on a path were 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 here discriminations were still rampant in some sectors but we made some progress in that realm as well. In order to implement the various policy proposals in the book that we will get to in a moment, do we do to change the structure of political power in this country . Guest i do think that we need more enlightenment when it comes to this segment of society at a fake that they are being totally ignored partly because everybody can point to the high gdp and is 90 to change anything. Because on average everything is going well but if the jeff bezos walks into a room of when are people on average everybody will have a higher level of wealth. It does make any difference to the people who are not, not jeff bezos. Thats a problem is recognizing that there is this need to lift up all americans. Also its important maybe it helps policymakers to know that if you want to compete against rest of the world. China and india with 1,000,000,000 people power, we dont have the people power especially with much less if we dont try to lift up all americans and have as Many Americans as possible reach their full potential be productive, innovative and really bring america back to number one. Host i know my parents really talked about the sense of unity coming out of world war ii. And they relayed how in their lifetime experience this great leap forward. My mother came from extraordinary level of poverty. Our mother with her first three children, loss of those three children to the count in the middle of the great depression. She lives in a boxcar. Who could imagine my grandmother realizing that a grandson might serve in the u. S. Senate . Extraordinary change from both sides of the family. But you describe in this book how the community of yamhill so much of this impact of moving forward during those years and how in roughly the mid70s started to stall out and then to decline. What happened in the mid\70{l1}s{l0}\70{l1}s{l0} that started to drive this reversal . Guest first of all, i think many people in yamhill and probably in your hometown of myrtle creek what a tree with their past success to rugged individualism, and theres 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 a homestead programs then Rural Electrification transform places like yamhill. The g. I. Bill of rights likewise. I think those programs to invest in people and community certainly helped. And then when things, i think essentially the root cause of things going downhill was good jobs going away because local employer in the greater yamhill area was a glove factory. It closed down. There were some new jobs they came in but the people who would work 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 the social fabric which had been very tightknit unraveled quickly. Host you had light manufacturing, gloves. You had the consequences picky making g. I. Bill of rights, a big portion of that was a Mortgage Program for veterans returning being able to buy house, have equity, savings. I think youre right about jobs being critical to the strength of the family. It does give structure. It gives dignity and against resources