 Greetings everybody. Thank you all for coming and I guess we have a few more seats. If folks at the back want to try to fill in everybody sitting next to an empty seat raise your hand and we'll accommodate anybody brave enough to come down and sit in it. I know you're a beer drinker. That's true. After tonight it'll be Boiler Gold, but what's your favorite beer? I've got to ask you. I thought it might be Dosekis. No, it used to be Pat's Blue Ribbon. Oh, okay. Well the reason I thought is because next time they want to change that most interesting man in the world designation it could be you, which means that we're going to try to move through in my part a number of topics. There are so many things that one could ask this particular guest and I hope that some of you are formulating some questions of your own, but we're really grateful to have you here after Senator Bob Carey, Governor Bob Carey, former President, University President Bob Carey has led one of the great American lives of our time. He's been a public figure of course, but also a successful business person small and large and still very, very active on a host of issues that are very topical in our community and across our country. So thank you for coming. We're delighted to have you. And among other things he was trained as a pharmacist and he finished in four years. I know our students are going to want to know how did you do that. That's a question. Well I mean just took more courses per semester than normal. I mean I was one of seven children. We had one choice to go to school and that was the University of Nebraska. So on the other hand I wanted to get out and go to work as quickly as possible because I had raised, you know, believing that going to work was a good thing. So I got out as quick as I could and what I hadn't thought about was I graduated in 65. What I hadn't thought about was my draft status changed. So I was out practicing pharmacy when the government decided they had a higher and better use of my skills, counting pills. And then? Well, well then I, you know, I passed to come down and get a free physical examination. It was my first contact with socialized medicine. And I passed it because I grew up with a pretty nasty case of childhood asthma. And every year around Labor Day I'd start to get pretty bad symptoms. And then it would end with the first freeze and my physical came in December. So I passed a physical. And at that time I, you know, I was trying to figure out, okay, now I'm going to get a notice and join the army. And I just read Herman Wokes the Cain Mutiny and volunteered for the Navy. So, you know, it was all well thought out and planned ahead of time. So that's what I did. I'm going to skip maybe as one of the most important, at least for now, one of the most important parts of your chapters of your amazing life. But that chapter ended with an injury. You had a direct experience before most of us had ever heard the term opioids, which has led to a continuing interest you have today that the senator asked very specifically to meet with some of our faculty who are researching in this, in this area. Could you share with the group a little bit of your own, your own views on this subject and your own, the reason that your own personal experience? Well, I'm obviously in pharmacy you study it. I study, actually pharmacology. And so I understand opiates and what they do in a theoretical way. And I've watched the impact on lab rats as well. But after I got injured, I had a traumatic amputation in my right leg and my hand was messed up a little bit, a little bit of body damage. And I was given opiates in the hospital. And I can tell you, I can still taste them or all of my mouth. I mean, it produces pleasure, real pleasure. And yes, it gets rid of the pain, but it substitutes pleasure for pain in a very big way. So I'm sympathetic to why people are attracted to it, particularly in what the current kind of state of things going on in America today, this post industrial age we're living through. I'm very sympathetic why somebody would do it. And on the other hand, I know that that it can grab you in a hurry. And because it crosses the blood brain barrier. And the next thing you know, you need more. And the next time you take it, it doesn't do as much. My roommate at the time, that tail rotor came off his helicopter and he suffered what's called circumferential burns on the neck down to his toes. And he was addicted to dilated, which is probably on the synthetic side, the most powerful, the ones you can get with a prescription. And so, but he wasn't an addict. He was addicted, but he wasn't an addict, if that makes any sense. And so when he withdrew, you know, I watched the withdrawal. And it was uncomfortable, but he got through it relatively unscathed and got to a non-addictive pain medicine. But that dilated was absolutely essential because he was in constant pain with dressings and so forth. So I'm familiar with what medicine can do to actually relieve genuine pain. But I'm also familiar with the draw, particularly the opiates. And I watched, you know, we've now in last year, we had more people killed from overdosing with our, with these opiates and particularly fentanyl and car fentanyl than were killed in the entire Vietnam War. So it's a, it's a compelling social problem. I don't have an answer to the problem. I got ideas and my problem, my ideas, I have good ideas and bad ideas, and they both feel the same when I have them. So I don't know what works. Among the other services you provided to the country was your leadership, your membership and leadership on the 9-11 Commission. And what, looking back now with benefit of 15 years or so, are we safer or less safe and in what ways? Oh, I think we're unarguably safer. The Congress responded, made lots of change, executive branch. I mean, I don't think anybody that was there at the time says anything other than we made some mistakes. And the problem is it doesn't take much to let guys like this get through them. I mean, all 19 hijackers were unrecognizable if we saw them on the street. And in the old days, you know, two years earlier, we were watching mainland Soviet forces. So even after the Soviet Union ended, you're still worried about large-scale military forces that are out there. And that's how we'd organize ourselves. And there were lots of instability in the world that when the Soviet Union collapsed, and we were paying attention to that. And we just missed something. We missed, you know, this Mohammed Atta was, you know, cafe in Hamburg, Germany shopping for flight schools in the United States on the Internet. And that vulnerability that and we've tightened up security in the United States, the collaboration with the rest of the world has improved, particularly European countries, but also Arab countries that now understand that this is an existential threat. So I think the answer is yes. It's not possible to get the risk to zero. And it's not possible to operate without making mistakes. But I think we are unquestionably safer today than we were prior to 9-11. You had a one of the more remarkable elected careers in elected office. Prior to that service, you served as governor of your home state and quit. Then you served as senator from your home state and quit. You're obviously not addicted to that in the way that some people are. You made a run that some of us hoped might go further than it did for President of the United States. So a lot of folks have fret these days for very good reasons about the state of our national of our democracy and our state of our representative institutions, the people in them. So I'd love to hear you tell them about your views of that. Let me just start with this observation. You were widely recognized and this was a compliment most of us thought as a maverick during your time. Someone who was not entirely predictable, called him case by case many times and from time to time deviated from the party orthodoxy of your team. There don't seem to be any of those anymore. Everybody's gone, haven't dated their own camps. So when you look at it from the basis on the basis of the way you approach public service, what do you see and what could be done to improve it? Well, it's it has gotten, I think, measurably more difficult for Republicans and Democrats to work together because you get penalized with primary opponents and and an expectation that you are always going to behave according to whatever the orthodoxy of your party is. And it has gotten harder. But that my first response, a lot of times it's worse than it's ever been. I say, wait a minute, we had 700,000 men die from 1861 to 65 because we couldn't resolve the issue of slavery. In 1970, there were 2000 bombings in the United States with 25 casualties, half of whom were police officers, same number the next year. So it's been worse than it is today. You know, we've got significant problems on the political side. I frankly, I'm encouraged by the fact that there's still a long queue of largely young people that are that want to become candidates that still believe in their country, they believe they can make a difference. And they're they're getting in the game. And, you know, I can certainly talk about the quality of take the Republicans who were in the Senate when I got there in 1989. But the problem and they were superior individuals. I mean, you could I could work with Allen Simpson, I could work with Packwood and Hatfield and Rudman and and and Dick Luger and people like me. It wasn't that difficult to do. But you begin to sound like a not just an old fogey, but one of the one of the worst things that happens in life is this moment where you you stop being a skeptic. We all should be skeptics of things that other people say you always want to examine the facts and reach your own conclusion. But when you become a cynic, a cynic doesn't believe human beings have the capacity to do good. And cynicism comes from loss. When you experience a loss. And that's that's the game in life. You're born over here, you die over here. There's losses all the way in between. And you're trying to figure out the question is what do you do with those losses? You lose your youth, you lose your mom, your dad, your best friend, your terrible things happen in life. And the question is what do you do? And the worst thing that I see with with people my age is to tell young people encourage them to become cynics. It's a it's a it's it's a terrible thing to do. It's a wonderful system that we've got. There's a huge amount of opportunity. You know this from your time in Washington. If you got one of the unspoken things about Washington is if you take 535 Senate and House offices, which is the number there are mentioned I was talking earlier, there are 537 elected people in Washington DC, they get up every morning and look in the mirror and all of them see the President of the United States, but only one of them is. There is there is that with the members. But if you take 535 Senate offices and literally pull it random 100 staffers, the mean age won't be over 30. They're young. They work like heck, they're idealistic, they care about their country, they're trying to do the best they can. And oftentimes we're getting more than we deserve, given our own language and our own attitude towards what they're doing. So I'm, you know, guardedly optimistic because there's no guaranteed democracy survives. It's hard. And one of the most difficult things that gets underestimated with freedom. And I understand the difference of your birth. I won the ovarian lottery. I had terrific parents and almost ran aground anyway needed, you know, some some people mentioning me along the way. But, you know, the most difficult thing with freedom is the correlation between effort and results. And so if you encourage people not to not to care, not to try not to get involved with democracy, knowing there's going to be disappointments, knowing there's going to be frustrations, it's a terrible thing to do. You know, the fact that you're frustrated and life is difficult. And, you know, I get when it comes to politics, I get unsympathetic. It's you know, the men who signed the Declaration of Independence, they pledged their lives, they pledged their sacred honor, and they pledged their fortune. Other than that, they didn't put anything on the line. And we said, Oh, you know, Donald Trump does this or Hillary Clinton does that. The whining drives me crazy. It's a great country. We've got we're playing a winning hand. And we just got to kind of suck it up and do a better job. So you mentioned young people. And that's our primary interest here, of course, you spent almost as much time in higher ed directly as you did in in the Senate, for instance, running as president, I should say of the new school, an unusual university, maybe you could say a word or two about that. But go from there to talking about the state of higher ed right now and how it looks to you, you're still active in a way that that I want the audience to hear about it Minerva. But well, I was you know, I my best friend in the Senate, we talked earlier was Daniel Patrick Moynihan. And he introduced me to a woman in New York. And she came down and we had dinner on December 7 1995. And we remember that date as our wedding anniversary, because neither one of us can routinely remember February 23, which is actually when we got married. So and I, I fell in love with her and she fell in love with me. We both had a little case of comitophobia. So the relationship went on for a while. And she would not agree to marry me unless I agreed to try to have another child. And I had raised to and apologize, particularly the Senate can be hard. And I didn't want to do it again. So I decided I wasn't going to run for reelection. And a couple days later, I got a call from a friend of mine who was on the board of the new school asked me if I wanted to do that job. And it was three blocks away from where she lived. And that sounds good. So I said, I said, yes, with minimal due diligence. And by the way, we have a 16 year old son. So that worked out as well. So it's, it's challenging. I was so impressed with what you did when you first got here. You met with everybody, you listen to them, you talk to them, you, you respected their point of view. You know, it was very impressive. That first letter you sent out was, you know, testimonial, not just the value of higher education, but the importance of getting good leadership. And not just leadership in selecting the president, but the governing boards are enormously important because they can panic when, when, when crises occur and crises will always occur. I think the genius of American higher education is just radically decentralized. There isn't one entity, although we have regulators we always have to deal with, but it's radically decentralized. And we have a comparative advantage with the rest of the world. We don't mess up our immigration policy. We have, we have people want to come to the United States and go to school. So it's not like we're dealing with failure. There's lots of need to change. I told Mitchell I was there 10 years, I only had one no confidence vote. And my, my board freaked out when that happened, I said, you know, if I had been doing my job, I'd have gotten at least one no confidence vote every year. This place needs to, this place needs to change. But I have a huge respect for the men and women who choose to, to work in higher education who choose to be in the administrative side of the faculty side. It's, it's not easy. It's, but you get the opportunity to watch 18 year old men and women come in and you get to watch them four years later with greater capacity and greater knowledge and greater confidence. And I just, I think our higher education system contributes more economically, politically and socially than any of the set of institutions we have. Amen. But there are changes underway and you're a part of some of them. Say a little bit about Minerva and maybe some of those other new models that you're aware of or have, have assisted. Well, Minerva is a, is a startup university. We started out in San Francisco and it's a residential program, although we use technology and it's described as an online program. It's not the kids go to school in a, in a very difficult computer environment. There's no way to say it other than to say it. There's no tenure. Everybody that works there is hired on the premise that they are, their goal is to produce the high absolute highest quality at the lowest possible price. So our tuition comes in at $10,000 a year. But with $15,000 room and board, it's still a lot of money. So it's completely merit based. There's no, there's no calculation of geographical distribution and so forth. But the whole idea is in a residential environment to give these young people a chance to, to really learn how to think critically, how to do critical analysis, how to work in groups, how to communicate the results. And they travel to six additional international cities, one new international city per semester for the rest of their academic career. And we are enjoying early on very good success. So the, the test scores, the most important, I'm, I'm sure you know this, but the most important question for oftentimes is how many year freshmen come back to sophomore year and we're, we've got 95% of our freshmen come back to sophomore year. All the test results so real success. So we're very enthusiastic about it. But it's, it's small. It's a thousand students. It's, it's, it's a, it's, but it's fun. It's, it's a fun thing to do. And I, I, I'm hopeful that it will help other universities and colleges trying to figure out how to organize themselves. Maybe they'll get some ideas from what Minerva is doing. We'll be going to the audience for questions in just a minute. So this is your two minute warning. Well, that depends on the length of the next answer, but maybe, maybe more. And because of this particular room, we'll have people moving around with microphones. We don't have them down front for you to queue up at. So just raise your hand when the moment comes briefly. But I, before we get to that, I do have to ask for your reflections. We're now in the, the five decades after the Vietnam era with all the changes that it brought to the country was obviously a major part of your life. And many of us have been watching the recent documentary. By the way, I think apart from your consulting on that, you had something else in common with Ken Burns, you told me. Yeah, Ken Burns and I both suffer from post-traumatic stress disorder as a consequence of having dated Deborah Wenger. Right. He want to make sure I got that in this whole presentation. It's too good not to share with y'all. Look, we've been, we've been working. I mean, the war itself was awful. What war isn't? And rather than getting into the, the, you know, I told Burns, I said, you know, the civil war is easier for you to do because all the guys who are in that one are dead and we're not yet. So you're going to provoke another argument about the war, which is fine. What has done those provoked a big debate inside of Vietnam itself? Because perhaps the most moving thing in that whole 17 hour series was a North Vietnamese soldier. And those guys were good. They were really good. And he says, you know, I, I used to think that the protests in the United States of America was a sign of weakness. And I now realize it's a sign of strength. We couldn't then and we can't now protest this war. So there, Facebook is wide open in Vietnam. And I, I know that because we in 1991, when the Soviet Union collapsed, the, the Vietnamese got interested in a hurry. So did we in normalizing relations. And, and George Herbert Walker Bush was, and Dick Solomon were leading that effort. And it was difficult. It was a difficult process. And, but we got money through a State Department program called the Fulbright program, which started graduate school. And we've, we've graduated 1200 students since that time. About half of them are in the government. And now we're trying to do an undergraduate program. So we have a, you know, a pretty regular conversation with the people of Vietnam. And other than they have a, they still have clung to communism, which I say to them, if you, if you're trying to figure out whether that's a good idea or a bad idea, just answer this question. How did the 2 million Vietnamese who came to the United States of America, how have they done relative to the 2 million who didn't come? And, and by the way, you know, one of the, one of the great things about 1975 was the United States at that time, the Congress made an effort to change the immigration law and let all these Vietnamese that were in trouble come to the United States of America. And they've added enormous economic and social and political value to the country, enormous amount of value. And the reason is that freedom is not phony. They, they can do whatever they want. And they've created a lot of wealth and they've opened businesses and so forth. So the key conversation moment with the Vietnamese political officials is to say, you know, if you want your country to prosper, it may be you're going to get protests against your own government as well as we do, but there's nothing better than emulating the economic system of the United States. Questions? So there's one over here. Hi, I grew up in Nebraska and you were my governor. The, the, the, and during high school, you during the election that my high school or your high school? You can, you can run for governor in high school in Kansas, but not Nebraska. The election that followed your governorship was famous because it, it was two women. It was the first time that any state had two women running, you know, as, as the both parties candidates. Do you have a feeling about your, the, the status of, of women in, at both the state governance level and, and within the national, um, government? Yeah. No, I think it's, it's, uh, I think women are represented in greater numbers than when I went there in 89, but still short of the mark. And the best way to get a female president for the Republican Party and the Democratic Party to nominate a woman, then you can't lose. You're going to get a woman president. So I think I, I, you know, I'm actually quite encouraged by the, again, the quality of, of women that are participating. I think the, I think the changes that are occurring as a result of largely of Harvey Weinstein's behavior, but others as well. I think it's going to improve the, you know, the relationship of employer and female employees. I, it's, so I, I, I don't know if it's going to happen in my lifetime, but I do think that you're going to get, uh, at some point soon a female president. Thank you. There's one on the aisle right over here. Hi, I'm Kevin Wiley. I'm the volunteer for the Concord Coalition fiscal lookout for Indiana, Bob. So I know you're familiar with it. I have. And, um, like I do fiscal presentations around the state as volunteer. My question is, what is your current view, both of you on current U.S. debt, where it's at today, and what effect foreign debt holders might have in the United States, such as China? Oh, uh, well, I'm going to be uncharacteristically brief with the answer. Um, no, I, I, for the United States of America, we're borrowing a trillion dollars to make a single year budget. It's just wrong. We're borrowing trillion dollars. We're going to add, you know, pushing over $20 trillion total, and it's going to, we're also be soon going to become the fastest item in the growing item in the, in the federal budget. And Mitch knows how ugly that is when that happens, because you, you don't get anything for it other than paying the interest on the debt. So it's a, it's, I think our fiscal policy is wrong. If we have any economic problems at all, there's no flexibility left. We've been dependent upon the Federal Reserve anyway for, for a long time. So not easy to, not easy to pay your bills. Just isn't. And, um, and particularly to when the fastest growing items are Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid. So those are, we don't even debate those. And it's a challenge. Particularly the, the retirement programs, because it's gotten harder as a result of the very rapid movement over to 401k away from defined benefits. So you've got a growing number of people who are heading towards retirement and all they have is Social Security. And if that, if all you have is Social Security, you're going to be living in poverty. Because we just, the 401ks, they've done a good job for certain groups of people, but it's way short of what's necessary. And so the political challenge has gotten harder. It's gotten much more difficult. But essentially, where my view is we're robbing from the future to pay for the past. Um, anybody, I mean, you almost have to consider passing a law saying, no, let, you know, Senator Winbag can't give us speech anymore talking about how he cares about his children, his grandchildren, because he sure as hell is behaving like it. I wish the problem stopped at public debt, which is bad enough, and is incredible intergenerational inequity. It's not exaggeration to say that it's immoral, really, to borrow money in enormous quantities, not for investment in the future, but to spend on current consumption by one generation. Thomas Jefferson described the pursuit of happiness as not having the bills of the previous generation foisted on you. And if that's the case, we're depriving the next generation of happiness. And it's not just it's not just public debt that the coalition works on, but we've got private pension funds in serious trouble, lots of private debt that may also in student debt. And it's weighing on the future in a way that's one day going to be impossible to fix without a serious dislocation. You probably know they put a provision that created commission for a multi employer pensions. Yeah. It's going to be interesting to see if they can knock that one back up. That will that'll be a signal because they're going to be doing it after the midterm. So maybe people think and it's it is set up for the federal government to backstop private pensions the pension benefit guarantee corporation, but they're teetering on the edge. And if one big fund goes bust, they'll be bust. And then we'll be, you know, there's an uplifting subject. Yeah, so, you know, that's what he meant when he said we want to you know, cheer up the under generations. So we got a couple of presidents of higher education here and speaking of debt. What do you think about student debt? Any solutions there? Oh, again, I referenced what I said earlier. I've got some ideas. You'd be the judges whether or not they're good ideas. I think you got to follow the lead of people like, you know, President Daniels, who's been very careful with cost of Purdue is in order to be able to keep tuition. So it doesn't constantly go up at presumption of mobile. It's only 3%, 4%, 5%. Why not? We drove over here in a car that he had when he got here that he hopes to have when he leaves. And it takes those little things like that. Because, you know, there's there's only one way to end up with cash in the bank at the end of the year. And that's not to spend it during the year. So and there's only one way to get some public money, but you're charging your students for every expenditure that you've got. So I personally think on the student debt issue, I'd like to see the universities and colleges. I'd like to see them the loan be recourse to them. Let's say start off. I'll start off 50%. I get the cash. I'm running the new school. You go to the new school and I'm charging a $600 fully discounted. You do title four loan. I get the cash from that loan. And if I if I watch you take I don't know how to sell me a media studies grant, my students here. But if I'm watching you take media studies knowing that it's unlikely you're ever going to find a job when you graduate. Why shouldn't I why shouldn't I have to pick up some of the tab for that? So I think I think you should it should be easier to get to get through bankruptcy. I think we make it much more difficult than an auto bay. But you can't solve this problem unless governing boards at university say we've got to control costs. We just have to control the cost because if the costs are high, there's no way that you you can solve the problem. You're always going to see you're always going to see an escalation of the of the tuition. So that said, the only real problem we have with people paying back student debt are people that don't finish college. The people are finishing colleges are paying back their debt. They may not be having children, they may not be able to buy a house. I mean, they're not like it's, you know, the trade offs that come with it. But the bigger problem of our students that don't finish. And I there's a number of efforts going on to try to do something about it. But that that is the biggest challenge. The biggest challenge I think in the country today is tell me earlier, there are 200,000 five year olds that show up in New York public school systems every single year. And fifth and kindergarten. And I can predict almost by zip code which 40,000 are going to graduate my school. 40,000 are graduate my school. And you think that's their problem? Yeah, that's their problem. But that's our problem as well. And I think we're doing precious little to solve that one. Don't want to cheat this side. Far, far corner. Mr. President, Senator, thank you for taking the time to come out today. So I'm currently a junior here on campus. And what I've noticed around campus itself that many college students today aren't especially interested in government and really they don't really care too much about the country itself. So I was wondering, what are your thoughts and advice on how current generation college students can become more involved in the country and what steps can be taken to kind of bring back that pride in the country that you kind of grew up with? Well, first of all, there are an awful lot of young people who are volunteering for the United States Navy, Army, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard who are 100% committed to the future of the country and the safety and security of the country. So there's a large fraction. And among the things you need to think about is those people who are doing that, those people who are not going to college. What's their life like? What are they doing? And others, at some point, it doesn't hurt to feel gratitude for your circumstances in life. And I think anybody as a student of Purdue should feel a certain gratitude because it's an extraordinary gift to be able to go to this university. The next thing I say is, you know, this isn't unusual. How old are you? 20 years old for God's sake. I mean, you're like five years beyond puberty. Your brain, your brain has got five more years before it catches up with your body. Don't worry about not, you know, being as engaged with politics as you ought to be. I think adults need to do a better job of telling you what you can do. I think the young people need to do a better job of recognizing that there's a huge amount of opportunity to get involved. And it's fun. You've seen this Tony Shalub series called Brain Dead. Anybody watch that? Oh my God, it is the best series to understand Washington, D.C. Tony Shalub is a terrific actor. And the series is based on this premise. A meteorite lands close to Washington. It's picked up by the Smithsonian, put in one of their warehouse. In the dead of night, it bursts open and tens of thousands of ants come streaming out single file up into the cherry blossoms in the daytime at night. They crawl out, go up in the ears of members of Congress and destroy that part of their brain that makes them reasonable. So anything. They must still be hungry when there's death. Underneath this is a story of young people who are running these offices and they're making friends. They're doing things together. The Republican and the Democratic staffer work together. So I wouldn't I wouldn't worry about the current generation of college students being less engaged. I'd be grateful for the young people who are volunteering to wear the uniform the United States military to defend us and give you the freedom and the right to be able to go. And I'd look for opportunities because there are there abundant and are worthwhile. I would only add that I would be I would be careful not to equate the idea of love of country and absorption in politics. In a way, there's nothing more healthy and American than the understanding that politics is not the center of life. It's those it's those societies where politics became the center of life that murdered tens of millions of people finally and and created the worst barbarities in recorded history. There's so many ways to to help build the country and to demonstrate a love and commitment of country volunteerism, you know, participating effectively as Boilermakers do all the time in in the in the private economy and creating opportunities for others. And yes, of course, there's a citizen's responsibility to take part. But there's so many there's so many ways to be a major contributor to a vibrant free society. And, you know, our guest tonight's a perfect example. Yes, he spent time in in public life, but also in the military and in the private sector and in higher education. And every one of those, he was demonstrating his patriotism and making this a better place. That's the upfront. Yes, sir. Yeah. Wait a second. Yeah. Good evening, President Daniels and Mr. Kerry. My name's Kedep Pena and sir, I just want to thank you for your service and for you being here on behalf of the Army ROTC. We're just honored to be here and hear you. But my question for you would be who initially comes to mind and creating for your success through aspiring to their leadership. And then can you give like specific examples of their leadership and how it was displayed to you? Oh, it's not even close. My mother and father, not even close. You know, I'm my as I said, there were seven children. And I say this a bit, you know, I didn't do any work to become a United States citizen. My mom did all the work. So, you know, and there is something to that. If somebody gives you something, you don't value it as much as if you have to earn it. So seven kids, you know, they graduate from college at the end 1931 as the depression was kicking in and they very difficult time finding work. And they considered the best years of their lives. My dad's brother was killed in the Second World War. And, you know, she my mom, when I was a sophomore in college, I was taking organic chemistry my sophomore year. She was in class with me. She had decided to go back to college. She had four kids at home still three of us went school. She had four kids at home, cleaned the house, cook the food, did the laundry. I used to eat my damn laundry home from college. Hey mom, do the laundry. Yeah, okay. But, you know, my dad, she did the books for my dad for his lumber and construction business and they never disappointed me. Never. So, I mean, it's not even, it's the hardest, hardest job in the world. I realized when I realized, and I trust that you'll get there someday, when I saw my oldest son and my daughter be good parents. I said, okay, I did all right. You know, it's once I saw them being my boys, my oldest son is a great dad. My daughter's a great mom. I said, okay, I did okay. Everything you can take everything else and show it out the window. Actually, there's two ones to get them both. Oh, okay. Hi, I'm Elketh Maywall. I'm a senior here at Purdue University. And a problem that I've seen is post graduation satisfaction. And what that means for me is not knowing the industry that I want to go to after graduating from Purdue. And I wanted to get your thoughts on, as university presidents, is there a way for a university to solve this problem? I'm glad to ask you. Well, yeah, I do. I mean, just constantly ask yourself, are the skills you're acquiring going to be things that people are going to want to pay you to do? But it is so much of it is is your own attitude towards work and your own values. You know, it just don't call it work for nothing. It's, you know, there's a columnist that you know where you'd remember him because he's, you know, way before you're born called Mike Royco and wrote for the Chicago Tribune and he had this false character, Jim Broski, and Broski didn't have a job till he was 50. And Royco says, how come you waited so long? And he says, you know, if work is so damn good, how come they have to pay you to get you to do it? So I mean, I, I, my, I'll just predict that you're not going to have any difficulty whatsoever. Not because it is, it's values, it's attitude. It's, do you feel good about what you're doing? Do you're grateful that you're alive and have the chance to do things that other people don't have a chance to do? I mean, I graduated pharmacy and ended up, you know, 12 months after I graduated, I mean, SEAL team won. Not exactly something I had in mind, but I went through pharmacy and then, you know, I went to a restaurant business, the next thing I decided to run for governor and, you know, it, it just, if you, if you're, I don't know, I'll reference another, another guy. There's a guy, you asked a question, there's a character by the name of, a man by the name of Victor Frankel who wrote a book called Man's Earth for Meaning. The Viennese psychiatrist who was, he survived Auschwitz. And he says it, he said the thing that he learned at Auschwitz is they took everything away except for one thing, his attitude. And what he realized was the only thing that really matters is his attitude. And he survived Auschwitz because, because of that. And he, and, and, and if you haven't read Man's Earth for Meaning, it's worth reading because I do think it's helpful to try to understand what you have to do in life, not just to survive, but to thrive and be happy and be, you know, be able to say I've contributed. And the mic up, there's, there's two right there in the row ahead. Oh, sorry. Hi, I'm a high school junior in the area. And we've had a lot of discussion at school recently about the shooting in Florida. And especially in my AP psychology class. And we've been talking about like different ways that could be used to solve school shootings, such as teachers being armed. And I was wondering what you would think of a gun education program similar to what drivers have to go through to get their license. Why I think it's a it's a good idea. Look, first of all, you should not be worrying about this. This is the first generation from combine in 1999 to the first generation has to worry, am I going to get shot when I go to school? This is a solvable problem. We have a we have a law called the National Firearms Act. It's it's law. You know, you don't have to say I'm for gun control, I'm against gun control. We have a federal law called the National Firearms Act. And it's got a list of things that you can't own. And you can't own grenades. You can't have a bomb in your house. You can't have chemical weapons. They're all in there. You can't own an automatic weapon. You can't buy an M 60 and haul it home. When you're 17 or 18 years old, they're illegal. They're heavily regulated. And and you have that has to be the context for the conversation. I personally would put put AR 15s on the list. But that's the conversation. In addition, there is a need for all of us to think about gun safety, especially if you're in Indiana. But no, I've I've taken my son over to New Jersey. We have to go to New Jersey to do gun safety. But gun safety is enormously important. But to the adults in the room, the state of Utah has one of the highest adolescent suicide rates in the country. 20% of adolescents in Utah have planned their suicide by by good survey data. And it's, you know, their clinics are prescribing trigger locks. So don't underestimate the difficulty that older people should not have. We should not have a situation where a young girl is asking a question. What are we doing? Because I'm afraid to go to school. They closed every single school in West Virginia today. Come on, this is it's it's it's time to say we're going to make it safer. And I can't I got lots of teachers who I loved when I went to school. I can't think of a one of them that I'd want to give a gun to. Hello, my name is Noah I am a sophomore here and I'm majoring in political science. And I did some research on the man on the 9 11 commission who you replaced. His name is Max Cleveland. And I like to read two quotes from him real quick. He said the Bush administration was purposely stalling the investigation and said, as each day goes by, we learned that this government knew a whole lot more about these terrorists before September 11th than it has ever admitted. And he also said, after the White House set conditions for the examination of documents, if this decision stands, I as a member of the commission cannot look any American in the eye, especially family members of victims and say the commission had full access. This investigation is now compromised. So I'd like to ask you, do you believe the White House obstructed the 9 11 commission's investigation and did not allow the full story of 9 11 to be exposed to the public? First of all, Max Cleveland is a very dear friend and I actually helped him find a job that he needed to have in order to get the support that he needs. He's a double leg amputee and arm missing as well. So he needed more support. He'd lost a Senate race. He had no, he didn't have the support that he needed. So I disagree with his analysis of the conditions. I would not call what the executive branch did obstruction. They did make it difficult. Not an unreasonable thing to do at times. I mean, they do have the mandate to protect classified information. And I don't know if you've noticed or not, but Washington is not a good place to go and tell somebody a secret. So I think in the end that the Bush administration did cooperate sufficiently to be able to help us do the most important thing, which was not to, and let me say one additional thing before I get to the conclusion. I'm responsible for coming at the end after drafting the report. I've been on lots of commissions and every single commission I was on, except for this one, minority reports were allowed. And I made the case for good and for bad, I think mostly for good, I acknowledged some bad came with it, that we had to be unanimous. The language was unity of purpose. We could not have minority reports. We could not have dissenting views. We needed to be unanimous and I think it helped galvanize the Congress to take action. The executive branch should take action. But look, it was a conspiracy. It's a 20-year-old conspiracy to attack the United States of America. And the idea that you're going to, I mean, some people come up and said, the whole thing was a conspiracy. They said, well, duh, yeah, it was a conspiracy. I'm not a part of the conspiracy. We're trying to understand what happened. And it's not easy to do because there's not like you can, you know, bring a bunch of witnesses in because most of the witnesses were the bad guys that had died on 9-11. So it was, it was a difficult process. I do think the bottom line was that the results were that the country savers a consequence of the Congress and the executive branch implementing the recommendations that were made. Thank you, Noah. I want to slight this side of the room. Anybody here on the, who's closest? A topic that hasn't come up yet that you should be familiar with is healthcare. Wondered about your thoughts and good and bad ideas. We don't know which one's which. Of single payer versus private method versus Medicare versus Medicare D. That's all those subjects of Medicare. Well, I don't know how to get to where I'd like to go. I'll tell you where I'd like to go and I'll start with myself. I have a claim under federal law. There's a federal law that gives me a claim on the incomes of everybody in this room to pay for this $18,000 prosthetic. That's federal law. And as a consequence of being a relatively high profile amputee in Nebraska, I've had many moments where I've been called upon to come into a family, usually a farm accident or cancer. They don't have a claim on my income. They don't have health insurance. I have a claim on their incomes. They don't have a claim on mine. What did I do? It's a bill. Well, you were in the military and you're fine. Say I'm entitled, but it doesn't take away the fact that I have a claim on your income and it hasn't made me lazy. It's caused me to be grateful. And it's taken away all the uncertainty that you've got about healthcare, the older you get, this system is expensive. My first child was born in 74. My second, 76. My third in 2001. The deductible and co-payment in 2001 inflation adjusted was greater than the total cost of the delivery of the two babies who were born in 74 and 76. It's gotten better. Moms are less likely to die. Babies are more likely to live. Everything you present is more likely to find a cure for it and be able to get picked. But it's expensive. So I don't know how you get to where I'd like to go, but I'd like to, I think the only thing is you have to prove that you're an American citizen. Because there's only about 10% of us that get sick any one point in time. Well, I want to subsidize people who are sick. When the bottom drops out and these bills start rolling in, you shouldn't have to say, oh, my God, what's going to happen to me? And for you young people, I promise you the older you get, the more likely it is you're going to find yourself in one of these moments. So I don't know how to get to where we got, but I don't like we have a system that says one loss is if you prove that you got blown up in a war, you're eligible for a subsidy. The other one says if you work for the right employer, we'll subsidize your health insurance and you'll have a FICA offset. It's a quarter of a trillion dollars of subsidy a year. Another one says, oh, if you reach 65, you get a subsidy. The worst of all is Medicaid where we say prove your poor and promise to stay poor and we'll provide you with a subsidy. And then everybody that works for the federal government, everybody that works for the state government, everybody that works for the local government or for a school district, they're also being subsidized. So the idea that we're all, oh, I'm again subsidized, it's ridiculous. Who isn't being subsidized? So I don't know how to get to where I genuinely do not want a top-down government-run health care system. I think they'll make it worse than it is today. I think some ways that good news is we've got a decentralized system with lots of innovation going on. But I don't think we're going to be able to get to where we want to be unless we have one large group of 330 million people in it. The question there, all those are all the right questions. The one that an aging society, none of us wants to think about, but without which we won't have a solution here is the end-to-life problem. An enormous percentage of the costs in the system come in the very late stages of life, often for people, often futile, often for people who cannot be saved and sometimes whose lives are prolonged only to endure more pain. And really hard, really hard question. You don't want, probably, the government deciding. It's very difficult to ask a loved one. All of us want to try anything, anything that might, that might, might, might make a difference. But that's where a huge part of this cost is, a cost which we sooner or later will have to face up that we can't afford. No, it's true. But it's, you know, I don't know, 40% of the healthcare spending today is preventable metabolic diseases. So it's not all, and by the way, end-to-life could be a NICU. So it doesn't, doesn't have to be, one of the problems with, with the American healthcare system is a really good thing. We like saving lives. We've got 17 million people that go to work every single morning, wanting to reduce pain and suffering and save lives. That's what they do for a living. And at the margin it's gotten better, I think, as a, as a result. It's messed up as, as, as, as our laws are. I've almost called it a system. It's by it. I mean, that is not a system that we've got. So, you know, I don't, I just get back to what I said at the beginning. I just, something wrong that I've got, I've got working people who have a son or a daughter who suffers an amputation, either accident or cancer, and they don't have a claim on my income. It wouldn't kill me. I just, I think we're better off with one large group. In part because we'll see where the costs are. Yeah. Much more likely that we'll be able to have a rational conversation about, you know, why is it so darned expensive? And what do we need to do to adjust to make it more affordable? We had one in the third row. I don't know where the nearest guys want to race to it. Thanks. Hi, Cody Guffey, president of the Produced Student Veteran Organization. Student Veterans are oftentimes criticized by their peers for quotes not belonging in higher education. I recently attended a conference where I heard some statistics and my numbers aren't going to be perfectly accurate. I apologize. But the national completion rate for bachelor's degrees, I'm sure both of you probably know this way better than I do, is 66 percent. Among student veterans, that number is actually in the 70s. Additionally, the national GPA is approximately a 2.75, I believe, where as, I'm sorry, that's a 2.8. But among student veterans, we were up to a 3.5. Seeing and hearing those numbers, I'm curious what your thoughts are on the importance of veteran education and what sort of things can be implemented to improve it? Well, I think the post-911 veteran education act was one of the most important things that's been done in the last 10 years. Then the success has been phenomenal. So, if you've got students who say you don't belong, that's their problem, not yours. I mean, it's a problem because they don't want me to belong, but they're the ones that are going to lose. They're the ones that are going to lose the opportunity to learn from somebody who actually has served and try to get an understanding of what it means. I mean, it's the hardest thing in life to presume that somebody else might actually be smarter or know something you don't know and you kind of get walled off against the experience of learning. So, I think the post-911 education legislation, which was very bipartisan, was enormously important, it's had a huge amount of value. It was the right thing to do. And, you know, it's it's the loss of the students that think you're not welcome here because you're more likely to be successful when you graduate than they are anyway. So, I would I'd say your way ahead on points. Hey, Cody, if you say you encounter that sort of attitude, I don't dispute it, although it's a big place. We have every kind of attitude, including some of the most distasteful on this game. As all I'll say is, if if I ever encounter it, those folks will have a problem with me because I'm proud you're here. And so I think of the overwhelming majority of your of your peers and the faculty and the staff of this place. You know, one day when you commence, you'll wear a cord. We give a special cord and we stand up the veterans and recognize them. Generally gets a standing ovation at the commencement ceremonies. We stand up the ROTC commission or commissionees and honor them to and that'll be the policy of this university has been since it got here. And I just trust that if there is such an attitude out there, it's very, very aberrant and will remain infinitesimal. How about on the aisle back about halfway up there? Gentlemen, thank you for being here. My name is Dominic Oto. Sir, I read a Louis B. Puller Jr.'s book, A Fortunate Son. He talked about you a great deal in that book. Sir, I'm also a veteran. Can you talk about how you thrived after having a life-changing injury and how that affected you? How you were able to do as much as you did after such a thing that happened? Well, Louis B. Puller is a son of the most famous Marine that ever served in the Corps, Chesty Puller. Five Navy Crosses, a remarkable military leader. And his boy, Louis, who was in the hospital with me, was 4F to begin with. Got reclassified to 1A. 4F meaning, for those of you too young to remember those numbers, or know those numbers, 4F means you're physically or mentally unqualified to serve. And he had really bad eyesight and not very coordinated physically. He was an English major. A really good. So not that being coordinated is incompatible. He spent too much time reading, you know? Anyway, so he got in the Marine Corps. And he got an infantry and went to Vietnam. And shortly after he got there, he hit a tripwire of 105 millimeter or how it's around to cut him in half. And the blast, the heat, carterized his wounds. And so, yeah. And after he wrote Fortune and Son, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, he, it's back on this addiction problem. He was an alcoholic. And he had quit drinking. And he went to Walter Reed because he was having pain. And they put him on pain meds. And he went back to drinking. And he killed himself not long after that. So in fact, he called me just before he killed himself. He was playing Fortune and Son and just basically calling friends and saying goodbye. And I think that's how you get through it. You get through it saying, God, it could have been worse. You know, I don't know why I didn't, wasn't killed. I don't know. I wasn't. And there, but there are moments, you know? There are moments when I less so today than what first happened to me. Because pain causes you to kind of block out everything, particularly orthopedic pain, but mental pain can, as well. So you just, you have to avoid getting on that vortex of self-pity. It just sucks you right down the drain. It's not an easy thing to do, but it's possible. So among the things that I would do that people come in and say, you're going to be able to do everything you could do before, I said, that is unadulterated horseshit. And that's the advice I give to people that I meet in hospitals. I said, don't accept that you're going to be the same as you were. You're not the same. You're different. You're different than you were before. I can see when somebody's hurt again. I couldn't see it before. I have a lot more sympathy and compassion than I did before. There's lots of things that I can do that I couldn't do before. And those things to me are more important than can I shield them on a six-minute mile. So and I think, look, I just, I think that the more difficult thing for a man, particularly, I don't know if women have this problem as much as men, I don't think they do, is learning to ask somebody else for help. And a cousin of that is letting somebody love you. Because then half of that will get easy. So I actually don't know how I got through it all. I'm just glad I did. I had wonderful friends and family and people helping. And I had a claim on all your incomes, which helped. I've been lucky enough to meet several members of the nation's highest military honor, including Senator Kerry. I've never met one who was willing to take any credit or talk much about himself. And you never have. I've studied this and know that his almost constant to answer when someone asks him is that he accepted the medal on behalf of others who, in his judgment, were equally deserving. And I think that just tells you what the last hour did, the quality of this man and his character. And I'll just say, on behalf of the entire Purdue community, we're awfully glad you shared this day and evening with us. Thank you, Mr. Schenke. Thank you.