https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=_v-NfZ1j918

Music Alright, well, hi everyone. I’m pleased today, very pleased to have the opportunity, the privilege to speak with General Stanley McCrystal General McCrystal retired in July 2010 as a four-star general After over 34 years of service in the US Army His final assignment was as the commander of NATO’s International Security Assistance Force and all US forces in Afghanistan He had previously served as the director of the Joint Staff and almost five years in command of the Joint Special Operations Command Since 2010 he has taught courses in international relations at Yale University as a senior fellow of the University’s Jackson Institute for Global Affairs He’s the best-selling author of his most recent book Leaders Myth and Reality And today we’re going to talk about well the book and about leadership in general We’re going to talk about the development of young people and what’s necessary to help young people make the difficult transition from Let’s say unstructured adolescence into responsible maturity We’re going to talk about the geopolitical landscape that faces the US in the West over the next 10 years something approximating that And we’re also going to talk about General McCrystal’s future plans and ambitions And so welcome to the YouTube channel and the podcast. It’s a as I said, it’s a real privilege to be able to talk to you It’s my honor. Thank you So let’s start by talking about your newest book Leaders Myth and Reality and that’s published by Sentinel an imprint of Penguin Random House. When did it come out? It came out in late October 2018 And how’s it been received? It’s being received very well. It’s a It’s a pretty deep book So people have sort of got to put their arms around it before they understand it, but it’s been very successful Now you profiled a number of leaders in that book, I believe 13 is that correct? That’s correct. We use the model that Plutarch had used for parallel lives where he did the Greeks and Romans We didn’t do 48 like he did. We picked 13 people a pretty diverse group We had Margaret Thatcher the UK Prime Minister Martin Luther the Protestant Reformation Harriet Tubman We tried to get a different group so that people thought about leadership not in a political or military or single sense So, okay. Well, let’s let’s start. I mean, I’m relatively familiar with the psychological research on leadership, which I think is generally quite a mess and I think the reason for that is that It isn’t obvious that leadership is a homogenous category There’s many different ways of leader of leading but I would also say that there’s probably some commonalities like it seems to me for example that one of the primary attributes of a leader who’s worth his or her salt, let’s say is the ability to instill and also deserve trust among the people that they work with but I’d be interested in what you’ve derived from your From well from all your experience including the experience of writing this book. What what do you what do you have to say about leadership? What have you learned? I think the biggest thing we learned is that for most of our lives when I had been taught it by people when I had the Chance to practice it and try to learn it myself is that we really didn’t understand the essence of leadership We had simplified it and in the book the way we outlined that is we’d simplified it through these mythologies we thought of leaders as a checklist of traits or behaviors that they do and that’s that there’s a generically good leader model or the idea that the leader is the person the man or woman who come in is responsible for success or failure of the organization and Finally that we as followers or participants you might say that we demand our leaders to be effective and successful and All three of those are absolute myths. What we found is leadership is intentionally contextual There’s no such thing as a generically good leader You pick a person up who’s very successful in corporation age and from somewhere else Their chances of being successful actually much lower than if someone inside the organization’s promoted We found that leaders are not the reason organizations succeed or fail in many cases and we also we as Followers we elect select follow support leaders who often cases serially fail or take us in the wrong place because Leadership is actually our conclusion It’s not a thing that the leader possesses that they direct on followers and solve problems It’s almost like an emergent property from the interaction between leaders followers and the always unique Contextual factors of the moment and so it’s this very complex Interaction that we try to simplify because we try to get our minds around it Well, it seemed it seemed to me. Tell me what you think about this is the people that I’ve seen Operate as effective leaders in different contexts the first thing that characterizes them is that they they tend to do a tremendous amount of work to try to understand the organization that they’re in fact leading and from the bottom up so they tend to know the organization inside out and backwards and then they do a tremendous amount of listening and aggregating, you know because if you go into an organization and you Discuss the structure and the challenges of the organization with the people who are actually in the trenches especially Near the bottom. I would say they’ll tell you how the organization works and then you can aggregate and synthesize and reflect back and and that seems to be associated with your idea of that reciprocal relationship between The leadership and the people who are hypothetically following That’s exactly right We found out that leaders who think they have figured it out and then they get put on a new program and they try to run That play again almost always end up with frustration and it’s really what you described I would also use the word humility because you come in and you don’t think you have a solution instead What you do is you listen you you show some empathy to understand why people do what they do because then you can Divide the right kind of leadership for that situation because it’s always different. You know, there’s a there’s a research showing what makes a physician an effective Diagnostician and one of the markers is the number of words that the patient speaks compared to the number of words The physician speaks in the first 15 minutes of their interaction and the more words the patient speaks the higher the Diagnostic accuracy of the physician and I really like that idea of humility You know you you have to walk into a complex situation Knowing that you don’t know anything including what the problems are and then if you have the possibility of listening if you have the opportunity To listen then and people trust you that which is a real crucial issue and something that’s maybe central to leadership Then people will actually tell you what the problems are and what’s actually going on and that seems to be a prerequisite for Solving them right you actually have to know what the problems are. I Think that’s exactly right when I took over in Afghanistan in 2009 I’ve been in Afghanistan a lot before but now I was in charge and the first thing I did was this listening tour and It was essential Because you have to start with the assumption that they are rational Actors that they do things a certain way for a reason when you see it from afar You say they’re corrupt or they’re this or that when you get up close if you were in their shoes The reality is you probably would do it very similar to the way they do and so It’s a certain amount of just showing respect to go and listen and understand Okay, why are we doing it this way there may be a better way and you may be able to help But if you walk in with a bag of solutions, I think they’re almost always wrong and as you say it’s hard to build trust Yeah, well the problem with walking in with a bag of solutions is that you have the steering wheel But it’s not connected to any of the mechanism That’s exactly right You know if you can have I tell young people I work with now having the right answer in the room It’s no longer the secret. You can get the right answer often on the internet But the reality is it’s getting the people in the room to accept the right answer and implement it Yeah, so okay so that’s the next thing that seems absolutely crucial is that so if you if you listen and Gather information that enables you to lay out the problem set and then to start to formulate possible solutions then the next issue is to Create what would you say formulate those solutions in a manner that? Encourages and motivates people to be on board with them instead of resisting them at the multiple levels of the organization Because that’s a big problem, too I’ve seen this many times in organizations where the leaders will Command a particular direction and then the implementation of that is resisted at every single Hierarchical strata of the organization and what you get is the appearance of compliance with none of the reality That’s exactly right. I found in special operating forces you had big Experienced personalities, and I found it it would be better to say we have this problem How would you solve it and if they were anywhere close to what I thought was a? Workable solution I would accept their solution because it was theirs they owned it They would then implement it with a completely different level than if I had told them Here’s exactly what I want you to do this this this and the reality is often they had a much better sense of it Than I did yeah Well, there’s a psychological truism there too like if you’re a clinician One of the things that clinicians have learned over the last hundred years is that? The probability that a client will follow your advice is quite low But the probability that they will follow their own advice if they formulate it themselves is quite high And so partly what you’re doing is encouraging and enticing people into Formulating a problem statement and then also determining how it is that they would go about implementing the solution. I Think that’s right now that sense of ownership Responsibility so key yeah, okay, and that’s another thing is that that and that’s a matter of delegation Is that if someone comes up with a solution to a problem? Themselves and then they implement it themselves then they also have all of the psychological and practical Advantages of having done the problem formulation and the solution right then they get to you said ownership They get to identify with the success and the failure of that particular enterprise and that that what would you say? I hate to use the word empowers because I think that word has been badly corrupted But it’s not a it’s not a bad choice of words to characterize that situation That’s right I describe it to people sometimes that said if if you go to your boss and you say boss we can do a or B and the boss says do a do it this way you go out and then if a doesn’t work you tend to go home That night and tell your spouse well boss had a bad day. Just made a bad call Yeah, right But but if the boss looks at you and says use your best judgment Then tell me what you did you go out to your team you say we really got to get this right Yeah, well it also develops your team across time the more you can delegate that responsibility down I mean one of the one of the I think useful rules of thumb for managerial types Is that when you go into an organization you should strive to make yourself redundant? Because you should be able to distribute everything that you’re and I don’t mean to offload it or to or to avoid the responsibility but if you’re running the organization properly, then You should be Putting people in place who can who could do everything that it is that you Hypothetically need to do that also means that if you’re if you disappear suddenly if you leave Then the organization can keep moving forward without you seamlessly That’s exactly right someone once said the most effective leaders the group tends to say at the end We did it all ourselves, right? Right, right, right. Well, then they can step away. So, okay, so Let’s let’s walk through the book a little bit you talked about all 13 people Why did you pick them and and and what did you learn and what do you reveal about about about each of them? We don’t have to go through all 13, but sure, but we did six genres We called them one was zealots and we picked Maximilian Roubaix Pierre of the French Revolution and Abu Musab Azar Khayri who I fought for my kid in Iraq We picked geniuses Albert Einstein Leonard Bernstein we picked power brokers We were going to use politicians, but we used boss tweet and Margaret Thatcher we used reformers Martin Luther of the Protestant Reformation and dr Martin Luther King and what we were trying to do was get diversity in sex gender Nationality and whatnot so that we would get a wider thought process on this We didn’t want to follow sort of a tight people expect a military person to write about military people We have 13 because obviously six pairs doesn’t equal 13 Because general Robert E Lee had been my hero growing up. I’d gone to Washington Lee High School I grew up near his home So he had been the example of the perfect leader in my youth and then as I got older and after Charlottesville particularly in the spring of 2017 You know, I did a lot of thinking about it and the reality is I came to the conclusion I had to write about Robert E Lee because he’d been so important to me But I now had this conflicted relationship with him. I in many ways. He was the near perfect Exemplar of leadership but in a very fundamental way the fact that he betrayed his country and he did it for the cause of slavery you can’t overlook and so I Tried to take that one on Because for me it was a complex personal thing and I came to the conclusion I still admire so much about him But I now don’t think of him as a mythological Hero, I think of him as a human being Just like you or I flawed but if You can look at each of these leaders that way get them off their pedestal but yet don’t automatically put them in a ditch and say they’re Valueless because Abu Musab Azhar Khoury who my force killed and I was happy we did I’ll be honest I admired his leadership skills. So what about them? What what was it about him that you you felt was compelling? Well, he he came up in a tough Background from an industrial town in Jordan very little education. He went became a jihadist in Afghanistan when that was popular Many got thrown in prison back in Jordan for five years and during that period what he did was he became really pious really disciplined really focused and He didn’t have the advantages other people do but he found if he was more committed than other people if he was more Fanatical about the cause that people would follow him and so his zealotry became sort of this white hot burning flame that people were attracted to And so when he came into Iraq and we fought against him for two and a half years Here’s a guy who was charismatic. He was completely focused on his cause. I disagreed with his cause But the reality is maybe in his position. I would have believed it as well and who’s to say I’m right and he’s wrong and His ability to motivate people and to live The values that he decided to adopt is pretty impressive and the Frightening part about it was many of the people who followed him didn’t share his level of fanaticism But because he was so overtly competent confident because he was so overtly committed because he was willing to walk the walk People followed him anyway, and that’s that really says a lot more about us as followers than it does about him as a leader Well, it also it also indicates part of the nonverbal Elements of deciding who constitutes a competent leader like we definitely associate confidence and the ability to keep negative emotion under control With the ability to lead because we’re looking for people who have a direction. That’s the first thing because we need a direction But then we’re also looking for people who can Maintain control over their own emotions and their own feelings Because that indicates that they’re stable in their Orientation in the world and that’s attractive if you don’t have time to do a detailed analysis of their ethos The the nonverbal cues of confidence and direction are a decent pointer to someone who’s competent even though they’re not in They’re not infallible pointers That’s exactly right in confidence and direction You know Young children do the same thing with their mothers So if for example if a baby the young child three years older So is in a room let’s say with their mother and a mouse runs across the room and they’re looking for a baby And they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby And they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby And they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby And they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby And they’re looking for a baby and they’re looking for a baby Is in a room let’s say with their mother and a mouse runs across the room and they’ve never seen the mouse the first thing They’ll do is they’ll look at the mouse because it attracts their attention and then they’ll look at their mother and they read off her face What the mouse means and if she’s up on the chair screaming, then of course the child is going to be terrified So they call that referencing and so it’s very interesting to see that replicated on the battlefield, right? So it’s an instant search for a model for emulation Exactly Okay, so so what what other people that you wrote about really struck you in in in a particular way that that’s interesting to talk about Well, very interesting harriet tubman was unlikely. She was a middle-aged african-american slave who escaped And she’s not educated but she goes back in the decade before the civil war back into the slave control part of the south to bring out about 80 Other slaves to freedom she does it 13 times anytime during which if she’d been captured She would have been either executed or re-enslaved And and we have a tough time in our frame of reference understanding just what that would have meant and She became this leader not because she was well educated or she was powerful. She never had a position But she became a moral leader and so as a as a consequence of that she was powerful for the abolition and then after the civil war for Pushing rights to include female rights but she Everything else about her wouldn’t have fallen into the sort of standard leadership If you’d had a leadership course and put her in there, she wouldn’t have jumped out The person that came out as the best leader and people ask me this question I admired abu musaba zarkawi. Although I didn’t You know admire his values was dr martin luther king jr And it was funny because I grew up my family’s from the south and my mother was very very liberal and focused on the civil rights movement but the thing that’s interesting about him is I’d grown up admiring dr king for his beliefs for his cause But in reality if he if you were trying to start a company now and you needed a ceo of the 13 people we profile Dr king is the guy he was adaptable. He was humble. He constantly changed his tactics He stayed focused on the overall goal But one week he would compromise on the march across the edmund prettage pettis bridge in selma the next week He would get himself put in jail to push something that flexibility That ability to pull together this disparate group that was the civil rights movement Actually is the most impressive leadership Uh performance of any of the 13 people we profile. Okay. So what what do you think gave him that ability? Like he was obviously it seems operating under a set of principles, let’s say but and he could be inflexible in some situations and flexible in the others like It was is there a goal a transcendent goal? For example that you think that was driving him that that he had well articulated and formulated what what kept him integrated and flexible at the same time Yeah, that’s a great question I think it starts and we’re going to talk about this later was how he was developed He grew up the son of a preacher. He had a good education. He got a phd and at 26 years old He is the pastor of a church in montgomery alabama when the bus boycott starts and he’s put in charge So at a very young age He starts with a good set of values from his family A good solid education the letter from a birmingham jail written later is this Extraordinary performance where he pulls from all the education he had so he had a foundation that gave him confident In his beliefs He knew that the direction they were going was ultimately right and from his other studies He believed could could make progress could succeed and how did he how did he conceive of that direction? Like you said he had he had his phd. So he was educated He he was obviously pursuing a set of principles that were deeply associated with the civil rights movement And and I suppose that’s manifested to some degree in his speech his dream speech And I think so. Yeah, I think a couple of things. I think he starts with a child in the south grew up in atlanta So he starts with that but then as he interacts with other civil rights leaders who have been involved in the movement much longer Than he has they’ve got the scars to prove it They’ve also got the political in fighting that that sort of limits their ability. He steps in younger without that Sort of tarnish on him. He can step above that He takes a leadership role where he points at the far position on the on the ridge line He says that’s where we must go. We must use non-violence to do that. We must try to unify our Our cause and so I think that combination of very solid mooring to values and and I think the education helped in that a good family But then also this idea that he would interact and listen to people He was constantly adjusting based upon what other civil rights leaders were pushing and pulling and on so I think he had a tremendous about of a mental adaptability without ever giving away The objective okay. So one of the things that I thought through recently um, I I spent a fair bit of time studying the sermon on the mount and it’s sort of relevant to Luther king because of course of his christian faith, so I think it’s a relevant segue the the The advice maybe you could call it leadership advice from the sermon on the mount is to keep your eye on the prize, right? so the first the first injunction is to To love god with all your heart and all your soul and so that’s to lift your eyes up above the horizon and to focus on some transcendent goal, right the the Some some to to maintain a relationship with what you regard as of the highest value or divine And so that’s the first thing is to set your sights properly and then the next thing is to concentrate on the day Right because the troubles of the day are sufficient It’s it’s and but what that does is gives you two It it it orients you in two ways. It gives you real direction But it also allows you to concentrate on what’s right in front of you and perhaps to make the course corrections that are necessary That are associated with with moment to moment transformation and it’s it’s interesting that that particular sermon Uses the day as the proper unit of measure, right? It’s it’s well, I know where i’m going But I know I have to figure out how i’m going to implement that in the here and now And make whatever course corrections are necessary You know, it’s interesting I teach a piece by admiral james stockdale in my course at yale And it is the world of ipictetus and what he does is he describes his time in the hanaway hilton and he describes different prisoners and how they responded to the inhumane treatment the torture and the the issue of a day is because they had to go Through that experience literally one day at a time They could go and they could be tortured and they would be broken when you are tortured you will break you will talk And then what happens is you lose your self-respect Because you think that okay i’m not worthy because I didn’t do name ranking serial number And but what he found was by being connected to strong values the eye on the prize And his prize was loyalty to his nation loyalty to his faith loyalty to himself He kept his eye on that and every day he would almost you could call it recharge his parents return to that That’s right. I’ve got to go back and keep an eye on it and it won’t always be easy and I think dr king did that and I think that leaders who are Leading or taking themselves through a very difficult journey It’s keeping that because there are disappointments. There were failures. There are Frustrations along the way. Okay, so that’s interesting. So I hadn’t thought about it quite that way before so You’re going to have trouble as you implement your plans and there’s going to be failures and disappointments and there’s also going to be like Moral and personal failings on your part, right and and you talked about breaking under torture which is of course exactly what you’d expect and so your sense was that That one of the or your sense is that one of the advantages to being associated with these higher order Principles is that you can draw on them as a source of strength. It’s a well to which you can return which is a good psychological trope So so maybe that’s a good segue into the other the next thing I wanted to talk to you about We’ll return to your book as well, but It seems to me that there’s somewhat of a crisis of Maturity, let’s say among young people today and i’m not blaming them for this I think it’s a consequence of technological transformation and immense cultural confusion but It it i’d like to talk to you about what you’ve seen as necessary to help immature young people mature and become Responsible citizens and and what all that means like why that’s advantageous why it’s necessary and how it can be done And why we’re not doing a particularly good job of it as far as I can tell Yeah, I feel very strongly about this so thanks for bringing it up I think if we talk about advantages if if we look at you or I and we get to a certain point in life We can get feeling superior. We say well, we’ve been successful because we worked hard or whatever We started on third base and thought we hit a triple and we did because I had two parents that I admired who loved me and they put structure I was one of six kids and there was structure and I didn’t like all of it at the time But the reality is they they didn’t talk about values. They demonstrated values They forced us to live within a certain left and right limit we would call it and maybe at the time it I wouldn’t have just on my own come up with that but They did that the education I received also gave me a pretty solid set of Foundation stones that I could stand on. I think what has happened is We’ve weakened those we’ve weakened the family in america We’ve weakened some of the things we ask or demand young people to do or give them the opportunity To be a part of certain structured things that I think help You know It was funny. I I entered the army in the 1970s. They came out of west point the army was still struggling after post vietnam And some of the best Senior sergeants non-commissioned officers I ever worked with sergeants major had come from these really terrible backgrounds I mean single family or or no parents and this no opportunity But they’d come into the army and the army had put in front of them a set of values pretty pretty admirable values And they’d looked at that and they’d said, okay, I accept that And they embraced them and in some ways they embraced them better than the officer corps came out of colleges It was a little more nuanced and thought through These guys and gals just literally said, okay, that’s right. That’s wrong And when you were serving with them, it was it was amazing Sometimes we’d be hand wringing over what we should do And one of these people would look at you and go hey, there’s a right and wrong here What are we talking about? And they were always right And so when it comes back, I think we owe young people the Experience we learn I think we learn through experience. We don’t learn through civics class on government works We don’t we learn through things we do And so if we can give young people the opportunity to be part of a team where they’ve got to subordinate some of their Uniqueness They’ve got to sometimes shut up in row Because that’s how society all of us have got to spend part of our time doing that They have to respect other people they have to live by a set of values that gives everybody else Their opportunities succeed as well. Then I think what you do is you create an opportunity for them to learn I call it citizenship But learn the way to fit in that that gives them a much greater opportunity to be successful Yeah, okay. So that’s see that that that’s real interesting to me because one of the things um I learned when I was reading Friedrich Nietzsche in particular as he was a great critic of christianity But also a great admirer of the catholic church And one of the things he said about catholicism was that over the centuries of its unfolding That it required all of its practitioners to adopt a particular disciplined ethos and to explain the world Within the confines of a single coherent system and then also to act that out And so Nietzsche was very interested in the development of let’s call it full individuality But he also knew that the pathway to individuality was through the rigors of a disciplinary structure and and I think this is something our society hasn’t discussed well because It’s it’s useful for us as people who believe in individual sovereignty To concentrate on individual uniqueness But it’s it’s naive of us to fail to understand that part of that unique individuality Is developed as a consequence of subordination to some disciplinary structure, right before you can become full-fledged You have to become something and it might be something narrow, right? You have to pick a path of some sort and commit to it. Whatever that path is and i’ve been telling young people especially in my lectures that If they’re lost they need to commit to something even if they don’t know What that optimal something should be and they have to lose themselves in it to some degree And and that seems to go against that individualist ethos, but it’s actually a precursor to it You know, you say that it strikes a personal chord with me I I entered the army at age 17 and I still fold my underwear in my drawers Even though there’s probably no great reason for that But many of the things they taught me Gave me a personal discipline That kept me remembering who I am and when I left the service there was a fair amount of you know Notoriety about the rolling stone article and whatnot. It was a personal failure But what I had was I had a sense of who I was and I kept doing many of the things that I had done before because It reassured me that some of the good habits that I had some of the good values I believed in I don’t suddenly throw those away because they helped define me The cause i’m involved with now is the service year alliance and that’s a movement to give every young american a year of civilian national service experience paid And so it’s not limited to upper middle class families who can support, you know Their child with a gap year, but it’s to get people a year in health care education conservation whatever they want to do as part of a team hopefully working with people not from their zip code and They’ve got to subordinate themselves to a bigger cause they may not love what they’re doing But I would argue that a decade or two decades later. They’ll go. Yeah, that was good for me Yeah, so that’s that that’s that opportunity to be engaged in a disciplinary process. Yes, sir And you know, we tend to think of of disciplinary processes is only composed of limitations And and so as as antithetical to an optimal freedom But it is much more appropriate to consider them as preconditions to the kind of self mastery that enables you to have some freedom Okay, so that sounds like a variant of the peace corps idea to some degree. And so what? Where are you where where is that plan in terms of implementation? Yeah The peace corps is part of it It’s a subset of it and americorps city year all the different things you probably teach for america They’re all part of this and the idea is the service your alliance. We are now pushing to get legislation To increase this the serve america act which went in in 1997 So there are programs in the united states for about 200 000 young people a year now not counting the military But we have 4 million young people in every cohort So the reality is we’ve got to expand this so that Every young person possible gets that opportunity to do a year of that experience before college or if they’re not going college before they go You know, we we’ve had some good political support our strongest political supporter john mccain Unfortunately passed last year. We are working the hill every it’s a non-political Cause So we’re trying to work both sides and let people come together in consensus, but people have been distracted so we we still got a A lot of work, right? But you say it’s at the point already where it’s been implemented It is being implemented for about 200 000 young people a year Yes, yes, sir And they they vote at three times the rate of people who don’t have a year of service later in their lives Oh, yeah, so that’s okay. So how do young people go about applying for this now and finding out about it? The the easiest way is to get on the service your alliance website cisco corporation Paid for and created a great platform So young people and their parents can go on they can literally shop for the kind of experience It would be good for them. They can connect with people who are doing or have done that experience Parents can get comfortable that their young person will be safe and whatnot and so we can match opportunities with okay so one of the things I should do is get the Get the url for that so that I can put it in the video description so that I would love to send that to you Yeah Well if you can send me whatever urls would be useful to put in the video description to allow people to further investigate the sorts Of things that we’re talking about Absolutely, so you know we’ve been working on this program and maybe this is a discussion we could have Offline, but i’ll bring it up quickly. I have this program called future authoring That helps people young people but people of any age really develop a vision for the future and then to derive an implementable plan for that and so the idea is for them first of all to decide what the values that they wish to serve are and we talked to them about thinking about their family and about their community and about their employment choices and their education and their self-care mentally and physically and their productive use of time Outside of work to and then ask people to contemplate what their life could be like three to five years down the road in the future So that they build themselves a vision of who they could be and what their life could be Then we have them write the reverse which is well What would your life be like if you let everything disintegrate around you because your bad habits took up took the upper hand And then we have them write out an implementable plan and we’ve got We’ve got good data from three different educational institutes and fairly high numbers showing that Just doing just spending even as little as an hour on that increases the probability that kids will stay in university by 35 And so it’d be interesting to think about it might be interesting to have a conversation about how that might be integrated with this youth development program because people need to to take the Time to articulate out something like a vision for their life Exactly, and they need to believe it’s attainable Yes, or or or they might even just have to believe that Even failing in the service of a noble goal constitutes a form of success That’s much more desirable than merely doing nothing and staying nihilistic That’s right. I had my course at yale one year right there obituary Aha, and and they’re 20 to 30 years old and I said right your obituary be honest, but also be ambitious Right, and so how did they respond to that? They they were pretty ambitious, but it was interesting because then we said walk back Okay, here’s what you wanted to have done Are you on the road to doing that? What’s it going to demand from you? Are you willing to make the trade-offs or whatever depending upon what they were? Yes, exactly. It was thoughtful. Yeah. Yeah Well, that’s the same sort of thing that we thought about this in some sense as a modified business plan, right? Because there’s also evidence for example that this is a really interesting line of research There’s evidence and it’s very relevant to leadership. So imagine that you had two cohorts of people within your within your Within your organizational structure and you wanted to increase their productivity and job satisfaction And in one let’s say you had three One cohort you just left to their own devices the second cohort you asked to Formulate a vision for how they were going to be better employees and to write that down and the third cohort you said no formulate a vision and plan for how you would have a more Richer and more engaging and productive life So make a life plan And then you set those those cohorts head to head and look at productivity over a one-year period What you find is and the studies now have the cumulative studies are of more than 25 000 people You get a 10 productivity increment in the group that you have develop a personal vision And no improvement whatsoever in the group that only specifies corporate goals You know it makes so much sense and the young people I work with today They spend more time talking about that the sort of whole life idea And so the idea that they can put all those pieces together and be intentional about it. That’s the term I try to use You’re going to get where you try to go where you’re going to get close to there But if you don’t try to get somewhere it’s going to be luck Yeah, well the probability that you’re you’re not that you’re going to hit a target that you don’t specify or aim at is extremely low And you know that the funny thing too is it’s it’s not just a target. It’s like a it’s like sending a missile It’s like sending an anti-missile missile upwards because the target moves. So that’s the thing, you know, you think well What should I do with my life? And the answer is well, I don’t exactly know because it’s so complicated and it changes It’s like yeah, but that doesn’t mean you can sit on your laurels What it means is that you should aim at something and move forward and as you move forward you can adjust your aim And as you move forward you learn what you need to adjust your aim So it doesn’t really matter if your initial plan is 100 accurate. It’s not going to be but you need that vision and so Yeah, I love that. That’s one of the great things that we found in the book for we we profile coco chanel And she was an orphan at a young age in rural france and she comes up and she’s opportunistic But she’s always looking forward. She’s looking for opportunities. She’s acting on that. There was no there was no Set path for her life. There was no predictability that she would be successful But she was constantly adapting to what happened and being pretty aggressively opportunistic Yeah Well, so so that’s that interesting paradox of both having a vision and being able to move And being able to dance on your feet when necessary you need to be allied with the proper higher order principles Which is you know, that’s what the civics classes and and humanities in the universities were supposed to help instill in people was that ability to develop an affinity with with Large-scale principles and then the same thing with religious education for that matter Which is which is I suppose one of the things that was motivating for For luther king because he he was educated but also had his has had his feet well Planted on a firm religious foundation so Without that it’s very difficult for people to have the moral fortitude to move forward We also found that Reinforcement is very important certain things like the catholic church or like the military where every day you do certain things in the montgomery bus boycott of 1955 to 56 you had 382 days when the african-american population of montgomery alabama is trying to force Integration of public transportation and to do that they boycott the buses Which meant that every day african-americans had to walk to work or carpool so every day they had to take an act That reaffirmed their commitment to the boycott and it wasn’t just once a month Oh, yeah, I still support it you had to do it every day and what they found is psychologically that strengthened their commitment to it Yeah, right. Well, that’s that’s a continual process of of of evident Sacrifices right you need to make sacrifices in order to move ahead and that does in fact Foster your commitment because if something’s worth doing it means it’s worth giving up other things for which is really it’s almost like The definition of worth doing right because you can’t do everything at the same time And so that that’s that’s part of the development of the sacrificial motif that emerges so early in human In what in human interactions with with with well with divinity or with higher order purpose You have to make the right sacrifices And if the end is worth attaining if the end is worth pursuing then the sacrifices are worth making And there’s there’s a nobility that goes along with making that sacrifice too and a discipline Now now you’ve seen young people inducted into the armed forces over a very long period of time and what? Characterological transformations for better or worse. Do you see as? Attendant upon that process and what and of that what’s necessary because having kids do this year of services It’s it’s kind of got that it’s got a bit of a military feel to it, right? You pull them out of their families you you put them in a in a foreign situation or in a strange situation for them There’s a disciplinary routine that’s associated with it What have you observed as the consequence of that personally and and and among the people that you’ve observed Sure, let me start at a point down and i’ll back it to it when a soldier’s wounded on the battlefield and they were evacuated to a first Aid station and then up through the chain As soon as they’re able the first thing they ask about is their comrades. How are their comrades doing? and they desperately want to be back with their comrades even though they’re wounded because What’s happened is they formed this family atmosphere this commitment this sense of i’m a member of this team And that membership is very very important to them And as they get further away and one of the reasons why wounded veterans have a tough time is they come back and although We’re nice to them in the u.s We’ve broken the umbilical cord with their family And unless they’ve got a strong family base back in the u.s Which takes them and even then it can be challenging And so what the military does is when you first come in they they call it soldierization They cut your hair. They change your clothes. They they make you go by a rank in a name They change a lot of overt behaviors Because they know that you force behavioral change and attitudinal change comes after that you start to believe cognitive dissonance kicks in And so you start to think of yourself as a soldier and as you start to think of yourself as a soldier Or a marine or whatever you start to adopt those values you start to say well soldiers don’t do this Or soldiers do do this. I don’t put my hands in my pockets. I don’t you know, whatever it is And you start to identify with those behaviors and values and they become very very important to you and so What the military is able to do is pull you into that now They’ve got to show a purpose to it I mean at the very beginning they you know people go well Why do I have to have my hair cut the military’s got to show a purpose to it? But as they do and the purposes of discipline and cleanliness and all the different kinds of things Become evident then people begin to believe in them and they begin to self identify With those values One of the hardest things for someone leaving the military is to stop self-identifying as a soldier You know, you say well, who are you? I’m a soldier and that’s comforting It’s uh, it’s reaffirming And so and it’s it’s not just what people think of you. It’s how you think of yourself Yeah, so you have it Well, you have an identity that’s personal and then you share that with people that you’ve gone through difficult and demanding experiences with And so it broadens it develops you as an individual but broadens out your commitment past you To those who are immediately around you and then at a more abstract level to to the military structure and then the political structure itself So it means you’re ensconced Your identity is ensconced in multiple levels at the same time and that’s very reassuring and also very purposeful I mean people absolutely need this, you know, I I’ve been thinking that part of the problem that that we have with regards to purposeless right now is It’s partly a consequence of over emphasis on the individual and and partly a consequence I would say of lack of discipline because The optimized individual is working in a way that’s useful for him or her but also for their family and for the community all simultaneously and so you can you can build in the idea of social obligation and citizenship into the idea of optimal individuality and and I don’t think that we’ve Articulated that particularly well with our concentration on atomized individuality I think we’ve actually made it much much worse than it should be because we We focus on the rights of the citizen, for example, but we don’t really talk about the responsibility. Yes. Yes, that’s exactly it You know, I’ll tell you something that’s really interesting so i’ve gone and talked at about 115 cities over the last year to about 250 000 people And every time every single time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning As opposed to the relationship between rights and meaning Because we’ve had lots of conversation about rights every time I talk about the relationship between responsibility and meaning the the audiences fall dead silent Because that’s that’s that’s something that we haven’t Articulated well over the last 50 years and I think young people in particular are really Dying on the vine because of it because most of the meaning that you’re going to get in your life is a consequence of taking on responsibility You take a great sense of self-worth When someone says thank you for serving thank you for doing something selfless, whatever it is for society There’s this tremendous sense of reinforcement for the person. So We don’t do it just for the good for society we do it because it makes us feel better And young people who never get that opportunity They never get thanked for what they do because they’ve never been asked to do anything Well, I think it’s very difficult to see yourself as useful to yourself if you don’t see yourself as First as useful to other people because that’s the validation of that sense of utility and worth Yeah, and that’s when we start getting into metrics like money or other things which are sort of false metrics of success I think that’s the most important thing That’s the most important thing Okay, so let’s let’s let’s let’s ask another question here. So, all right, so you’re working hard on this What did you call it again? I’m sorry. It’s a service year alliance service year alliance. Okay, and hopefully that’s going to be a Bipartisan push. Yes, sir. And and it’s it’s something that’s akin in some sense to a short apprenticeship To every young person in america, we’d like to have that realistic opportunity to do a year of paid service What do you what do you see as the um? Challenges associated with expanding that and and because a year isn’t very long either, right? it’s something that has to be set up really quickly for people and and they have to be pushed into it and or put into it and And get off the ground very rapidly. So what are the challenges? that Stand in your way with regards to Developing and expanding this program the the programs that have been good so far peace corps city year americor Teach for america have all learned through experience. They’ve got to have a training program at the beginning They’ve got to have a very structured system to make sure that the quality of what people do is of value because right put people Out there and it’s a waste of time So they’ve learned that you can’t just throw something together and then call young people forward and do that even if you were to have funding So that’s sort of step one. You’ve got to create the opportunities in a disciplined way I think a common experience at the beginning of three or four weeks for every young person to go through some kind of thing Where they before they go out to their specific service would be very valuable And I think they’d all talk about it later in life remember when we went to kansas and we all went through this orientation training and They’d laugh about it, but running collective experience. That’s right. That that would be a challenge The the biggest thing that’s surprising is the demand among young people for this program is huge In fact, it’s about 10 times greater than the number of opportunities we have The the hold up is our generation my generation For some reason we either won’t fund it. We won’t work on it Because my generation to be honest that a good percentage of us didn’t serve a smaller percentage did so at the dinner table They don’t talk about when they served in the peace corps when they did this I mean some families do but it’s not common And the professional military is actually weakened a little bit because it tends to be a smaller A smaller group so we don’t have that tradition where my uncle my aunt my grandfather grandmother all did that and so so it’s really interesting that you’ve got 10 times the applicants because that’s That that implies an applicant pool of about two million Which is already about half the population that you are hoping to serve I don’t think we will have a bit of problem with applicants because I think that will even go up as As at the lunch table if they start talking about where are you going to serve? Or as employers say where did you do your year of national service when you apply? And if you’ve got this dead silence or if a young person is running for congress Gets up on a stage and says I should be and someone says well, where did you serve? And if there’s dead silence then other ambitious young people are going to go up I got to think about that Yeah, and that may be you know, whatever it takes. So what’s the evidence that programs like Peace corps for example or teach for america What’s the evidence that those programs are all actually having their desired impact because like one of the rules for social science investigators is If they’re canny and intelligent is never assume that your stupid intervention is going to have the positive results that you assume Right you or that you that you are hoping for you have to measure that and so When you look at people who’ve gone through the peace corps or teach for america or similar programs What’s the evidence that the programs are actually producing the results that that are hoped for? Yeah, it’s a great question And the first thing is we do a lot of studies on this but You have to understand what it is You’re trying to get out of it if you say teach for america is to make education in america better right now There’s an argument that says no bringing people in for two years of teaching isn’t professional teachers So they’re they’re not as good. I I would disagree but there’s an argument If you say conservation building trails or health care we can hire people to do it And it’s cheaper I would argue that’s not what we’re looking for what we’re looking for in this program is alumni We’re looking for people who come out of the peace corps or out of the teach for america experience teach for america Alumni tend to go into education at an extraordinary rate as you know getting into teach for america is harder than getting into yale university You know in terms of it’s it’s a it’s a small program. It’s very elite And and that’s not a bad thing But it means not many people are getting the opportunity to do it And yet that’s not a cohort that would automatically be involved in education later in life and yet they are That experience seems to bring them to it. I mean earlier in our discussion that People who have done a year of service vote at three times the rate of people who have not They volunteer at higher rates. So It’s the real measure and getting the right metric for this as hard as how do you measure better citizens? Yeah, well that’s you put your finger on something of absolutely crucial importance There is that if you’re going to do an outcome study you have to make sure you get your metrics right? And that’s a deadly difficult thing because the question is well. What is it that you’re trying to produce and You know what what what’s implied in the way that you formulated your answers is that you’re trying to produce citizens Exactly, yeah And and you know it’s so interesting because generally the way that we construe people in our society now isn’t as citizens But as something approximating consumers, that’s the most common adjective You know consumer confidence or what is the consumer thinking now or how is the consumer responding to the latest economic news? And it’s it’s a terrible replacement for the idea of citizen because a citizen is the foundation is the foundation of the state and and someone who’s Bearing responsibility for the state rather than someone who’s merely living off the benefits of the state That’s it I mean that if you think the state is just a covenant between a bunch of people to be a state To be a nation whatever and the responsibilities of mutual security or raising barns or volunteer fire departments Which used to be so critical have weakened a bit as we’ve professionalized a lot of things And I think that if people feel that that responsibility I sometimes talk about marriage I’m not an expert in marriage. I’ve been married all of once For 42 years, but if you go back to the age of Out on the frontier a man and a woman get married and they have a family They need each other. You know every relationship goes up and down You know you go through periods when you’re deeply in love and periods when you’re irritated But if there’s a sinew that binds you it’s a combined responsibility for the children or the farm. You can’t survive alone I think that that helps keep you focused focused Doing more difficult periods. Yeah, well that covenant idea is exactly right I think is that you know I was talking to a divinity professor at Cambridge University and we were talking about This is sort of relevant. I suppose to the discussion of Martin Luther King too We’re talking about the exodus narrative, which of course was used as a as a what would you call it? a metaphorical Re Restatement of the problem of the slaves in the United States And so the exodus narrative is often read as escape from tyranny into freedom something like that But it’s it’s not a it’s it’s escape from Involuntary covenant that’s the tyranny Into something approximating a voluntary covenant, which is what’s arranged with yawa in the desert So there’s no there’s no chaos and directionlessness or that’s portrayed as the desert and and the solution to that is to enter Into a new covenant and that covenant is something like a long-term promise and that that’s also what you see in marriage and The advantage to that is that it the disadvantage is that it constrains you right? and so that’s why people think about this as as burdensome duty, but the advantage is is that it gives you direction and and shelters you from Excess uncertainty and doubt and the commitment that goes along with marriage Is is something that should be regarded as Aspirational it’s right look we know this is going to be difficult and we know that this is limiting your possibilities like Limiting your possibilities of mate choice down to one person But you commit yourself to it and in that commitment and that adoption of that covenantal Arrangement that’s where you find the meaning that’s associated with responsibility We’re not doing a good job of communicating those ideas No, because we tend to think too much of responsibility as only limiting as you put it When I was in the ranger regiment we had this creed six standard creed and one line says I’ll never leave a fallen comrade to fall into the hands of the enemy and every day we recited this creed And every ranger is promising no matter what it costs them Ie to go out in a bullet-strip street to pick up a fallen comrade even the cost of their life The cost of their life they’re going to do it and you think about the power of that I’m going to give up my life for someone without Worrying about it without thinking i’m just going to do it And then you turn it around and you say every day 22 other rangers are making a commitment to do that for me And then you go wow the power of that. I got 2,200 people who have promised to do that for me now the the value of that shared responsibility becomes Becomes pretty important. You know when i’ve talked to conservatives, you know about What they have to offer to young people? And it’s in my life at least it’s the first time i’ve really seen a situation where conservatives have something to sell to young people That’s sellable and I really do think it is the issue It is the idea of responsibility and it’s also that that’s where young people did that’s where young people all people Discover their possibility and their capability is by taking on a heavy load the heavier the better In so far as you could manage it because that’s what forces self-revelation It’s not it’s not navel gazing and it’s not looking inside in a contemplative manner, although that sort of thing can be useful it’s Trying to pick up something heavy and worthwhile and seeing how you can manage that and stagger forth under the load That’s how you discover who you are and that’s worth discovering because there’s a lot more to you than you think Yeah, I I used to have a technique that I just sort of stumbled upon When I was leading people you’d be in a room and you’d look at somebody and there’d be a tough task and you’d say Jordan can you handle that? And then you don’t even really wait for their response to just say I know you got it I got it even if they don’t think they got it. Yeah, they go. Holy smoke The confidence you’ve shown in them and you didn’t do 20 questions. Can you do this? Are you sure you just go? I trust you do it. It’s amazing the effect it has on them. Yeah, that’s that is some that’s there’s faith in that, right? I have faith that you can pull through to do this. It’s like extending your hand in trust So, you know if you’re a young really young person you trust people because you’re naive And then you get burned and you get betrayed and you get cynical and you think well I shouldn’t trust people but that’s no good because then you can’t trust people and you can’t work with them And so then maybe you go beyond that cynicism and you start to extend trust as a as a manifestation of courage It’s like i’m going to interact with you. I’m going to give you an opportunity or a responsibility And i’m going to trust that the best in you is going to respond to that And then that’s an invitation for that part of the person to come forward it really works like and then and I do think that that’s a key element of leadership is to Take the risk of manifesting that trust Absolutely, it takes a little courage, but it is the most important thing I think Yeah, well and it it seems that way because it calls forth if there’s some best to be called forth from a person That’s the right way to do it Yeah, there usually is there a few people who test the hypothesis but but for the most part there is yeah, that’s right for the So that’s right in the bulk in the vast majority of situations. There isn’t a more effective There isn’t a more effective process okay, so What what needs to be done strategically in your estimation in order for people to get behind the the youth service programs that you’re attempting to to foster Yeah, I I think we need some high-profile people Talking about it in just the way our conversation has been the idea that citizenship in america is sacred It defines the success or failure of any state whether the citizens live up to it and the sense of responsibility to that And it’s going to take people with profile to do that because young people again They look to to people with more experience in how they should react to that We also need to build in reinforcements for that if people do years of service They should get preferential admission to universities or to jobs. There should be education benefits for that Right so that should be an accredited that should be part of the process of recognized accreditation for competence and service Yeah, and then recognition we we thank veterans for their service. We ought to thank Everyone who does some kind of service and do it pretty publicly You know do it in a way that hey board the airplane first, you know When you’re waiting at the gate those people who are doing national service you get on first, right? So you get some you get some status along with your responsibility, which isn’t the same as having privilege That’s right. That’s right. It’s a deserved reward and that’s how you segregate it from unearned privilege You ever see how somebody responds who never gets that kind of? Status never gets that kind of recognition they beam right? Yeah, yeah. Yep. Definitely. Well, that’s a fundamental human motivation And and I do think it’s also the fundamental human motivation is to respond extraordinarily positively to the granting of status when It’s it feels like you’ve earned it though all those things have to be there because otherwise it’s false and and and and makes you cynical And that’s why when when president obama a few years ago said we’d like to make community college free for everybody My wife and I were watching tv and she finished the sentence. She says as soon as you finish your year of service Because when you’ve done right right right good point, then you feel like you deserve it Yeah, otherwise you’re likely to throw it away too just because because you feel like you don’t deserve it, right? It’s it’s a moral burden to gain a gift that you haven’t deserved That’s right. Yeah When you look forward now five years into the future What do you see as the fundamental challenges that are going to be facing the the the the us and the west? What what’s your take on the geopolitical situation broadly speaking? Where where should we be awake? Yeah, I I think we should be awake to the rise of authoritarianism and What we saw arise in the 1930s and then we saw the cold war And we saw this belief that we were moving toward liberal democracy and there was a lot of data that says we were Uh now we’re not and if you look around the world elections in various places because not all dictators seize power Many are elected to power We’re seeing a real move to that and I think there are lots of reasons for it as societies get under pressure People sort of banned tribally. Sometimes it’s nationalism. Sometimes it’s it’s racial leaders populists grab that And social media which I thought if you’d asked me this question 20 years ago. I said I’d have said that the information technology Would improve democracy it would allow fresh air and and uh light to get on things it actually hasn’t done that it has allowed people to to utilize them to create this rise of authoritarianism and to me that’s very frightening because of very authoritarian countries have a tendency to take zigs and zags and of course Historically, they go to war much more than other people So I think the near term the next decade and a half maybe two decades That’s what we’re going to have to worry about and It’s going to make the world More dangerous militarily. It’s also going to pull at some of these things that we built for the global economy because the global economy Is so connected now. We can’t unconnect it and so That’s going to create some strange dynamics. We’re going to have this connected economies But yet we’re going to have The rise of these nations with people pulling in strange directions We’re going to have to figure out where we as a nation fit where our values fit how we What we are going to trump it in the world what we are going to represent the world If we don’t do that, I think we are going to to run into yeah Well, you know we could tangle this back into the discussion We already had to because it seems to me i’ve thought about authoritarian structures for a very long period of time And it seems to me that the most effective Defense against the rise of authoritarian structures is to make stronger and stronger individuals And you know, I think that’s the great secret of the west at least to some degree is that our states have been powerful because they function well, but the reason that they’re powerful is because we have done a good job of emphasizing the autonomy and sovereignty and Responsibility and rights of the individuals and I think the more that we can do that Which is why it’s so interesting to me to hear about the youth development programs for example that you’re that you’re championing Is the more responsible individuals we have in the world? Not not only in the west that greater the possibility that we’ll be able to resist authoritarian tendencies and also to resist them Let’s say sociopolitically and militarily as well because we’ll be up for the challenge. That’d be the hope anyways Well as we know tuckerville wrote, you know, if you’re not an educated populist electorate then democracy is not going to work Right and which is why you need to make citizens and not consumers exactly Okay. Okay. So, all right. So you’re concerned about the rise of authoritarianism and and and and then what are what about your ambitions? What what’s what’s in your what’s on your purview for the next? Let’s say three to five years What what do you want to do? And what do you see happening with your own political views? What do you see happening with yourself? Yeah, i’m 64 years old. So What I do now is I have this this organization we created by crystal group got about 100 people now and we work with Organizations to be better. I really like that. I I like developing the young people in our organization I like working with clients to make their Organizations function better. That’s sort of the personal level On a broader level, uh I really want to get a national conversation on leadership started I don’t see myself, you know going into elected office or appointed office or anything like that But but I would like to foster a national conversation where people talk about like what we just talked about And people don’t scream at each other, but people ask difficult questions of each other and what am I doing? Leaders myth and reality was an attempt to start that Uh, if we can foster that then I think that that would be a contribution I would take I mean part of this is selfish I would take great pride from being part of forcing that conversation Okay, and so yeah Well, if there’s anything that I could do to facilitate that i’d be more than happy to participate because it’s it’s it’s exactly aligned with What I think i’m doing with my lecture series and my books and so on and just so so and I do think it’s of absolutely Crucial importance to to to to work on that sense of well reinstallation of of of Community meaning and and and a reinstantiation of fundamental values It’s very important and people are crying out for it in a in a mass manner. All right Well, so your book is leaders myth and reality. It’s published by sentinel That’s a offshoot of penguin random house You’re going to send me the url so that people can sir can make contact with the Organizations that you’ve described. Is there anything that you would like to ask the viewers or listeners to do? That would support you in your endeavor to move the the youth citizenship programs forward apart from becoming aware of them I that’s the first one. I think this is going to have to be demand. We are going to have to first help create Opportunities for this but second we’re going to have to demand them if teachers in schools aren’t talking about this if employers aren’t asking people if they’ve done a year of service and giving value to that if universities aren’t giving credit for the fact that you’ve done this because this is pretty important life experience you would bring to a university and then finally of our politicians Ask them why don’t we have this because our politicians will respond to what we ask for Okay, you know, I yeah. Yeah, I think that’s key right right and so well So that’s a marketing campaign to some degree marketing and communication campaign so All right. All right. Well, look it was a great pleasure and privilege speaking with you and um, i’d encourage people who are watching and listening to pick up your book leaders myth and reality and to start What thinking about and participating in this conversation to start thinking about the sort of future that we want to craft Collectively and individually so that we can do things properly over the next 10 years and keep things oriented in the manner that thoughtful and wise people might want them to be oriented and so um Thanks very much for agreeing to speak with me and and uh, I hope we get a chance to talk again in the future I look forward to it. I really appreciate you having me on and I really enjoyed hearing your thoughts. All right. Great. Great Good to see you. Yep. Bye. Bye. Take care When we think about education of a person you get part of in the classroom in high school or maybe at university level But reality think where you learn the most you learn the most down where you’re solving problems dealing with those knotty issues in society The flint water crisis had a huge effect on everybody that lives in flint. It scared kids It scared entire families Our education system does not teach young people how to work So we have the idea for connecting the dots between two major issues In the u.s. There is an affordable housing crisis Here in charlotte, north carolina what we’ve seen is housing costs Increasing by over 10 percent in the last year and wages really have remained stagnant The demand for housing is really outstripping the supply When we have disaster strikes like what we’re seeing right now This is a very long crisis and most people don’t recognize that when something happens like what’s happening real time in houston In houston, there’s a call to action people see this playing out on television and so they immediately think they want to help And then what happens is that recovery actually lasts for years? We have great divides in america We live in different neighborhoods We watch different television. We eat different foods. We don’t interact like we think we do What we need to do is give people a common experience a common sense of contribution And a common sense of responsibility to other americans Over the past few decades we’ve come to equate service with military service In reality service is much broader education health care conservation The goal of the service your alliance is to give every young american the opportunity to do a year of paid national service So that when a young person is growing up, they don’t wonder if i’ll serve they wonder where i’ll serve Home to me is much more than four walls on the roof So to me that’s a house So I try to build homes Where you have christmas and where you have birthdays where you come home soaking wet on a rainy day those kinds of things That’s home You don’t hear the story enough about the people in this flintz community that really make the community a better place to live The people that are working hard on a local level in their neighborhoods It’s not just about planting in the dirt. They’re actually doing something with their hands And then next thing you know you’re connected to more people and you’re learning all these skills that you thought you could never learn Because these skills aren’t really put towards us in our environments We believe that forming capable professionals is a top priority but along with that Teaching them how to be effective citizens Service year is something that should be part of every institution where students have opportunities To really contribute and feel a sense of accomplishment I think a year of service would go a long way toward creating a common bond There’s thousands of people involved in these programs deciding their own fate and putting their own ideas and energy Into these new pursuits and saving lives as we go Never what I thought in the future that I would be teaching people how to recycle or teaching people about How to be energy efficient. I don’t even look at things the same anymore. I’m learning that everything really matters I think in 30 years we’ll be a different place We’ll still have political differences we’ll still argue on specific issues, but we’ll argue from a different place We’ll argue from a place that we have a shared sense of where america needs to go what america needs to be And what being an american really means