Affairs from all Different Directions into some of the worst tragedies on the planet, but you chose to focus on a small town in oregon. Why lex guest we were running around covering humanitarian crises and we would go back to my beloved hometown and we saw a humanitarian crisis unfolding there. A quarter of the kids who were on my Old School Bus were gone from drugs, alcohol and suicide. I tried to process back. The kids that got on the bus right after me [inaudible] and then nathan and their sister virginia, smart talented kids. One died of drug and alcohol abuse, one in a house fire when he was passed out drunk and one blew himself up cooking meth and died of hepatitis from drug use. Hunter biden the Oregon State Penitentiary for 13 years. So, for a while, we wondered is it something that this is a National Problem that we have depths of despair and Life Expectancy is falling for three years in a row in america and god my old loves this kind of a microcosm to see that opinion across america. Host you solve this through the lens of returning home and it almost could have been titled School Bus Number six. So much is drawn from your friends growing up and expanding from there. As you grew up in manhattan and the other upper end early in your relationship you saw it unfolding over these last couple of decades. How did the lens for which you saw differ . I dont think that you can get further than manhattan. I grew up on the upper manhattan and it was smack in the middle of the urban world so first it was what are these people like but it was basically we think of what is going on right now as a tale of two americas. On the top deck of a boat there is a party going on and on the bottom deck is where the whole thing is happening in all these people are struggling to figure out what to do and how to stay afloat so i think manhattan in many ways the people of manhattan, many of them are in that party and they dont know whats going on in the lower deck. When i started meeting them and learning the background i talked to them and realized they are very complicated beings and of the stories we learned about their household and their background and the journeys they took were so alarming and touching and heartbreaking. Host so you look at the upper deck and what is going on below into your boo your book hr anthology in the title, tied with. To pave a solid path for families here is not just a narrow path of a tightrope were you conveying . Guest for those of us in the upper middle class and those that are very well educated at least graduating from high school and college we have a fairly wide path ahead of us. Many of these people around america in the rural areas are walking on a tightrope. Oneness and theyve al they fals no safety net. Host severe falling into the chasm that you describe in the book as involving drugs, alcohol, Domestic Violence, suicide. It is a pretty bleak picture and there is a dynamic that you wrestle with about is this personal responsibility they just need to walk the tightrope better or is it their fault they got into a tightrope for personal responsibility versus collective responsibility. Responsibility. What have you concluded . Guest personal responsibility is absolutely real big. I want to make the case that progressive like myself sometimes dont fully appreciate that responsibility is real and one has to give agency to people, but i think that over the last 50 years we have overdone it blaming the people that fall off the tightrope for the catastrophes that follow. At this point we can predict with accuracy the outcomes of a newborn infant and when you do that its not because the infant is making bad choices were showing irresponsibility. So, by all means lets have a personal response about the conversation. If we do that but also have a conversation about our collective responsibilities and try to help the people who were on the number six bus and there are so many ways we can help them and benefit them and society. Host paul for you quoted thquote inthe book says the conf birth do not determine the outcome of your life. In the document producing share this term Adverse Childhood Experiences in which you are basically saying if you have collected several Adverse Childhood Experiences, your odds of succeeding drop dramatically, which you portray as the odds of being in poverty increased substantially, so explain how these childhood adversity is in fact your life. It is pretty well documented by scientists that have analyzed the situation. Many of us have a childhood experience patrons get divorced, theres a big move from one state to the next that is traumatic partly depending upon the child between zero and five that is when the brain is developing at its most rapid pace for the rest of the persons life. We think of children as being really resilient but you know something they are not as resilient as we think and in fact when there is violence and yelling and abuse and chaos that creates stress and means the hormone is coursing through here brain and as it is growing it impacts the development of the brain architecture so if this is not corrected that babys brain isnt going to develop properly. So, if we can address these issues early on and there are treatments and ways of using therapy, we can actually put a young child onto a better course so that we dont see them for decades later and poverty or drugs or high school even. Its not just that, its not just the psychological trauma. Its also held. So, in fact people much more likely to have heart disease, chronic disease like diabetes that is th a huge cost to sociey as well. Guest im thinking about the personal responsibility narrative for the trajectory, we talked about the success sequence and its true if somebody does three things they largely avoid poverty and if they graduate from high school and get a fulltime job and then they have kids only after and only 2 live in poverty, 79 live in poverty, and clearly those involved in element of bad choices and responsibility, but they also reflect what we as a society do and one reason American Kids have sex at the same rate as european kids that have babies as teenagers three times faster because as a society we dont think comprehensive education available and dont make Birth Control available. Our High School Graduation rates are substantially lower than those in many other countries because they dont place the same premium on it. There are certainly ways we can shift it. Its not because American Kids are dumber than others are less diligent. So, it has neglected. Those that are raised with the stressorstressors entitled i wao go back for the moment, sheryl, to the conversation about how the brain is rewired. In what ways is that compromised in success in adulthood . Guest a lot of it has to do with the brain architecture. Cortisol is a stressor hormone. Most of us as adults it happens for a little bit and then it goes away but because the babys brain is developing so rapidly at the time and also its much more fragile than we think it can start going through the development. Host does it make the children more susceptible to addiction or less able to have if you build a committed relationship or just multiple affects . They show all these things you talk about also are more likely to graduate from high school. More likely to have suffered from things like adhd. A number of things that make it harder for the child growing up to actually succeed. Thats why pediatricians are so focused on trying to address ending in california the new Surgeon General bear that is. One thing i it does is prepae children for violent turbulent dangerous environment and therefore on a fight or flight response and one consequence is that made it harder to concentrate on the blackboard because they were being trained to look for potential threats. Guest i believe in the book you note that Warren Buffett referred to the lottery and ive heard him speak about how he had been born under different circumstances he would be a multibillionaire because of the infrastructure. It sets th set the path for himo well so its disturbing that seems to be giving doing a pood the other democracies that could have similar problems and you note near 39th on Drinking Water and 40th in Child Mortality a 61st on High School Enrollment and that we suffer more stress than the average person in venezuela and its droppings of years the United States or but r Congress Working on these issu issues. How is it that they are having such horrific outcomes . Guest on the one hand weve got all these Economic Statistics showing gdp as doing well. The stock market look at these that say we are doing really well. You can see that this and the full picture. They wont even be counted and these men may be selfmedicating area theyve been out of a job for a while, they dont have the competence to jump back in and weve interviewed a number of them and so we know that that is what is happening. They are not even looking so they wouldnt be counted as looking. But if you look at the Life Expectancy as mentioned, that is another broad venture by which its because of the depths of despair which are three types of this despair that was characterized by two economists at princeton and they look at the census data and basil that the depths of despair were related to alcoholism and Drug Overdose and from suicide actually since world war ii. Deaths went up a little bit so that is still 67,000 people that died of overdoses and tha that n the small figure so that weighs in on the entire Life Expectancy. Why is the united its not doing a better job of getting people off the tightrope and getting people onto a solid paved road guest i think that this is a 50 year course that the u. S. Took. In the southern strategy in 1958 and the tendency to stigmatize investments in Human Capital and programs on the basis that africanamericans would disproportionately benefit. I think that lea led to a numben strength and Human Capital and benefits across the u. S. I think it also relates to president Ronald Reagans narrative where the government can do no good and is invariably part of the problem. And the kind of glorification of business taking of power from labor unions and corporations with the war on drugs come in us and preservation, i think a few of these came together and so until the 1970s, the u. S. Is essentially in line with other oecd countries. Life expectancy was actually hired and since the 1970s, the other oecd countries surpassed us. Host so those developed countries are similar to our o own. Let me throw out a little bit of a fought here because i see this through the lens of trying to change the policy and governme government. What im seeing is the institutions have been changing in ways that create power for the powerful. Where you have high wealth divisions, the wealthy can have disproportionate political power which leads to rules that benefit the wealthy. We are seeing between the rich and the poor as we are at a very high racial rate compared to other countries. So is it possible that our inequality and 12 is influencing the political system preventing us if you go from investing in the resources on the fundamentals that paved the path for ordinary families. Guest in the mechanism of power turning into the political power they think its a little bit similar to what happened in the gilded age. Host it too host into the Great Depression and world war ii and that is a little scary but it took that type of intervention to put a speck on a path where are the three decades after world war ii we had an investment in programs that did lift up the middle class. In order to implement some of the policy proposals that we wantewill get to in a moment, de need to change the political cover . Guest i think we do need more enlightenment when it comes to this segment of society into the air being totally ignored because the high gdp and there is no need to change anything because on average everything is going well but if you walk into a room with 100 people on average, everybody will have a high level of wealth. That is the problem is recognizing there is the need to lift up more americans and its important to help policymakers recognize that the u. S. Wants to compete against the rest of the world from othe, other countriee china and india with a billion plus people we dont have the people power especially if they have much less to lift up and have as Many Americans as possible reaching their full potential to be productive it can bring america back to number one. Host they released a great leap forward. My mother came from extraordinary levels of poverty. Her mother with her first three children. My grandsons served in the u. S. Senate and its a change for every side of the family. There was this a the subject ofg forward during the years how in the mid70s started to stall out and then decline so what happened in the mid70s they started to drive this reversal . They attribute the success to individualism and there is certainly a lot of that. Theres the g. I. Bill of rights and the programs that invest in people and communities certainly help and then essentially the root cause of things going downhill is good jobs going aw away. There were no jobs that came in but they were not able to get new jobs men in particular felt the loss of jobs not only in the monetary sense but psychologically as well the local institutions like churches were not able to handle the trauma. They collapsed quite quickly and were very tightknit. Host you had the right manufacturing and consequences you mentioned the g. I. Bill of rights with mortgage programs. I think you are right about jobs being critical to the strength of the family because it does give structure, dignity and resources. Weve seen this in towns across oregon for example of you see some people develop right away and others who dwell in Domestic Violence and alcoholism, drug use. Guest back in the 1990s there were a lot of pejorative comments made in the communities that were struggling at that time it was the word deadbeat dads are making bad choices and the sociologists said its about jobs leaving. When they left parts the same. Guest also in the u. S. We are not as a resilient country when it comes to job losses and you can see that very easily with a comparison to what happens in canada. Its often by the same company and you can see the difference because it is a natural crisis s into the extended Unemployment Benefits so people got more money that they actually left their jobs and also lost their health care which is a huge stressor on the family. Over in canada they lost their jobs they didnt lose their health care because canada had universal healthcare into the government intervened and looked for where the demand was for other types of jobs and found out that nursing had a demand so they arranged for Training Programs for the workers to retrain to go to the nursing field. They are not selfmedicating, they are isolated away. Guest the loss of jobs this is an area we might have different opinions because what i is all happening i saw happene mid70s, this was the start to dissipate the chinese production and the companies benefited from competing with americans from wages so they can make things more cheaply so you had a glove factory that might have said we cant compete or maybe we can right now but the cost of production would be less or the same. Weve seen a lot of the factories go overseas and some of us feel so quick to open up the market in a way that we did to help drive this job loss. Guest i think im the one hand, globalization could have been a force that we couldnt actually compete. We couldnt prevent it from happening because individual factories are going to make their decisions based on what is going to yield the best return so they are going to costa rica or other places than they are going to make that decision on their own unless theres a wall that says you cant go overseas but there would have been competition from others so it is a force that may have been slower but nonetheless we didnt address it very well and overall it kept inflation down because the costs were lower for the goods americans use, so the benefits are spread out among 20 million americans rather than just losing their jobs but felt much more intensely by the Smaller Group of people. They havent suffered the same degree that the un has partly because of the policies that the u. S. Has taken. We dont adapt quickly to job losses in as a society try to help with nudges the people that have been laid off. I think that a lot of us didnt appreciate how we talked about creative destruction. Its cratits great in a textboot what i think we havent appreciated as those that have lost their job in the Old Industries might self medicate and might cook meth and their families might break down and it came the trade might benefit all the more important to make sure we supported those into those that invest in their education to adapt to new jobs and we blew it. The winners couldnt compensate the winners at all. Host i remember very well studying economics, the argument was if you have a trade deficit with the Exchange Rates would adjust over time. Its one that we were slow to respond to, so in tough situations thasituationsthat yoh universal of care, you mentioned that in the book is one of the remedies, and i often talk about the foundations for a family to five and i pictured a house in the foundation and you have healthcare and housing and education and good paying jobs. The final chapter in the book you start to address various issues and they pretty much fall into those four categories. Maybe starting with universal healthcare and eliminating unwanted pregnancies, which