An Evening Conversation with Senator Ben Sasse in Nashville, TN

so again welcome and thank you very much for being here tonight we are pleased to have this great crowd and particularly grateful to have senator Ben Sasse here in fact I was telling Jason I he was asking me about a trip I made up to DC earlier in the year and I said yes I went up to DC I heard you speak then and I thought well our mission was to try to get him to come back down to Nashville and we're successful so we're so pleased to have you here this is the seventh year that st. Paul Christian Academy and Montgomery Bell Academy have worked together with the Trinity Forum and the intent has been to have a great relationship to bring a lot of people within the Nashville community to hear people like Senator sass and the mission of the Trinity forum which you'll hear more eloquently from Sharia in a moment it's about bringing people together to talk about good ideas and they do a terrific job with it and I'm also grateful to work with you sridhara who is the president of the Trinity forum please welcome Sheree to the podium [Applause] well thank you Brad and welcome to all of you to tonight sold out evening conversation with Senator Vince ass on lonely America as ever all of us at the Trinity forum are delighted to partner with you Brad and the Montgomery Bell Academy and you Jason and st. Paul Academy it's a real pleasure to continue this partnership and to host this event we're also grateful to the sponsors among us who have helped make tonight possible we have several corporate sponsors including Simms Funke gob properties the law firm and polsinelli PC several foundations including the Beasley Family Foundation the Charis foundation with Joe and Judy cook the Creed and culture fund which is the Family Foundation of Byron and Beth Smith as well as several friends who have helped make tonight possible including Lee and Mary Barfield Gary and Susan Dean Natha and Laura green ed and Molly Powell and Giff and Anna Thornton thank you to each of you for your generosity and for your support I'd like to acknowledge just a few special guests that we have with us here tonight including Congressman Jim Cooper two of our trustees at the Trinity forum our chairman of the board and the visionary behind all of these events byron smith well known to all of you as well as trustee Sam funk who's joining us this evening and to give a shout out to the student delegation from New College Franklin we're so glad to have you here but this is your first Trinity forum MBA st. Paul Academy evening conversation we'd like to give a special welcome to you we have a full house tonight as you can see we sold out almost immediately for this event so we will once again be live-streaming tonight's events as well as recording it to making it available via video so if you had friends too one who wanted to come tonight but didn't register quickly enough or are out of town you can encourage them to follow along the alive stream as well which is on the NBA's livestream page and we will also be posting video within a few days on our website at WWF org as well as our YouTube channel you're also welcome to add your comments via Facebook or Twitter at TTFN tonight and we'll have photos on Facebook within 48 hours as well as Brad mentioned we've had this partnership going on for over seven years now and over those years we have tackled a broad range of topics we started our series 7 years ago with a look at Abraham Lincoln's second inaugural what our speaker Ron white called Lincoln's Sermon on the Mount we heard from California's poet laureate Dana Joya on why Beauty matters we heard from Oxford mathematician John Linux who analyzed whether science and faith can mix Princeton professor Eric Gregory took us on a tour of the life and thought of a Gustin historian Joe lakhani looked at friendship and its role in shaping the imagination in the midst of wartime of JRR tolkien and CS lewis we heard from visual artist maka Fujimura on caring for our culture and legal scholar John and azu on how we can enjoy a life of principled pluralism and of course last November David Brooks came out to speak to us on the road to character with this diverse mix of topics and speakers we've been excited and delighted by the consistent response and interests such that we once again sold out but if this is your first event you may well be wondering what it is that tie all of these topics and speakers together so if this is your first event and you are new to the Trinity forum we always start out by saying a little bit about who we are what we do and why we do it and part of what we try to do is to provide a space and resources for leaders to engage the great questions of life in the context of faith and we do this both by providing reading and publications which draw upon classic works of literature and letters and explore the enduring questions of life as well as sponsoring programs such as the one tonight to connect leading thinkers with thinking leaders and engaging those big questions of life ultimately coming to better know the author of the answers so with each new evening conversation and we try to take on and wrestle with one of those great questions and tonight our speaker our speaker will grapple with several such questions arising from the strange and the sinister paradox in which we find ourselves which is this we live in the richest country in the history of the world and yet over the last few years there has been a decline in life expectancy a surge of suicides more than a doubling of overdoses a spike in depths deaths of despair so why in the midst of peace and prosperity are we increasingly pessimistic angry and fearful why do we claim to be ever more isolated and alienated even as we grow more virtually connected in his new book them why we hate each other and how to heal our keynote speaker tonight argues that the fundamental crisis facing our body politic today is not actually about politics but about the state of our relationships our communities and our souls it is he argues a crisis of loneliness fully half of us report feeling lonely rejected or left out 13% of Americans say that no one knows them well along with our isolation we are more polarized divided indebted medicated overfed and depressed than we perhaps have ever been some measures even show that each succeeding generation over the past several decades is lonelier than the one before and not surprisingly many hurting lonely people see company and community and a tribe of the like-minded looking for community they find some solidarity in shared antagonisms towards the other side of the political spectrum there is money to be made in peddling outrage there are plenty of peddlers ready to profit the result is ever more outlets dowsing our loneliness with fear and loathing leaving us ever more angry at each other all alone together the path out of this rather brutish state of nature requires according to our speaker something radical the formation of deep relationships and connections with both people and places a rootedness that can lead to both a reflooring of community and a reconciliation of difference it is a provocative intriguing and countercultural argument and it's hard to imagine a writer or a speaker much less a senator who could make it with the conviction boldness and eloquence that our speaker tonight senator Ben Sasse is the junior senator from Nebraska he grew up in Fremont Nebraska a fifth generation Nebraskan before leaving to study as an undergraduate at Harvard and followed by graduate work at both st. John's College at Oxford as well as at Yale he completed his PhD in Hale where his dissertation won both a field prize and the George Washington eggless ten award over the course of his career he worked for Boston Consulting Group and in private equity as well as the executive director of the Alliance of confessing evangelicals and at one point had edited the modern Reformation journal he also worked as a Capitol Hill staffer at the Department of Health and Human Services and Homeland Security before assuming the presidency of Midland College in Fremont where he worked for the next four years during which time the college went from near bankruptcy to a surplus and more than doubled enrollment he left it as the fastest growing college in the Midwest since coming to the Senate then quickly established himself with a reputation as one of the Senate's most articulate and historically informed members even if he is still occasionally mistaken for a page after Ben gives his keynote remarks st. Paul Academy headmaster Jason Powell posed the first question and then moderate questions from the audience Ben welcome that bio was too long and boring thank you you're generous but she left out the most operative facts free and I went to college together and I'm gonna take half the time did I just tell stories about her so there's gonna be fun for her whole bored I'm looking forward to her squirm in a bit what a room this is a great space and what a great campus and there's somebody who is the son of a football coach my dad also was a high school teacher but that was just an excuse to be a football and wrestling coach and I was college president for five years when I walked we don't really play lacrosse in Nebraska nonetheless whatever is going on I'm playing fields out there becomes like a magnet that draws me and as a professor who knows when you're about to get student evaluations one of the best things to do to sort of juice your ratings is propose that we do class outside Brad can we move out to the stadium and just this is a great room but it's gorgeous outside I have never lived in Nashville and yet every time I'm here I feel like it's Old Home Week a whole bunch of people I didn't know I was gonna get to see today I have already seen this afternoon and evening so thank you and I'm gonna preemptively excuse myself for any names that I forget later I didn't forget any of these my niece showed up soon to be dr. McLeod and a bunch of andy'll of med students pastors that I know from other places Kimberly caraway who drove the getaway car at my wedding in Birmingham 24 years ago I didn't know I was gonna see her here by the way if you're not from the south you all are sort of southerners slash edgers as they were sometimes called 150 years ago and you marry somebody from the Midwest don't be surprised that the person from Nebraska who's having a wedding in Birmingham needs to take out ads in the paper to find enough groomsmen to match the bridesmaids I've got a lot of good friends like we're gonna say some depressing stuff about family structure and about deep friendship and about vocation and calling but I'm blessed with lots of good friends I don't know thirteen guys that I could get to fly across the country and rent a tuxedo on a specific weekend and I found out when I proposed to my wife that thirteen was sort of the median number in Birmingham we supposedly didn't have a big wedding but there were thirteen bridesmaids 13 groomsmen and all these other people that had assigned roles knows this woman named a wedding coordinator which feels like it's a term from some sort of a death camp but anyway I'm gonna say preemptively there's all sorts of sort of med school cynical laughing here I just want to say fellas when you get engaged realize it's not your wedding it's not even your bride's wedding it's your bride's mother's wedding and the wedding coordinator works for her and you just say yes ma'am but I am back just now 36 hours ago off the plane from an intelligence - I'm on the Intelligence Committee and we're not gonna talk about politics at all tonight so you're welcome but I serve on the Intelligence Committee and I just did six countries in eight days in Africa and as I step foot back into the u.s. I'm in the middle of seven states in six days and I'm not just groggy because of the travel I'm groggy because I did serious malaria meds dosage so we were in a bunch of exposed countries and if you haven't had malaria meds before they they mess you up there's fog in your head for like eight inches and your consciousness recedes to the back of your skull so if I don't remember your name that's my excuse I want to do something a little bit atypical tonight and that is we have left a pretty healthy amount of time for question and answer and so I want to preemptively say besides the fact that we're not here to talk about politics I'm not gonna finish the talk in terms of getting all the way to all the sowhat's of how do we solve this problem I want to do something first and make sure we have a set foundation for this to get to a shared understanding of what we're dealing with shree did a great job of summarizing some of what I've been thinking about and worrying about the last 18 months and since she did that so well I'm not going to give you a full overview of the book then but I am going to try to persuade you not going to be a commercial for the book but if you heard the summary and you thought that partly sounds like it called the civility I'm not sure that's gritty enough for the problem we face at this moment I agree with you so almost none of what I'm arguing for is sort of a simplistic return to being nice to each other I think something much more fundamental is going on which is that we live at a time where as again as Cherie summarized it well the richest people any time and place in human history and I don't just mean in a lovely neighborhood in a thriving city that is Metro Nashville I don't just mean this group as as a well-off blessed group I mean median middle-class Americans are by far the richest people any time or place in all of human history and just to orient you for what middle class means you can make it plus or minus a standard deviation but median household income in the u.s. is fifty-nine thousand dollars a year those are the richest people ever and yet in this moment of unbelievable riches for the overwhelming majority of Americans we do have rapidly declining happiness there are a whole bunch of metrics that those of us who share a lot of the core worldview that's associated with the Trinity forum would have theological categories and Augustinian categories for talking about this there are also philosophical Aristotelian categories to get there but when I say that there's a massive decline in happiness I a historian who's done mostly business strategy with my work history but as a historian I am NOT a sociologist but as you become a lay student of the sociology of happiness which is basically a new sub discipline of sociology in the last 15 years there are quantifiable ways to measure declining happiness in the US and I think one of the most simple ways to think about that decline of happiness is to recognize because we are so rich because we have so much freedom from freedom from constraint freedom from necessity freedom from nature freedom freedom from geographical boundedness we are able to be rootless this thing this supercomputer that all of us carry around and I stupidly have four of them part of its ethical concerns about what's government versus what's campaign in life part of its because I'm in the Intelligence Committee and I get hacked a lot so I'm a different set of devices that I take certain places than other places but these supercomputers that all of us carry around they have far more computing power than a computer that was the size of this room at MIT fifty fifty five years ago that helped the u.s. win the Cold War this thing is unbelievably powerful to transcend time and place geography and moment and yet it is also a liar because this thing is always whispering to you you don't have to be here you can be somewhere else if these people are annoying if your mother-in-law is droning on and on and you don't want to stay in that conversation you can go to Wrigley under the table and check the scores you can go somewhere else and so as a sort of meta view of what we're talking about tonight I think it's important to recognize and I'm gonna dive right into four meaty stats that I want to unpack together and then we'll get to a place where I give you just a very cursory guess about what comes next over the next 20 to 50 years I'll make a few predictions but I won't try to solve our problem I'll leave that for question and answer but I think that the meta story is happiness is highly correlated with roots and we live at a time where we don't have to have roots and we haven't yet figured out how to constrain ourselves when we're free to be free from and yet almost all that makes us happy are all the places where you're free to which is what are the ends not really what are the tools of liberation but what are the things I want to do with my time and with my treasure and with my talent with my limited years what do I want to do with my life who do I want to love where do I want my sensibilities to be rooted I think so much of this moment is about that tension between never having had greater clarity that happy is related to roots and never had anywhere near the riches and the freedom we have to flee time in place and be rootless we don't yet have the right habits the right affections or the right institutions for a rootless digital age so that's what I'd like to talk about tonight only four facts four things I've been worried about and then sort of a simple interpretive framework on what that means and a prediction and then we'll punt it to question and answer the four facts are these one is related to life expectancy as Sheree mentioned we live at a time of declining life expectancy no one 10 years ago would have predicted that few of us are even aware that it's happening around us number one life expectancy number two job duration number three friendship and number four family structure I'm gonna give you some quantification around each of those four things okay life expectancy job duration friendship family structure first life expectancy we live at a time we're in 2016 and in 2017 and in 2018 life expectancy has gone down in the u.s. that is never happened before probably it happened 1863 1864 1865 we were living through a massive war but we didn't have any mortality data at that point so as long as we've had data we've never had three years of declining life expectancy and the last time we had two years of declining life expectancy it was really just one year or one winter season that happened to bridge over the calendar from the fall of 1962 to the spring of 1963 we had a really bad flu pandemic in the US and so both 1962 and 1963 56 years ago my math is right yeah 56 years ago is the last time we had to define a life expectancy for two years and it was really just a long six-month season that bridged a year we had demonstrable decline of life expectancy three years ago two years ago last year in all likelihood we're gonna have it again this year and yet infant mortality down life expectancy for 80 year olds up for eighty five year olds getting longer I have 1715 and seven-year-old kids my seven-year-old born in Douglas County which is a home aha Nebraska in 2011 he has a 50-50 statistical chance of breaking age 100 that's pretty amazing if you read biotech stuff if you read what Silicon Valley is doing in the health space we have more and more debates about what will be the proper level of end-of-life investment if you could always spend more money and prolong life but not necessarily prolong high-quality life at the end how do you think about all the ethical quandaries about ninety eight and a half versus ninety nine and a half versus a hundred and one what happens at those places in life where we have technologists debating whether or not worth within 30 years of a moment where life expectancy might be growing more than one year per year what does that mean what if life expectancy was growing more than one year per year we use this word and I'm hesitant to deal with a whole bunch of Andy med students present but we use this word cancer as if there is a thing that's called cancer at the National Cancer Institute's at the NIH and Bethesda Maryland there's a debate about whether or not cancer really exists or whether or not we use it as an umbrella term to group together about 30 different disease categories that are really really different things we've got 10 category diseases that we call cancer that we're really good at prolonging life maybe sometimes ending them as killers and and mitigating the downside consequences of struggling with these diseases we've got about 10 other disease categories that we don't really even know what they are and there's a big debate about where our public research investment dollars should be on the middle 10 to make them like the category 1 diseases but one of the things that you hear in Silicon Valley is a debate about whether or not we're close to a moment of implantables where you're gonna have supercomputers swimming around in your bloodstream that are going to be repairing your cancer before we've even had a clear declarative diagnosis of the fact that you have cancer so there's a whole bunch of stuff happening at end of life that are going to extend it radically there's declining mortality mother mortality and infant mortality globally we've had a decline of disease-based and certain public health categories of accidental deaths over the last 30 years that's unprecedented in the history of data and yet we have declining life expectancy in the US over the last three years how's that possible where's the math we are living through a mass suicide of 20 to 55 year old males in this country we've never had a mass suicide before we are killing ourselves with opioids with suicides with other forms of addiction and overdose at truly epidemic unprecedented levels it's hard to see from a room like this one of you have really really thick social fabric Melissa my wife and I are blessed have really rich social fabric yet 15 of the poorest counties in America are within a couple hour drive of here there are a whole bunch of places in Tennessee and especially if you had north and east of here into Kentucky and West Virginia where there are communities where it seems like there is absolute abject hopelessness so one category is how is it possible that we have declining life expectancy second data point we have shortening duration jobs which scare people a lot and it should and yet it's a function of this digital revolution we're living through where there's lots more opportunity coming really really fast I was born in 1972 in the 1970s average duration at a firm for a primary breadwinner was 26 years average duration at a firm today is 4.2 years and getting shorter the vast majority of anxiety that we find in lots of communities is related to that fact and yet we don't even have a shared way to think about it I'm a big fan of congressman Cooper I shouldn't say that because I'm in cycle I'm up for re-election this year so publicly praising a Democrat could be a way to commit political suicide but I think he's a really thoughtful guy I think if he and I got together and had a big debate about what's wrong in American health care we could at least start with a few core facts that didn't require incident screaming one of the things that blows my mind I'm one of eight people out of 100 in the Senate who's never been up politician before one of the things that blows my mind is when we talk about health care we have almost no shared set of data about what's happening in American health care here's a really simple fact we could have lots of debates I'm sure we would differ on Obamacare we could have lots of debates about 2009 10 and 11 and the implementation of Obamacare till today but let's just go before that for a minute why did we have massively increasing uninsurance in America from 1990 to 2000 and massively increasing uninsurance in America from 2000 to 2010 if you ask the American public they'll give you two answers both of them very fervently both of them entirely wrong the two answers you will hear is that we must have more poor people or we must have more sick people it must be socioeconomic status or it must be health status from 1990 to 2010 we didn't have more sick people in America from 1990 to 2010 we didn't have more poor people in America the sole explanatory variable variable what for why we had so much more on insurance for the 20 years from 1990 to 2010 is more rapid job change period full stop end of story there is nothing else to explain all of the data is explained by the fact that when you change jobs in America you tend to be uninsured for four to six months and if you change jobs every four years it means you are uninsured one-eighth of the time because and that may be when you get the breast cancer diagnosis that may be when you have the car accident now you may become part of the pre-existing conditions population that can't get insured again when you get to the next job but the whole story for growing on insurance in America over those 20 years is that we've tied our insurance to our jobs and our jobs used to be lifelong and our jobs are no longer lifelong that is the whole explanation for growing on insurance over 20 years so what does that mean know that you've gone from 26 years at a firm to four years at a firm one of the most fundamental things it means on the cause side is that technology is displacing labor really fast because we're living through a digital revolution which is another way of saying smart people tend to get better and better at being smart at automating tasks that can be automated and so when we have our big debates about trade in our mind we're having a debate about whether or not their use to be a factory in Youngstown Ohio and whether or not there's today a factory that has the same corporate brand name on it south of the border in Mexico that's an important part of the debate but it's a very very tiny piece of the debate compared to the fact that the factory in Youngstown in 1975 had 38,000 employees and the factory today whether in Youngstown or in a right-to-work state south of i-40 or in Mexico today has far more output with on average 800 workers instead of 38,000 workers the overwhelming story of shortening job duration is that humans are figuring out ways to create technologies that eat up the work that we do that means we're gonna have more total output it also means we're going to have a lot more churn and change in our lives and it turns out when job work vocation calling let's take this up a step from mere job all the way to something that has more theological and philosophical import to it which is not just how do I put bread on the table as fundamental and as important as that is but what do I do to live a life of gratitude to redeem the time to spend my hours this day this week this month this able-bodied thirty to forty to fifty year phase of my life what do I do to live a life of gratitude to say thank you and to matter to do something that helps somebody else if it turns out the work that I do evaporates when I'm 35 or 40 or 45 or 50 this is a really interesting problem if you have a little bit of distance from it it is a really scary problem if you're living in the middle of a from a factory town that has pink slips going out everywhere and what's happening in America right now because we don't have any shared vocabulary for thinking about the fact that we are the first generation we are the first people in human history that is going to see the end of lifelong work this hasn't ever happened before nomads and agrarians from 10,000 years ago to 150 years ago not the kind of Agriculture we do in Nebraska now that feeds the world that's a high tech computer digital industry but agrarianism from 10,000 years ago to 150 years ago those two categories of people didn't have job choice they just had becoming eight or or twelve or fourteen years old and doing more of what mom and dad had always done and Grandma and Grandpa had always done but then the Industrial Revolution created job choice 150 years ago lots and lots of specialization and it was hugely disruptive we created this big new category of adolescence there's always been coming of age crises around puberty but most of what we deal with as teens in America it's not really with biological change it's much more related to coming to figure out who you're gonna be when you don't have mom and dad as the exact model for how you grow up to become an adult because you do more of the work that they do most of what we mean by adolescents is the transition from being a child to being an adult who has to learn what being an adult is in terms of job choice and provision when you're not just going to do exactly what mom and dad did and you grow up in natural rites of passage and coming of age to do that but that massive disruption that is this new category adolescence which again has existed as a as a coming-of-age category in certain ways for 2,500 years but it's really only been a mass experience for about 150 years hugely disruptive adolescence around and does the Industrial Revolution but it was a once in a life experience it was what happened when you picked your job and now in the industrial urban era of 1870 or 1920 until maybe 20 years ago you picked a job you picked an industry you picked a skillset you picked an identity that you were gonna have until death or retirement what's new in our time is that 35 and 40 and 45 and 50 year olds are gonna get disintermediated out of that piece of their identity and they're gonna have to figure out how to go through a new kind of adolescence at 35 and 40 and 45 and 50 and no one has ever done that before there's never been a civilization of lifelong learners before and I promise I don't have any desire to get near culture warring tonight but at a weird time where we're pretending there might be 57 genders and gender has no biological basis let me just say there has never been more clarity in any scientific literature about gender difference and about brain structure then there is right now and here's the big scary news for all the dudes in the room men and women are really different and women are just lots healthier almost all the data shows that women navigate women who have them far more across hemispheric connection connections in their brain and men who have much more front to back connections on each lobe in their brain so the stereotypes not true of every individual of course but the stereotypes that men tend to be decent at long focus in certain tasks but less able to deal with disruption that turns out to be borne out in lots and lots of literature guess what the economy is doing it's creating perpetual disruption and chaos and complexity forevermore and it turns out there are a whole bunch of things that fourteen and sixteen and eighteen year old boys don't navigate very well and we tend to take a huge deep breath when they become 22 or 23 and they start to calm down and stabilize a lot in their life a lot of that chaos of navigating complexity poorly in teenage adolescence it turns out it's also associated with just navigating big life disruptions and we're living in an economy where job duration getting shorter means you're gonna have job disruption you're gonna have life disruption you're gonna have identity complexity and chaos at age 35 40 45 and 50 and it turns out lots of men are really terrible at navigating those moments and lots of us right now are just killing ourselves as we go through those moments point number three friendship we've gone from Sheree and I met in 1990 in 1990 the average American had 3.2 friends the average American today has 1.8 friends a having a friendship in less than 30 years defined friendship you see a couple people hugging in row five thank you that was very tender that I even by the way that was a real moment for you but I'm just gonna make it up at every speech I give in the future I'm gonna claim that somebody just did that in any venue I'm in that was a fun distraction I mean friends I mean aristotelian friends I mean an expansive sense of the self I mean the sense that you have when you actually love somebody and it's no longer a choice when they're happy you're happy and when they hurt you hurt you don't choose it you just their identity becomes a part of your identity I don't mean Facebook friends right I don't mean Senate friends in the center my good friend the senator from Vermont whose face I'm about to tear off in a debate I mean real friends I mean what Aristotle means when he talks about friendship and some of the best ways to think about that is think about how you feel about your kids because we used the term friends so generically so let's take it as an expanded sense of Familia I've got 17 year old daughter of 17 and 15 year old daughters and a seven-year-old son when my girls hurt I hurt there's no there's no choice involved I just ache because they hurt when my seven-year-old is flying down the street on his bike and the sun is shining on his face I don't choose to take a much deeper breath I just feel my chest expand in my eyes wall up and I'm happy because my seven year old is happy and life is good that's what friendship is it's that necessity sense that we're bound together forty percent of Americans have only zero or one confidante right now so when you get to an average of one point eight forty percent of us have only zero or one deep relationship in our life at sixty-five sixty percent of men defined their wife as their best friend at age sixty five twenty nine percent of women define their husband as their best friend it turns out one of the reasons why is most men never make any new deep relationships after about age 23 24 25 they just atrophy relationships over the course of their life we have stereotypical pop culture versions of this not all the data is exactly right but there's the old claim that women speak on average thirty thousand words a day and then eight thousand words a day it's that data is probably not accurate but it is clearly true that the average median middle-aged woman does a much better job if changed if geography has changed on her figuring out how to re-engage and the average 45 50 55 year-old man if his geography has changed does a very poor job figuring out how to build any new relationships and so we atrophy relationships over the course of life well it means the connections between this friendship horror the going from 3.2 to 1.8 deep friendships per American over the last 30 years when you combine that with job change it means there are a whole bunch of men whose second-tier for sure and maybe their first tier of relationships are the guy who works next to them at work and if you change that job at 25 and at 30 and at 35 and 40 you got a whole bunch of people who were structurally built in to likely being really lonely before they turn 50 and so it isn't that the 60 percent of men are doing such a better job of cultivating their wives than their wives who won't reciprocate at 29 percent it's that the men tend to just not have many other relationships move on to family structure I think the biggest crisis in America today is the crisis of fatherlessness I'm the second or third most conservative guy in the Senate by voting record but I very self-consciously set in Daniel Patrick Moynihan's desk on the Senate floor Moynihan's the author of a whole bunch of important stuff one of them is the famous quote you're entitled to your own opinions but you're not entitled to your own facts it's attributed to about 20 people in DC it's actually a Moynihan quote but in addition Moynihan in the mid-1960s Rotta wrote a study on the crisis of the black family and what he pointed to was that out of wedlock birth rates in America were 6% overall but they were hitting 24% in the black community he sounded an alarm and he said a civilization of self-governance of government as freedom from so thick capital social capital can be lived at all the places where you want to actually build and innovate and be an entrepreneur and build family and community and Rotary clubs and and Montgomery Bell Academy and all the other institutions that you all know so well and invest in deeply in Richmond Richard can I blame that on malaria natural enrichment are very different communities but lots of good grass stops community and both all of those kind of investments Moynihan said are only possible if people are not starting out from a sense of crisis that life doesn't work for you and if you start out in a broken home there's a lot of crisis and life statistically doesn't work for you and he one hand was sounding this bell when 24 percent of one subset of America about twelve percent of Americans at that point when when was writing this twenty four percent of kids were born in a family where they were not gonna have a deep and enduring connection to dad today without regard to race forty percent of American kids don't have a dad and it's worse than that fifty nine percent of babies born to women 30 and under now don't have any meaningful connection to baby daddy so what that means is we're going through a demographic moment where we still see a lot of stability in our communities because there are a whole bunch of 39 year old women having their fourth kid and they're from fame stable family structures and we've turned a demographic cliff or turned a demographic corner fallen off a demographic cliff to mix metaphors where 39 percent of children born to age women 30 and under do not have a stable family environment and those kids are not likely to have any enduring connection to their dad there is no bigger crisis in American life I submit to you that all four of these things are highly related to where we started with the rootlessness of this moment the problem is not the creation of the iPhone in 2007 but I think that the the smartphone is the best metaphor to have in your mind of what it looks like to be so rich that we don't have the necessity that compels us to have continue investing wherever we are in that moment one thing that I said earlier though that was inaccurate that I needed correct when I said we've never had any demographic crisis that's at all like the declining life expectancy of this moment I think there might be one other analog besides the civil war and that was probably the nineteen arts and teens again we don't have mortality data till the 1930s but we had something that looked a lot like opioids look today in American life in the 19-teens and arts and teens and early 20s and that was the rampant public alcoholism crisis that we were going through when you think about how weird it is that we could have an eighteenth and a twenty-first amendment that we could have the Volker Act that we could have made alcohol illegal in a community in a culture that drank a lot more alcohol than we drink it on average today I mean drink it as a more normal part of life than we consume alcohol today it makes you want to pause and say passing the constitutional amendments really really hard you need three fourths of this many two-thirds of the states that this kind of voting rate and you needed to come out of Congress or you need to be ratified there are two basic ways to do a constitutional amendment both of them are really really hard and we passed a constitutional amendment making alcohol consumption illegal how did that happen pollsters will tell you historical pollsters because we didn't have polling then obviously we'll tell you you probably needed more than 85% public support to pass prohibition how did that happen why did that happen it happened because there really were drunk Irish kids passed out on the street all over America you could be in Baltimore in Boston in New York you could go up and down industrial inland cities heading into the Great Lakes region and there were drunk passed out people on the streets in every city why because they were going through an economic disruption that I think is the only analog we can think about for this moment when they went from rural agrarianism to urban industrial jobs social capital collapsed that were push and pull factors there was a huge tech revolution going on so much substitution of labor for capital for labor on the farm meant you had more output on the farm with much less inputs and you had the pull factors happening in the cities that this giant new thing their supercomputer of the time the factory had been created and there were all sorts of reasons why labor was leaving the farm and going to the city and when you think about it I live in a very sparsely populated part of the plains it sounds like if you leave the countryside and go to the city of course you're gonna have more dense relationships right there are a lot more people or Stated now if you go from being connected only to your physical place to having a computer and social media that allows you to connect to a lot more people I have so many more friends I know so many more people now of course you're going to have thicker community right no what happened was a collapse of the social capital they knew in the new england town village to make it stereotypical and the isolated anonymity of the city and people were literally killing themselves with alcoholism mostly teenage and twenty-something males who were the migrants to these places as social capital collapsed and hadn't yet been rebuilt my prediction to you is that our moment will ultimately not look nearly as pessimistic once we figure out how you rebuilt social capital how you figure out the new habits and the new institutions for a rootless age in the same way that the transition from rural America agrarian America to urban industrial America looked like between 1870 as it started filled with optimism 1900 1910 and 1920 filled with pessimism and fear and panic about the Industrial monsters think about the book Frankenstein what is Frankenstein it's a way to personalize and anthropomorphize the fear and the terror and the loneliness of machines that you couldn't control Shelley and Frankenstein is telling a story about computers that are soulless and sold in some ways but horrific there's sort of a happy ending at places in the book but really what Frankenstein is about is the fear of the anonymity of the Industrial Age we are doing are analogous moment transitioning from lifelong industrial jobs as the mass experience to digital jobs that are really really placed as place laSandra las' and we haven't figured out what the new community with the new habits with the new forms of self-restraint look like where we go from just being addicted to the consumer possibilities of freedom from I can go to Wrigley under-the-table instead of having to engage my mother-in-law to the maturity and the wisdom of saying actually I love this woman and my kids need to know that I love this woman and I need to be physically present here now learning how to manage tech intrusions into every moment and crevice of our life is a picture of what we need to do but it's not the whole thing the real thing we're gonna need to do is figure out what does it mean when you don't have to have a geography when you don't have to have roots when you don't you're not gonna get to have one job that lasts forever but where you don't have to have any permanent address what is it going to look like to find home my guess is we're gonna figure this out but only once we rebuild new forms of social capital for a digital age that makes us so rich that we don't know how to say no to the largesse and say yes to the home to the family to the structure to the community and ultimately to the vocations that drive human happiness thanks for having me [Applause] Thank You senator sass it's a lot to think about and we do have time set aside for questions and answers and there's going to be a microphone in the center and I have the privilege of asking the first question but before I ask the first question I would like to set forth some expectations on how we are going to structure our time for the questions this evening and we really have three ground rules and it's important that all of us understand those and subscribe to them the first is to please be brief to be civil and to ask a question in the form of a question this is not a platform to share an opinion could you make an introduction in the Senate gladly gladly gladly so with those ground rules stated the the question I have is McCauley Brad and I have the privilege and the honor everyday of investing in that social social capital 20-30 years from now those who will be leading I spend my days I'm with four-year-olds through sixth graders Brad seventh through twelfth graders your time is a college president now in the Senate what skills do you see us needing to make an investment and now in developing and making that investment for twenty to thirty years from now because we have the window right now and what we do every day matters and it is going to shape the future of this nation and then the subsequent generations after that thank you so there's a big debate going on at the College Board which is the owner of a number of different standardized tests but most prominently the SAT and they are trying to reaffirm what they call they've got a way to say it that's quickly and I'm sorry it's not coming to me right now but it's civics and coding they're trying to figure out how in a world where everybody and by the what my answer is going to be to affirm them but then to say something different so if you're already wanting to pick a fight with that I'm gonna affirm them but that's not really my answer coding is a language right and we're gonna have to develop a familiarity with quantification so applied math if you will logic to think about it in an older way that is going to have to become a second language of everybody that you're teaching every kindergartner through senior and most of us in this room are ultimately gonna have to get good at thinking about data that why I spend so many sleepless nights is a little overstated but I spend a lot of worry time in the forty percent of my professional life that I spend on intelligence issues about the long term tech race with China because if Huawei wins the battle for 5g what we're going to essentially do as a civilization or as the u.s. is going to do is we're just entering a new Cold War that we don't even have the right categories for how to think about China we're somewhere between 1944 and 1948 and the origins of the old Cold War we're entering a new Cold War that's arguably going to be lots more complicated than the last cold war and I come to you having just been in Rwanda cote de fois tunisia a whole bunch of places in africa some cities some rural contexts some places that are developing some places that are in utter chaos I was nowhere that there wasn't Huawei technology everywhere why that's horrific is because the substructure the skeleton of what's gonna be the hardware that underpins the new 5g world that's gonna underlie drone technology biotech AI machine learning quantum computing is setting the stage for big datasets that we can't even envision right now what the ten to twenty year implications are going to be of all the big data you might know and we as a civilization we the 320 million Americans we're gonna have to navigate this moment are gonna have to be familiar enough with applied math that this conversation is is the way that you can transition from a spoken language to a quantifiable coding language I think we need coding for everybody number two we're going to need civics we don't have a shared on standing of principle pluralism we don't understand what America is America is an idea by the way if we want the the shorthand America is a claim about universal human dignity that says rights predate government government is a shared project to secure rights government is not the author and source of our rights government is a tool government is not the super font of what we of what we get to receive from those that have power but if you believe that then you probably need to understand we probably need to understand why the First Amendment's five freedoms were not clearly distinguishable to the founders because they wouldn't make sense without each other the First Amendment freedom of religion speech press assembly and protest are all highly intertwined I don't really have religious freedom if I can't assemble with my co-religionists and shout out the hymns of what we believe together because mine ours is an incarnation of faith where the dialogical conversation between God the Redeemer and his assembled people requires that back and forth conversation I don't have religious liberty if it's just something that's in my head but never allowed to be a part of a worshiping community you don't have freedom of speech if you can't write down what you said that's what freedom of the press means you don't have either of those four prior freedoms if you don't have the right to protest when the government oversteps that idea know of civics is still derivative American civics is fundamentally important as it is to all of us as a shared community but it's still derivative to basic empathy which is the ability to understand an argument in a fallen world that's not your own we live in a media environment where we're supposed to pretend we should get outraged every second about whatever is being screamed at you by soap sellers on the bottom chyron of your TV breaking news six times since we've been here tonight how many of you if you go on vacation for a week really think when you get back you have to DVR CNN and Fox and MSNBC to go look back at the breaking news well my grandfather who didn't go to college himself but was a fund raiser for the college that I was privileged to be the president of 30 years after he died when I was a kid he'd go out on the road fundraising from alumni and he'd take a six-week tour of the East Coast and six week tour of the west coast with my grandma every year and when they got back they had this big job which is they had to read all the papers when they got back why did they feel this burden they needed to read the obituaries they needed to know the sports scores of the local high school baseball game because somebody two blocks down was a part of their community and they had missed something important in the texture of their place CNN MSNBC Fox screaming at you on their Chiron that's not the same thing and the outrage comes to us from a Manichaean worldview that says when I differ with somebody else dang it I know that I'm right about everything before I ever listen to them by the way this is not an argument for the mushy middle again I'm if we're gonna talk politics I'm the second or third most conservative guy to 100 in the US Senate I believe in decentralized market oriented solutions but what I really believe is there's no messianic moment coming in American politics and that's because what really matters I'll take that clap thank you sir what really matters in American life and in every life after Adam every life after the fall is ultimately the things of volunteerism love persuasion community building it's all the stuff that you're building not just the stuff you need to be free from and so certainty gets way out of whack when the certainty of what we're investing in is these artificial distant tribes of politics rather than the textured real embodied flesh-and-blood local tribes and right now I think we have a genuine crisis of empathy and one of the fundamental things that you to do and that your faculties do and the parents do and that you board members do and again I'm Senate rules don't allow me to ask for money on behalf of other people but I can say thank you as a citizen for things that you've already given money to so when you invest in these schools when you invest in the Trinity forum you're building something really really meaningful that's far more interesting than politics because they're communities of love and they're places where if you differ with somebody in a classroom at Montgomery Bell Academy my guess is you don't decide to write them off as damnable because you have one particular topic you're arguing about in seminar today that person may be my ally in a debate tomorrow and by the way they may be on my wrestling team or my lacrosse team a week from today and there's a whole bunch of texture that says I'm not gonna solve every fight to the death the way we're doing American public life right now is everything is a fight to the death about the less important things and the more important things we don't really have time for your institutions are building the loves and the affections of people who want to have time for those more important things sorry Sooners fast thank you for being here read both of your books they're excellent you are an incredibly intelligent person we live in a culture that is not MBA st. Paul other schools in this community take education very seriously but the reality is our founders built this country for an educated population and and we're not there and I'm interested in your thoughts on that and the second part of the question is what would you tell people that are blessed to live in this neighborhood of this community who have a strong social fabric how can we help those who may not thanks so there is some literature about mobility in American life that is often reduced to the categories the mobile the rooted and the stock and I would say to your point when you said the founders built this country for an educated people they surely built it for illiterate people but I think the prior category that I would use as opposed to level of educational attainment is they built it for a grass tops localist community there was an assumption that the place where you lived needed to be the center of your world right now all of us are allowing this thing to happen where our consciousness about the things that we worry about our hopes and our dreams and our fears and our angers tend to becoming more and more distant from where we actually sit so we become less and less able to make a difference I think one of the things we need to do so it isn't just because of the the economic benefits of a community like this but one thing every American needs to do is ask ourself really hard questions about how much bad news do I need to take in from far away that I can't affect I'm less and less persuaded that we need all of this information that comes at us and it turns out as humans we're just not very good at managing all of those alerts if every minute there's something coming in telling me about terrible news it turns out it changes who I am it changes my chassis and so we know that a data level that there has never been a safer time in American history from kidnapping and abductions there are far fewer kids kidnapped today that at any point in my lifetime I'm 47 years old consistent drop decade by decade by decade since the 1970s when you poll the American people about it they believe there's never been a more dangerous time so much helicopter parenting thinks that your kid who's seven can't go two blocks away from your house because there's some dude in a white panel van about to rip him off and steal your kid it's just not true right but the reason we think it is is because if there was an abduction four states away four months ago in 1972 you just didn't know and today you know about every abduction that's happening anywhere and so we have this mass assumption that all sorts of things are true in American life that just aren't true I don't mean to get near politics but I'll just give you one more example if you look at the gun violence debate in America the vast majority of people believe there's much more gun violence in America than there's ever been there's actually been a very consistent decline in gun violence in America in the last half-century the one thing that's different because we have a lot more batched gun violence that kills five to twenty five people at a time less overall but more in this category overwhelmingly committed by fifteen to thirty five-year-old white males that don't have a father I know we're not supposed to profile but if you talk to the FBI's ice chair the subcommittee of the Judiciary that does FBI oversight when you talk to the FBI profilers the statistical correlations about the kinds of shootings that were having they're highly related to these same categories that we started tonight about about detached local community so I think by far the biggest thing we all need to do is figure out just because I can be free from the place where I find myself do I want to be should I be what are my duties to the place where I'm planted how do I grow where I am I say this as someone who's paid taxes yeah I've been married 24 years we've paid taxes in 12 or 13 states each move individually makes sense collectively we have lots of regret so for the mobile the rooted and the stock Richard Florida as the sociologist I'm citing here what's really happening in America is we have a mass Lee group massively growing mobile class which is the richest upper one-third of America who have lots of opportunities lots of freedom from place we can just skim across the surface of any place we want to be we have a massively growing stock category of poverty in the bottom two-thirds of America so there is massively expanding income and wealth inequality in America even though America is getting richer but it isn't a 1% in a 99% America it's a 30% and a 70% America and the 70% where there are far more people who are stuck or people who aren't able to make all these navigations at 30 35 and 40 as the factory job is not going to last forever anymore what we have a decline of is rootedness which is people who could be mobile but instead they're not stock they could be mobile but they choose to be rooted they do it for themselves but they also do it for a love of neighbor and I think a lot of us are gonna have to think through what does it mean to invest in community and invest in place where lots of our neighbors don't have the same opportunity to leave so it becomes more normal to leave because everybody that you know that has the chance does every time there's another great job offer lots of Americans jump at it that's not necessarily a wrong choice individually collectively we've got a problem if we don't know why reinvesting in rooted in this matters somebody needs to ask a question or I'm gonna be ashamed I'm gonna be embarrassed yeah what was the first word used before mobilization gotcha so the overwhelming majority of job growth in America is happening in a hundred Metro regions it's not necessarily happening in an urban center but it's happening in the suburban and exurban rings around those places most of them are I forty and south so Nashville's healthier than most growing places in America but you're sort of representative of a number of these 100 communities that have a lot of growth and what we're having is sometimes economists call it the agglomeration economy what's happening is that even though we're having more job change firm to firm if you're gonna build a new firm in the ten largest sectors of the American economy all have their own version of a digital revolution if you plot the number of jobs new job creations in each of those 10 categories so if you're doing health care you're doing transportation or you're doing manufacturing production if you look at the job growth in any of those top 10 categories you could plot City one's growth City to s growth city threes growth and rank order them in almost all 10 categories well more than 90 percent of the new job creation is happening in only four communities per sector why is that because it turns out so in in Nebraska a place with only 1.9 million people but we're growing we're growing because Omaha and Lincoln are growing really rapidly as 89 of our 93 counties are flat to shrinking so 89 of 93 counties are shrinking or flat and we only have four communities or four counties three of which are Metro Omaha and Lincoln that are growing a lot what's growing AG tech is growing so in the last five years we've gone from doing seed application fertilizer application water pesticides at a square yard basis to a square foot basis and they're places where one square foot to the next square foot may have a nine 100% Delta and how much pesticide or fertilizer or seed you apply because the land tilts a little bit there's a little more water runoff this has headed a little bit more toward the Sun and so based on last year's yield data we're doing GPS farming down to the square foot that's a highly highly technical industry almost all the businesses that are booming in that space our new job starts and they have lots of affiliate companies around their perimeters so individuals are changing firms really rapidly but if you wanted to build egg tech you wouldn't go to Buffalo because you wouldn't have any of the human capital necessary to hire for your new job start an Ag Tech and it turns out the the agglomeration economy is this idea that almost all new job creation happens next door to where there was just job creation in the same sectors so exurban booming America as you know in many places I don't know your geography well but it seems like most of it is south of town here a lot of the new Franklin kind of economies that you're you're seeing here we're seeing that in a lot of Metro places in America and you have a whole bunch of Left Behind communities and right now we haven't thought about what do you do in those places again north and east of here as you head into Eastern Kentucky and West Virginia where it's not likely that there's going to be new tech jobs that are going to replace the old coal jobs I don't think the political economy of that has been thought through at all sir come here so when I say that we don't have that the question was what do I think about the trillion and a half dollars of student debt first of all one shared fact about it the majority of student loan debt in America is held by people who have never finished college and are unlikely to so the number one thing that should scream out to us when we hear that data is why our colleges and universities failing so badly because we don't have the right supply side coming online and higher education for a world where we're gonna have the kind of disruption of 35 to 55 year olds that we've been talking about that we're gonna need all new institutions not all new but we're gonna need a whole new ecosystem of institutions that come online on the supply side anybody know any new college University in this room any of you have any sense of a new college or university they don't happen why doesn't this happen we should be having a slightly greater number of college and university bankruptcies than we're seeing and we should see a much larger number of new starts because we should see dynamism in this space we're mid-career job retraining and the different aspects of historic tertiary higher education are creating a whole new universe of landscape of the supply side we have a cartelization of accreditation right now where the people who are already the institutions that control access to being a new start they don't want to change and the vast majority of them are doing a very poor job the University of Chicago I'm gonna give shorter answers so we don't run out of time and I get in a few more questions but the University of Chicago has a big long longitudinal study summarized in a book called academically adrift that shows that the majority of American college kids learn nothing from fall of their freshman year till follow their junior year it turns out in your junior and senior year you learn how to learn but freshman and sophomore years for most kids are a total wasteland well you know what there's also been a 40% reduction since 1990 and the amount of work required in the average college freshman year in college sophomore year it turns out there's a perfect conspiracy between teachers who'd like to teach less and do more research and students who'd like to have more management of the Freshman Fifteen and their buzz experience and do less class work and so the old Carnegie rule the idea that you spend three hours outside class for every hour inside class the average survey time management surveys that have been done the last five years show the average student spends eight tenths of an hour outside of class for every hour in class so if you're taking a 12 hour load you're working 19 hours a week and we're pretending it's a full-time experience it turns out the time expansion principle is if we don't demand enough of people they get less quantity but they also get less quantity I'm gonna go to you and then I'll go to the people who are in line sorry here we'll get closer to politics I think lots of it is economic but I think there's a big political component as well so one of the key pieces of moving to an economy where you have less brawn and more brain is that a lot of men have been told for generations that if they stay out of trouble in high school and they get their first job they've paid their dues and they're never gonna have to do anything else to continue learning over the course of life and that's just clearly not true right we're we live in a world where jobs are disintermediated over time and you got to figure out how to keep learning but if your identity to your family is highly correlated to just being the breadwinner and all sorts of stereotypical ways we could think about the 1950s and 60s it works the high-water moment of industrial economics it may not work in terms of all the attachment that we need and all the human texture of familial relationships but it works to be the breadwinner as the breadwinner if you can actually be the breadwinner and the high-water mark of industrial employment in American life was 1956 were 31 percent of Americans worked in factories overwhelmingly male today we have less than seven percent of Americans work in big tulle jobs and we have far more total output than we had in 1956 when 31 percent of the people work there so I think some of the disruption is related to the idea that male roles were not sufficiently explained with all the vocations and callings beyond breadwinner but another big piece of it I think is the rise of the welfare state at the same time that is willing to replace the paycheck with a government support paycheck that makes that historic not that the male role is the only breadwinner but if the male role was often reduced to the breadwinner you got a whole bunch of problems when you create a world where the necessity of that role is less significant charles murray scholar at the American Enterprise Institute has a great shorthand he said the job of government is to take the difficulty out of doing things that you want the difficulty taken out of doing so if y'all are going to some restaurant downtown tonight in a neighborhood that has a little more crime we want the government to police well that neighborhood so you take the difficulty out of walking from the restaurant to your car I want the government to take the difficulty out of that walk to protect us that is a public responsibility I don't want the government to take the difficulty out of my wife and me having to bond two weeks ago when our seven-year-old had the flu in the middle of the night because it turns out as terrible as it is to clean up puke at 3:00 a.m. my wife and I actually we wouldn't have put it this way at the time but we fell more in love because we were doing that work together and we were both needed and it turns out necessity is one of the core anchors of identity and one of the things we're doing with our welfare state right now is we're saying that almost everybody is replaceable by some sort of benefit check and we're making the news nuclear family neck less relevant sir I spent some time in Grundy County last week one of the poorest counties here in Tennessee I talked with several people just in matter of milling around what struck me was that they all had a very similar lament they were all local they were all routed they all have large families yet they all three women all said the same thing quite independent of each other that their families don't get together as much as they used to so given the theme of loneliness I'd love to know what your thoughts are about what's happening in that type of situation yeah so you're right in the data the average American household has gone from hosting 14 times a year a decade ago to eight times last year so just the basic act of hospitality and breaking bread together has been reduced by 50% in ten years I think overwhelmingly that is driven by habits that come from a world where the way we're consuming distant digital media is supplanting rather than supplemental so there there's data that shows if you go from fifty to a hundred Facebook friends a hundred to two hundred Facebook friends it probably correlates to having more actual relationships in life 50 to 100 100 and 200 if you go from 200 to 500 500 to a thousand a thousand to 500 to 5,000 social media friends it turns out you actually have reduced you to correlated with the reduction in actual known human relationships one of the high correlates you can find in sociology to happen is do you know the people who live two doors away from you and it turns out people who are heavy social media consumers are much less likely to know the people who live two doors from them then the people who self-consciously don't do that a small subset of people but the people who self-consciously don't do that tend to invest in creating actual community in the places where they are some of the communities you're talking about also just have basic economic crisis of the evaporation of the factory to be sure but I think the habits of hospitality Rosaria Butterfield is a name that many of you probably know in this room if you haven't read her stuff you should both read it and then you should prepare to repent because I I think she's both wonderful and does that read her book I just keep throwing it against the wall and anger why are you screaming at me lady and she's not she just tells you how she lives and it is brutally painful to think what it would really look like to not view our suburban McMansions as a fortress where we can protect ourselves but as something that if we have them they're really a gift that we're supposed to be sharing I'm terrible at those habits and I highly commend her books do you sir as one of those in the demographics that you've been talked about tonight I was wondering we have a lot of changes coming up especially in the workforce you've already mentioned that several times with automation everything it sounds like you've been calling us to rethink our work time a lot which do you think was going to be more important restructuring at work time or restructuring at leisure time going forward oh great great way to frame the question so now I'll go full theological purist nerd on yeah leisure is an unchristian word my friend the Puritans used to have a debate about whether our Christians could use the word leisure because the Christian term is recreation because what you're doing with recreation and I think you asked this question knowingly I don't know you but that was fun what the Christian sense of recreation is if there is deep in our soul a kind of yin and yang between production and consumption we are recipients of unbelievable gifts right and the Sabbath is supposed to remind us of the fact that we are not in pendant we are not self-sufficient I can't keep the world in its orbit I can't keep the temperatures in a range where I can live I can't hold back the flood I live in a state right now that's going through the worst natural disaster we've ever had there's Nebraska has been around for 151 years we are living through an unbelievable flood bizarrely uncovered by the national media I'm not here to complain about that but just you may not know this but Nebraska has 93 counties eighty-one of our 93 counties are in a state of emergency and the way the flood came through our state is truly breathtaking we had a couple of things happen at once but we ended up with 40 inches of snow in January in February which was record numbers and then we happen to have this thing called a-bomb cyclone which is essentially when a blizzard becomes a hurricane and it hit an exact place on our state where the the geography the topography I can't come up with the word for altitude what do you call that above sea level term for your place what was it elevation thank you our elevation drops from 4,000 feet in the western part of the state to about 1200 feet in the eastern part of the state and at exactly the place where that line is this blizzard hit and so it dropped 12 inches of rain on top of 40 inches of snow so the ground was frozen it took no water the 12 inches of rain melted tons of snow and all of it went straight to tributaries creeks streams and we had five river systems that had all their levees destroyed so we had the ice floes raised high enough that basically think of a piece of ice the size of a suburban by weight width and length but only maybe two feet tall that's many many many tons of ice they were elevated to heists where they went through communities and just took everything out like a road grader so I never expected to go places where there never used to be a river and sea channels the width and depth of this room of new rivers running through talons I am weak I am dependent I am a recipient I am a consumer and yet we are meant to be producers the fundamental part of our identity in terms of aristotelian time consumption is the six days a week where I'm living out vocations but the way to think about this is not that we have one job but that's the thing we get paid for and we have all the other stuff that we decide to consume with our leisure time the way to think about this is all of the identities where I have duties where I'm needed where I have callings right so I am temporarily a u.s. senator that's where I get my paycheck but I'm a Nebraskan on the neighbor in the particular community where a lot of my people were just wiped out in a flood I'm a dad I'm a husband I'm a Christian in general but I'm also a member of Grace Presbyterian Church in Fremont Nebraska I've got a whole I'm a corn Husker football addict and they need me I was I was here today to save a recruit Scott frost is Nebraska's football coach we've been texting today that there's a linebacker here at MBA who signed with Nebraska and he came and got his picture taken with me when I was here earlier today and I sent the picture to coach and I said this recruit was thinking about flipping to LSU but I kept him on board so totally freaked out the coach like the kid wasn't really thinking about flipping but just did tell him that he was going away tomorrow when we know when I think in late second round early third round there's still a chance I'm gonna get drafted I'm gonna be meted by something I felt it come on that was a little funny those duties those callings that's what you invest your time and the thing that make the things that make you happy are not consumption there's recreation that we need there are lots of things we need to do that we associate with the term leisure but they're really to get ready to go back to creating again and so I think that we shouldn't be thinking about it as the one thing we get paid for versus all the other things we should do we should be thinking of it in terms of all of our callings and oh by the way and the urban is the uber ization or the economy lots more Americans are going to become job shares the categories of people who get the majority of their pay from one job is gonna fall well below 50% of Americans lots and lots of people are gonna cobble together many different things and lots of that might be more interesting than having one job on the line where you turned one cog in a wheel in nineteen 68 but it's sure scary to think about maybe I'm an uber driver by the way I do all sorts of field events in Nebraska and so I'd like to work and so I Drive uber and all the money goes goes to charity but it's a good way to get to know my constituents but if I had to pay the bills with uber it really freaks somebody out when all of a sudden I realize the bend that showed up to pick them up as their senator usually they're they're so stunned that they're nice but sometimes you find somebody who's just ready to give you an earful about why everything in your voting record is wrong and I'm like why do you know everything about my voting record you're a little too engaged but your goober driver becomes the stock but if all of a sudden uber is gonna be 40% of the way you pay the bills and you used to always have a job that paid a hundred percent that's pretty darn scary unless we have a conception of ourselves as having lots of vocations lots of callings and lots of needs thanks to the way you invest in the Trinity for I'm good to be with you all tonight [Applause] [Applause] thank Thank You ver that was terrific we do commend Ben's book to you which will be available for sales and signing right outside those doors you can pick up them why we hate each other and how to heal for $29 you can probably convince Ben to sign a few copies for you as well and so highly commend that book I think you'll find it well worth reading also want to come in an invitation that should be on each of your chairs which is to join the Trinity form Society we hope that you will be part of the community that helps make events like this tonight possible in a culture that is overwhelmingly characterized by distraction trivialization loneliness isolation and alienation we try to do exactly the opposite which is to cultivate a space that encourages conversation discussion and reflection on what matters most in a spirit of both intellectual rigor deep community and warm hospitality so it's modest but potent we hope that you will join us in that effort and become a member of the trinity farm society in addition to all the psychic as well as organizational advantages to your membership there are several other benefits as well including a subscription to our quarterly readings where we take the best of literature letters essays biographies poetry basically include an introduction which gives background and context discussion questions in the back so it's basically a book club in a bag and where you can find some of the most thoughtful scholars leaders and thinkers in the country offer perspective background in context on the most seminal works of literature as just one example right outside the doors at the same table that you'll find Ben's book you'll also find different Trinity forum readings which includes aleksa excerpts from Alexis de Tocqueville democracy in America with a foreword by none other than our speaker tonight in addition to that you'll also receive podcasts our daily what were reading list of curating reading recommendations as well as the opportunity not only to know other fellow members to receive invitations events like tonight and to help make them possible in addition if you would like to join the list of sponsors who helped make the events here at MBA possible we would love to talk with you please talk with me talk with Brad jason byron smith our chairman of the board byron if you could just wave your hands so people can see you right in the back more my very able colleague Elissa Abraham krob ahthe right there all of us would be delighted to talk to talk with you further as well as trustee Sam funk who's right here maybe you can wave your your hand as well you will see a bunch of different reading recommendations in the back several of the authors that Ben has talked about tonight whether it's a Gustin aquinas people he's mentioned in his book including Martin Luther King jr. vaclav havel Nelson Mandela all of them are featured in our different readings in the back which will provide we think an unparalleled introduction to their life work and thought if you would like to share this event with others we warmly encourage you to do so you can do that via twitter at our hashtag TTFN tonight on our Facebook page where we will have photos up and ready for tagging within 48 hours I feel a little bit awkward saying that after all the social media discussion but there it is we also hope that you will join us for future evening conversations and we will be back to partner with MBA and st. Paul and get in the fall stay tuned for more details on that if you happen to find yourself in DC next month on May 28th will be hosting David Brooks of the National Press Club to speak on his book the second Mountain June 10th will be in Atlanta with Robbie George and Cornel West and of course next fall we'll be back here as well as we wrap up it's always appropriate to end on a sense of gratitude as in all of life there is much to be grateful for but there are many people to thank whose effort work and thought made tonight possible so special thanks again to our sponsors we so appreciate your generosity and your thought that has gone into tonight we also just want to thank again our stellar partners Brad joy at MBA and Jason Powell the headmaster at st. Paul for all the folks on the ground who helped make it happen the staff at st. Paul Christian Academy and MBA with a particular shout out and thanks to Courtney Travis at MBA and Kristin Jones at Saint Paul our photographer Alison Aikens our videographer very McAllister and our fantastic volunteers Luke Julian Chad Barlow a delegation of volunteers from st. Paul including Ann Smith Dana Mullis Mitchell despot and Beth West as well as a student delegation of volunteers from New College Franklin including Hannah hoobin Lizzie Snipes Anika ceiling thank you again to my fantastic colleagues Alissa Abraham Cravath who does so much work behind the scenes trustee Sam Funke and our visionary chairman byron Smith thanks again to a fascinating night and much food for thought from our speaker Ben Sasse and thank you to each of you who've come out and join us tonight for what we hope will be a well of valuable and Crenn encouraging conversation thank you for coming and good night [Applause]

Channel: The Trinity Forum

Views: 2,595

Rating: 4.75 out of 5

Keywords: education, civility, loneliness, faith

Id: kqWaXB5yxcI

Length: 85min 43sec (5143 seconds)

Published: Fri Apr 26 2019