The Vanishing American Adult

Millennials have we gone from the greatest generation to the softest with us today a member of the United States Senate who knows how to turn Millennials into adults Ben Sasse of Nebraska on uncommon knowledge now welcome to uncommon knowledge I'm Peter Robinson a fifth-generation Nebraskan and the son of a football coach Ben Sasse attended public schools in Fremont Nebraska spending his summer working in corn fields he holds degrees from Harvard Oxford and Yale and he spent five years as president of Midland University Ben Sasse was elected to the United States Senate in 2014 unlike most members of the Senate who leave their families behind in their home states senator sass takes his family back and forth with him from Nebraska to Washington helping his wife homeschool their three children senator sass is the author this spring of the vanishing American adult our coming-of-age crisis and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance senator says welcome back to uncommon knowledge good to being today from Stanford University welcome to Stanford beautiful place tell us the story of the Midland University Christmas tree so I was 37 when I became a college president and I'm a business turnaround guy and I live in this town with a special 130 year old college is in danger of going bankrupt nobody thinks they're hiring me to run this college because I know anything about student affairs or student culture and yet that's the thing that's keeping me up at night my first six 12 months 18 months at the school I knew we were going to get the debt restructure and we were going to raise new money and we're going to try to buy another college and we're gonna be able to solve the business problems but I was worried about what was happening on student in student life and one event crystallized it sort of more than everything else its Vienna code doesn't make the world but it sort of captured and angst I had we had a big athletic arena and there was a 20-foot Christmas tree to be erected you know day before day after Thanksgiving I don't remember when it was and we had a bunch of students who were employed by the athletic department or the advancement and development office and these are good jobs like these are sort of the being the patients are being paid and it's desirable to work in the development office or work in the appoint department these are Hardy and healthy vital young 19 20 21 year-olds and they were supposed to decorate the Christmas tree it's 20 feet tall and the tree was there and all the decorations were there and they decorated all the bottom eight feet of the tree with twice as many decorations as you would probably need because they spent all their decorations in the bottom eight feet and then they're packing up to leaf and the tree is naked from foot 8 to 20 and the vice president for development happens by and she's like hey what are you guys doing and they said yeah we used all the decorations and we're done and she's a but what about the top half of the tree and they said well we didn't know how to get up there and she said so did maintenance refused to bring you a ladder and it turned out that nobody had really thought to ask there was no real problem solving in the group it was we've been given a task and we get a leave on the task is done and bright kid kids able kids but passive passive is the right adjective okay uh this book lays out the figures Millennials I don't Millennials and those coming up behind them do they have a name yet is this next generation whatever they're called Millennials will kids they marry later they live with their parents longer they know less about American history they demonstrate less initiative and more passivity that participate less and religious organizations they're softer not just psychologically but physically you note that where is in the 1960s only one teen in 20 was obese today one teen in five is obese that is a quintuplet soft passive and this despite having grown up during a period of peace and by and large economic expansion in the richest and most powerful nation in human history what has gone wrong you said in spite of maybe it's because of so I want to be clear this book is a constructive book it's too Thirds program for how to think about habit formation for thirteen year olds and 15 year olds and seventeen year olds the part we're going to talk about first it sounds like is the one third stage setting about a problem right but this book is not a blame Lang bucket is not a beat up on millenials book it is a wow what is this category perpetual adolescence book so that's a new thing in human history I want to be clear adolescence is a pretty special concept it's only about two millennia old we came up with this idea that you go from the dependent state of childhood to the independent state of adulthood and you don't have to boom transition from one to the other instantaneously when you become physically an adult two millennia ago people came up with this concept that when you biologically transition from childhood to adulthood at puberty that doesn't mean you have to immediately be fully independent financially emotionally morally in terms of school leaving or household structure we have this idea that for 18 months to 4 years you can have a kind of green house phase of intentional transition from one to the other that's great as long as we remember that adolescence is meant to be a means to an end it is not the destination Peter Pan is a dystopian hell it is not a utopia as Disney has tried to remake it Peter Pan is a character who becomes physically an adult and yet he has no historical awareness he has no moral awareness he kills people and he doesn't even remember their names that's a bad thing we don't want to be sort of man babies we want our kids to go from a stage of necessary dependence to more and more independence when they can so the argument here is that if the children grow up in conditions of peace and prosperity parents the society cannot simply leave it to reality to slap them around and shake them up parents have to help them grow up more intentionally right I think that though there's no blame laying in this book really there were it would be at we the parents and grandparents feet to not have thought through what does it mean that our kids are growing up at the richest time in place in human history because there's a lot about that that's obviously great to be protected from levels of violence that most people have known in history to be projected protected from abject poverty but we're going to need to figure out how to celebrate scar tissue with these kids because scar tissue is the foundation of future character we're going to celebrate it so we cannot do the book justice because this is video not not not print but we're going to do is but as well as we can as you say two thirds of this book this marvelous book is it's a kind of handbook on how to help kids grow up into real adults so let's take a few of a few of your Maxim's discover the body I'm quoting discover the body T teens need to appreciate the joys of birth and growth and the tragedy of pain and decline discover the body you that's your first bit of instruction why yeah I wanted to think about as you transition from childhood to adulthood it isn't enough to just progress through grades in school most people most times in human history have had rites of passage they've had the big hunt they've had intentional home leafing they've had first job or first economic self-sufficiency we've sort of muddled all these markers together and so what I really care about is when you're 13 versus 15 versus 17 what are these habits what are what are the sort of affections it loves what are the exposures you should have and so some was about work ethic and limited consumption etc but one of them is the body is necessary you need to understand your body intergenerationally because you go from a state of dependence to independence but you're ultimately going to decline and become dependent again and we're raising 15 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 15 year olds and 19 year olds that spend almost all of their time with 19 year olds that's really weird historically no one has ever done that before if you brought people in a time machine from 300 years ago to 3,000 years ago and you dropped them in today I think the main thing they would think is weird about our life at first is just the material surplus was a cornucopia of produced goods that they would have known a world of nature and a couple of things that have been built and our world is just filled with tools and instruments and consumption aids and whatnot but 30 days past that I think that people from another place another time would think the strangest thing about us is that we live entirely age segregated lives you quote Puritan Minister I'm quoting now Puritan Minister Cotton either was severely blunt now you're quoting cotton mazes in your book go into burying-place children you will there see graves as short as yourselves yeah you may be at play one hour dead dead the next close quote and you quote that approvingly so winsome book is it is but you but you're very serious about this point is kind of memento mori you want children to understand you want children to spend time with grandparents you want them to spend time with the old the declining neighbor across the street you want them to be aware of the way this all ends even as they're beginning if our kids are going to be wise they need to be around people who have actually passed through some years a thirteen year old is never going to become wise spending all of their time with thirteen year olds I have two teenage daughters my kids are 15 13 and 6 our girls are that the teenagers it hurts when a thirteen year old girl experiences the slight of another thirteen year old girl right and yet if you know 60 year olds and 75 year olds and 90 year olds it doesn't hurt quite as much because probably this moment you're living at is not the be-all and end-all of your whole existence Ben Sasse from the vanishing American don't develop a work ethic tell us about your grandmother Eldon Krebs Seth my grandmother was I don't think she ever clocked in at a hundred pounds issues about 411 this tiny woman and yet had larger-than-life personality and charisma and when I was a kid I used to travel with my grandparents a lot in the back of their car my grandfather came back from World War two and never went to college himself it was the business manager of this College for 35 years the college that I was president oh really real is relator and he was the business manager ultimately kind of CFO type role but the athletic department reported to him so he'd travel and go to all the away sporting events and I'd ride in the back of the old Chevy Impala with my grandparents and I would ask them questions about the war Great Depression and kind of Dust Bowl era upbringing that they had and they never thought anything was exceptional about their upbringing and yet I was stunned as a kid in early 1980s and just how much hardship they had gone through it was just like water off a duck's back that they didn't think anything about any of it it was just what you did and my grandma had this great story about how my dad's older brother six years older than he was he was born grandma was pregnant when Grandpa left for the war and then my Uncle Roger was born while grandpa was away at the war and Grandma and Grandpa had just leased some property they grew up on a farm grandma was the hired man they're only a year apart in age but they met his teenagers when grandpa was the hired man on my grandma's parents farm they had leased some property and they were going to start farming and Grandma had grown up around farms but she'd never driven a tractor and all of a sudden her husband's away at war she's giving birth they have new land there's planting and harvesting to be done and she had to figure out how to do it and so she had this leased property and she had a borrowed tractor and she figured out a way to take my uncle's bassinet and attach it to the side of the John Deere trap tractor and she taught herself out of plow and harvest and I thought this was stunning as a ten year old kid and grandma was always amazed that I wanted her to tell me the story again and again because she just thought it was necessity as the mother of invention okay now here's what I need to ask you to do please persuade me that this book written by a fifth-generation Nebraskan which is filled with stor not filled with stories I don't want to but there are a number of stories about your grandparents your own upbringing as of course there should be about about your kids what is it detasseling corn you have to persuade me that this isn't in some way a lament for a lost agrarian way of life that characterized America through almost all of its history and that you in your generation and where you grew up in Nebraska you saw the last glimmerings of this way of life and that you young man though you may be are filled with incredulity daddy well you and Thomas Jefferson oh no we're not all farmers anymore the country can't work anymore so get over that address that critique or that pop that thought in the back of a reader's mind so let's let's locate ourselves in economic history run a minute hunter-gatherers agrarianism industrialization the big tool economy and whatever this thing is that we're entering now mobile economy the digital economy IT economy service economy sociologists are throwing in the towel they're just calling it the post-industrial economy it's kind of a weird thing to name something we don't refer to industrialization as those days the D agricultural ization of America it's not just the push from the farm that was technological substitution for labor that made it more efficient it was also the pull of factories and cities mass urbanization mass emigration we're going through a transition that is pretty unique in human history we didn't have alphabets when hunter-gatherers settled down and began to farm so I think the only analog for the economic disruption we're going through and frankly what I care about even more than the economic disruption is the social network and human capital implications for neighborliness at this moment I think the only analog we have to this moment is the Progressive Era where people are leaving the farm moving to the city and there is bipartisan panic in America that America can't long endure Democrat Woodrow Wilson Republican Teddy Roosevelt this won't work because you won't have transparency and virtue and neighborliness they were wrong we ended up recreating a kind of human capital in the city's urban ethnic neighborhoods were every bit as neighborly and accountable as the Tocqueville ian's village had been but there was a massive disruption in route to figuring out what human capital looked like in the cities again I think we're going through an analogous disruption in the nature of work now but probably even more than what they went through because we're going to have a shrinking of the average duration at a job that probably accelerates forever more hunter gatherers and farmers they didn't choose jobs they just became eight or ten or twelve and they did more of what their parents and grandpa instead when you went from the farm to the city you had a massive disruption 15 to 25 year old males went to the city and they had to get a job and it was hugely unsettling for everybody social structure but once you got a job you tended to keep it till death or retirement what we're going through now is what they panicked we were going through back then which is ever more rapid disintermediation not just of jobs but of firms and of industries and so this is not agrarian romanticism it is an awareness that if you separate work from the household as we've done and so kids come of age with lots of material surplus and very little exposure to production right you're going to have to create something that's going to feel a little bit artificial but that is a structured way of habit-forming that build the work ethic even when necessity didn't mandate it okay so tell me them we've got changed economic circumstances we're going through it the country's been through something like this once before and we're going through a huge something again yeah but your argument is that there are certain virtues that children need to learn that American children in particular need to learn that remain the same from the founding Thomas Jefferson would recognize what you're talking about in this book although he believed in an agrarian America we've been in an industrial America and now we're under exempt Third Kind why do you argue in particular that there are certain virtues that Americans need to learn to make this republic work explain that line of thought which runs through the whole book America has promised on a few ideas one is universal human dignity we believe that people are created with dignity and that those natural rights are things that government exists to secure government is not the author or the source of those rights so we believe government is limited because we think rights are prior to government we believe a whole bunch of pre political things we believe that happiness is something that people have the right to pursue and frankly that can't be secured by compulsion we believe that production is the people have the right to pursue happiness and that is the only way to achieve it pursuing it on your own yeah I don't know go ahead yeah I don't think we think that so here I'll blend a little bit American idea stuff with I think some modern sociology let's just soso go ahead with the ology for a minute I am solidly Aristotelian like that one argument in this book is some slight anti Platonism but I don't want to scare people my very gentle thought okay difference but I think social science is now bearing out a lot of what Aristotle understood about you know the sort of way that nouns and verbs get wrapped up together in habit formation you you can't decide who you want to be in the long term and your time is often occupied in the short term you make decisions about the medium term and the medium term decisions you make about what to pursue end up creating short term tasks and many duties and time expenditures in your life and those things end up becoming habits and those habits define your long term character right and I think modern social science shows us that production makes people happy consumption doesn't and right now our kids are not being raised with an instinctive in the belly exposure to a distinction between production and consumption we're occupying our kids time with schooling and progression through grades as if that's their work and then when they're not in school it's just different types of consumption we don't sort of burden them with having to understand the distinction between needs and once well that kind of burdening with them is a real serious kind of love because if you help your kids understand that one of the things that defines whether or not you're happy in life is earned success it's a sort of a numerator of needs mat over a denominator of perceived needs one way to be happy in life is to get more stuff into the numerator but it's not a very fruitful path it's not very reliable a much more reliable way to be happy in life is to guard against expanding the denominator of your perceived needs very far and it turns out healthy people tend to know the difference between the word need and the word want and we're raising a lot of kids right now with appetites that feel fairly limitless because we're teaching them that more and more consumption might fulfill them but it's not true it doesn't bear out in wise lots of older people or any of the literature we have I'd like to still stay with the nature of the American Republic for just a moment longer the vanishing American adult quote material abundance can make us freer and less dependent obviously but simultaneously more lonely and isolated and here is one of the most striking Clinton's is in the book it is very difficult for a rich Republic to remain virtuous close quote so here is this strange seems to me you're all you're almost setting up well you mentioned Aristotle you're almost setting up a tragic view of American history here we're at where the greatest generation indoors the depression your grandparents the endure the depression your grandfather goes off to the Second World War and there grant through the sacrifices that they made their grandchildren get just the kind of life they wanted for them and their great-grandchildren you and your children they get a period of peace they get prosperity and it ruins them that when America gets what it doesn't want war depression Americans are great people we produce the greatest generation and when we get what we want we're an unimpressive as citizens talk me out of it well if you look at inherited wealth around the world people who figure out how to manage that inherited wealth without growing their kids appetites turning it into actual investments it can work out well but if you become consumers in the next generation there's danger in that right it's natural that there should be a cycle of production wealth creation and then recreation or leisure as an important historical debate about why the word recreation is more virtuous than the word leisure because it's cyclically driving you back to productivity again I want to I want to be revivified but to get back to work to live a life of gratitude by serving my neighbor again it's natural that inside any family or any individual maybe even any generation that production leads to wealth leads to recreation but if it slides across generations and people in the second the third generation or just living off of inherited wealth from production past something lacking in their lives that is unsatisfying for them there's tons of data that shows that one of the highest correlates to happiness in life is whether or not you do work that you think anybody needs not at the end of the day do my knees hurt or my ankles or my back or do I think I made enough money or was there some annoying jackwagon three cubicles over who talks loudly but do I think somebody needs me if Monday morning or whatever day of the week you go and start your work there's a place that you need to go because someone needs your work you have worse and you have dignity and you have self-esteem and just consuming more can't replace that so I do think there is a danger in becoming so wealthy that we forget to inculcate those habit habits of productivity that lead to happiness all right so one of the other Maxim's here learn how to read and beside what to read reading done well is not a passive activity like sitting in front of a screen close quote senator senator kids these days smartphones computer screens 75 inch flat panel televisions and you want them to turn off the screen and pick up books now lost causes can be Noble but it really love to hear you persuade me that this isn't a lost cause but ranches and nobility well let me do a little a little history for a minute I think if you have one true founder of America if there's a sin Coenen that if you didn't have this guy or gal you couldn't get America I think it's Gutenberg so our founders believed that are the habits of mass literacy produce a world where you've got competing printing presses and it's competing printing presses that get to sort of healthy skepticism of authority that leads to cultural pluralism that leads to a freedom of the press speech assembly religion protests America and it's predicated on the habits of mind of decentralized power we're individuals who created with dignity where families are making lots of decisions for themselves and there is a difference between the deliberative consumption the deliberation that comes from reading and reflecting upon a text the dispassionate nature of deliberation and reflection and choice there's something different there than the appellative dopamine feedback loop of shorter and shorter digital addictions now I am a celebrant of a lot in the digital economy I run my own Twitter account I don't know I was about to say I was about to say I was about to charge you and you would have no choice but to plead guilty you are one of the tweeting list members of the United States Senate going tweeting this sounds almost dirty but I am at Ben Sasse is really me there's an Adsense a switch is my press office but at Ben formal dignified decorous but the one that's really you yeah yes I'm a commuting dad 15 year old 13 year old six year old kids lots of fishing and snakes peering in our lives out in the country and Nebraska and I we just have a great time commuting as I'm a dad educating my kids and that's who at Ben Sasse is and I think there's a lot about the digital moment economically and even a subset of the digital moment which is digital media that has real potential but only if it's paired with a certain kind of habit formation that recognizes that constant digital consumption and digital addiction is really dangerous because there's a time for deliberation there's a time for choice there's a time for action but you need to ultimately be able to get back to a place where you can wrestle with long thinking and bigger arguments and your own mortality and and your kids read they do because you make them read because we have we gather where the sounds of the phone wanting them to love it yeah so by the way this book is not only not old man screaming get off my lawn this book is not in any way us holding out our family as a model fair enough we stumble and fall every day but my wife and I have a shared theory of what we're doing and one of them one of the motivators behind this book is I have a broad belief that as we're hollow out local community and mediating institutions and we're politicizing national conversation we're left with this huge vacuum of space where people don't have the chance to deliberate around a dinner table with their neighbors about how to raise their kids well and I think a lot of people want to do that so I wrote this book and Melissa and I deliberated long and hard about this book as we were leaving the college so this idea predates the Senate campaign to just sort of think aloud about the theory of what we're trying to accomplish we fail in the execution but we've got to share the theory of what 20 training wheels removal looks like it's kinda how we think about parenting a teenager we have in the literacy chapter a quantity and a quality theory of what we're up to wherever possible we want a parent with the grain I've got a theory of human fallenness one of my kids is named after a Gustin theologically heavy for a six-year-old so we call him Brack but I definitely believe in a fallen human nature and yet when you can parent with the grain I want to do it and so when we could get our kids to be interested in reading at 4 or 5 6 years old we want to just go with it at first even if it had a cotton candy-like feel Hardy Boys Magic Treehouse encyclopedia brown Hardy whatever it was we would just do more of that when they light it reward them praise them help build an identity that they are readers give them stuff occasionally we're not big into material consumption but try to figure out how to reward them with experiences that they wanted when they were reading more and then we'd substitute more quality into the flow of their quantity we tried to do both at once heavy troy who i think you know oh yeah and has a game called the Century Club which he used to play when he worked for President Bush Bush and Rove and TV would have a competition to see if they could read a hundred books in a year my kids have never succeeded yet but we pled the Century Club at our house a lot of people can read two books some week on vacation in August or over you know Christmas holiday but to try to hit two books a week 50 weeks in a row to get a hundred in a year that's saying something and we got our kids on this pathway of start reading stuff that's pretty shallow and cotton candy and then you read instead of five of those in a row you'll read - and then we'll substitute a menu of options of spinach versus asparagus versus broccoli and you pick among these three really good bucks and then we'll let you go back to reading some cotton candy for a while okay a few couple of last questions here two presidents both of whom you write about in the vanishing American adult quote at the beginning of President Obama's administration the reporter asked him if he believed in American exceptionalism after a pause he strangely replied I believe in American exceptionalism just as I suspect that the Brits believed in British exceptionalism and the Greeks believed in Greek exceptionalism close quote why was his reply strange yeah honestly I it hurts me that President Obama said that like it one of the jobs of a president the United States is to hold forth big and have a Gorsuch joke here by accident I was said Bigley to hold forth loudly an understanding of what the American idea is about and the American idea is that we believe 320 million Americans and 7 billion people across the globe but we've got proximate governance responsibility for these 320 million we believe they're created with dignity and we believe that that is a pre political thing that you affirm creedal II as an American and anyway and that makes this country exception well America is not exceptional in that we think we're better than other people it's not an ethnic claim it's not a tribal claim it's a historical understanding of how unique Philadelphia 1787 was which is our founders said something incredibly arrogant in Philadelphia most people most places in all of human history have been wrong our founders said government isn't the author or source of your rights rights come by nature and government is our shared secular tool to secure those rights and when you flip that I sort of I teach civics to a lot of Nebraska high school kids and I draw an island surrounded by an ocean on one side of the whiteboard then I draw the same picture on the other side and I say the pre American view is that the island is your rights and the ocean is the government's power and the American view is that the island is the government's power and the ocean or your right second president again I'm quoting the vanishing American adult we need to go back to Reagan not because you did or did not or would or would not have voted for him but because he was presiding at the last moment when we talked seriously about what America means for all Americans the Cold War against expansion istic Soviet Communism forced us to explain who we were and why we differed close quote back to Reagan can you get kids to think seriously about the Cold War about Reagan speeches you don't really mean back to Reagan you mean back to an understanding of historical understanding of America yeah I think I think we're living right now with two political parties that are just hung over from the 1960s I think both of these political parties are incredibly exhausted intellectually neither of them know what they're for they're both mostly just against the other party and vast majority the American people want to tune them both out I want to be clear I think I'm the third most conservative guy in the Senate by voting record but I'm not very partisan because I think both of these parties are just not interesting I care about problems that are 5 and 10 and 20 years in the future and neither of these parties is dealing with anything big it's both you know had field in McCoys but it's it's worse than that because it's seven year old slapping each other to say he started it she started it and I think that in the Cold War you at least had a sense of an obligation to understand why expansionist at communism was bad and we got to color versus bipartisan Harry Truman starts it well and Ronald Reagan finishes it well and its bipartisan in between oh yeah last question one final quotation from the vanishing American adult quote I am an optimist and I believe that America's best days lie ahead all right senator from the greatest generation to these soft Millennials from Ronald Reagan to Donald Trump from the lincoln-douglas debates which is on your list of of items to read from the lincoln-douglas debates to whatever it was that we watched during the presidential race last year how was Leslie you're an optimist but you've named one of your children Agustin Agustin is sitting there in northern Africa and watching Rome fall he leads a great life he becomes a saint he produces a enormous volume of important literature it's possible to lead a good life in the end of time so to speak do you consider yourself more in the position of Agustin or do you really believe that this country's best days lie ahead how can you be an optimist well let's be obstinate Agustin option is very dignity of anything you I'm giving you I'm giving you a good pessimist makes a model you want you already set it up though by saying we're at the last question right now we'd have to do a whole bunch of theology and political theory and parse the two kingdoms and do two cities and two loves and a city that has foundations it seems too big for a pardon question so I'll say I'm definitely optimistic about the net productivity about what the global economy will produce in the next decade or do more stuff and not just stuff more services that are quite interesting I got here with you know a Waze app I was in San Francisco this morning and coming down to Palo Alto there are opportunities to not sit in traffic but you're not life-changing but that was a nice little gift to know taking this exit could avoid that car wreck and not half an ally delay five years you'll be writing in from now in actually you could ride from San Francisco to here there driverless vehicles already I like to drive so that sort of worries me now and now I will be a Nebraska romantic about a big county road and why every kid should drive at 14 like we do in Nebraska but I think that what comes next in the digital revolution is going to be fascinating we're going to have a layering of information and data on top of the physical world that's going to be fascinating what I'm not sure about is that the benefits of that are going to read down to the median worker and the median family right now and that I'm scared about because I don't think we're thinking at all and about the disruption in the nature of work Larry Summers talks about how 7.2 billion people on earth maybe get four and a half billion workers today we're going to nine billion people on this planet by the year 2050 and you might go to a place where you only need four billion three and a half billion three billion workers to more than meet the needs for all nine billion people well guess what work isn't just about how you put bread on the table work is a fundamental anchor of human identity and surface and we're meant to live a life of gratitude by doing something meaningful we're meant to get to the evening and get some of that leisure or recreation or fun food and wine and fellowship with French looking back at the fence you built that day or the field you formed or the factory you colle a bird with or the app that you designed you're meant to look back at that and say I produce something today and right now I don't think we're thinking nearly enough about the challenges to the nature of work going forward the potential is huge our political conversations and are bigger than political it's called civic conversations they're impoverished right now I'm trying to find it the book the book actually ends on an up note and you just you just sounded more like a Gustin than I was expecting to get to right here so the notion is the notion is what the notion is you need to teach your children these virtues so that they can become good Americans so that it can continue the chain so to speak you're very conscious of American history and as you've demonstrated a couple of times here you're happy to go back to Aristotle at the slightest provocation but also become something because something big and actually a little bit alarming is coming at these kids that right yeah there is a real difference between actually climbing the top of the mountain and going there on your friends Instagram and right now we're doing a disservice to our kids by pretending that a more sedentary passive life might fulfill them it's not true we need a crazy uncle Teddy Roosevelt in our life and I want kids to become intoxicated with all that they can travel to through literature across space into other cultures by learning to produce there's a lot of opportunity for our kids but we need a different conversation about how to raise them and passively allowing them to be peer segregated into a more sedentary posture it's not going to be sign for them or for the Republic senator Ben Sasse of Nebraska America's crazy uncle in the 21st century and the author of the vanishing American adult our coming-of-age crisis and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance thank you thank you for uncommon knowledge and the Hoover Institution I'm Peter Robinson [Music]

Channel: HooverInstitution

Views: 303,930

Rating: 4.6342649 out of 5

Keywords: Ben Sasse, Congress, millennial, adolescence, youth, Hoover Institution, Stanford, Uncommon Knowledge, The Vanishing American Adult, work ethic, production vs. consumption

Id: y59g54hC-aY

Length: 38min 14sec (2294 seconds)

Published: Tue Jun 13 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/[deleted]]

Thanks for posting! Excited to watch tonight.

[u/high-valyrian]

I'm not at all familiar with this gentleman's stances or views re: politics, but from watching this video I can already tell you the type of man I believe he is. I think the interviewer is wrong. Sasse is not painting our time in history as a tragedy at all; he is merely providing a constructive point of view and I think his words are actually overall positive. The interviewer seems to be spinning this negatively due to the limitation of his own worldview, which is strange due to the very nature of the interview lol.

Overall, I think Sasse is on point and I enjoyed his anecdotes. I was surprised at how much he elaborated each question/knew about subjects which some consider arcane. (eyeroll) I will definitely have to pick up this book.