 Thank you very much Peter. Thank you all for coming out this morning. It's a real pleasure to be here I'm going to be speaking quickly because there's so much I'd like to say in these next 20 minutes before I pass the stage on I have to start with the fact that my beloved wife Deb who I met at age 18 We got married at 21 and Oxford. We both got back from Shanghai about 30 hours ago And she is really feeling the effects right now. So she's here in spirit, but not in person I will try to represent her as best best I can What I'm going to do is talk about what we've been the way we've been spending the last year and a half of our working life Because I think it's from my point of view. I'm going to explain it because it's the most interesting thing I think I've ever done even including living in China which we thought we stay there as long as we did because every single day We told ourselves it's more interesting than horrible and that kept us there This has been a much more interesting and much less horrible Prospect and it is directly connected to many of the developments you've heard about yesterday from various new America fellows and Friends about kinds of recovery and resilience across the country. So that's what I'm going to tell you about I'm gonna spend about a minute giving you the setup for a project two or three minutes giving you a little brief slide show I hardly ever do this But just to give you some orientation of what it's like to see these places in Mississippi in Maine and Arizona and all the rest And then I'm going to get to the payoff of the points We've discovered that are related to what new America is doing and what we're discussing during this conference. So About two years ago when we came back from China and I'd finished number of some political pieces and defense pieces and all the rest We decided that we would like to try to apply to the United States The the policy that Deb and I had done in so many countries around the world in Japan and Malaysia and China and elsewhere Which is just trying to see the fabric of the small parts of the country to not the big cities And so in China we've done that on buses and trains We thought this fit in the American tradition of the road trip narrative from Lewis and Clark onward We also we started this at a time when the Central American narrative was that of decline The financial crisis was not that far behind us There are very few signs of manufacturing other things coming back So we wanted to see what would look like to go to places off the grid Considering them not as curiosities just because there'd been some grain elevator explosion or something like that But reporting on them as real places and see what we would find We had two criteria for the places we wanted to go These are the places where we've flown to and spent at least a week over the last while One we wanted them to be small ish and let me explain that We've been to places as big as Columbus, Ohio Which is a very large city But the standard is a place that most people who are stylish or van or graduating from fancy universities would think of as The sticks they would think of well, you're going to New York. You're going to Seattle But I'm going to ho Arizona or Greenville, South Carolina or Sioux Falls or the rest Also, we wanted to have places that had suffered a challenge of some kind Economic demographic natural or whatever and it founds to see how they were covered. I put a note on the Atlantic's website We got more than a thousand essays back people saying you'd need to know this about this town of Louisiana This town in Texas this town in South Dakota God willing we could spend the next hundred years doing this but we're trying to see as much as we can Let me just give you a sort of an idea of the kinds of places. We've seen I'm going to give you a few seconds apiece per these various slept Snapshots. This is the plane itself. There is Deb not absent today getting in the plane taking our provisions That's what it looks like inside the plane. We're crossing the Missouri River in one of the Dakotas I think from East River to West West River. This is how you can see how the landscape was like laid out We love flying at low altitude this way across the landscape It's a unique view of what is interesting and beautiful and sometimes less sightly about America You notice number one how many prisons there are and number two how many rock quarries This is the famous parachute for the plane. This is not our plane, but this was the test of concept We're flying very safely only daytime no bad weather, but there is also the parachute should the need arise We went to Holland, Michigan a little manufacturing town on Lake Michigan Which is beautiful and which has maintained manufacturing of supremacy in lots of ways you have this kind of scene It's a recycling plant and you can read all about it This is city fathers in Holland where they get a hundred inches of snow per year They volunteered their own money to build a sidewalk heating plan So there's never snow on the streets or sidewalk of Holland's the way the city has kept going This is Sioux Falls, South Dakota with the eponymous falls downtown and which has recovered made itself a big tech place This is part of the downtown movement, which I'll say more about This is Deb is not here today, but she's there with a giant Sioux Falls tractor The reason I mentioned this is that Sioux Falls is an international leader in GPS directed agriculture That tractor is driven by GPS It plants a seed and a precise location puts a drop of fertilizer on that location comes back a week later to water that location It's a huge industry around the world that we've been to the black hills of South Dakota and a rapid city Rapid city has statues of all the presidents life-size ones. That is Bill Clinton downtown We've been this is some some of the oil territory of Wyoming. We saw the man camps there So we're coming in for landing Burlington, Vermont famously nice place a lake Champlain, etc Side note if you want to see if there's a city on the rise look for a craft brewery No joke. This is a proxy for a city that has entrepreneurs a young sort of creative class clientele Deb has an embarrassing collection of photos of me like that. It's right after the airport. That's someplace in Michigan I think happier than I generally look Who knows about hetty topper beer anybody who knows beer? This is beer porn This is by all accounts the best beer in the world. You can get it only in this part of Vermont only get four cans at a time That's what it looks like. That's like looking at Fort Knox for people in the business This went to Eastport, Maine a city of 1,300 people which has a good news bad news plan for the future Good news when the Canadian Arctic melt, there'll be the closest Atlantic seaport to China That's that's their that's their glass half empty glass half folder on the Bay of Fundy They're using tidal energy from the bay to have become a title in it. That's downtown Eastport Redlands, California my hometown. I once worked in this orange packing plant We went there to see how they're coping with drought and all the rest That's with our marketplace partners out with orange groves Try to see what they're doing about the blight that's removed destroying the citrus industry South Carolina a public Residential high school that teaches ballet and the arts in South Carolina school innovation has been important South Carolina Elementary school of engineering something you don't see every day in the poorest part of town This is st. Mary's Georgia trying to rebuild itself This is a high school in st. Mary's which I won't even give you a description about but in addition to being the state a pretty all-state champion in football they train people coming out to go either to college or to have high-end skilled technical jobs in Construction in auto repair and computer in robotics and all the rest a very impressive school This is Fresno, California. We've been recently Fresno is a hard-pressed place that is trying hard to come back Welcome to Fresno This is at Fresno has a theory that it can become the next American bohemia Because the real estate is so cheap and that you can start your your drama troop You can become a fire blower or whatever else Those are walnuts bound for China. We've been in Winters, California about how the nut industry is dealing with drought This is someplace where it says this is Mississippi I say some place because so many nice downtowns like this are coming up around the world This is the Mississippi school for math of science math and science so touching a public Residential high school for poor people from Mississippi that sending kids to Harvard it's sending them to Claremont, McKenna This was a dramatization of this city's civil war past which just was tremendously evocative and wonderful wonderful kids there This is Duluth, Minnesota the rise of minor league ball in Duluth This is Duluth with a monument to the most northerly lynching in American history Which happened in Duluth and they've made a big effort to remember it Allentown, Pennsylvania the mayor there the mayor who has rebuilt single-handedly downtown of Allentown in a tech space Where young people are going to live over the top of the tech company. They're building Charleston, West Virginia downtown Revitalization this is in the Christo Ray schools in Columbus, Ohio Which have had a sort of public-private partnership to deal with people who are going to fall behind the cracks This is a how a town in pit a house in Pittsburgh covered with Chinese characters You can go to our site and read about it to explain why that is the case Aho, Arizona a city of about a thousand people right on the southern border border, which is using the arts as a tool for Bring itself back. It's also using the successor to the WPA These are kids from the N triple C the new sort of AmeriCorps staff who were there trying to rebuild the town again It's touching a thing as you might see Riverside, California trying to rebuild us downtown The first McDonald's anywhere in history in the most troubled town We've seen San Bernardino, California, and that's a close also to where I grew up As we've this is just to give you an idea of the kinds of things we have seen as we've been on the road Let me now sort of rapid-fire fashion go through Lessons we have learned that I think are directly relevant to what a new America is doing and so many of the cooperative efforts We have lesson number one the generally positive Impression you would have of America if you ignored national politics there national politics We know as being severely troubled and everybody here has has has insights on that and we know about all of the various imbalances and inequities and all the rest if you Didn't know about any of that and you were exploring this country for the first time in the way that we have done Other countries you would think this is a place where things are going on where people care about their communities where they have Some confidence in the future where they're able to work with people of different Backgrounds and all the rest so number one We started this when the American narrative was much more negative than it is now We are as aware of the problems of this country as any of you are but just the fabric city by city Region by region you would think there's a place where people believe things are going well What one one illustration from Fresno Fresno who's been there Fresno is not seen as one of California's chic towns I was interviewing a tech entrepreneur there who moved there from the East Coast saying he'd grown up there saying We're just sick and tired of being told this is a place for losers You know our parents can say that I'm 28 years old I want to make something happen here and he's making it happen So number one the generally positive tone in a non Just cutesy way you get by traveling traveling around Impression number two the functionality of politics again when you move below the paralyzed national level We find in our national level politics and inability to compromise a zero-sum outlook a difficulty to look in the long run All the other things you're familiar with we have found the opposite of that most of the places not all but most of the places We have gone. Here's the clearest illustration. I can give you Greenville, South Carolina is a very right-wing town Jim DeMint was their congressman Bob Jones University is there Romney carried it by 30 points It was the last county in the last state to observe Martin Luther King's birthday as a holiday Burlington, Vermont is the other extreme the two parties there and local politics are the Democrats and the socialists Bernie Sanders was a socialist mayor there Obama carried it by 30 points over Romney If you didn't know that you were you would think they were the same town The mayor works with the universities with the businesses with the schools with community groups and they have a very similar look and feel They're both have beautiful downtown though both have universities That is a shorthand for a kind of thing we've seen lots of places again Not every place San Bernardino, which I'm about to write about next week is in trouble because it almost uniquely still has National style broken politics for reasons. I'll explain Third lesson that we found a surprising talent dispersal property If you talk to young people getting out of fancy schools You will assume that if they want to make it they need to go essentially to six metro areas Boston, New York DC Seattle San Francisco LA with some polite Acknowledgment of San Diego and Chicago and Atlanta and all the rest we know all these Concentrating trends what's interesting is also an offsetting trend of people deciding that they can make a first-rate life for themselves Doing agricultural technology in Sioux Falls or in Fresno doing design work in Greenville, South Carolina Which out of Bob Jones has a great design department can do things in in lots of in Burlington and many other places in Duluth a Subcategory here is the crucially Important factor of real estate prices in the six big cities I mentioned everything is distorted by the crushing burden of real estate and the rest of America real estate is cheap You can buy a house for a couple hundred thousand dollars not a couple million dollars You can start a dance troupe or a company or all the rest and that opportunity for America We found dispersed through the magic of both people recognizing that and having the advantage of real estate Fourth thing we have observed the power of immigration goes on Immigration in the DC perspective is something that is a polarizing issue It's a problem in the in the Republican Party is especially etc. etc Most of the places we have gone if you were a foreigner looking them you would be you would remark on how Thoroughly this process is still happening partly involves refugees Sioux Falls and Sioux Falls They have one of the world's biggest pig slaughter houses that's now owned by the Chinese It's a long story most the people working there are female refugees from Somalia the Sudan Cameroon some other places who are making money slaughtering pigs wearing their often a Muslim headgear So they can send their kids to school the leader of ROTC in the Sioux Falls High School is a the child daughter of a Somalia Refugee of that sort immigration historically is always disruptive We have been impressed by the ways in which it is being absorbed the Midwest is largely Latino now You know Dodge City, Kansas is a majority Latino City, but if you compare this with any other part of the world I think you're impressed that this is continuing to happen number five observation the rise of Downtowns is real there is enough left over good-looking real building from the 1800s in the early 1900s that hasn't been torn down in enough places the cities in every corner of the country are finding this a way They can revive the downtowns. They can attract younger people to live there There's a whole metric for this involving river walks and downtown residential and all the rest Deb wrote an article about how you have a river walk without a river which a number of cities have done But we've we've been very very impressed by in every scale of city. You see this downtown revival in different stages number six the manufacturing Renaissance not say full-stale recovery, but but a dispersed Renaissance in manufacturing also is real We've seen companies in Duluth that it sort of spun off from the Aviation Center there with Cirrus that are now exporting their products around the World also in Mississippi or there's a giant helicopter factory near this Mississippi School of Math and Sciences I just will not give you any more details But again the trend is factories on the small scale beginning to open again rather than just close in the way they were before a Seventh observation we have seen and maybe signaled in shorthand by some of the school photos I gave is experimentation in public schools when we began this process we assumed as you would from national media that Most of the country was regarding itself as the object of big historic forces Whereas in fact most people regard themselves as active shapers of their lives the public schools were a disaster etc. etc Every place we have been we found people experimenting with the public schools and finding ways to adapt them to the local needs and take advantage of the local strengths Deb has written about this extensively. It's what she would have been talking about if she were here But in Central Valley, California you have schools training migrant workers children for jobs in sort of high-tech Agriculture in Coastal Maine you have them training for maritime Careers including that Northwest Passage you find this sort of Adaptability all around the country and that's something we've been impressed by Number eight observation has been the to me entirely unexpected crucial emphasis of community colleges We all know that research universities are part of America's arsenal that no one else can match I hadn't appreciated how much community colleges are the connective fiber for people who are not going to Berkeley or Stanford or Yale or Arizona State or other big research universities But once some job other than working in Walmart or working in a food service industry Community colleges are the connectors. I've written a lot about one called East, Mississippi Mississippi Community College in the so-called Golden Triangle of Mississippi. Who knows what cities are in the Golden Triangle? You have to read our site to find out. I won't tell you here But one of them is the home of Mississippi State University, but this East Mississippi Community College for a large tire factory the Oklahoma tire and a large diesel engine factory there is training people who were on welfare We're on food stamps. We're in prison training these people for high-wage Manufacturing jobs and for robotic repair type jobs community colleges are what make this this happen The ninth thing we have seen is what I would describe as the thickness of the social fabric Everyone here has either read or heard of the bowling alone hypothesis by by Robert Putnam We recognize all the things that fragment America sprawl suburbs and sprawl Metropolis is our bad and contributed to that But it's been surprisingly easy to find signs of dense social fabric Deb has also written a lot about the rule that libraries play here libraries are in a way the sort of fastest Rebounding institutions we've seen they are workspaces. They are training people and languages and all the rest Deb has pointed out that when Andrew Carnegie founded his libraries He thought they would be social centers his original libraries had bowling alleys. They had swimming pools They had bars it's sort of coming back to that tradition with some of the libraries We have seen as part of this sense of it's a proxy for the thickness of fabric. We've seen a lot of places and number 10 the last observation is the narrative we have heard in a lot of these places is Not meant as a challenge to the national narrative of paralysis gridlock hopelessness nothing you can do But just ignores it, you know, that is unfortunate because it would be good to have a national politics that functioned But in the absence of that for this stage of history It's impressive how the tale many of these cities are telling themselves is we can make this downtown better We can bring this factory back. We can attract our children to come here We can have places that look better 10 years from now that than they do now To conclude in my final 15 seconds by the clock We went around China and Japan and Southeast Asia looking for the impression you would get from the fabric of the country That's what we've been doing for the past year We plan to do it for another year or so then do a book in video series the actual feeling of this country is More positive than you would think from the the discourse we mainly have in our national politics this I think is worth being aware of and helping to give a Name to the reforms and improvements that are going on So people who are doing them in one state can know they're doing it in another state And we can have a different sort of national narrative of what their responses that the country is making So that's why I was so happy to hear the the the projects underway yesterday And I turn the stage over now to hear even more