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Ladies and gentlemen, please stand as one in honoring Benjamin Eric Sasse. Thank you. It. All right, all right, all right. I'm on a lot of morphine. You don't want to make me tear up. I don't know about all of you, but my bingo card did not include Roger describing a pregnancy check. I want to thank a lot of friends here tonight, but I won't. I will say Paul and Betsy and Roger and to all the board of the Manhattan Institute, thank you. When you're 54 and you get a terminal diagnosis, people start to act like you're a lot wiser than they thought you were when you were 54 and you didn't have a terminal diagnosis. So I'll just say broadly thank you for many friends and for lots of kindness in this room. Many of you have been extraordinarily generous to me and to my family. And so I'm on the clock tonight in more ways than one. So I want to make every minute count. So forgive me for skipping all of those thank yous. Forgive me also for having the lack of linear thought that flows from a normal 55 milligrams a day of morphine. Today I'm at 20, so I can be a little more awake and coherent, but I'm going to stick closer to written notes than is ever my normal custom. But I want to make sure we stick at 20 minutes and I don't accidentally go Irish on you and speak for two hours. I would also ask your indulgence to forgive me for giving a speech tonight that's a little bit more about what I think America needs to thrive and a little bit less about what the benefactors in this room might specifically need. But you all care about the same project, which is America needs renewal. And so the conversation that we need to have with America is relevant to all of us. Even though the audience that I'm thinking about when I was sketching this is slightly broader than just what's in this room because I think the problems that we face collectively are problems of habits, love and community, not chiefly of policy. So I'd like to spend our 20 minutes ish together tonight thinking about families and especially about younger parents, grandparents, aunts and uncles, and all those of us who've earned the titles of aunts and uncles to our friends. Kids have a role to play in this, of course, but my thoughts at this moment in America's Riddle and America's Challenges are aimed primarily at parents, the blurry eyed over caffeinated, ever doubtful moms and dads who know the truth of the aphorism that the days are long and the years are short are in the business of raising souls and raising citizens. As Americans, our experiment in self government and our pioneering spirit has always depended on wisdom and self control. And these are not exactly the things that policy or Washington is known for, and certainly not the things that politicians or bureaucrats could ever impart. Also, these are not exactly the things and the virtues that are fostered by technology's illusion of endless consumption, infinite optionality and cost free disembodiment. No, the virtues for a life well lived are taught, modeled and practiced in the daily life of society's smallest but most important platoons, the Republic's thickest but yet pre political institutions, chief among them the family. So I want to start with a big prediction and it is this. In the coming decades, if AI continues to progress as it has, America is going to have a big messy debate about ubi, about universal basic income. And in its long term implications, this debate is going to dwarf the fights we had a decade ago, or almost two now, about Obamacare, and even the debates we've had about the Great Society and the New Deal. To be perfectly blunt, it's unlikely that I'm going to be around for this debate. But for the record, I am strongly against ubi. I think it's terrible policy. But either way, whether we end up with UBI or we don't, Americans are going to need better habits than we have right now. So whether we end at the sunny uplands of abundance or the hellscape of an actual jobs apocalypse, we're going to need better habits in either scenario to help our people, our citizens and our republic thrive. Because virtue has always been at the heart of what it takes to keep a republic. To borrow Lincoln's metaphor, it's the golden apple in the silver frame politics. The silver frame is the stuff we do to secure our rights through ordered liberty. But life, the daily stuff that's made up of community affections and habits, that's the golden apple at the center. The state's job isn't to define that, but it's to secure the preconditions. The silver frame that enable all the little puts platoons and communities to pursue the golden apples. And that's what needs to be protected. And no matter what the illiberal left or the increasingly illiberal system subset of the historic right claims that cannot be done with policy levers in Washington D.C. we are never just one piece of legislation away from civilizational recovery. Politics are merely means the bigger questions are teleological and their souls are central. I just made a big claim about the future. Typically, historians don't do that. So it might be helpful for us to level set a bit of where we stand right now, because we are in the midst of a civilization warping crisis of institutional decline. The consequences are all around us. We're lonely. The share of Americans who tell pollsters that they have no close friends, none, has quadrupled since 1990. A study last month from the University of Arizona found that over the last 15 years, people average 338 fewer spoken words per day than the year before. That's 120,000 less words per day. We don't trust our institutions. Over the past 50 years, decade over decade, and regardless of which political party controls Congress or the White House, Americans have lost faith in our mediating institutions. Pew data shows it most pointedly around the federal government, where trust has dropped from 77% in the mid-1960s to 17% last year. But it's not just Washington. With the exception of the military, every institution in American public life. Pew and Gallup have measured 10 different institutions every year for about 50 years. Nine of the 10 sectors, the military being the only outlier, have experienced a declining level of public trust four consecutive decades. Nine of 10 sectors, business, religion, law, media, medicine, et cetera. Every sector of our economy and our cultural life together, with the exception of the military, has seen these precipitous declines. We also don't trust each other individually. Only one in three Americans tell Pew that they think they can trust most people. Down significantly from previous decades, conspiracy theories are metastasizing across the Internet. And more and more of our neighbors are falling prey to these echo chambers. We're isolated and distrustful. So how did we get here? If you ask people who frequent policy conferences, and I want to say one cheer, maybe one and a half cheers for policy conferences. Policy conferences matter, and you should continue to make those investments. But just as if you have a hammer in your hand, every problem looks like a nail. When we're at policy conferences, we often talk like policy and politics are at the center of this. Do any of us actually believe this? Come on. Politics the source of these problems? No. Politics are a symptom of these larger problems. There is no simple, straight line answer to explain our challenges. But we should understand that the economic and chiefly the technological moment we're in is far more fundamental for what we're tackling right now than anything in politics 100 years from now. When a historian looks Back at our moment. They are not going to tell a story about our divided politics. Most of our political actors today are far too small to merit even a footnote in the history books. A century from now, historians are going to tell a different story. They're going to talk about the fact that we were living through an era of technological revolution, that that was driving rapid economic change. That's the backdrop for the challenges we face at this moment. Our story is the story of bits versus atoms. For almost all of human history, up until just a couple years ago, productivity was always measured in atoms. Job categories lasted for a lifetime. Physical products were the tangible output. But today it's mostly about bits. It's about data. We live in the information economy. We had hunter gatherers, we had agrarianism, we had industrialism. And we have this thing, what is it? The knowledge economy. Sociologists call it the post industrial economy, which is a way of saying we don't even know what it is. It's the after the last thing thing. Hunter gather, nomadism, agrarianism, industrialization, and this. The reality is we are living in an information economy that is put on speed thanks to to the advancement of artificial intelligence. And there's a lot to be very thankful about this. There are massive positives and incredible opportunities to unlock some of our biggest quantitative challenges. When the cost of quantification falls to zero, or so close to zero that we cease to even meter it, amazing new opportunities are unlocked. We should be clear about this. This is not a Luddite argument that I'm going to make tonight. But we should be aware that lifelong work is a thing of the past. And our fellow citizens don't know exactly how to articulate it, but they know how to feel it. And it feels scary. Doing the same job, even remaining in the same sector for your toil for your entire career, is increasingly going to be a thing of the past. And this has massive implications for how we conceive of ourselves. Think about how our identity is wrapped up in our work. For thousands of years, people lived in set communities from birth until death. And their lives were declined by their work. You were a farmer because your dad was a farmer. We moved from agrarian hunter gatherers to farmers to workers in industrial economies. And our identities were wrapped up in the kind of work we did. Many times our work even gave us our Smith, Miller, Carter, Mason, Weaver, Brewer, Baker, Cook, Porter. These are nouns, they're trades, but they're also families, they're identities and they're still with us. How many of us really believe that 100 years from now, you're going to look at people's surnames and hear coder, designer, influencer. We are in a completely different economy where technology is remaking entire sectors at breaknecks speed. Automation is inevitable. The debate right now is usually whether AI is going to bring heaven or hell. And the troubling, dizzying but true answer is it's going to bring both. This is not an OR question given the false binary between the enthusiast's unencumbered optimism and the safeties low view of human resiliency and agency. Or we should all pick optimism every time if you're given a hard binary. But we should also recognize that this isn't really a binary. Things are going to get a lot messier from here, even if you're on the optimistic side, that they're going to be net better. Most jobs are going to be unbundled and rebundled. Emotional intelligence and character are going to matter more than they've mattered in the past. Because the hardest things to automate are the things that depend on relationships. But if the future of work is relational, the nature of relationships matters. Does anyone really believe that replacing any one job with another job is always morally indifferent? Morally equivalent? To hear the AI enthusiast talk, and again, I want to be clear, this is no Luddite argument. This isn't really a binary. But if you have to choose, I'm with the optimists. But to hear the enthusiasts talk, there's sometimes a scorn about those who worry about the dignity of work versus merely a GDP analysis of humans as cogs. The qualitative matters in addition to the quantitative. Even though we're living through a fascinating quantitative revolution, job A and job B might be equal on a spreadsheet, but there's a profound difference in the hearts and and in the lives and in the emotions of our neighbors. A really good coach. That's a relational job. You can motivate young men, you can help people get fit. That's an important relationship. And the work matters. But an onlyfans model selling pictures of her feet to lonely men? That's also a relationship, but it's pretty damn bleak. Not all relationships are socially productive and certainly not equally socially productive. There's nothing redeeming in an onlyfans economy that commodifies human sexuality. It's depressing. And our daughters and our sons deserve better. All of this that we're living through and that our neighbors feel is so much bigger than whatever clickbait outrage is driving the cable news cycle today and will be forgotten by Thursday. A technological revolution is driving an economic revolution in our time. And the changes in this economy are already having and will have more profound spiritual, cultural, educational and even political implications. Though the political is arguably the least important. To be clear, this is an incredibly exciting moment to live. This is not a neo Luddite argument. Who could have thought we could launch rockets to space and then catch them as they plummet back to earth? We should all stand in awe of this. It is a breathtaking tribute to human imagination, ingenuity, innovation and entrepreneurial creation. As someone who is being kept alive this very month by incredible advances in biotechnology, I am a zealous proponent for disruptive innovation. The challenge now though, is how to live with virtue and technology when technology, left to its own trajectory, would often erode virtue and place and human texture. So what is our response to these tectonic challenges? It must be habits and community and a revivification of place. The biggest divide, I submit to you in America is not going to be race or class or income, regardless of what the political addicts and the culture war intersectionality proponents tell us. No, the biggest divide in America is going to be between people who figure out how to harness the tools of technology and the near limitless information of AI versus those who outsource their affections and their habits to these tools and algorithms. The future will be awe inspiring for the first group, life will be miserable. For the second group, heaven and hell. Lots of us grew up fearing the dystopian future of George Orwell. But it turns out the dystopian future of Aldous Huxley was much more likely. The immediate danger is not the brutal authoritarianism of 1984, but the soft despotism of of brave new World. We face a tyranny of ubiquitous pleasure, of easy comfort. Our choice is master the tools or be mastered by the tools. We can be creators or merely consumers. We can be thinkers and builders or just junkies. The way that we use or abuse technology will shape our souls and therefore inevitably our society. Given these disruptions and presented with the existential choice, we would be fools to wallow in self pity, doubt or despair. The answer to our uncertainty and our anxiety is to be found in building. Was it Martin Luther who said, if I knew that tomorrow the world would end, I would still today plant my apple tree? Friends, that's why I'm here tonight. I want to encourage you for your builders and investors to plant trees for your kids and grandkids. And selfishly, I want to encourage you to plant trees for my kids and grandkids. The men and women assembled here tonight have done incredible work building institutions. You are the builders who've rolled up your sleeves and done the work. And the rest of us are tremendously grateful. But none of that work will matter without another more foundational institution making a fundamental comeback. And that is the most local institution. The family is the source of the habits that we're going to need to cultivate the next generation. This work is pre political. Many of you have done tremendous work in public policy, but the era that we're entering is going to require even more energy, even more creativity around something more textured. Housing affordability cannot tackle our challenges. Tax policy will not solve this. Even something as essential as educational choice will not ultimately love your kids and create habits. All of these are important, to be sure, but they are not aimed at creating the habits of ensouled humans. Because the challenges that matter most are questions of love and loves are local. And that's why it starts with the family. What I'm suggesting tonight requires us to reject the relatively new but culturally pervasive assumption we have that school is the primary institution of character formation. If there's a villain in my story, it's John Dewey. As Americans. Hear, hear. Zero cheers for John Dewey. As Americans, we have sleepwalked into a culture that is now defined by one man's bureaucratic thinking. We don't have time to unpack the fact that Dewey's anti Catholic bigotry. Bigotry was explicitly aimed at making sure that schools, instead of parishes, were forming the morality of the next generation. For now, we can simply acknowledge that too much of childhood today is defined by Dewey's vision of an institutionalized childhood. Just because the economy had gone from agrarian to industrial, he told us that we should industrialize childhood. And today, for the vast majority of 4 to 18 year olds, waking hours, children are indoors, sitting still passive, on receive mode, entirely disconnected from productive labor, and surrounded by people that merely have the accident of the same birth year. There is no pedagogy that's written on stone tablets from heaven insisting that this is the way that children must learn. Education and school are not synonyms. School is an important tool many times for parents, but today it is usually an ineffective tool that stifles the kinds of learning that our kids most desperately need into the disrupted era that we're now entering. Despite receiving nearly a trillion dollars per year, public K12 education in America produces abysmal results. 70% of 8th graders are not proficient in reading and more than 70% can't do basic math. We have led the next generation on a path to more soul deadening complacency. And this is the institution we've decided to outsource habit formation to. Modern schooling is systematically terrible at forming well adjusted, curious, intellectually creative, entrepreneurial adults. Schools, even much better schools cannot solve this. Here's the truth. Nobody loves your kids as much as you do. I never had the chance to serve in the Senate with Phil Graham. But I think often of the time when he was cross examining at some hearing, a bureaucrat. And he made the case that the local community where he lived was best able to help form the kids of their community. And the bureaucratic kept pushing back at him saying no, that she loved his kids every bit as much as he did. And he was just flabbergasted that someone would even claim this. And she kept insisting and she used the word love, that she loved his kids just as much as he did. And he said, really? What are their names? Loves are local. And creating the habits that foster the love of the good, the true and the beautiful begins at home. It falls to the neighborhood and to the village, to be sure, but it falls chiefly to your parents. The bad news of what I'm suggesting is that it's deeply inconvenient. The good news is that parenting has always been inconvenient. It's the ultimate inconvenience. There's nothing convenient about the work of raising children, teaching them delayed gratification, working late nights and putting their needs before your own. In an age that is designed now around instant endless convenience, the work of parenting is countercultural. It's going to take some uphill running. But here's the true news that should encourage renewal becomes possible when we understand the job before us, when we face the reality that we have to do this work ourselves. Parents want intentionality and they're willing to do hard things because they love their kids. In theory and in practice, they want to do this work. The great promise of technology, for good and for ill is disembodiment. This thing which has more compute power than gymnasium sized mainframes at MIT in the late 50s and early 60s that ran the targeting exercises that won the Cold War. This is amazing. This is the largest tool any median citizen has ever held in their hands in human history. And part of its promise is disembodiment. If you're bored by the speech, you can check the scores of the NBA playoff games right now. You can free this time and place. Please don't you got a dying guy in front of you. But the promise of don't clap for that. The hell's wrong with you. But the great promise of technology that you can be disembodied from, from the table or from your culture or from the world also has an escapism about it that we have to learn how to manage. There's always the temptation, the claim that there's a better conversation somewhere else. There's a better sexual partner somewhere else. There's a better option out there somewhere. It's the conceit of selfishness, and it leads us to profound isolation. Human nature has a voracious appetite for self indulgence. But America doesn't work if we sit and scroll. America doesn't work if we decide that comfort is the greatest virtue. I think of Mike Rose's old joke. Safety first is the stupidest possible sign you could post at a workplace because you could always set the speed limit at one mile an hour. You could have no car accidents. But safety isn't first. It's one of the inputs into the algorithm at the workplace. But you're there to do something in the same way. Comfort can't be our number one goal. We didn't go to the moon because it was easy. We went because it was hard. And being an American requires grit, resilience and wisdom. We want technology and virtue. So let's flag four starter habits for tonight. Fewer than half of Americans read a book last year that is a national crisis. We have to develop the intentional habit of reading. A nation that does not read will not thrive. Shorter attention spans are killing our imagination. Before our kids even learn their Alphabet, we now hand them tablets and we know from neurological imagery that it is rotting their brains. Families need to read aloud together again to build children's affection for books and to build a shared library. This kind of reading is far more formative than the kind of isolated reading compliance culture that is engaged in in so many schools. CS Lewis talked about how we all suffer from chronological snobbery, the idea that because we are in the here and now, everything before us must be outdated and wrong and irrelevant in reality. Every era has mistakes and blind spots, and the only way to scrutinize our current moment and to gain a perspective of wisdom because we can't go to the future is through history or literature. Contrast this with the digital casino in our pockets. The that pulls us out of our place and breeds constant dissatisfaction and covetousness. We are unable to stand on the shoulders of giants if we don't know what they have to say, and we do that by reading. We need to build family canons that inform the character of our homes. And like every debate about the canon, there are going to be fights about what is in and what is out. There is no definitive answer to the canon because the intellectual journey is central to the point. We need to teach our kids to fall in love with reading and show them that the endless dialogue between ideas is more rewarding than the endless scrolling of social media. Habit 2 We need to develop the intentional habit of hard work like reading, hard work is preparation for life. Our kids need to learn to work hard and to love the fact that their identity is as a worker, even if it might not be the same kind of work. Porter, Weaver, Smith, Baker Work can start at an early age. Sure, it's easier to load and unload the dishwasher and to put away the laundry ourselves, but we miss the opportunity if we don't bring the next generation into the labor. Over time, small jobs become medium jobs and ultimately clear the way for hard tasks like preparing for a life of lifelong work where you're going to have to relearn who you are and what you do to serve your neighbor at 35, 40, 45 and 50, something no generation has ever previously had to do. Young men especially need work. As they grow, they need work that isn't their main work as well. There's a reason that dad hobbies are all chores. Woodworking, yard work, grilling, tinkering. It's work that engages your body when so much of our work has merely engaged our mind. There is a reason that when Winston Churchill needed a break, he laid bricks for hours at a time as rest. We need to encourage side hustles, and we need to create agency and foster compliance. Right now we are insulating our children, on average, from work until they're in their mid-20s, and lots of them turn out not to be able to learn how to do it. Then habit number three we need to develop the intentional habit of tech Sabbaths. We can go too far and worship our work. I love work, but worshipping our work is something I'm guilty of, and we need to be able to set it aside. Recognizing that our storehouses are not permanent, we should love work, but we should also learn that we need rest. In my theological tradition, we remember the fourth Commandment not just as obligation, but as a gift. As more and more of our work becomes detached from specific places, think of all of our zoom meetings, calls, emails, disembodied interactions with Remote colleagues. The habit of rest, of airplane mode, emphasizes place and guards against digital intrusion and allows the revivification of the thickest, the most local and the most important. Lock up our devices and keep them away from the family meal. Prioritize the people around the table, the bread, the conversation and the hugs at hand. Habit number four. We need to develop intentional travel in the same way that learning another language teaches us how to master our own. The fish can't explain water to you because he's never not been in it. Travel forms character through lived experience, but don't hear this as vacation travel actually has the same roots as travail. Etymologically, to travel should be a kind of work. It takes work to leave your comfort zone, to set aside the things you thought you needed and to work at something new together. If you live in a city, you need to experience the country. If you live in the country, you need to know how to navigate the city. Have our kids take extended leaves of absence from school and go live with other families somewhere else for a significant period of time. For those of you who can do it, figure out how to do the work of multi generational living with family compounds and other places that you return to again and again to steward. Give kids the thickness of a community of cousins, aunts, uncles and different types of family members doing different types of work. You don't need a McMansion to do this. There's a real difference between need and want. The average home size in America in 1950 was under 1,000 square feet. Today the average new home start is over 2,400 square feet. Humanity has been raising kids for millions of years without the conveniences of the 21st century. And nothing teaches the difference between need and want like being in a different place, traveling and living in a thick community elsewhere. We need our kids to learn a new skill in a new environment. Character formation happens when things are not convenient. Travel, done rightly, seeks the appropriate level of inconvenience. Friends, we live in the richest time and place in all of human history. And yet we have grievance peddlers and everywhere on social media that have persuaded our kids something false. This is the first generation since we've had polling about 80 years. This is the first generation that has thought the future is going to be worse than the past. And they also believe they live through more economic hardship than any of the previous three generations. This is economically verifiable nonsense, and yet they believe it. And the fault is ours. Economics was once the study of scarcity. We're fast approaching the moment when economics will be defined by ubiquitous abundance. We are blessed to live in the here and now, by God's grace. We've been blessed to be called to this time and place, this here and now. But the challenges before us are big. But they are ours. Time, however, is finite. Human nature is constant, and no technological process or progress is going to change it. We will never upload our consciousness to the Internet and become indifferent to our own mortality, regardless of what idiot philosophers in Silicon Valley tell us. Character. Whether the character of an individual or of a nation is molded by habits and by time, this republic requires men and women to do long form deliberation, serious thinking, honest humility, and daily striving. This may sound like idealism until you realize it's what America has always been about. Too often we think of our founding fathers as graybeards, but that's wrong. We're celebrating Alexander Hamilton tonight. They were young. Hamilton was 21 in 1776. James Madison was 25. Thomas Jefferson was 33. The old, old man was John Adams at 40. They were alive. They were full of energy. They were imperfect, to be sure, but they understood virtue, and they understood that the nation they were building would depend on virtue today. These are the things that technology, though it can be great, left to its own devices, would take from our kids. Disembodied consumption, digital gluttony and cultural lethargy will rob us of the joy at a moment when incredible discovery and adventure await. The digital revolution can bring big pieces of heaven, but it will drift toward hell unless we steer it and form the right kinds of habits. What good is it to gain the whole world if we four foot the souls that we're supposed to form? We cannot expect to remain free without being virtuous. We cannot be bold without being rooted. We cannot be great if our folks are not aiming first to be good and to build a home base from which to launch and build much more broadly, my friends, the biggest divide in America is not going to be based on race, class or income. The biggest divide in America will be between the people who figure out how to harness these tools of technology and AI Amazing they are versus those who outsource their affections and their habits to the tools and the algorithms. For the first group, the future is thrilling. Life will be miserable. For the second, it is our job to help steer more people into group one. We must fight Huxley's dystopia. We must master these tools rather than be mastered by them. We must deliberately shape our children's souls so that they, too, like all Americans, passed in the greatest tradition can be creators, doers and thinkers embracing the next frontier. Thanks for having me. Thanks for joining us for the weekly 10 Blocks podcast featuring urban policy and cultural commentary with City Journal editors, contributors and special guests.