>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin tonight with richard haass, president of the council on foreign relations. he has a new book called "a world in disarray: american foreign policy and the crisis of the old order." >> instead of our welcoming him the way the israelis and saudis did, the europeans were not inclined to welcome him because they almost preferred barack obama, almost a mirror image of the middle east. lots about this president is not what they've come to expect from the united states or presidents. and his whole manner, went to saudi arabia and say i'm not here to lectur >> it's important for your viewers to tune in and soak in

because this is the week that's realized and internalized the fact that for as long as donald trump is president they will be beseeched. they recognize the russia investigation between what's going on with prosecutors and the multiple committees on the hill that are investigating this, that there is at least months, probably years of investigations. >> rose: and we conclude with a conversation with ben sasse, junior republican senator from nebraska. >> it's not good for the kids to be in this protected cacoon but certainly not good for a republican either. we need these kids to ultimately become the leaders of the country, and they're going to go through job disruption when they're 40 and 45 and 50 in ways never before in human history, they will have to be resilient. >> rose: richard haass, mike allen and ben sasse, when we continue. >> rose: funding for "charlie rose" has been provided by the following:

>> and by bloomberg, a provider of multimedia news and information services worldwide. captioning sponsored by rose communications from our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. >> rose: president trump is wrapping up his first overseas trip. he's in sicily at the g7 summit. it is final stop of a foreign swing that has taken him to saudi arabia, israel, the vatican, a n.a.t.o. meeting and the g7 summit. joining me is richard haass, president of the council on foreign relations. his new book is called "a in disarray: american foreign policy and the crisis of the old order." welcome and thank you. >> good to be back. >> rose: happy memorial day as well. >> thank you, sir. >> rose: how would you assess

this president's first foreign trip is this. >> i think the first half, okay. he would have done more, i think, to talk to the saudis and others more directly about the flaws in their own societies that in many ways have generated so much of the terrorism we've seen. but the first half to have the t because the israelis and saudis were thrilled he wasn't barack obama. >> rose: and they view themselves with a common enemy, iran. >> exactly. first half of the trip. not bad. the second half could not be more different, much more difficult going. instead of we canaling him in the way the israelis and saudis did, the europeans were not inclined to welcome him in many ways because they much preferred barack obama, almost the mirror image of the middle east. lots about this president are not what they've come to expect of the united states or presidents and his whole marion of confronting him. he went to saudi arabia, i'm not

here to lecture you. then he showed up in europe and lectured them so that didn't go down too well. >> rose: n.a.t.o., he lectured a payment of the united nations and makes a good point that president obama and other presidents have made, those countries should contribute more. i guess the question has to be not what he said but how he said id. >> both. if one adds up the totality of what they spend on defense, probably $180 billion. not negligible. they don't have the same global responsibility as the united states so it need not be the exact same. many give higher percentages of g.d.p. to foreign aid and development aid of sorts. but basically, you're right, even if you wanted to get them to do more, it's not clear to me this is the way. diplomacy is to persuade people to do what you want them to do. this seems hardly doing that. he showed up, backdrop calling

n.a.t.o. obsolete, those concerns, so had low-hanging fruit and he chose not to pick it. >> rose: i thought the idea he didn't strongly support article 5 especially when you consider all the nations in the spirit of article 5 came here at 9/11. >> absolutely. article 5, you know, an attack on one is an attack on all. it sends the message we're all on equal footing, no distinctions. but america first sends a very different signal. it says we'll put ourselves before we put others. so he needed to use the trip to reassure and say we see your security intrinsically tied to our own, every bit as important as our own and, again, he missed the opportunity to do it. ironically enough, standing under the twisted piece of metal from 9/11 which was the only time in its history that n.a.t.o. has actually put article 5 into play. so, again, it seems to me he just missed a fairly easy opportunity to send the right

signal. >> rose: how about the g7? well, it's ironic. g7 was created decades ago to forge all sorts of cooperation not just across the atlantic but globally, bringing the japanese in, to deal with global challenges, one of which is trade. this administration has walked back from that many years. and climate change, big question as to whether mr. trump and colleagues will come out on that. other things like nuclear proliferation and terrorism, which are old fashioned sort of guns and bullets national security questions, it's not clear whether there is going to be a meeting of the minds, not just in sicily but more broadly. >> rose: do the europeans and members of g7 come away with the fact that they don't really trust this president? >> i think the honest answer to your question is exactly that. first of all, we haven't been through a real crisis together. they are very uneasy with his policies toward russia.

very uneasy about some of the misuse and mishandling of intelligence. they look at what's going on across the ocean and just don't recognize it. they don't recognize the role of family. they don't see a lot of names and faces they would have expected to see in republican administrations. you're hearing things from him they've never heard from an american president before. so they don't feel comfortable with him. i think some don't trust him. the big irony of all this, donald trump has been against the e.u., favors brexit, signaled marine le pen he favored her in the election, he may do more than any other american president in decades to forge solidarity in europe. >> rose: against the united states? >> to go their own way, to promote their own -- >> rose: to create true europe. >> to consolidate more there and promote global arrangements to their liking whether in climate, trade, refugee issues, what have you, so we face the situation where we'll end up with less influence in europe and less partnering with the europeans.

>> rose: back to saudi arabia. did he, having said all the things he did during the campaign, in a sense create a better understanding that he and his administration was not anti-muslim? >> yes, i think he clearly improved the standing there and that's where the trip worked well. also you invest in relationships. first trip over there, early meetings, so he cut both the irlzies and the saudis criminal slack. he didn't lecture the israelis publicly on settlements, he didn't lecture the saudis about women driving and other issues. he essentially said i want to work with you against what we all see is the principal threat which the iran, and i thought that was all fine up to the point that, with the saudis, i don't think he did enough to address the real internal threat they and others not only face but are generating by the flaws in their own societies and i think, with the israelis, at some point there has to be not necessarily publicly but

privately straight talk about what it will take to advance the prospect of peace between israelis and palestinians. >> rose: there is some believe a grand strategy to get the saudis and the iranians -- i mean the saudis and israel together against the iranians and produce some kind of relationship between the arab countries and israel who, therefore, will work with the palestinians and the israelis and all infused by the idea of doing something no one has ever been able to do by finding peace between israel and the palestinians. >> there is some of that out there. the problem is this stark opposition with iran, and we're seeing it played out in many places including yemen and syria, this could lead to real escalation. the saudi deputy crown prince the other day talked about war between iran and saudi arabia and saying we the saudis are going to take the war to iran, not wait for you to bring the war to us. we've got to be careful about

how much encouragement we give the saudis that no matter what we'll be there if they take a provocative view or approach toward iran. the peace process, it's up to the israelis and palestinians. they have to be willing and able, both, to make the big compromises for peace. so the arabs and saudis can help create the context but they can't solve the split between ma mas and the palestinians on the west bank. an israeli government not configured for peace, it would fall apart before that. so this top-down or inside-out approach, i believe people are overestimating what it can accomplish. >> rose: finally, looking at this president's foreign policy, has he drawn us closer to china because of what happened in the summit and the feeling that they had in florida dr. the meeting they had in florida and looking at the threat of north korea? >> the short answer is yes. during the campaign, there was a lot of criticism of china, a lot of suggestion that, you know, we

were going to be closing up to russia but had real problems with china. i think the administration got religion in the sense that north korea has emerged as the most significant national security threat. they know that the best way to influence things in pyongyang is through beijing through working with the chinese, so there's actually been discipline of a north korea first approach with china. we're not picking a trade war with china. we're not criticizing them on human rights or the excesses of anti-corruption drive. we have been low key about our differences in the south china sea. >> rose: we had a little exchange in getting too close in terms of planes. >> again but, overall, i would say there's been some discipline. it's real north korea first approach, and i think the administrations realize that, absent china's active participation and really using the leverage with north korea, we're left either with a military option or essentially living with a north korea that can put nuclear warheads on missiles that can reach us, those options are each in their

own way so unattractive i think the administration is prepared to take a run at a diplomatic option with china's explicit report. >> rose: thenal? back to the existential choices, either using military force and using combination of deterrence-defense of a north korea nuclear arsenal. it's hard to convince a lot of americans nuclear is the right option. >> rose: it may with p be the only option. >> the question is whether the least bad option or necessary option. >> rose: if diplomacy fails and they get closer to the capacity of delivering a nuclear warhead. >> then we have to make an existential decision whether we were prepared to live with a north korea with nuclear weapons or we don't trust it and run all the risk of starting a war with all that could mean. you and riboth old enough to

know the destruction of the first korean war. so i don't know how we would come out of that. nobody wants that. we, the south koreans, the chinese don't want it, so the question is will this motivate china not to allow things to drift which has been chinese policy for a couple of decades. this administration deserves credit for signaling the chinese. it can't be business as usual. >> rose: and my impression is xi jinping had a lot of opportunity to tell the president what he thought and why and the long history of china and how they view the world. >> again, deploimsy with china, deploimsy with israelis and saudis the other day. the one place there wasn't near as much as thrsked be was with our democratic allies in europe. go figure. >> rose: thank you for coming. i know you have a tight schedule. >> good to see you. >> rose: richard haass, from the council on foreign relations, his book "a world in

disarray." back in a moment. stay with us. >> rose: president trump returns to washington saturday night, that gives him a week to prepare for the return of congress and coming battles over healthcare, tax reform and the budget and looming over all that the investigations into russia and the 2016 elections. joining me now is mike allen, co-founder of axios and the editor of the axios am newsletter. mike, thank you for coming, happy memorial day weekend. >> and to you and yours. it's an honor and treat to be here. >> rose: jared kushner, no one closer to the president. he and his wife ivanka trump. he is said to be at the center of the investigation without any question or anybody suggesting or knowing that he is in any way having done something. his lawyers have said he will come forward and explain everything about their meetings he's had with russians, but this is a critical point for someone so close to the president to be

so central to an investigation. >> perfectly put, charlie. just to set the scene here, over the months we've called jared kushner the supreme court because he's the last word. you talk to people both inside the west wing, c.e.o.s that come in there, and we say if you want to sell an idea to the president, if you want to convince the president of something, who do you talk to? universally they say jared kushner, who is very gifted at moving the president in particular ways. we are told if he wants to get the president's attention on something, he'll get the right people on the president's calendar to talk to him. he has campaigns he doesn't even know are campaigns and has his hands in everything, such a big portfolio, both foreign and domestic. so now, to have the the f.b.i. interested in him as part of this russia investigation -- now, charlie, as you suggested accurately in your top, he's not a subject, he's not a target, whatever words you often hear in

conjunction with an investigation. it's much more nuanced and removed than that. during the transition, he had meetings with rungs that they are interested in finding out about, so it's natural that he would be talked to. last week when there was a story in the "the washington post" at the end of the week that said a white house official, someone close to the president was of interest to investigators, people had a pretty good idea. so this news didn't come as a shock. but, charlie, you outlined that calendar that they have ahead, and this investigation is really a pall. anytime the f.b.i. is interested in something, to do the interviews, prep the interviews, federal investigations don't tend to stop where they start, so it just makes it harder for this white house, which already was struggling to keep its head

above water. >> rose: but there is also this -- he did not include in his security clearance information the fact that he had met with the russians. later it was amended to say he's happy to amend it and fill in all the information, but it was not there at the beginning, nor was it there from michael flynn when he offered up the information for his own security clearance. >> no, that's right, charlie. and fascinatingly enough, a key lawyer for ivanka trump and jared kushner is jamie gay relic who your viewers know from the clinton years in private practice and she put out a statement saying, if contacted by investigators, jared kushner will be cooperative. so the reason that that wording is so key is that if suggests to you that he has not heard from him, that there's not been any document from them or requests for documents.

so that's all a movie that's still to play out. >> rose: there is also the question of steve bannon, who had lost some, it is said, influence in the white house to, in fact, ivanka trump and her husband jared kushner. it is said now he's back because there is beginning to be in the white house a kind of war room mentality, and how do we know and how do we resist what we know are going to be these extended investigations? >> no, charlie, that's right, and this is a sea change for the sweathouse and a very important moment for your viewers to tune in and soak in and that is a week the white house realized and internalized that as long as donald trump is president they been besieged. they recognize the russia investigation between what's going on with prosecutors and the multiple committees on the hill investigating this this

that there is at least months, probably years of investigations. separately, they recognize, in part, because of their own doing of inflieming the bureaucracy, in part because the permanent government here in washington was never going to be aligned with the president who won running against the president and they loved the fact that he was showing up washington. so now that he's here, though, the price he pays for that is constant leaks and part of the administration that don't want him. so between the media criticism, between the investigations, between the bureaucracy, what the trump people like to call the deep state, both left and right like to use that term because it sounds spooky but it just means the permanent

government, among those, they will be fighting these battles for four or eight years, so they're creating a clinton-style war room. so scandal machinery, charlie which your viewers will remember, is back, and this white house is trying to learn lessons from both the reagan white house after the iran contra revelations and the clinton white house which had plenty of opportunity and experience with scandals. one of the big lessons, charlie, is to try to wall off what's going on, that if you put one person or one office in charge of the response, the strategy, the idea is that you can keep every aide in the west wing from being sucked into it, that other people will be allowed to do their day job, will be allowed to serve the president in other ways, will be allowed to pursue the agenda. so we'll have a war room within the white house that will take in research, coms, rapid response, legal, and the idea is

that will be both the repository and landing pad for all these inquiries and all these messages that are going to have to be launched. there's a twist here, charlie. there is always a twist with the trump white house, right? that is, if the staff on paper can compartmentalize, and we're told there are charts drawn up for the war room, the president will make final decisions about it after he returns from his nine-day trip, but, charlie, will the president be able to compartmentalize? there's been no sign donald trump can do that. that's partly how some of these issues were touched off is he wanted to vent about some of the things he thought were going on that he didn't like. he didn't like the fact that jim comey, the f.b.i. director, was out talking about the russian investigation. he chose not to wall it off. so this will be the challenge and thing to watch that, yes, they can build a war room structure to try to preserve the

mindshare and band width of other parts of the west wing but will the president go along with that. >> rose: when the president gets back he will come back to the russian probe which has an independent council that are highly respected, robert mueller former f.b.i. director, who is already there and obviously collecting information. we have investigations a from the justice department, b from the house intelligence committee, c from the senate intelligence committee, and james comey will testify. some say there are questions as to he'll clearly want to talk about the diary. he will work with robert mueller to figure out what he's prepared to testify about. this is going to make a washington that's going to be focused a lot on investigations. >> well, no doubt. and, charlie, and you hinted at it there. this is going to be so juicy. so we know james comey is very fastidious and he tended to

document thims and one of the things he documented is when he had interactions with this white house, some of which, according to his friends, felt were inappropriate, felt he was being pushed, felt maybe they were over the line. he took contemporaneous notes about it and had memos about it and clearly those memos have circulated around. other people have seen them and read them, to reporters. and, charlie, something we know from covering investigations over the years is that a lot of credence is given to contemporaneous records. so here you have amazingly the f.b.i. director in president trump's vegas keeping realtime detailed notes about his conversations with the president, presumably with his aides, some of which he felt were inappropriate and, since then, the white house has antagonized him. we had the president in that meeting with the russian officials referring to james comey as a nut job.

you have robert mueller, special council, who is friends with comey, allied with comey over the years, so a lot of this is going to come out. jim comey wanted, interestingly enough, to testify in beelike, and that's -- testify in public and that's partly to protect himself so there wasn't questions about what was said behind closed doors, but in addition to being a headache for the white house, this is going to be unbelievable drama. i think there was a tweet the other day that someone from "house of cards" said washington had stolen all their ideas for the next season. >> rose: is the president going to have any kind of legislative agenda when you look at all the issues he's facing? >> it's very possible it's going to be a shutout. you have to start and acknowledge the signature achievement, the collection and confirmation of justice gorsuch, supreme court, a 30-year change in society and road to tipping the balance of the court with

one more selection and a choice that gave this president so much credibility with conservatives. but then after that, there is going to be no big achievement, and there's been none so far. we're now told there is unlikely to be one of these big ticket items checked off before september when they come back, and the twist -- that twist that's always there, that rally in the rose garden when the house had passed healthcare, but it hadn't yet gone through the senate or gone back through the house, and, so, a lot of people in the country may think this has been done. they may blame republicans for any changes in their premiums that come and, charlie, one top republican told me he calls that the bon jovi rally because they were halfway there. >> rose: happy holiday. happy memorial day weekend, mike. >> to you and yours, thank you,

charlie. >> rose: mike allen. back in a moment. stay with us. >> rose: senator ben sasse is here, the junior republican senator from nebraska, was elected in 2014. his voting record in the senate places him among the more conservative members of the republican caucus and the most prominent member of the never trump movement in the 2016 presidential campaign, has a new book called "the vanishing american adult: our coming-of-age crisis - and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance." it offers advice on how to raise more resilient children in today's uncertain world. i am pleased to have him at the table for the first time. we can. >> great to be here. >> rose: i want to talk about republican politics before the book. it's an important book in terms of what's happening in institutions and family in our society. what's going to happen to the healthcare debate in the senate? >> i don't think we know. so one big myth out there is that obamacare or the

affordable care act was passed by reconciliation. it wasn't. it was passed by 60 votes before ted kennedy died and modified by reconciliation. there is a broad thinking by republicans on the right that it can be replaced by majority. 60 votes for a regular recorder. regular path 51. >> rose: used in the confirmation. >> of justice gorsuch. so first of all, i don't think that -- i'll put my cards on the table to your point about conservative voting record, i don't think that obamacare solved a whole bunch of problems. i think it helped a bunch of people and exacerbated a bunch of other problems, so i wanto fully repeal and replace obamacare, but republicans are, you know -- naive isn't exactly the right word, but we're regularly talking to the public as if the problems in american healthcare began with

obamacare, and obviously healthcare reform was needed before obamacare. there are a whole bunch of structural problems in american healthcare. >> rose: the clinton administration tried. >> exactly. we are not doing the things you need to do to create a system where there is portability of health insurance across job and geographic change. the political continuum from left to right should be about the debate about how much decentralized market mechanism you want in creating that portability or how much state control you want in creating that portability, but we should all agree that we want a system where there is health insurance coverage at the goes with you across job and geographic change. right now we're not usually focused on the right thing. one party is trying to defend obamacare and the other is trying to criticize and attack obamacare but we're not talking about what we're trying to get. right now republicans in the senate are trying to get 50 to 52 of us and mike pence as a tie breaker to use reconciliation to change obamacare, but it's not going to fix the structural problems that are deep than just the obamacare architecture.

i wish we were having a conversation about what kind of healthcare system we want in ten years, and i wish both parties were participating in that. right now it's a one-party discussion, the democrats for a whole host of reasons don't want to talk to us and some republicans think its not necessary to talk to democrats. >> rose: what's the essential problem to create healthcare legislation that works. >> is this first of all, you have to start with what's the essential problem in american healthcare, which is we don't have prices. that's why you don't get any higher quality lower cost care over time. in almost every other sector in the economy, we expect you get higher quality, cheaper stuff over time. that never happens in healthcare. >> rose: explain that to me. higher -- >> you think about your computer. you expect next year -- if you hold off on buying a new computer today and buy it next year, you expect you will get more computing power at a hiring speed for a cheaper price. when you buy a car, you expect the car you buy five years ago

will be heck of a lot better than five years ago and cheaper. >> rose: why cheaper? on consumer pricing, almost every good in american life ends up getting cheaper over time. technology yields hiring quality lower-cost goods and services over time. we don't have that happening in healthcare and one of the most basic reasons why is we don't have any pricing, so american healthcare is dominated by third-party payment, that's primarily governmental third-party payment. >> rose: medicare, medicaid. about 60 cents on every dollar spent in american healthcare touches the government somehow. we have hospitals that are big general hospitals. you don't have focus factories where you disaggregate the parts of american healthcare delivery that should become more effective. hiring quality, lower infection risk rates and cheaper. one of the fundamental problems we have is we don't distinguish between catastrophic events we're trying to insure against and the routine delivery of

healthcare. how do we explain why american healthcare doesn't work? think of any other insured marketplace and how could you mess it up as bad as american healthcare. property and casualty, imagine you passed add law that all state and state farm had to buy all your gas and schedule all your jiffy lube appointments. i submit jiff where lube won't be in the right locations, will have poor hours, poor services and prices will increase, not really what happens in oil changes. >> rose: you're saying medicare dictates all that? >> medicare pricing. so about 40% of most hospitals' actual receipts are driven by medicare, but it drives the accounting systems for everything. the drgs, the diagnostic groupings and codes that drive how we price don't allow us to disaggregate by different types of procedures so we get hiring quality, lower cost over time. again, i get a lot of people in

our audience tonight may be for much more state intervention in healthcare delivery than i'm for for, but in health finance, we want people not to be uninsured because they change jobs. that's the largest driver of uninshiewrnsd in america. numerically by far the largest driver of uninsurance in mark is job change and we'll talk about how average duration at a firm is getting shorter and shorter. right now most americans have six months of uninsurance in three and a half years. that's when you get the breast cancer diagnosis, a car accident, and you create a new population with pre-existing conditions five or ten years from now. i believe we could solve all those problems. the pre-existing about 3.5% of the public, and there are

320 million americans, about 10 million people. second solve that problem. >> rose: how would you solve it? >> again, if we picked a more government-interventionist plan that was just for ten million people, that's fine. >> rose: so you would have people who have pre-existing conditions paid for and would unlikely be able to get insurance or would have such a high deductible or high premium that it would be unpayable by them. >> exactly, but either are uninsurable or insurable in a way that's cost prohibitive. i think we can solve the problem for those folks. i want to solve the problem of ten to 15 years from now how do we create a world of people with pre-existing conditions. you want people not to be uninsured for the three to six months they're changing jobs where they have the car accident and breast cancer and can't get

insured. we're living off tax accident from the '40s where employer-sponsored large group insurance is where most americans get their insurance through, it has tax subsidy that nebraska farmers and ranchers and small business people don't get. >> rose: the politics, it's likely you will use reconciliation. >> yes, but whether it's likely to pass something and whether or not that thing is passed is good are hard questions. >> rose: and the house and the senate will negotiate. >> yeah, but i would bet against us getting healthcare reform in this cycle. >> rose: what's the cycle men? this congress? >> now to 2018's election. >> rose: what's the politics of that? some say that it's a lose-lose. on the one hand, a lot of people will say that the republicans promised they would replace obamacare and did so i'm going to vote against them. others say if you passed what

the republicans were doing it would so hurt the constituency that elected donald trump that they would be outraged. >> i think there are two big ways to fail. we can fail by failing to pass a bill. republicans for seven years have been running on repeal and replace obamacare. that's one way. >> rose: paul ryan's line. the second way is to pass a bad bill. if you pass a bad bill where the individual market continues to implode which has happened under obamacare in the last four years and premiums rise at unsustainable rates, if you continue to have a restriction of number of choice and plans offered in states, in states like mine you have a lot of counties where they're only down to one to two insurers in huge parts of the country, if republicans pass a plan that says it's going to solve the problems and they aren't solved that's a second way to lose. >> rose: do you think the president understands healthcare? >> it's hard to figure out how he would talk about healthcare if he had to give you any to have the policy details. obviously, he wasn't elected on an agenda where the american people were expecting him to be

bill clinton or barack obama level wonky but it's difficult to know what the president would be on healthcare reform. >> rose: why did you write this book? >> i believe we have kids stranded in perpetual adolescents. adolescents is a gift that if you live in a part of the world that isn't war-torn, you've kind of got this greenhouse phase of life where from 18 months to four years, you hit puberty and you're biologically an adult and we don't push you out of the nest, you have to be a fully independent adult, emotionally, economically, morally in terms of school leaving, household structure, you don't have to be a full adult right away, we transition you, that's great but it's a bad thing if it's a destination and right now we for a whole bunch of reasons largely because of our place and time in economic history we have a lot of students stranded in

neverland. >> rose: living at home meaning. >> meaning it's hard to distinguish 10-year-olds from 15-year-olds from 25-year-olds from 35-year-olds. that's new in human history. this is not an old man screaming get off my lawn. this is a constructive book, not a blame laying book. if i were going to lay blame, i'm not beating unmillennials, i'm beating up us parents. >> rose: because we did not. i think we have not done a good job of celebrating scar tissue with our kids. >> rose: celebrating the joy of trying. >> yes, yeah. scabs are okay. >> rose: yeah. stitches are okay. >> rose: yeah, exactly. and our kids are living at the riches time and place in all of human history and somehow rev drifted to this cultural assumption that the way to love your kids is to protect them from those hard experiences, to protect them from work, and i think parents who love their kids and think about it a lot, i think there's a burgeoning movement of parents in the country who are really worried

about the way we're raising our kids is that because of what it's doing to the kids. >> yeah, it's not good tore the kids to be in this protected cacoon, but it's certainly not good for a republic either. we need these kids to ultimately become the leaders of the country and they're going to go through job disruption when they're 40 and 45 and 50 in ways never happened before in human history they will have to be resilient. >> rose: because? we live in a weird time in economic history. i think there are four stages of economic history. hunter tbat rears, agriculture, industrialization and this thing which we don't know what to call it? some call information age. >> sociologists are throwing in the towel. it could be the mobile economy, the i.t. economy, the digital economy. sociologists are calling post-industrial which is another way of saying after the last thing. >> rose: exactly. like post-modern architecture. >> we didn't call industrialization deagriculturization. we didn't call it post-agriculture. we ultimately figured out the big tool economy was a pull and technological substitution and

agriculture was a push and it created a new world. this thing, we don't know what the pull will be to yet but it's not true industrial jobs are coming back. >> rose: the problems you've described and the solution that you recommend, does that have anything to do with politics? >> no, this book is 100% not about politics. >> rose: not democrat or republican. >> yeah, sure. >> rose: i mean the idea this has to do with a political solution? >> no, buttates a tiny bit policy oriented but definitely is not political in the sense you could pass one piece of legislation and you can fix this. it's about cultural issues well upstream from politics but certainly concerned with the american experiment. >> rose: what are the cultural issues? >> i think america was founded on the idea, sort of a toke vilian understanding of where happiness comes from. and people's lives are ultimately rooted in their jobs, they're rooted in their families. >> rose: it's always love and work isn't it. >> it is love and work. when i say it's not about politics, what i mean is there

is no power solution to this, it's ultimately about our appetites and our affections and our loves and right now we're raising a generation of kids that are becoming more and more passive. there really is a belief that somehow going to the top of a mountain on your friend's instagram might be an adequate substitute for going to top of a real mountain. >> rose: with your friend. yeah. >> rose: do we have enough toafd know what the impact is? >> no, i don't think we do. the declining sense of work experience in your teen years is brand new, right. i'll give you an anecdote. i became a college president at age 37. when i got there, i didn't think of myself as much older than the students. i'm historian by training but named as a college president because i'm a crisis and turnaround guy by business and work history. nobody thought they were calling me to this college because i knew student life or student

culture is that they had a problem they wanted you to fix. >> a 130-year-old college that went bankrupt, forgot how to student recruit, had tenured faculty in departments with no students, growth potential in departments with where they didn't have tenured fac diand couldn't add cost. the thing that kept me awake is seeing the passivity of the student culture. we had a big athletic arena. in thanksgiving of 2009, a bunch of students are supposed to decorate a 20-foot christmas tree in the lobby entrance to the athletic arena and they decorated the bottom eight feet of the tree and spent all the decorations in the bottom eight feet and were walking away. these were party -- hardy and vital kids. these are good jobs on campus and the vice president for development walked by and said what are you guys doing? why did you only decorate the bottom half of the tree? they said, we didn't know how to

get higher. she asked, did maintenance refuse to bring you a ladder? they didn't think about that. they organized the task, spent all the decorations and were going to leave. we had anecdote after anecdote like that and look at the data and turns out for the first time in human history our teens and twenty-somethings have never worked before college. i had only 2k3wr5d waited from the same ag manufacturing farm town 20 years later and when i went away to college not a single kid in my town whether they went to college after high school or went straight into the work world, none of us had ever not worked. the segregation of work from home is pretty new. the direct causal impact on the impassivity of the students, hard to tell. >> rose: my father would be on your side to a large degree. he had a country store. i literally started working when i was, like, eight.

part of it is it was a family thing. he liked the family being together. my mother worked as well. but i had responsibilities. lf-reliance, that kind ofity, thing. you talk about we lost the culture of self-reliance. >> right, and the intergenerational point is critical. if you brought somebody from 300 or 3,000 years ago and dropped them into modern american teenage life, obviously the first thing that would -- >> rose: is this less true in small towns, farming communities, that kind of thing? >> i think it's a little bit less true because work is more closely connected to home in the farm towns. where i live an hour outside of omaha, we still bus a lot of kids out in the summer to the corn fields. but if you live in exushia today where do your kids work? we parents need to plan how to get our kids work experiences. it feels artificial but it's a challenge.

>> rose: how do you fix this? i think we need to pay attention to the habits that should define coming of age. it's more than progression years through school. you need experiences, work exposure, you need to become a literary traveler. aerica depends on a literate populous and right now our data shows our people are reading less than before. average american reads 19 minutes a day. t skews with age -- it skews with age. >> rose: what are they doing? a lot is passive digital addiction. if you look at porn consumption rates in the last 12 years are spiking off the charts, video game consumption, 18-year-old to 24-year-old males about 40% of them spend half their waking hours playing video games. that's not the same thing as actually going out and conquering and hunting. >> rose: is america going to lose its greatness?

>> if we don't tackle this, we will. i think we'll succeed at tackling it. the analog -- >> rose: analog versus digital? >> the analogy to this promote is industrialization. when you had mass immigration across the seas and country size, so urbanization, industrialization, immigration from 1870 to 1920, creating a new kind of economy. attend of the civil war, 86% of americans still lived and worked on the farm. by world war ii, 60% of us lived and worked in cities. when that happened, many people, republican, teddy roosevelt, democrat rood woe wilson said america can't go on. we need a rule of experts because you can't have a toke vilian theory of the city, a culture of virtue in the cities because there is too much anonymity. they were wrong. turned out the social capital, the dense networks, the

neighborliness of the village is re-created in urban, ethic neighborhoods. we're going through a transformation from the industrial economy and the cities to post-industrial economy in the mobile, digital, suburban, exurban suburbs. we haven't figured out what neighborliness and human capital looks like. we have a crisis of loneliness in the country. social media says it replaces human relationships. it can't. it can supplement them. >> rose: a crisis of loneliness. >> let's define friendship -- people who feel pleasure when you're happy, pain when you hurt. i don't choose to be sad when my kids hurt,eth because i love them. the average american had 3.4 friends in 1990. the average american has 1.8 friends today. a having of deep relationships

in -- a halving of deep relationships in two and a half decades. 40% of adults have no one to confide in big and important. >> rose: these are parallel problems. one hand, you talk about the the vanishing american adult. now you're talking about another big problem we have which is the idea of loneliness. it has nothing to do with this. >> i think it does. i think the hollowing out of mediating institutions is directly connected to both of these. i think social capital rides on top of work. work is a core anchor of human identity. work is not just about how to put bread on the taicialtion obviously it's critically important for that. but it's about dignity, being needed and having a place in the world. >> rose: it really is. people who really like not having a job are crazy. it is such an assault on your dignity. >> right. the least happy people on earth are lottery winners, according to sociological data. >> rose: because they have no

need to work. >> a massively expanded denominator of potential consumption and the numerator how much they fill up but earned success and producing something they're almost irrelevant to being able to meet their own needs and leaves them feeling hole-and empty. we have forgotten work and vocation -- >> rose: are you suggesting in some way this is an answer -- if we listen to you and change, it therefore becomes an answer to some of our political problems. >> i think so. i think our political dysfunction is well downstream from this hollowing out of local community and mediating institutions and family structural breakdown. i think most americans are not politically polarized. people who are consume ago lot of media, elite media, we know a world of hyperpolitical partisan polarization, right, but most people aren't doing that. most people are checking out. but there is a sense that, once you hollow out the local, then there's more tribal at the

national, and we project grand hopes and dreams and meaning and good and evil. these two litticle parties are too boring to carry anybody's hopes and dreams. the people i work with, we can't solve these problems. >> rose: how do you think president trump did on his trip through the middle east? and now on to brussels an italy and now one last stop? >> i think the dividends of it will take time to analyze, but i want to affirm his attempt to try to bring some of the sunni arab nations into a conversation. i think we lived 28 years since the end of the cold war. we still don't have a national security strategy for the age of cyber and jihad. we still think peace all the way to 1989 we think of global peace

and instability will be the ungoverned places around the globe. these al queda-taliban distinctions, taliban didn't attack us but ran such a horrible nation there were all the ungoverned spaces that allowed entities like al quaida to plot and global reach, we'll have more of that going forward and cyber will exacerbate those problems. we need america's allies to know we keep our word and can trust us. iran is trying to undermine many nations in the middle east and creates more ungoverned space and it would be useful for us to have a pan-sunni-arab alliance. >> rose: you're in favor of what the president did because of why the president said he did it. he wants to build an alines in the neeldz and isolate iran. >> i think we should isolate iran. >> rose: this is the best way

to do it? >> i don't know how it plays out for the president when he hasn't had a coherent foreign policy in the transition. it's getting more coherent. the american people should take comfort from the fact general mcmaster is his national security advisor. he can build a policy process that actually enables real decision-making by a lot of the impressive folks in the administration. jim mattis is one of the most impressive people in the pentagon in half a century and jim mattis wants to build a relationship with state and secretary tillerson which is unlike usually happens in most administrations. usually you have state and defense at bureaucratic loggerheads. in this case, there's some impressive stuff happening but i think the fruit will be well in the future. we'll need to actually sound a consistent note for months on end. >> rose: you write questions about this president when he was a candidate. in the end, how has he failed and why has he failed if he has failed? >> well, i think that everybody in public life has an obligation to see themselves as a civics

teacher as darn near the heart of their calling, and we have 41% of americans under age 35 telling pollsters now that they think the first amendment is dangerous. you might use your free speech to say something to hurt somebody else's feelings. that's america, that we protect each other's right to be wrong. the most important thing we think is heart, love, volunteerism, local comiewrnghts and government and politics exist to provide a framework pore ordered liberty, not to solve every problem, and i don't think now the president spends a lot of time thinking about five and ten years from now what will we have done to rebuild public trust and to help young people understand the first amendment, how can we celebrate the freedum of press, speech, religion, assembly so the first amendment is the beating heart of america? and right now the tendency for these two parties to act like either of them have ideas that are interesting enough, if you could just vanquish the other

party from the field, that then you would be able to advance your great policy agenda -- and i say this as one of the most conservative guys in the senate by voting record, but i view the things we're voting on as a continuum from here to here, and the things we should be voting on are much larger policy and above that there needs to be a shared american narrative -- >> rose: did that kind of creativity exist in the political class we have running the country? >> not today. >> rose: so you're basically saying the leaders we have today are not capable of providing the solutions that are necessary? >> i don't think anybody would accuse washington, d.c. of being too focus opened the long term right now. i think we have about two-thirds of the folks serving in the congress, their biggest long-term thought is their own encouplesy. we have generational challenges before us, some about the nature of work, some about cyber war fair. a whole bunch about basic civic understanding. >> rose: with the impact of technology, one to have the basic questions we have to understand is in terms of the people who will be displaced and is it a government solution or a

realization that we have to change our sense of what a quality life means. >> yeah. great question. i'm not in favor of a universal basic income as a solution but i want that to be debated because that's a big idea that helps -- larry summers talks ability we have 7.2 billion on the earth, 9 billion by 2050, yet we'll probably go in needing 4.5 billion workers to 4 to 3.5 to 3 to 2.5 billion workers. a that's fundamentally about dignity and meaning and hope. the opioid crisis is at the center of a lot of hopelessness in our economy and those problems will only get bigger and we're not debating the big truck strral problems yet. >> rose: thank you for coming. ben sasse. "the vanishing american adult: our coming-of-age crisis - and how to rebuild a culture of self-reliance" thank you for joining us. see you next time. fofor more about this program ad

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special edition of "kqed newsroom" about bay area innovateers. from silicon valley tech giants to world class research universities, the bay area is home to big thinkers and ground breaking technology. today we will hear from engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who are creating new products to help solve products here and around the world. one is helping get interest free loans while building up credit. two young women are helping girls get excited about engineering through toys that spark the imagination. another bay area entrepreneur is hoping technology will help get