Host im excited to discuss your book, its called the vanishing american adult. And what i find striking about it as i was reading it is i think the idea for this probably origin naval nateed long before originated long before you became a u. S. Senator. Its about how were raising our kids. Tell us more about how you decided to write this book and where the idea originated in. Guest first of all, thanks for having me. Good to be with you. The book is 100 not about politics, and its 99 not about policy. Its about a whole bunch of upstream issues in our culture well prior to american politics. And be youre right, im a businessturn around guy, but im by training an american historian, and i spent five years as a College President. It started when i was 37 years old, so eight years old, i was brought in because i cared about this 130yearold liberal arts institution. It was in financial trouble. Im the turnaround guy, i had a whole bunch of family connections, my parents met at this school. My grandpa came back from world war ii and worked at this college for 35 years. I grew up on this campus because of my family, and it was in trouble, but i wasnt going there for anything connected to student culture. I was restructuring the department and thinking about campus operations and where we would grow and if wed buy another college or if wed merge or expand into ohm omaha. And i got there, and one of the things that caused me to lose sleep was what was happening in student culture. Youre right, ive been in the senate for two and a half years, im one of five people in the senate whos never been a politician before, but this book originates in my mind as a worry when i was a College President currently reading, thinking sociology, history, the economic moment that were at had all these vignettes that crystallized it. One is the story of a christmas that you mentioned. We have a lot of special instances at this college in nebraska and the kids that get work in the Athletic Department or the development or fundraising department, they tend to be the best of the best and we have a big athletic arena there and one year they were decorating the facilities for the holidays and there was a 20 foot Christmas Tree going to be assembled in the atrium entrance to the basketball arena and a bunch of the students were assigned to decorate the tree and these are hearty, healthy kids. Kids who should be leaning in. And they decorated the bottom eight feet and packed up and were leaving and one of the Vice President s happened by and she said whats going on, why isnt the work done . They said we used all the decorations on the bottom half, didnt know how to get higher and she said they refused to bring you a ladder, did anyone think to ask . Everyone shrugged their shoulders with passive any. This book is a constructive book, theres no get off my lawn screaming in this book but there was something that crystallized around this idea of capacity as opposed to figuring out how to solve that problem and as we unpack in the book there are a bunch of ways that is playing out across the generation that largely has grown up insulated from work. Its odd to be 19 and not already to have had seven or eight or 10 years of Work Experience in your history, its a new thing in American Life and our kids are so annoyed from work you talk about this passive any, a decline of agency among the generation of kids coming up right now. What are the forces that are driving . You paint these vivid pictures and another one that stands out is the fear, i think it was your friends daughter on the cell phone watching youtube videos all day. You see these stories playing out but what is really driving me climate of agency that youre talking about . Couple things, the distinction between production and consumption is an important idea. Its also something we should feel in our belly because we lived it and we live at the richest time in the richest place all of Human History, thats a good thing. We should be grateful we are a nation of 320 million thats overwhelmingly free from material deprivation as been known throughout most of Human History but one of the downsides of that is our moment in economic history at a place where we raise our kids largely insulated from the extremes of work. Enter gatherers and so from the beginning of time until 11,000 years ago, until 150,000 years ago you didnt have the concept of job choice, you just became eight or 10 or 12 or 14 and you did more of what grandma and grandpa did. You were called into the clergy or law, became a defined profession about 200 years ago, before the emergence of medicine a lot of it was battling Snake Oil Salesman but by and large you have didnt have the idea of job choice until the industrial revolution. That was scary and unsettling but it only happened once, you left college, migrated across the ocean or to the city, you picked a job and you had until death or retirement. We live in an era where we have job choice forevermore and yet you dont have the exposure to different work in an urban, suburban, exurban household arrangement the way almost everybody would before. Theres also something we can talk about the media environment because thats a contributing factor on this topic of economics , we are in this postindustrial age and were expecting young people towork multiple jobs , probably more jobs than ever in the history and that is one of the Key Driving Forces here. I think one of the arguments is that were not sure if the Younger Generation is prepared to do be nimble and able to move from job to job as these disruptions are taking place. The question of whether we can adapt to a fastchanging economy, is that part of it . I think that our twentysomethings comingofage are going to have to be more resilient than anybody has ever been before at exactly the moment where more is going to be expected because of the postindustrial economy. Were attending to bubblewrap than more, not doing enough to celebrate scar tissue. Our tissue is the foundation of future character and were not having that share conversation. You mentioned the job change that comes after high school. By and large, students that are going to graduate this spring and summer from college are going to change jobs three times. Not just jobs, change industry three times in their first decade. Thats new and all the unsettling, scary stuff that produces progressivism during the industrialization. Was about the idea that Job Disruption created all these unsettling ripples into neighborliness and Human Capital and social networks. A lot of what people panicked about that is what we are going to experience at work speed forevermore. Going to have 45, 50yearold getting disrupted not only out of jobs but out of whole industries. Were going to create a civilization of lifelong learners and no civilization has ever done that and exactly as were going to have this new challenge, were bubblewrap in our kids longer and longer through adolescence. Theres no blame laying in this book, its meant to be constructive. It is directed at parents and grandparents for not having a conversation about the new challenges of resilience that are required, this is not aboutmillennials being lazy, this is about us not having a conversation about what dry job retraining will look like. If you touch on policy in the book, the closest you get is the education chapter. You talk about the eight through 12 jewish and we have and you see obviously a lot of failings. I think thats the one filling in the book, and is it true you homeschool your kids . We do what we consider hybrid schools. My kids opt into the Public High School a quarter of the time and come on the road. Basically we are geographically split as a family. We live in a farm town an hour outside of where i grew up and my wife who is a longtime Public High School teacher and my dad was a Public High School teacher and i went to Public High School, we love the American Educational system but for geographic reasons, i think im the only commuting dad in the u. S. Senate. My kids are 13, 15 and six and i bring a kid with me every week. I get home on friday and my wife tells me which kid annoyed her most and that becomes my date for the next week so wetake our kids on the road but we do some tutoring , some that we hire out, some public schooling and some online stuff. We use a lot of that as well. Very cool. So in addition to parents having this intentional conversation with their kids about the economic disruptions happening, what can we change in Public Policy so that our Education System is better preparing young people for the new economy . Great question. I want to reiterate the book is 100 percent not about politics and not about policy but i knew people were going to want to talk about policy as well so let me put a postscript in the book. This wasnt a policy book but if it were here are some of the things to talk about next. A few of the things i try to flag our number one, i think this new concept of grade 13 is a bad idea. We should have some understanding of where we got that secondary education because it is unmatched and a great benefit but its unmet. Its a mixed blessing. At the end of the civil war about one percent of americans were high school graduates. By world war ii almost 80 percent were. Today is not much more than 80 percent so there hasnt been a lot of change but weve created institutionalized experiences for 14, 17, 18yearold because of industrialization. It was a melting pot experience. It was for good and ill americanization stuff going on but ultimately what happened is we realized it was a lot of work that wasnt dangerous and dehumanizing forces what was happening with child labor in factories but before that kids have grown up as hunter gatherers and in farming communities doing a lot of work and our leaders, our National Conversation from 1870 to 1940 but we needed to institutionalize this time. Again, i think its been good to have mass education. Im a strong believer in public funding of educational experiences but we should have more debate about institutional form. We need more pluralization of the experience to take a lot of the 17, 18yearold kids and say you should have the majority of your waking hours sitting inside in a classroom as a sort of passive recipient of knowledge. Wealso need to be wrestling through what does it look like to be an active learner that pursues the world , that climbed the mountain, that learns to work, that deliberates about your body and intergenerational experiences and what is a little soft stoicism look like, what does a limiting of our consumption look like and i wonder that we have over learned the lessons of secondary education as if its an unmitigated good. Were trying to expand that concept in Higher Education so 41 to 50 governors right now are remaking their k12 education bureaucracy as a grade 16 bureaucracy. Preschool to kindergarten, thats an important debate about literacy and intervention, as a meaty debate we should have but grade 13 to 16 is a dangerous idea. You dont want to take Tertiary Education and remake it on a secondary education model as passively in spoon feeding. We want to do the opposite. We want pluralized forms for higher ed and midcareer job training and what that the crowd down into grade 12, 11 and 10. We want to teach our kids at some point you flip the switch and you go from being a passive recipient of instruction from the front of the classroom to being an active learner that wants to throw open the doors to the library and shake the trees of nature and fruit and demand more learning. What socrates was saying when he says you need a pregnant question to educate somebody, hes saying the soil isnt for trial unless the soil is crying out for the seed. You cant firehose seed at a 19 or 21yearold and think theyre going to learn, you need them to ask questions so i want them to be rethinking secondary education on a Higher Education model, not going in the opposite direction. As you mentioned in grade 13 mine reminded of one of the ideas that made me think, it was the whole idea about age segregation and how our School Systems are promoting that and i think about my own personal life, the value of having friends were much older than me so i can gain a much broader view of the world, gain more familiarity with whats coming and you talk about how this segregation can have a detrimental effect on how the Education System needs to take a closer look at that but can you explain that more . Its an odd thing in Human History, across cultures to have most of europe he or cohorts just be people who are born in your same birth year and we segregate you in institutionalized school where you tend not to know or experience life with people from different ages. Your frontal lobe is forming as a teenager, youre developing selfrestraint and becoming aware of time. Youre developing wisdom. One of the ways to do that is not a in the narcissistic experience of people going through puberty who believe every challenge of the second is the endall and beall of human existence. My daughters are older girls though there are two teenagers, pure slights can feel really painful. This is you wounding my last forever and if you know people who are 70 or 85 in your life and theyre telling you stories about their life and where they developed a work ethic and they traveled in ways they persevered and peoplethey loved and lost , the way they recovered, then if you go down this street and cooked baked cookies a couple times a week, the school slight isnt as lasting an immediate and supposedly eternal. You need lots more intergenerational relationships. There is a curve on Plastic Surgery consumption in america right now its kind of extraordinary and there may be places and times and needs for certain things but one of the things thats happening isnt just a kind of natural pursuing of the fountain of youth, fleeing mortality and being scared of death and the fact that the world is broken, that is as old as the curse in the garden needs to be but theres Something Different about our time and place that has a sort of narcissistic attachment only to the immediacy of this minute. To have a cotton candy like experience, one of the best ways to do that is wisdom from knowing different generations. The same thing is with our teens knowing about babies and people that need them, theres a responsibility taking for a 17yearold had to know some twoyearolds. In our family we do things, we will figure out how to babysit together as a family, not because its great fun when you have limited leisure time or recreation. But if our kids have to learn to attend to and care for somebody else, they recognize their responsibility to the community. In terms of this professional adolescence you talk about and the transition to adulthood, you talk about among those things are developing logical reasoning skills, the willingness to endure torture for a longterm gain and i sort of am thinking about our political system. As Congress Stuck in a perpetual state of adolescence . This book is not about congress and yet, theres the shortterm is in the city that is really quite bizarre. The American Experience is that the center of life is not politics. The center of life is not power. We distinguish between government and community on purpose. Alexis tocqueville as a travel writer in the 1830s, it was such a literate audience that most of our viewers do, is 1500 pages. It feels like a heavy book. The binding off it and read the sevenpage chunks around your house because thats really how the book was built. He was writing travel dispatches back to france to explain america and de tocqueville said you wanted to expand the economic dynamism of america. It was diversity, free speech, religion, protests. That was new. The american exceptionalism is a lot about the anthropological claim that built a special community but nobody in europe thought we do have economic dynamism. All of a sudden there is all this dynamism around the transportation revolution, the canal evolution, putting out the lead to a factory system. No one comes to america and wants to explain it to europeans and he said america had the economic dynamism and i went to washington dc to find the meaning of america and he gets here and says its kind of a swap where people dont work that hard. It is not that interesting so he traveled out to 17 or 25 states to the capital to try to figure out whats the meaning of america and he wrote back and said rotary club is the meaning of america. Its communal, these people believe in neighborliness and persuasion. Its voluntary, not compulsory and so much of america is about work portion where you raise your kids, where you participate in rotary or volunteer or coach little league. Right now dc is a strange place because a river of money flows through there, is five or six of the richest counties of america are the sensors where the lobbyists live and yet were not focused on anything longterm. Local parties are mostly about explaining why they are worse than we are. We dont choose the better of two visions, we always talk about the lesser of two evils. There is a perpetual adolescence to the city that is rooted in having become less and less historically minded. Are not aware as we people come from. And were not having a longterm conversation about the policy challenges of things like you and i were talking about before the show. Whats interesting is you explain your arguments here. You put it in a historical context. And i think maybe one of the few if the only trained historian in the senate, is that right . Im the only one in the senate which is another way of saying that. One thing you learn from your study of the senate is that freshmen members would also take almost a year of listening, learning about the institutions before getting on the floor and you interestingly were first elected in 2014 and spent about a year. Year from election day so 11 months after arri