 Ladies and gentlemen good evening Ladies and gentlemen good evening. Let me ask everyone to come on in and take your seats. We're going to get started here My name is Kurt Volcker. I have the honor of serving as the executive director of the McCain Institute for international leadership, which is a part of Arizona State University and We have a great partnership both Arizona State University as a whole and the McCain Institute in particular with the New America Foundation And so we are delighted to be back here again We launched together a series of conversations aimed at focusing on core issues of leadership And we hope that this is an interesting and useful Discussion for you We are particularly interested at trying to reach a young audience of professionals in Washington who are Thinking about their lives their work their role the balance of these things and what they can and should Accomplish in their lives working in this town and we've had great presentation in our first round of this with Anne-Marie Slaughter who's the the president of the New America Foundation and We have a great line up here tonight and I'll let in and Marie introduce our speakers we Have about one hour of conversation. It'll be Moderated here, but we do encourage you to ask questions and take part and there'll be reception that follows And we do ask all of you to stick around a little bit and mingle so we get to know who you are and vice versa And so with that introduction, let me turn it over to Anne-Marie to Welcome all of you to her home here and also to introduce our speakers. Thank you. Thank you So let me begin by welcoming you to New America And also just to say how much we value our partnership with ASU The president of ASU Michael Crow is on our board ASU is the new American University and we are new America So it fits beautifully together But also specifically with the McCain Institute out of admiration for senator McCain and also very much supportive of the McCain Institute's mission in across many issues, but cultivating or working on Leadership and what it takes to be a good leader Through your own studies, but also these kinds of events are something we think is needed in Washington So we're delighted So I have the pleasant task of introducing our speakers I'm going to start with our moderator Rosie Gomez who is a child welfare program specialist At the US Department of Health and Human Services and she is a 2016 our graduate of the 2016 next-generation leader at the McCain Institute Rosie Gomez has over 14 years of experience working in the field of child welfare and she works now at the federal level and has Done many different things at the federal level including being the senior policy advisor on Trafficking prevention at the administration on children youth and families, which is something I know from my time. It's in the State Department enormous global issue, but also An American issue, but she's had experience not only in the federal government, but also at the city and county level I emphasize that because it's very important as a public servant To think about not just the federal government, but also increasingly municipal government and state government And she's had experience in the nonprofit sector and again If we're thinking about public service that can happen both at multiple levels of government But also in the nonprofit sector like New America and indeed in the private sector But you have to choose your jobs more carefully there So we're delighted to have her as moderator and she will be interviewing David Brooks now the most important thing to know about David Brooks is that he is a member of New America's board Everything else is quite secondary, but I'll go ahead and tell you So he is as you know an op-ed columnists for the New York Times and has been since 2003 and I will say that I Remember when he became an op-ed columnist He had written this wonderful book called Bobo's in Paradise He really burst onto the national stage with Bobo's in paradise the new upper class and how they got there And you all are too young to remember, but it captured a particular moment of sort of post-cold war prosperity and Double-income no kids people living a new bourgeoisie life and it Set him up as somebody who Follows his own line and I would say still He is not predictable as a columnist you not and that's a great compliment Because we all know those columnists where you sort of know what he or she is gonna say With David it is often a new book. He's read It's always a sort of cut into a subject that is not predictable either politically or I think in other other ways He's had two recent books the social animal. I highly recommend. It's my teenage son's top Book choice or so he told his colleges. I don't know what Probably better than Marvel, but anyway But it's a it's a book I relied on when I wrote Unfinished business talking about care and caring because it really analyzes how we are Biologically hardwired to be connected to others and to care for others And it's just a it's a wonderful read But a very important subject and more recently and you'll hear more about this the road to character Which was on the on the bestseller list actually number one and has been is on military reading lists and I think Presaged or or got ahead of this sense in the country that we have Lost a number of old-fashioned virtues that we absolutely need so with that I'm going to turn it over to what I know will be a fascinating conversation. Thank you Well, good evening everybody and I'm honored to be here and delighted to be talking with David Brooke About the topic of leadership So as mentioned I was part of the next generation leaders program And one of the books that we had to read was the road to character and it actually made me think differently about my leadership journey and The impact that values can have on leadership. So I wanted to start with a couple of questions from that book It seems that sometimes especially in hyper-competitive or hyper In environments like Washington DC where it seems that getting ahead is the most important How do you keep with upholding values when others around you may not be I? Don't really worry about that Well In writing this book one of the things I learned that writing a book on character doesn't give you good character And even reading a book on character doesn't give you good character but buying a book on character does get you good character Recommend that you do that, you know, you know the the basic foundation of the book is that we There are two sets of social virtues the resume virtues and the eulogy virtues The resume virtues are things that make you good at your job and the eulogy virtues are things They say about you after you're dead Whether you're courageous honest capable of great love and we most of us have been filtered through an education system that That teaches a lot more about the resume virtues about the eulogy one And I find in my students that they come here they go to New York and they have what I call a telos crisis Which is to say some bad thing happens in their life They get fired or they have a romantic breakup and they have a very serious emotional collapse I've come to expect a call. I just got one from one of my former students this week and Nietzsche says he who has a why to live work and endure anyhow If you know why you're doing something you can handle a setback, but if you haven't been taught, why am I doing this? What is my purpose in life? What is my calling? Then when the setback comes you're sort of lost And so in this town, I think one of the great challenges is to keep your heart alive This is the most emotionally avoidant city on the face of the earth we came here because we're awkward talking about emotion and I happen to think that's You know, I read a I read a book where I recently read about a guy who bought a home Had a bamboo plant next to the driveway and he didn't want bamboo So we chopped down the plant he took an axe chopped up the roots for plant food in the plant in the where the roots were That's poison. Excuse me put some gravel over the plant poison put cement over the gravel two years later bamboo shoots up through the cement and I think we all have that in us Which is our hearts yearning and usually yearning for fusion usually with another person or the career and We want to get lost in that and if you do not satisfy that yearning It'll come out in all sorts of bad ways or else you'll suppress it forever And you'll be a a soulless automaton walking around Washington And so to me a lot of cities are more emotionally open and available than Washington is and that's a fundamental challenge of living here And you speak a lot about different examples of people with character in your book So can you talk about some examples that you didn't mention or people currently that you believe have Character-driven leadership. Yeah, well, I sort of got the book a little wrong So that the central formula for character building in the book is confrontation with your own sinfulness and The people in the book had humility and humility is radical self-awareness from a position of other centeredness You better just step outside yourself and see where you're strong and see where you're weak And so all the characters in the book were really good at saying what is my core sin And so for Dwight Eisenhower one of the characters in the book It was Anger he had a temper and So every day of his presidency we think of him as this garrulous country club kind of guy, but that was fake He was a guy who was up at night during the war during the presidency hating people filled temper tantrum smoking blood pressure spikes Just his stomach boiling But he developed a series of methods to control this temper and to fake a persona of cheerfulness Because he knew he couldn't lead from a position of anger and some of the devices were very shallow He would all the people he hated he would write their names out And then he would rip up the paper and throw it in a garbage can just a purge anger and so he created a better self and So that was my character version when I got done with the book I realized one thing about my characters almost all them that I didn't realize writing the book They all had amazing mom Their dads were but their moms were all amazing And then I came across this study part of the grant study very famous longitudinal study All these guys were drafted in the world war two into the army and some soldiers Rows and become colonels some stay privates. What was the trait that correlated the promotion of the army in World War two? It wasn't intelligence. It wasn't physical courage. It wasn't socioeconomic status. It was relationship with mother The guys who received a flood of love and joy from their moms could give it to their men and they were good officers And so to me my new theory of how really how you build character is falling in love with the right things falling in love with the highest things and making commitments to those things and So it my next book is about the four big commitments most of us make in life But most of us commit to a spouse and family to a vocation to a philosophy of faith in a community and After you commit after you make a promise to something Fulfilling that promise is what raises your character. So for example when my oldest kid was born 26 years ago in Brussels He had a very low apcar score. It was very unhealthy and so they The doctors wished him away the intensive care and so his mom and I were faced with this possibility that he might die and So we thought well suppose He only lives 30 minutes and we have to endure a lifetime full of grief Will it have been worth it? And the answer was clearly yes Now before you have kids that logic makes no sense a Kid who was not even aware of himself alive for 30 minutes a lifetime of grief But once you have kids you realize oh, it makes total sense. There's an infinite dignity to your kids life And so once you experience that level of commitment you want to make promises to the kid You want to be there for the kid you want to go running or go play golf But you're pushing the kid in the baby stroller and after those habits of self-sacrifice Then engraves have a habit of self-sacrifice and then the graves good character So to me it's our commitments to our kids to our jobs to our spouses to our country and through the process of enacting that enacting that love We develop good character and I got that wrong in the book, but you should still buy I Really like how you mentioned the support of fathers and mothers and communities because obviously being in the field of child welfare I know how important that is So your career you've had a very successful career. You've written for the New York Times. You still do I'm curious if you can think of a big break So that time in your life maybe early in your career that was really typical Well, I had two one I discovered early on what I wanted to do in life at age seven I read a book called Paddington the Bear and I said I want to become a writer and It was so useful so lucky to know what I want to do at an early age I remember in high school I wanted to date this woman named Bernice and she didn't want to date me she dated some other guy Remember thinking what is she thinking I write way better than that guy? But different values and I I've come to call this and I find it in biographies I read the enunciation moment the moment that happens in your life that prefigures a lot of what will come later and For a lot of people that's amazingly young. I read this biography of E. O. Wilson the great scientist His parents were splitting up when he was seven He was sent to live with the home family and the northern shore of Florida Paradise Beach that he was called and he didn't know the family So all day he just wandered the beach and he was from inland He'd never seen the ocean and he saw creatures he'd never seen before he saw jellyfish never imagined that He was sitting on the dock and with his feet dangling in the water in a stingray went beneath him and he was captivated by this new world and He said at that moment of wonder a naturalist was born But he had a further purifying moment in that which hopefully won't happen to us which is he was fishing and He cooked a fish, but he was careless and taking it off the hook and it flopped into his face and the tail pin This fish poked his cornea And he lost vision in one eye He didn't want to go inside because he was having so much fun fishing so he stayed out And so because of that he was gonna be a naturalist, but he couldn't Study anything that required both eyes like birds or anything big yet study something small He could hold up to one eye, so he studied ants and For the next 70 years he studied ants But so he had that enunciation moment young And I think the trick of an enunciation moment is not having it, but recognize you've had it It's going back and saying yeah, that was the moment that was a crucial thing where I just developed some intense interest Nietzsche has a good advice to for Career selection and basically go back over your life Pick the four times you were most entranced by something write them out on a list and try to draw a line through the list Because you're really trying to unearth the the obsessive interest that's lodged in yourself And so I had that lucky break and then the final lucky break I had and everybody has some career freakish thing I was a student at the University of Chicago We must buckley came to campus and I wrote a parody of him for being a name-dropping blowhard And it was a mean our very mean article You know I said he wrote the first three volumes of the of his memoirs on the day of his birth All of human history then the seeds of utopia about the nine months of this gestation the glorious dawn about his birth He formed two magazines one called the National Buckley and one called the Buckley review Which he merged to form the buckley buckley and so it's all like jokes that Adam came to campus and At the end of his speech. He said David Brooks if you're in the audience. I want to give you a job and So I wasn't in the audience sadly, but three years later. I called him up and said is the offer still open and He said yeah, he flew me to New York and I Was a editorial associate at National Review never asked me my politics It's a job that he'd given to a wide range of people Joan did he and had my job the guy named John Lanner Gary will store Jeff will and He became a father figure to me for 18 months That was just freakishly lucky And I wanted to ask a little bit about you've written many articles in New York Times And sometimes people agree with you sometimes they don't I'm sure How do we get back to the civil discourse in our society? Because I'm sure you have to wrestle with that So after I took this job I the first six months on this job being a columnist my joke about being a conservative columnist columnist in New York Times It's like being the chief rabbi at Mecca not a lot of company there and so After the in that when I first started we put the emails on the bottom of a column was right there and so I I had never been hated on a mass scale before And I would read all the columns and I would get so depressed Finally, I just couldn't go on so I made my assistant read them a guy right on Salam And he would get so depressed and so we just decided we can't read this and after six months I deleted all the emails in my folder and there were 290,000 and the core message was pull crewman is great you suck And what's good about that emailers is not only do they attack you for the things that are not accurate But they're good at finding the things that you actually feel most badly about in yourself So they're good at it And but basically I had to learn first isolate to a large degree But then adopt the attitude love your enemy That just treat them as if they're signed some demented way. They're bringing you a gift And because if you get caught up in the hatred and you follow you see it on Twitter people are responding. It just consumes you And you just have to adopt that posture And that's still true. I was at the mats game during the playoffs and in the ninth inning some guy turns around I hope we're not live-streaming he turns around says are you David Brooks and I'm ready for all love your work Something like that and I said, yeah, I'm David Brooks. He said you're a fucking idiot I Want you know, you're a fucking idiot. I hate you and then my son who was over here He turned to him and said, you know who that asshole is and my son that said that's my dad And he said you should be ashamed of your dad He goes off and you're just like vibrating and he said I'm handsome shaking. I mean the presence of pure evil. I was like, geez But so at that instant I confess I didn't exercise active love for my enemy But I still think that's the right attitude. That's the only way to deal with it Or else you just get consumed by what's out there And the Ambassador Volcker mentioned that the audience we have is younger I'm curious. Some some of us are right. So What about the millennial generation do you admire? Well No, I'm kidding. I'm kidding This is an unformed thought, you know, I You know, I teach my students and they're Millennials and there are lots of things that I I Don't blame them. I blame us that a lot of them have not given Thoughts to really what's the deepest part of their soul and do not have a moral vocabulary But that's basically not their fault. That's our fault and so a lot of us have gone to commencement addresses And if you look at commencement addresses, they generally are filmed with the most useless garbage advice possible So basically you're getting out of college. You're in the most supervised childhood in human history and All of life is station to station Next test next admissions process then you get spit out into your 20s and You're in the least supervised part of life in human history and so people are looking for a way to plant themselves and So what do we say? Explore your options be free People are looking way to nail themselves down and we say oh be free freedom. It's great Like people are drowning in freedom and they say well What you know, how should I use my freedom the future is limitless your potential is you limitless Where should I go to find answers look inside yourself? You do you? like if I knew what you was I wouldn't have this problem and So we give these empty boxes of autonomy and freedom and it's just useless and And so no wonder And so that's just a challenge and I find being in your 20s now. It's just phenomenally hard And I recommend the book by Meg J. If you don't think it's hard enough this book called the defining decade It'll totally make you panic because it says if you haven't figured out everything out by age 30 You're over your history, but it has some good some good advice in there. For example, she's a concept identity con identity capital Do the thing that's going to make you most interesting And so for example one of her patients. She's a psychologist wanted to work at Starbucks, but she got offered a job teaching at Outward bound She didn't want to do it. She said if you take the job at outward bound Every interview and every dinner conversation for the rest of your life will be what was it like to teach at Outward bound That separates you from everybody else my second bit of advice and a lot of you are too old for it is Your first jobs out of college are probably gonna suck So your only job is to widen your horizon of risk And so I had a friend she graduated from UVA She tried to get in teach for America. She didn't get in so she googled teach abroad And some guy in Korea wrote to her and said we need English teacher in a little Korean village She told her parents. There was a big organized program The guy sent her a plane ticket. She Alived in Seoul took another flight to this fishing village and She gets there at like 11 at night. There's nobody there to greet her She doesn't teach she doesn't speak any Korean or know anything So she's sitting there at the airport sits there for a few hours writing in her journal in a growing panic There's finally there's only one other guy with her a monk on the bench outside. He leaves they turn out all the lights She's sitting there in the dark in the middle of Korea and at three in the morning a van with five Korean guys pulls up and say are you our teacher and I would have killed my daughter if she did this, but she said yeah, and they said get in the van So she spent the next 19 months Teaching English in Korea and having a great time But having conquered that she'd widen her horizon of risk He said she then became an impact investor for a place called acumen working in Nigeria Pakistan And she could do anything because she yeah, I got this and So if you keep if you widen your horizon of risk forever after you have this horizon if you narrow it forever after you have this horizon And I had another friend who he was in the job interview. He was being interviewed for a job and At the end he turned it around and asked the interviewer This question, which is a good question. What would you do if you weren't afraid? And she started crying Because she wouldn't be doing HR for this corporation if she wasn't afraid and I now ask my students a yell What would you do if you weren't afraid in every class two or three say I wouldn't be a year They're too afraid to give up the brand But and but that's a good question to ask I've totally forgotten what the original question was, but that's my long That's my long answer You know the world changes of each generation and now we live in this digitized world where we Communicate differently we receive and send information different. So how does that impact leadership? Yeah, I never remember the question which I never actually got around to answering about millennial I do want to answer that and then I'll weave in so to me the the hard part about being a millennial is the lived experience I don't believe in generations are that much different from each other but generational stages the life stage is different and When I I grew up I was born 1961 I sort of a not too long ago the world war two was one I Had a vestigial memory of the civil rights movement. We won the Cold War. I Basically a lot of my early formation is pretty successful American involvement someone born in 1984 1980 Well crack financial crisis Trump it's not like a great story and so I understand the The loss of faith in institutions And and but to me that it To be the great blessing of the millennial generation and I have not I'm this gonna be a column I'm gonna write next week so I haven't thought it through is The great number of people who are hyphenated They used to have a phrase in the 19th century amphibians People who are good at walking on land and water and swimming in water and whether it's different ethnic backgrounds Different political backgrounds. There are a lot of people you notice who are our third culture kids or they just have They inhabit contradictions my current research assistant is a very traditionalist feminist and These two things sometimes push against each other, but that's creative for her and So there's to me. There's great strength in the hyphenation Especially in a culture that is desperately lacking for bridging capital For people are in one community, but can bridge it to another community to me. That's just a tremendous source of strength Now that's for the technology. I've come to like everyone else. I was excited at first and now I'm deeply alarmed That it is rewiring our brain patterns in all sorts of ways that in the one of the Astounding facts of our age is that we've learned so much about the human mind We've learned so much about even Drugs the mental health drugs and yet depression rates are going up mental health rates are going up Suicide rates are going up. That's just weird and I have I happen to think that Social media is the number one cause It just correlates too well With social media and the other thing is that we're connected more but relating less than I think that's somewhat true And it's a it's a challenge I noticed some of the early Google and Facebook employees have just created an organization to try to rein in what they unleashed And I think that's the wave the future just it's a tool. Obviously. We're going to live in it But how do we control it? And you know, I have a friend who's the guy named Andy Crouch who wrote a book called the tech wise family He basically there are certain rooms in the house. The phones are not allowed certain times a day. It's just getting control of this thing And I'm gonna ask one more question and then I'm going to open it up to the audience for questions So be thinking this idea of mentorship. So who are your mentors? How do people in the audience that are seeking new mentors do that and foster those relationships? Yeah Let me go back to you Wilson because he had a great mentor And so Wilson had a mentor who was a professional mentor Which was at the University of Alabama where he did his undergrad And that was just teaching tacit skills There's all the skills you can get out of a book But in any profession there are skills you can't get out of a book and the story There's a philosopher named Michael Oak shot who illustrated that by having a wheel right the guy who carves wheels in China And he's carving a wheel in front of the emperor and the emperor is reading a book and the wheel right says What what are you reading? He says a book of the sayings of the great men and The wheel right says well if you're reading the sayings of dead men you're reading the the scum of bygone men And the emperor is furious. He said how could you a wheel right tell me what to read and the wheel right says Let me tell you what how it is with me. I'm pushing this tool into the wheel If I push too hard, I break it. If I don't push hard enough. I Don't make any impact. I only know how hard enough to push It comes from the heart that was something that was imparted to me I can't you can't get it out of a book and in any profession. There's that kind of tacit knowledge You can't get out of a book and mentors give that first thing That was a normal mentor just walking alongside somebody as they do their job And that was buckly for me, but then he had another mentor a gun named Darlington and Darlington was a He collected bugs like Like Wilson and he was famous for his strenuousness He would climb up 10,000 feet to collect bugs at different altitudes and one of things he did he was in Latin America South America and he was collecting beetles and he went out into a pond and a Crocodile came up and grabbed him and dragged him down and he fought it off Whole right side chewed up He gets to the surface of the water again the crocodile grabs him again and pulls him down again He fights it off and then he drags himself through the jungle back to the station to get bandied up bandaged up And he's nearly dead lost of blood and As Wilson writes that wasn't really the impressive part The impressive part was the guy in a full-body cast Spent the next six months alone out in the jungle collecting more samples Using only his left hand. He devised a way to collect samples one-handed and I think we want that from our mentors. We want to be shown that what we're doing is hard and worthy of the hardness and So that there's you know, there's this guy Jordan Peterson is out there. He says life is hard Don't whine about it. Just do it and we want to I think we want to Be told that you know what we're gonna do is gonna be really hard. It's gonna expand us to get it done It's not gonna come easily or fast, but it's serious We want it to be serious, and I think mentors set that sort of example. We take this seriously All right, so I'm going to open up to the audience and I think there's microphone All right right here in the front Good evening. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Dan Salado United States Marine Corps I just want to ask you about writing styles you teach Millennials you see what they write and in this generation of texts and tweets Do you see the quality of writing? Maybe not what you had expected as a younger person? Well, I would say I I Teach at Yale so that's like representative of nothing and Every class I've got three or four Marines in my class. So that really brings it down But my students are good writers it surprised me My students are good writers and maybe I've got the creme de la creme But I will say that I'm impressed by them and now every time you go to employer. They say I Can't find people can write and one of the good piece of advice is if there are the people who write in any office have great power Because people can't do it there the our ideas don't get said most whitehouses the speech writers are actually shaping policy Because they are actually doing the writing and while I'm at it Let me give two pieces of a writing advice. This is what I do for a living one is Follow the masters so I read two people George Orwell essays not novels and see us Lewis Both of them wrote for radio and So they would never use a big word when a little word would do and they used clarity and Orwell was a master of the fit first sentence when you're in college Highly educated people are paid to read your writing once you get out that never happens again. You have to earn it and So good first sentence. He has a sentence. He's writing about the he's in the Blitz in World War two He's writing an essay about being English and the Germans were bombing him and the first sentence of an essay was Hi over my head highly civilized human beings are trying to kill me. It's a good sentence You want to know he wrote about being in public school or well what they call public school We call prep school and he said six months after going to crosswells not long but long enough So it should have not happened. I started wetting the bed The sentence you want to know what why is he wetting the bed? It's good for sentence. The second thing I'd say is that To me writing is not typing into a keyboard writing is about traffic management So I have a very bad memory. So every thought I have I write down immediately and when I collect for my columns I usually have two or three hundred pages of notes and For me what I do is I take all this paper and I lay it out in piles of the floor in my living room And each pile is a paragraph of my column It's only 850 words, but I might have 14 piles laid out there And so the writing process is not typing to the keyboard. It's crawling around on my living room arranging my pile And if you don't get the structure right nothing else will flow And so it's by the time I tell my students by the time you sit at the keyboard your paper should be 80 or 90% done Because it's all structure And judges having a saying that opinion won't write they thought they understood it But once they actually sat down they rest now it's not working. Don't try to save it totally restructure Don't try to salvage something that's not working And so that's random writing I Work at the office of Walter Russell Mead I had a question about a column you wrote a while back on gracious leadership And as I recall you quoted John Keats that nothing is real till it's experienced and so I really enjoyed your talk full of cases of really successful Examples but I was wondering if you could give us an example of an epic failure that ended up for the best and produced a Gracious leader an epic failure that produced a gracious leader That's a good question Well, there was a guy named I don't know why this story left into my mind There was a guy named John Callender and Callender was a lawyer in Boston in 1776 and he was the chief artillery officer at in the American Army Battle of Bunker Hill and the shells started flying He abandoned his post and when George March George Washington came to Take over command of the army his first act as commander was to court Marshall John Callender and Kick him out cashier him kick him out, but there was a loophole in the In the court Marshall it said he could not come back as an officer It did not say he could not enlist as a private as an enlisted man So he went to Rhode Island he enlisted again and then in the battle of Brooklyn Heights He went he was just a lowly private. Everyone held him contempt because he was a notorious coward and all the officers in this unit were killed all of a lot of the men ran away and he stood alone with his cannon and Fixed the wrong and I do think it is that Moment of failure is Is a value of vision? I'm sort of against a lot of the commencement addresses that say failures grade learn from failure From this you learn that for J.K. Rowling or Steve Jobs or Denzel Washington Failure is really awesome. So the rest of it. It's just it's just failure So like I'm not in favor of like all failure so great. You all got to fail but But there are moments And you know humility is radical self-awareness as I said and it doesn't come unless it's forced upon you and So it's those moments of failure where you discover Who you really are? There's a Paul Tillich in 1950s theologian said moments of suffering Remind you you're not the person you thought you were They carve beneath what you thought was the floor of your soul and reveal a cavity below and carve beneath that and reveal a cavity below And it's at those moments of failure you realize who you are and really what you really need to fill those deep cavities and The people who shrink from moments of failure and suffering are those who dwell on them and ruminate My rule for introspection is get in get out But those who can take their moments of failure and turn into us a Narrative of redemption then they grow from it and So the the the story is can you turn into a chapter in my longer narrative for redemption and again and again? You find that my other bit of advice is and this is a lot of people have made career Anxiety like what am I doing here? it's That my when I'm people have that I say go to the desert Go to the desert and hang around in the desert for a month or two Because the desert is a spare environment in which you are where you have to confront yourself And usually when you're doing a life That doesn't satisfy you suffering from a sedia, which is a disease of lack of desire When you're suffering from that usually it's because You've lived the life that others want for you, but not the life you want for yourself and You've got to get their voices out of your head and suffering helps do that So does this stay in the desert? Hey, my name is Isabelle and I work at New America. My question is just that you mentioned Meg Jay is defining decade I've read the book obsessively multiple times Most people would say too many times too closely. It really does inspire panic But but one thing that Meg Jay talks about and that you mentioned is the idea of identity capital and in for instance, you spoke about the acquaintance that you have that that ended up working teaching English in In South Korea and then ended up working in acumen But but my question and in something that I wonder is that whether or not that advice That's being given to Millennials whether or not that's based upon the experience of the The sliver of of an almost generation that came before us like the Zennials so to speak because now there's There's so many. I mean there's more college graduates than ever among the Millennials. There's more There's more people who are impact-driven who are college educated, etc. that That while doing something like outward bound or speaking in South Korea makes you memorable in an interview It doesn't help you get the interview So what are you does identity capital only matter and in face-to-face interactions? What is that step like? I'm sure that there's a step between teaching English in South Korea and working at acumen And what do you think about that? Do you think that it's that it's a bit too late now that that that's advice for people that were born about Seven years shy of the Millennials or what do you think of that? Yeah? I guess I'll I'll just give personal experiences someone who occasionally hires people and hires Millennials is That I got a resume a year or so ago and the woman had gone to Harvard and she had a 3.9 And she'd done the perfect inter internship track, you know black rock goldman She'd managed it perfectly. She was president of this. She was head of that And it was just like a perfect resume And I remember thinking who is this human being? And then I thought wait a second. There are a million of these people and And that is true. There are a million perfect resumes out there and so when I'm looking around and I think this is true I've talked to other people who hire I Look for someone who did something that makes no sense by the standards of normal career advancement Who did something completely? idiosyncratic and so I had hired someone she had gone to handover and Got very good grades and then it got to a gone to a small Christian college called Wheaton in Illinois I thought going to Wheaton probably wasn't very popular at handover and That suggests some some some depth there some strength of character and so I still think the perfect resume is Is an unattractive because there are just too many of them and the idiosyncratic Is still the what people are looking for? I have a friend who hires a lot of people and I said well, what do you what do you ask in the interview and he says? I always in every interview I asked this question Name a time you told the truth and it hurt you so I tell my students to fake that one But I do think it's it's The thing that gets you to stand out not the not the perfect resume and in in school The damage the thing about school is it really pays to be good across all subjects But in life you only have to be good at one thing And so someone who's obsessively interested in is going to live breathe or die on that one thing and I happen to need that thing I'm now in the process of hiring by the way and I've had a lot of coffee with a lot of students a lot of 25 year olds if you ever go to firehook in Farragut Square, you'll see me there with the 25 year old Most of them the subject of the interview turns into What can I do for them? like why do they want this job? How would help them and No one ever thought to tell them no the subject is how can they help me? Because I'm doing the hiring and they somehow it never occurs to them to think here's what you need and here's what I can do for you One of my fellow board members in America the guy named David Bradley who started the advisory board a lot of their companies Got out of school wanted to start a consulting firm and he said I've got he went around to CEO's and say I've got 15 subjects of expertise Here's what I can do for you. Here's what I can do for you and finally a guy said to him and he got no clients And the guy said you're boring me Just ask me one question. What keeps you up at night and then do it and So paying attention to the other person's need is the key to a good interview It's interesting I My husband used to say that when he interviewed people he really liked athletes And I said well, why is that he said because they can be coached. I know if they've done really well in athletics, they can be coached Yeah, hello, this is a great honor My name is Marty and I'm on the board of the directors of the Arizona State University Alumni Association here And so I'm really very proud and very appreciative of our relationship with the New America Foundation and with McCain Institute. So this is great Pardon me if I ask a Current event a partisan question But when you were talking about your healthy on days with the national review It made me think of you know when during the days of the lost in the wilderness after the thrashing in 1964 they sort of really focused on the becoming the conservative movement was built around ideas and and thinkers and I'm just wondering if I were to think about that today only like one guy comes to mind Maybe a person like Ben sass and I wonder if you've met him and are there any thinkers left in the conservative movement? And if so, who are they? No, it was funny when I came out like there was Buckley that was Irving crystal. I had real heroes gene for Patrick I had they were my heroes James Q. Wilson Now we've got Ann Colterd and I should just use the No, there are thinkers the problem is the party has moved away from it from its thinkers I I've gotten to spend time. I live not near him on Capitol Hill with Steve Bannon And he's a thinker. It's being with him. It's like being with Trotsky in 1905 It's like he has a plan. He knows who his intellectual roots are. He's a theory of history theories of change He's got a 50 year plan Donald Trump as a phase taking over the Heritage Foundation as a phase taking over this Republican Center as a phase He's got his international alliances with Victor Iban and Nigel Farage. It's a very coherent package And he understood stands what year it is and what the problems are and Frankly a lot of us on the right and left We didn't know what the debate was about and we've sent the last year sort of being appalled Knowing what we're against and not knowing what we're for and a little dispersed and I think now we're beginning to mobilize but I Just think it the history turned and a lot of the Republicans were stuck either in the era of Ronald Reagan The tranquility is where I think both Brian is In a paradigm that was no longer appropriate for the moment and Trump to his credit understood the paradigm was outdated and he smashed it and now we're gonna have a period of paradigm competition And I think I do think thinkers will emerge I think it we're beginning to see there are a bunch of books even this year that I think are very creative on the right There's Jonah Goldberg has a book coming out on on tribalism this guy Patrick the needing on the failure of liberalism I think the smartest thinker on the right is a guy named Yuval Levin who run at its national fairs I think we're actually due for another period of creativity just because everything has been smashed and And then say us Is one of them I think he's a truly impressive leader a lot of people say well he he's only anti-trump in tweet and not in action but Frankly, I would I would wish he would be a little more aggressive sometimes But I you can't ask a politician to leap out where there's not a community of thinkers and activists and donors ready to catch them and Right now the anti-trump community does not have the cohesion enough To leap out and be there for events that make to Ella, but it's not there yet, so I don't totally blame him for being a little cautious at this moment The cane would do it if you're younger and healthier He never like he never found a firefight either want to fly into Yeah, I was gonna ask you a question about Jordan Peterson, but you just started talking about the anti-trump movement So I think I'm gonna segue into that. I just moved up here I graduated from a small private liberal arts school in Lynchburg, Virginia And my family has roots up here my father grew up in McLean He taught at Langley High School and we relocated to Lynchburg about eight or nine years ago So I had the experience of living up here For about 13 years of my life and being inside the Beltway and then moving down south to Lynchburg Which is way more blue-collar and having that experience and kind of that shape my shaping my adolescence And so you're talking about the anti-trump movement is what I can interpret from a conservative Standpoint that doesn't really see eye-to-eye with who Trump isn't who his character is How do you connect the inside the Beltway mentality with the blue-collar people who voted for him in in areas? Like Lynchburg or Bedford County where you know, these are people where a lot of a lot of minds up here Write them off as racists or big hits and people who are out of touch with the 21st century, but Having both experiences. These are great people, you know, they're family value oriented, but they're not big It's you know, they're not racist like how do you bridge that gap into an electoral base for the Republican Party or for the Democratic Party to where You know the the elitist mentality is linking up with the more down-to-earth Person who's living three and a half hours south or even more southern. Yeah, and that's a good question I'm sometimes guilty of not honoring that Just because you get hyped up in those and I get appalled by Trump and I get hyped up My one-line answer my one-liner about that is that Donald Trump is the wrong answer to the right question That the people in you know in Lynchburg or you know, I wrote 16 or 20 columns in 2015 saying don't worry Donald Trump will not get the Republican nomination and So I got that so wrong. I spent the next year and a half really driving around and just reintroducing myself to a country I should have been more in touch with I but I live here. I spent a lot of time in New York I teach at Yale. How could I be out of touch with America, you know? I mean they sell a quiet car, you know, how much more in touch can you be so so I spent that time just trying to learn and so the sense of being a forgotten of nobody listening to you of people looking down on you a sense of insult my basic diagnosis after that trip was that we have a crisis of social solidarity That there's a lot of loneliness. There's a lot of loss of connection a lot of people have seen the communities They love shredded by loss of jobs loss of family isolation Etc. And so the question is how can we fix that? Well, the short answer is that we have to the parts of the country that are healthy are often at the local level Sometimes we're talking about Jim Fallows some cities are healthy some churches are healthy some community organizations are healthy military is healthy and So how can we take all these local bits of health and Put them in the leadership and ask how can you solve our national? How can we address this on a national level and it starts by learning from What's local and then trying to bring it up to the national level and you know people like 56 year old White guys are not going to be leading this This renewal and it has to has to be people at the local level who then say it's not enough to be healthy locally We need a healthy nation And I think one of the by the way one of the challenges that we have in front of us is to have a national narrative. I Was raised with a certain narrative is an immigrant narrative. It was This is the Exodus story Our people left oppression cross the ocean came to the promised land. I find more and more Americans don't believe this the promised land It's not the land of milk and honey. It's been betrayed too much The institutions are too sick. There's too much oppression and racism and snobbery and Elitism and so you can't tell that narrative So we have to come up with another narrative and to me the possible narrative is Is a The word America's an experiment in many ways the experiment has been betrayed But we're only at the beginning of the experiment. We're not at the end of the experiment So we have to go on a journey of a forgiveness and reconciliation and The model for that is Lincoln second and all girl You go to them all and read that thing. He could have been like beating his chest. We beat you guys You guys had slavery. We didn't we won but instead the key words in that speech are All everybody all of us Slavery is not a southern problem. It's an American problem. The scourge of sin had to be paid by all of us We all deserve this and so it's an act of great communion and so Honoring all the different populations and taking those local Successes and trying to build them into something national is a way to show respect To the people who are living good lives on local level I'm kind of curious about his question about Jordan Peterson, but I'll go to you. I think right next to I'm Gabriel Greshler. I work at the Student Press Law Center I'm You were talking about kind of overcoming hardship and and your students that call you and they're devastated I'm wondering the time in your life when you face Travesty or something difficult and what you did in response to that How personal to get well, I mean doing I mean The first bit of the job I described that was a hard period but I Won't get the great detail, but five or six years ago. I got divorced that's us and When you get divorced you you lose all bearing And somebody told me gave me good advice Which is don't try to swim anywhere. Just wait and let the water harden around you and The way you take advantage of that when you're go through a period like that You're like desperate loneliness like it never like I used to I'm okay with being alone usually But it I hated being alone I'd be with people all the time because it was just like having a weekend with nothing was just like death And but you sort of took advantage of that moment. I sort of I'm not nostalgic for that period, but everything was raw and so I was reading like really deep stuff and You know all these There are all these depressing songs. I listen to over and over again But in a period of rawness you take advantage of it to like your first instinct is to get out of the pain But the hard lesson is you know, you got to stay in the pain long enough to learn what it has to teach you and So I was it I was completely I completely changed And you know, I used to be a person who Nobody would tell secrets to because I was always in a hurry. I wasn't Broadcasting any vulnerability or anything and that personality type is sort of rewarded in Washington And now I'm not like that. I don't know what to say But hopefully I've broadcast a little more vulnerability and people do confide in me a little more And I think that's partly because of that change I went through in that two or three year period of Deep unhappiness Appreciate you opening up. I will say for anybody who's single I tell this to college presidents the most important decision any of your students are going to make is who to marry and Therefore every course in this college should be about the marriage decision the psychology of marriage the literature marriage And they never listen to me and then I teach him my course We have two weeks on the how to make a marriage decision. My students are not interested. They're like one of them said to me She said I was just a box that'll come in the mail and I'm 35. I'm not thinking about it now I'm like begin thinking about it like read George Elliot read Jane Austen learn from the Masters see how it's done You don't screw that one up. I Think we actually are almost at a time where we are we are out of time. So ambassador I'm gonna welcome you up But I just want to thank David for being here and sharing his leadership journey with us And I definitely wish you all good luck in your journey as well Oh David, thank you very much. That was really terrific. I really appreciate that and Rosie did such a great job Thank you very much for narrowing. Please thank Rosie as well And we have a little reception set up outside. So please Mingle chat ask any more questions informally and hope you enjoyed this and hope we see you again soon We do have our next McCain Institute event that I want to plug for you all welcome It is a debate on North Korea policy that we'll be doing at the Navy Memorial Theater on February 28th, I think the doors open at five o'clock and we have four very seasoned experts on the issues who engage in a genuine debate from Different perspectives about how we should be dealing with this challenge. So Look us up online McCain Institute org find information. Hope to see you there as well. Thank you