Media sponsor. I youve want to sponsor the book, tightrope, and supporting independent book store we have made it easy. Click the buy the book link at the bottom of your screen, and now, id like to turn things over to todays mott raider,. Im very excited for this. Its a remarkable book. At the very beginning i want to remind everybody that well be taking questions from the audience, from you, and im sure theres some brilliant questions in our audience so get those together now and in a half hour before we go well have time dedicated to that so get your questions together and ready. This is a remarkable book, and i dont want to sound like it comes to easily but it really is. Im not a original in saying this, its book that should be read by anyone who wants to know what is going on in america or what is going wrong in america today. We have heard about in the last four years mountain americans who have been left behind and thats the nicest way to put what happened to he the cohort of people were talking about. As the economy has boomed and crashed and boomed and crashed seven, over the last 20 years, mostly when the the context of explaining the victory of donald trump and his continuing popularity, but this book is much, much deeper than that and goes much, much deeper than that. Sheryl and nick are not just writing about white people. This book covers the boyer country and were getting to know not just these people but the riots riots riots of their f their problem through the compelling and detailed and sad to say horrendously tragic often stories. These are human beings, not statistics or political demographics, so as a reporter and journalist i appreciate being able to get into this. So, sheryl and nick, welcome. Thank you for make thing time to talk pout this remarkable book. And is a mentioned, all of my questions you reported this together bill be directed at both of you but just to tart off the first question i want to direct specifically to you, nick, because one of the most arresting packets of the narrative that grabs you is how you are writing about people that you literally grew up with, and i think a lot of us of our generation have this experience of when social media came on the scene, on facebook we are seeing what happens to all this people that we went to high school with and seeing how things turned out for people, and i am wondering when it was you first started to find out about the some of these stories and a lot of cases that the outcomes were not good. Arun. Something i saw all the time. My mom is still on the family farm so i go back all the time. My best friend still inam hill was a lore dairy dolocal dairy farm and we would talk about the old friends and class mades who had been arrested and then we noticed after a while we were talking about friends who had died, and im sorry, yamhill, oregon. Right, beautiful little farm town of a thousand people, on a good day. A place that really for most of its history kind of represents upward mobility and the praise we were proud of the social fabric, and then that just disspin grated and a quarter of the kid odden my old number 6 cool bus have died of drugs, alcohol and suicide, deaths of despair. I muted myself. We were wondering. At what point for both of you, did it become clear that there was you reported people all across the world. At what point did you become clear this was a story that you needed to tell, the beth both of you. Its so right. So, we were based in asia and in china we really reported on some of the most poorest villages in china, meeting people who had really nothing more than basically a tin can, and we would come back every year to the u. S. And go visit yamhill, the family farm, and we would be talking with some of nicks friends, and a couple of them start evidence work the opening family farm, and of course theres business to talk about, what to do on the farm and then over the years we started asking them more but their own lives and their families and it was then that we realized that while we had been following in the developing world all of these human crises around the world, in terms of poverty, there was actually, we realized, humanitarian crisis unfolding in our own backyard and didnt even know. It was right in front of our own eyes. Here in the u. S. People may have flat screen tvs, may even have an iphone for a month or two, but what they dont have is what so many people from around the world are clamoring to come to the u. S. Because they want to live the American Dream. But these americans are in america but for. The the American Dream is broken. I think also, frankly, the rise of trump prodded us to think but writing a book about this. Think that in a lot of america, trump simply embodied the problem, and we think in many ways he does but also a symptom of it. And the problems that unfolded yamhill and so mach of the country, they didnt just arise during four years of trump. Theyve been building over the last 50 years, and it is struck us that we have the tools to trace those problems, we have the resources and what we lack this political will and many ways we have the wrong narrative. So we wanted to try to address that narrative, where we think america has gone astray and talk pout the tools to create Better Outcomes for the country. I mentioned at the beginning that we have gone through Economic Crises and economic recoveries multiple times for these people, but unlike the cohort of people i drew up in suburban maryland and you write but baltimore, just a stones throw from where i was growing up. Its much of the same thing, and again, were not talking about poor working class white people. People that you would think veterans have this dream of being better for them than for their parents and its the opt. Thats what is so important about what we write about he anchor the book tightrope in yamhill and went to other parted of the country and realized that the exact same story, the tragedy and failings unfolding in tiny towns across america, whether its red or blue states. Everywhere of the this is not a political not a red or blue state problem or red or blue party issue or not that we can blame one party. This is the product of many decades of poor policymaking by both democrats and republicans, but the fact its happening across the United States and also to people who are not just born at the bottom of the ladder. These are people, veterans who partly because of one problem that they face, they didnt climb out of that problem properly, then they end up descending interest a downward spiral. So in case of daniel mcdowell, who is a veteran that youre talk us about, here is a man who he was at the top of his game, rising star in the army. Sent out to iraq. He got blown up unfortunately and came back with some injuries to his back to his knee, and the result is that they fav him the doctors gave him some opioids as pain killers. Well, he started taking some pain killers, and pretty soon the pain was so severe in his back that the medical doctor on the base said you have to good to a pain clinic because i cant deal with this. He went to a pain clinic the doctor starts giving him Pain Medicine and pretty soon he is taking a lot more Pain Medicine and his doctor switched and the new doctor says youre taking more pain killers than i would give my cancer patientsment you have to stop. He cuts this dosage in half. But by then Department Daniel was hooked so he goes on the street and buys heroin. 0 of people addicted to heroin started with prescription opioids. So, this is something that has plagued people like our veterans, people who are just upstanding citizens and they have one medical issue that requires them to take some pain killers, and they just descend into really terrible situation. Thankfully i want to be hopeful thank any for Academy Things work out because he got help through an Organization Called baltimore station. They basically helped him get off of opioids, off of drugs and he was homeless at the time he lost his wife, his kid, his job, the kicked out of the army, lost everything, and now he is putting his life back together again with the help of baltimore station. Arun, the point you make about this problems cutting across geography and race is important. It struck us as we were working on it, yamhill is overwhelmingly White Community and like a lot of white communities, back in the 1990s a lot of harsh commentary on the struggles of africanamerican communities and talked about dead beat dads and people making bad choices and not showing personal responsibility, and meanwhile the great harvard sociologist, William Wilson said, no, its jobs and the loss of jobs and that in a place of baltimore, inner city baltimore, and he was exactly right. When it was yamhill that lost working class jobs or kentucky and west virginia, northern maine, then the same problems and pathologies unfolded, and in fact one reason i think for a certain amount of optimism is that as whites have suffered from some of these problems, society as a whole has become more compassion not about them in weighed that are hypocritical, reflect double standard. We talked about dont talk about junkies weapon talk about people in need of treatment it and may be that in this way that is unfair and hypocritical we may belatedly moved toward more evidencebased approaches to deal with the problems. Host compassion is better late than never. This phrase like the system being rigged against people, unfortunately its been tainted by the way its come up politically but when you are writing about individuals who someone being in jail for literally not being able to pay their bills. Sounds like something out of a dickens novel. The are actual structural and legal aspectses 0 of the system that keep people down. Yeah, debtors prisons. We visited oklahoma where people were literally in prison for not being able to pay their debts in ways that shatter families, that jeopardize the future of kids and this has been a trend in much of the country. I think it also reflects failed narrative in which we have lost empathy over the last 50 years and tended to blame people for their troubles and said its about lack of personal responsibility and make better choices, and look, theres no doubt that people make bad choices and i look back at the friends i lost in yamhill and some of them made some really dumb choices about drugs and alcohol, et cetera. But they made those bad choices out of a context, and we fail kids before they fail us as a society. We when kids in three counties in the u. S. Have shorter life expect tap sis than children born in cambodia or bangladesh thats not because thats newborn infants in the u. S. Are making bad choices. Its because we as a society are making them. This personal narrative is really important and actually quite interesting. If you look at the origins of the phrase, pull yourself up by the bootstraps, thats what people think of. Make it on your own. So pull yourself up by the bootstrap was used in the late 1800s, but it was really meant to do the impossible. If you think but trying to pull yourself literally up by the boot straps, its physically impossible to do that. So it meant too the impossible. And somehow in the 70s this is something you should be able to do is the, what you should be doing, and took this meaning that you dig yourself your own hole of problems and have to dig yourself out. The problem we have come to realize is on the one hand absolutely you have to responsible for your decisions and there are people that make terrible decisions if the story about the nap where each family members, the poor kids, five kids and the matriarch now has no more kids because they have all died, thanks to some poor decisionmaking around drugs. And that is they make bad decisions and also times when we need nudges and little bit of a helping hand, whether its from the government, whether its from an a nonprofit organization, or a local community organization, just for a short bit of time to get us back on our way. We really think that is the better approach to take because in a longterm it helps society and it pulls people out of their problems to create them and to make them more of a productive human being. We have examples, number of examples. Daniel mcdowell is one and we have other examples in terms of drug treatment programs that are just wonderful, but i think its important to understand that what were arguing for is kind of a more not just compassionate porch but more practical approach put more practical. Purdue pharma wouldnt be paying bill of dollars and pleading to anyones if i were only about personal choices. Absolutely. Host i want to about what got us here beyond the legal things. Facinateing to read and again if our political discourse but the fact that for a lot of the people youre talking about, that in fact globalization and out mission sounds automation made things worse for a lot of people. I think theres a sense among educated elite who did not have to compete with foreign laborers, that trade makes us all better and it clearly does increase the slice of the pie. In theory we could then reallocate that pie but in fact we did not do that, and so low wage workers and low educated americans were particularly hit. The median wage for nonsupervisory workers, adjusted for inflation, was higher in 1973 than it was in 2018. Just think about that. 1973, median nonsuper vialsry hourly wage, actually going down in 2018. And so and if the federal minimum wage of 1968 had kept pace with inflation and productivity it would now be 2. That would solve a lot of problems were talk us about. Theres also a misperception that it is simplely about globalization and large forces we cannot control. Globalization also affected canada and germ but but dont have canadians and germans dying of overdoses the way you have americans, and that is in many ways a function of policy choices that we as a country made about inequality, taxation, investment in education. And so we have to look at our own choices as priority. Were not arguing to bring bat the manufacturing jobs that went overseas thats not point and thats not mat canada orterm germany did. We need to train laborers and its important to understand the distinction because we train if you look at what happened after the financial crisis in 20072008, auto manufacturers laid off a lot of auto workers and there is an interesting comparison. Look at the assaulter to workers laid off in detroit and then ontario canada, just across the border, often the same company. So in detroit when people were laid off they lost their jobs and also lost their healthcare because their health care was linked to jobs. They got unemployment and an extraordinary amount of Unemployment Insurance given but it came time, they had to find a job in a onecompany town. In windsor ontario over the border, people lost their josh but did not lose their healthcare because canada has National Healthcare. That alleviated a huge period on the family. At the same time the government also kicked in and said, okay, let look at the wind wind are so area and there are industries that would take on a huge group of workers that were laid youve and tornado itself was in healthcare. So they facilitated new Training Program for the auto workers because theyre obviously intelligent work sores they can learn something in healthcare and get jobs in the healthcare field. So they did that and these people were reusherred back into the work force in a different industry of healthcare but the result is that they are much more of a functioning family, theyre not addicted to opioids, innovate wallowing in depression, innovate committing suicide at the same rate we saw happening in michigan when detroit took a long time to recover. These are the result of policy choices. I want to talk more about the possible solutions and make sure i leave time but i have to ask you both, if i have the timeline right this book would have been sent to the publisher long before anybody knew that covid19 was even a thing, and the reason we have to talking about it is what we have seen over the last seven months its been a force multiplier for inequity and not just in boston but across the country, seening this over and over again. Im obviously curious about your book and the context of that and if you heard from any of the people we heard from in the book since then, how theyre doing right now. Among the trends we talk about in tightrope were the lack of universal healthcare, the problem of loss of jobs, and the problem of social isolation and loneliness and what has this pandemic none its created obviously took people who dont have Health Insurance and magnified by that lack, it has created a 11 Million People lost their jobs since february. And theres been a burst of social isolation and loneliness and 13 of americans say they have begun abusing drugs or alcohol or have increased their abuse since then because of covid, and to all these underlying problems have been magnified, we bungled the health e health side of the palled and the economic of the pandemic and economic side in the way that increased the distress and the inequity and i think some of this will go on for a long time to come. Mckenzie estimate one cost of the pandemic will be an extra one million American Kids dropping out of high school. Those kids are cooked. For decades to come. If theres a silver like i think its important to highlight that what the pandemic has taught us thats at that time arch count inside the sense that here before covid, the a lot of elites said of course theres working class people and people who are poor and that has nothing to do with me. Have my own little bubble merck white picket fence and i have an enclave of friends and so i think that what we now realize is that when you have an infectious disease, and that anyone can spread, and that anyone can catch, regardless of whether theyre rich or poor, we do have to take care of society. Have to make sure that everyone has access to health so they wont continue spreading the disease where whether they are poor or rich. Host seems like great setup to talk it potential solutions. Thing you talk about that would address inequities, mitigating covid19. Let me throw that out to you in terms of what can be done from here. If a jeanie is listening to me and will give me a few wishes obviously universal healthcare, bigger emphasis on vocational job training and on job retraining, much bigger emphasis on drug treatment. In other words, dont deal with addiction with a criminal justice toolbox but with Public Health toolbox. Maybe most of all greater focus on kids. Its really hard to help adults who are struggling. The kids on my old school bus, its going to be hard to help some of them. Their kids and grandkids, we can help them, and turn those lives around, and other countries do that. Child allowances, which the u. S. Estimates would reduce Child Poverty in the u. S. By half. And yet were the exceptional country who doesnt do it. National prek, which would offer childcare for working adults. So much we can do that is proven because it works in other countries to reduce Child Poverty and improve outcomes. I want to pham siles the difference between universal healthcare and National Healthcare. Universal means everybody has access to it whether its private insurance or public insurance. National is different. So japan has a National Healthcare system, canada. Often can be supplemented with private insurance as well but it is not the government invading your life. Its that everybody should have access to healthcare. So i think thats important distinction. Host again, its impossible to pull all this another of the political context when we have and the final president ial debate, we did have the candidates laying out two very different visions visions f america, economic visions for america. And it did sound like we heard former Vice President joe biden proposing sounded like there was in things in terms of creating jobs and working toward rosing neckit inequity sod lets me play a fantasy game, President Biden in jap, and a Democratic Congress or President Donald Trump is reelected and open to hearing ideas. Any kind of ideas assume theres an appetite for change in the country right now, going into whoevers new term it is. I think there is some reason to think this could be a 1932 style election and bun reason im slightly hopeful, maybe even actually strainingly a little more hopeful than a year ago, is i think many of the flaws in the u. S. System have become more evidence evident because of the pandemic and after all roosevelt in 1932 and 33 was no revolutionary, but he was given a mandate for change, and he had put the senate in the 1932 election precisely because americans failings were so map fest to all. Herbert hoofers approach has been so discredit and there is some rope reason to thing based on polling that americans are more ready for brand enough, big policies like universal childcare, like grand efforts to address Child Poverty, like bandit for all and like a public option for healthcare than a few years ago. And if that was what created the new deal. It was the failures of america between 1928 and 1932, and i think and hope and touch wood that it may be that our failures in recent years and especially our failings in Public Health and in unemployment during this pandemic may give new vitality to options for a big new approach. What is very interesting is that the new deal was also what helped clean up our forests and made our forests available to everyone. They started plotting out trails and basically opening up the forests so that the public could use themful now we have a great opportunity to look at the forests again we have too clean up from fires that have decimated the forest. Need to figure out what to do to prevent further widescale fires burning in our parks if think this hopefully will be an opportunity for us to reexamine how we can preserve this planet better. Host im glad that win youre talk about elections in he 0s i got nervous in the 30s. I we are going to get to your question inside just a minute. Get them together and get them to us should be clear how to do that on your screen. Either structural solution that might be able to take advantage of . Given there does seem to be an appetite for change at this moment, in american history. So, i think that there is but i think we have to think structurally. One of the things that really kind of awoke us in the reporting was we went to denmark and looked at how it is in mcdonalds has a viable business modding paying hamburger flippers 22 an hour and defined benefits and pension plan and a year parental leave, et cetera. It turns out of its not about minimum wage. Denmark doesnt have one. It is stronger unions, but most of all its about investments in Human Capital for through the danish system. People who work mcdonalds world over ten to be the 20th 20th pert tile of labor force and in the u. S. That is a high school dropout, who is not very literate, may have a depep den si and a spined drivers license and does not generate a lot of benefit for the employer. In denmark thats 20th percentile laborer is a high school graduate, is literal, dot not have a dependency problem and is more productive, and so we believe that we do need a higher minimum wage and we do need stronger unions, but maybe most of all what we need is a country that does invest in young people all along in ways that will result in labor force that is more capable and supports Economic Growth and more inclusive growth for all. Thats why we also really care but Early Childhood education and paste more than let focus on an area that is empty and no provision for education in that range of kid. When you think about the aims of zero to three what is happening is that the brain is going at the fastest rate year to five than it will ever grow in your life. When you were four years old your brain was going faster than it is now. What that means is that you dont want to disrupt the growth of the brain architecture but when kids of being ratessed in a household where theres a lot of violence, where theres child abuse, where theres a verbal abuse, or abuse among other people in the family household, that creates a very stressful environment and that little did always thing of kid being resilient but theyre only resilient to a point and that point is when theres a lot of stress in the household, and that stress creates a hormone coursing through your brain. Papps in babies the same way it happens in us as adults. So that baby when that is courting through this brain that ill pairs the development of his brain. Impairs the development of architecture of the brain. That is so critical, and so if you can actually help that kid at that time, who is in that household, facing that stress, either reduce that stress, rye move that stress, or really dress the problems that the baby is facing your putting that baby on a much better trajectory for life and theyve department incredible studies that show that when witnesses are facing this kind of streets at that early payment, those people are much lower likely to be involved in addiction, in juvenile crime, and believe it or not much lower likely to have chronic diseases when they grow old. Diabetes, heart disease, all those chronic conditions can actually be correlated with Poor Development from the ages zero to five. You can change the life trajectory of a lot of these children in poverty and now were seeing that more kids are being thrown into poverty pause of the pandemic. We really should be going in the other direction. You have some questioned from the audience, great question from elizabeth who says, drug treatment seems like very necessary component of a solution but too you have a comment how the programs can be vetted to people arent victimized by unscrupulous operators who see chance to make permanent profit from the funding. Often private companies in these situations that are running these. Yeah. This has been a big problem and there are lot of very quick programs, 30day programs, and the reality is that if somebody is having an addiction for 15 years, its innovate very like live its going to deresolved in 30 days and so i think we have to be realistic about the fact that treatment does take time. There have been improvements in medication assisted treatment for opioids, but not, for example, for meth. And there will be relapses. Its challenging. But if you think of it in terms how we address treatment for diabetes or other chronic diseases, then we dont blame the victim, we acknowledge that the behavior sometimes correlate to control of chronic diseases we dont blame that individual and look for evidencebased approached about what works and evidence that organization is actually going to provide useful treatment, and so we can do much bet theyre that regard. We talk about one program in oklahoma that basically diverts women who are destined for incarceration for five or ten years, they put them into die divert them into a program that rehabilitate them through drug treatment and obviously if working with the va this courts, the health authorities, its a very wellcredentials and professionally run program, and so what theyre is collecting cat over five to ten years, so that they can publish data so this program can be scaled across the done through. If you can create or find programs that actually can be rep mix calculate across the done replicated across at the country, bona fide companies that can be replicated, thats the way to go. Another question, what surprised you most in your research for this book . I think that one thing that i hadnt appreciated was the importance of jobs as source of identity, of purpose, of meaning, and i think that thats often been kind of conservative talking point and when i studied economics there was a studied in terms of income but became to so clear to us that a job is much, much more than an income stream. Theres something written about this as a particular issue with blue collar many. Its your identity and especially theres a union attachment to it you sense of purpose in life, the sense of meaning, and when americans have lost their jobs, our policy response has been Unemployment Insurance, and that does not compensate for the loss of the job and to say just i think we need to think more deeply about how to get people not just financial compensation but rather all the rest that goes with a job. I would say household formation. Traditionally we think of marriage, but the Research Shows that it is so important to have a twoparent household that is looking of the kids, and so when hey had so many years where the father was just thrown in jail, that really does break down households and it also not just breaks up families but breaks up the next generation of families. The grow up and replicate the problems and challenges when they were kid and they reembody is as adults and thats a real problem. Time for one more question. Can structural needs be addressed without addressing race and class . I dont i dont know i think we at least have to be aware of race and class. I do think there is some awareness on the american left about the role of race. I dont think that well on the right i dont think theres an awareness of the race gap and i dope think on either right or left theres adequate appreciation of class gaps, and i think policies have to address that and what is also kind of problematic is that educated elites in many ways are part of the problem especially in terms of educational access. K through 12 education in america is unequal profoundly unequal because its based on local school finding in ways that are not true in other countries, and affluent americans, including people on the left, kind of bought into a system where if youre reasonably well off you move to a Public School district that is more affluent and you send your kids to those local good schools, and so some of californias best Public Schools are in palo alto where anybody oh has 3 million to buy a house can partake. Mean while in East Palo Alto next door you have really awful schools, and this is a system that we as a country have bought into. It is profoundly unfair. It creates a kind of aristocracy of educational outcomes and transmitted from one generation to the next, and i dont think there is enough conversation about the way that we are content with the emergence of this new kind of class structure that is as ossifying in this country, even as theres certainly greater awareness this year of racialmen next witness. I dont think we have adequately confronted the issue of class inequities. The racial inequities are really severe, too. If you look at policies in past that were very successful, the homestead act. Oregonians think we came out to oregon and were sort of the really surviving survivalist daredevils daredevils who came west and found holds, and built our own home and everything. They did that because of the homestead act that allowed you to actually settle on a plot of plant land and then youch get. I and the g. I. Bill, for veterans and they can actually finance a home, they can finance an ooed education but both of those are mose mostly for whites. Right now the opportunity bill. I know that trump has trumpeted the opportunity bill. I have a little experiencen n working on the tub bill and frankly who is taking advantage of them . Its the big real estate moguls from new york city, they are going to other places and trying to build these giant projects in Opportunity Zones. Some of them already had a billion Dollar Program that they were able to convince the local authorities to include their billion dollar project in the Opportunity Zone so they get the tax breaks of the witness ill really benefit the local community or the low income people who are black or latino . I dont i havent seen as many of that as much of that as the really should be and there is no data on it because they dont want to report on it because they know it really is an unequal it isnt as much of a cureall for upscaling for redeveloping some of these poorer areas in cities and towns. The Opportunity Zones are classic american problem so people talk a good game about helping the needy and then they adopt a program that actually benefits titans. If we can squeeze in minute more. Its a nice question. And that is also good because theres been so little work on what you have done. Any other recommendations for other resources you would recommend, books, articles or films about this . Well, there is a film called eye tightrope on monday. We recommend that as well as the book of course are but theres a whole host of in the back of our book we have a whole host of citations and readings, pages and paints worth there are some great poock and stand of the shoulder of those authors. We really wrote it in hopes people would not just read it and then read other things. But read this and then get emigrated and be a mentor or support a Early Childhood program or advocate like results. Org or smarter programs for young people, but what really warms an authors heart is not just leaving people with a sense of satisfaction of they put the book down but that you actually move them to engage. Host sheryl and nick its as much a pleasure to speak with you as to read your work, thank you so much. Thank you. Its been ale