HEFFNER: I am Alexander Heffner, your host on The Open Mind.

I'm delighted to welcome to our broadcast today, a fellow PA, Phillips Academy Andover alum and my friend David McCullough, the third.

Welcome, David.

MCCULLOUGH: Great to be here in Go Big Blue.

HEFFNER: Go Big blue.

Always a distinct honor to welcome another person from Andover.

David, you are the founder of a really important organization called the American Exchange Project.

For our viewers unfamiliar, what is the initiative?

MCCULLOUGH: So, in short, the American Exchange Project is a first of its kind free domestic exchange program.

We send kids to spend a week in the summer after they graduate on a free trip to an American hometown that is totally different from the one that they're growing.

And the whole idea is to see another side of the country and to get to know the people in it.

And the places those people call home.

HEFFNER: Graduates from high school or college?

MCCULLOUGH: Sorry, high school.

HEFFNER: Well, when I first learned about the project, it made sense that you were an Andover alum and that you wanted to give young people the diverse body of experience, the cross section of America.

Now your project is particularly inspired by the object to reduce polarization in those homogeneously red, conservative or blue liberal district states, populations, that that's what inspired you.

MCCULLOUGH: Yeah.

And in many ways, it began as a kind of research project into what social innovation can scale up right now and bring our country back together again.

You know, I'm a great lover of history.

Come from a line of historians, and there's a trend in American history of innovations, social innovations, meeting the moment to fix a problem, and kind of creating a sort of rising tide that can lift all boats in society.

Think of public libraries at the end of the 19th century, turn of the 20th century, when illiteracy was on high, as was inequality, public libraries.

Andrew Carnegie built over 2000 public libraries across the country.

Literacy went up, inequality went down.

We were trying to find something like that.

It was me and a group of my founders, Paul Solman from the PBS NewsHour, Bob Glauber from Harvard, Robert Putnam, also from Harvard Ali host Shield, Akhil Amar from Yale, and leaders of military business.

I was the kid, kind of coordinating this project.

And we realized that across the country, kids were complaining about one common problem.

I feel like I'm growing up in a bubble, and I've never seen life outside the bubble.

And they feel like they're growing up in bubbles because they are.

So I'd encourage you to read Bill Bishop's great book, the Big Sort, which is talking about how Americans are sorting themselves into communities of people of like-minded people.

And so lifestyle informs politics.

Politics informs lifestyle.

And that was written in 2008.

It's only worse now.

And so when I when you say that we are focused on deeply red and deeply blue areas, well, ironically, the whole country is becoming more and more what it already is, if that makes sense.

So these are not just pockets of America.

This is really the whole thing.

HEFFNER: Young people, correct me if I'm wrong, are not taught from an early age, you have to see all this country.

They might sing about from sea to shining sea, but that's not consider part of the definition of being American.

And I would like to see that changed.

And I think your project is inspiring that philosophy.

It's not good enough just to sing the national anthem.

You have to experience America, at least from the other side of the shoe as you see it from urban life, if you're from rural America, or vice versa.

But your project is using certain modes of learning for these young people to try to engage them in imagining a more constructive future for themselves and cultivating leadership qualities that are not present today.

So counteracting the divisiveness.

My idea of this was a meal with an elected official and spending hours with them doing some of their favorite activities.

In the process, talking about their biography, talking about public policy challenges that we can approach from a bipartisan perspective.

What are the tactics that you are deploying in the programmatic piece of these recent high school alums going to new parts of the country and seeing if they can learn about their fellow American and not just learn about them, but help better their lives too.

MCCULLOUGH: The power of an EP experience draws from what I think are two very deep emotional reservoirs that are within all of us.

The first is the desire to adventure, to see what's around the corner.

And our country is enormous.

In fact, I kind of say we have a country that's almost the size of a continent.

Most of our states are bigger than most countries.

My wife and I have relocated to Utah here for the winter.

We're having a ball.

And you know, we can drive for four hours in every direction and still be in Utah.

That's extraordinary.

The second thing is the desire to welcome home.

The desire to go home, to welcome the stranger, to be proud of your hometown and proud of where you're from.

So our trips are focused on students going to places that are very different from their own.

So a kid from Boston goes to a place like Muskogee, Oklahoma, let's say, or Dodge City, Kansas.

And while they're there, they do all the things that kids growing up in Muskogee do.

Um, and it's one might call cultural immersion or community events and activities.

Uh, they meet local professionals.

They spend a day volunteering and serving, working on a problem in the community.

All the while they're hanging out with people their age from the community and from all over the country who are also traveling to the community with them and becoming friends.

Learning more about having fun telling stories.

And the hope is that it'll build social bonds that humanize people that they previously defined by stereotype.

And that notion of stereotype and prejudice is really what's driving polarization right now.

There is in this country what is becoming to be known as the perception gap.

In other words, we understand people who are different from us less than we think we do.

And it's stereotypes that fill in the inaccurate perceptions of the other.

In other words, most Americans or Democrats think things about Republicans that just aren't true.

Most Republicans think things about Democrats that just aren't true.

Rich people, poor people, white and black.

I believe that's because there's a serious deficit in this country of social connection.

Three quarters of white Americans don't have a friend who's not white.

40% have never met a farmer.

I think we're pushing each other away.

I think we don't like each other because we don't know each other.

And until we start creating relationships across these lines of difference, we're really going to have a very difficult time finding common ground and building the kind of, I was born in Hawaii, so I use this word, but building that kind of mutual aloha for one another, that we need to have a thriving civil society.

And so AEP is built on creating experiences and drawing from that, uh, those notions of adventure and those notions of welcoming home.

You know, we work with host families, we work with teachers and communities who run trips.

And there is nothing more powerful than the kind of scared, vulnerable kid traveling to a far away place that they think they might get pushed away and are cast aside.

And to be welcomed by a loving parent into a home where there's a bed and a shower towel and a hot meal waiting for you on the table.

And very quickly, this person who is just another person who becomes Mississippi mom or your New York dad.

And, and on the last night when the kids say goodbye, that the tears that are being shed or are being shed because of that affirmation of humanity that was shown when someone who you previously defined by stereotypes or you thought of under the range of prejudice became someone who took care of you and to your friend.

I went on a road trip like this when I was in college.

And let's see, seven years later, three of the friends I made on that road trip were sitting in the third row at our wedding last August.

HEFFNER: Well, you make a compelling case that the human connection is absent.

You didn't even have to say that technology has been an antisocial, destructive force in our lives, but that is the- MCCULLOUGH: Oh, it's amazing.

I mean, the average kid spends nine hours a day on a screen.

If you made a string out of all the feet of social media that the average teenager scrolled through in a day, it would be taller than the Statue of Liberty.

And it drives me nuts that we're encouraging kids onto screens, but we're not encouraging them to adventure and see the country that they're growing.

HEFFNER: Well, look, there was a way that we could have set up digital technologies to facilitate the culture of compassion.

That eliminated from pen pals.

There, there, there was no reason that the internet had to be a destructive force, or as we're viewing it devolved today, that being the case, maybe we have to scrutinize what you said a little bit more closely.

Because let's say it's not just technology, right?

Technology could have been a normative net plus.

as opposed to minus.

So I will stipulate everything you said, I believe it so to my core and I admire what you're doing.

Take us to the next step of that understanding, because I've been in conversations with people who affirm and nod their head when you submit to them my dear friends from a different geography are as humane or as honest, are as forthright or as ethical.

And yet the end of those exchanges, the sense I get is we will go back to our cubby holes, that we will go back into these ideological silos, in that demonstrating the basic decency of a fellow American from another state is not good enough that just not going to fix the problem at the end of the day.

However, what might fix the problem is the graduates of your program demonstrating that there's not just an awareness, but an aptitude for substantive bridge building that is equates to problem solving.

MCCULLOUGH: Absolutely.

And really what AEP is trying to do is create a critical first step, understanding that there's a lot that needs to be done after.

So the hope is that the hope, really what we see on the program is that these relationships become the basis for conversation that help us realize the common ground that we share.

And those realizations about what we agree on and what we share in common are realizations that young people take with them to the ballot box.

They take with them to the workplace.

They take with them to what they choose to do for work.

They take with it, take it with them when they go into the economy where they spend their money, and they take it with them when they choose where to get their news, who to look up to, who to read, what views to dive into, who to interact with, it informs the rest of your life.

And I believe that that sea change is really what we need to get our society back on track again and more unified.

There are many, many polarizing agents.

You're right.

Social media technology generally, it's just a tool.

And right now we're using it to further and polarize our country, but it could very easily be done another way.

In fact, we see that at AEP where suddenly students who are in the program and have friended six kids from a rural part of America or from the city that they went to see very different things on their social media feeds and on their Instagram feeds, and they saw them before they left.

And so suddenly, every time they go on Instagram, they're introduced to the other world of America and what the people are doing there and where that they've never seen it.

HEFFNER: So let me ask you, tangibly speaking.

As I said, I just returned from my 50th state, it was Alabama [inaudible] but in the talk that I gave at the university, my basic thesis was that civil society can only be preserved if we have some cohesive or collective understanding of life, liberty, and happiness.

So at the very root is clean water and clean air.

If you come from a place where there were carcinogens in the stream, or the air was chemically polluted, you understand this firsthand.

In the same way, if you're a native New Yorker and you lived in or around New York City or have loved ones who were lost to 9/11, that's impactful.

Likewise, the pandemic and the absence of preventative measures and adherence to vaccinations or mask wearing or other protocols that would mitigate fatality.

So at the very base of what Gen Z can stir up in us or Millennials like you and me, working with Gen Z, it's this paradigm shift that we can elect officeholders to preserve some fundamental values, and clean water and air being something that we in New Mexico, New York, and Utah, and Alabama, and the other 46 states, Hawaii, your birth state, all we can agree on that.

And I think the trouble is that young people are not imagining that paradigm where we build up.

All politics is local and also all change has to be rooted from bottom.

In some sense, I don't see where this paradigm change is going to be actualized.

Right.

This idea that like, we're going to find consensus on the most basic principles and like throw everything else out, the old clichéd ideas of what you ought to stand for as a conservative or liberal.

And instead, start with some collective goods that are not conservative or liberal, that are hopefully not authoritarian or autocratic, but that come from a deep human connection to each other.

MCCULLOUGH: Yeah.

I totally agree.

My concern, my sad reality is that that's really not the direction that things are going.

The today's seniors in high school were nine and 10 years old when Donald Trump was elected president.

So this era of politics, this political reality, we've been facing this way of talking politics, this culture around divisive issues, values, what it means to be a Democrat and a Republican.

What it means to be an American for young people is all they've ever known.

And so those parts of their psychology that exist in all of us that understand how to navigate nuance and how to understand how to talk across difference, how to appreciate gray area, know that few issues in life are black and white.

There is such a “with me or against me ” certainty in the way we talk about the things we believe in today that is totally toxic.

Those I believe innate muscles in the young person's psychology are completely unexercised.

So our program is designed to be a form of therapy for that in a way, without ever saying it, without marketing it that way, where it's so immersive that they're able to talk across lines of difference and understand, oh, we actually agree on clean air, we actually agree on clean water.

We might differ on whose fault it's.

But not only will we start saying that this is something we can do today.

This is something, these are people vote, candidates we can vote on, but these are companies that we can, we can spend our money with.

These are products we can buy that come from companies that support those measures.

And it's why in our exit surveys from the program, one of the areas we have the greatest impact every year is seeing kids say, I have, I'm optimistic for the future of America, and I have greater faith in my fellow Americans.

And it's because of the things they realize.

We share.

When I asked our kids last year what their biggest takeaway was from the program, they said that we're all the same, but different.

And I love to hear that because imagine taking that approach to every person you meet and imagine what the conversations you're going to take away from, you're going to search for those areas of commonality, those things we can agree on.

And so when it comes to asking yourself the question, okay, how do we make our country better?

How do I make my community better?

How do I improve my state?

You're going to start to think about those things we agree on, and you're going to start to think about people that you may have not thought about before.

And I think the average teenager today is pretty apathetic about democracy.

And it's not that they have the ones I've met.

It's not that they have negative opinions about quote unquote the other.

It's this, they really don't think about it.

We brought a kid out of the the Bronx, it's a great story, two years ago to Gloucester, Massachusetts fishing town up on the north of Boston.

And I said, what do you think?

He said, what do you mean?

I said what do you think about Gloucester?

He said, I never thought about Gloucester before.

I said, really?

See that I'm surprised that there are people here.

I said, what do you mean you're surprised that there are people here?

And the student said, well, you know, I live in New York.

I kind of thought that the whole world was New York, and then there were some people in Connecticut and the rest was just trees.

And I think we kind of operate that way when it comes to thinking about the greater country.

And we don't imagine that the people out there would ever agree with us.

HEFFNER: Well said.

Yeah.

I think the best recipe for that is what you're doing to open minds, to see the breadth of the country.

I'm both disheartened by your first comment, but then inspired by the second comment and anecdote, when you say that Americans, you suggest young people are apathetic about democracy, and maybe older Americans, 30 plus are numb, by or from democracy.

It's really dangerous territory to be in.

Because if you are both apathetic and numb simultaneously, you're not going to invest in the future functionality, effectiveness, merit of this form of government, and you're going to let other people choose for you, choose values, choose your elected officials or not elected officials.

So, you know, for those people who want to sit it out, is there at least the beginning of an understanding that you start voluntarily sitting it out, but then it becomes involuntary?

MCCULLOUGH: It's scary and in my view, totally un-American, self-reliance, individualism thinking for yourself is our characteristics as old as the country.

In fact, when, you know, Emerson Thoreau are kind of first national philosophers came to being, those were the ideas they were throwing around.

And so the idea of apathy, the idea of putting yourself on the sideline, the idea of just towing the party line without asking any questions, in my view, is truly antithetical to what will make our country better.

I don't have a particular agenda that I want our kids walking away with when they do our program.

I want them to be able to think for themselves.

I want them to be able to find the resources that they need to form their own opinions about things.

And I want them to treat people as individuals, not as parts of groups that they might stereotype.

And it's so easy today with all of the noise on television and online coming at you out of a screen to just pick whatever opinion feels nice to you, and then wear that like a hat everywhere you go.

But it's not really your own.

You're not really making yourself an informed citizen that way.

You're just taking somebody else's word.

That's just a very, very dangerous road for us to go down.

We're going down it pretty quickly.

HEFFNER: Right, right.

Well, you, you didn't exactly answer the question as to whether, call you out on this one, whether there is at least an awareness that what is voluntary apathy will become involuntary subjugation- MCCULLOUGH: Oh, yeah.

HEFFNER: Is that something that you find your 16, 17, 18-year-old students understanding before they take, do the program, and more broadly, I mean, do you think that that is a consensus of some part of the electorate?

Or is there just a rude awakening that the only way they will realize it, our fellow Americans, that it is involuntary is when autocracy has taken complete control?

MCCULLOUGH: Yeah.

No, in fact, I'd be shocked if the average 17-year-old, could use the words involuntary apathy and autocracy.

No, not at all.

I think they see leaders that they don't believe are worth believing in.

David, but here, here's what I want to say.

There are people of both parties that I've interviewed on my Bloomberg series, Breaking Bread, who are inspiring voices from Governor Gordon in Wyoming to Governor Moore in Maryland.

And the constant cliché, refrain is the people who would best serve our democratic interests do not run for office anymore.

So what is your parting wisdom to the 17-year-old and the 70-year-old watching this right now, saying, here we are again, having the media frame an election around unpopular candidates for president?

How do you change the narrative constructively in this 2024 presidential election year?

MCCULLOUGH: Begins with the individual.

The first thing I'd say to people is get off the couch and get involved.

Take, you know, and, and, and work for the future that you want to see, and find the leaders that you believe in.

Vote with your conscience.

Vote with your heart and your gut more than anything, and get to know other Americans.

Understand that maybe we don't know all the answers in the moment that we can extend beyond this and that good days are possible, but we got to work hard.

And it starts with all of us, starts with the individual.

I do agree that there are lots of wonderful leaders out there, and I wish that they would run.

I wish that they would get more involved.

So the other thing I would say is take up the challenge.

It's been very hard starting a nonprofit during the pandemic.

I'm not saying that what we're doing is that that much, on that level necessarily, but take up the challenge because it's the only fight worth fighting right now.

HEFFNER: Fair enough.

And one parting piece of information from me, and we'll talk about this more when we're over, because we're getting off our couches and talking and meeting up.

The thing that unites that 17-year-old and 70-year-old in a capitalistic system is currency.

And you think that your vote doesn't matter?

Well, why don't you take the time to ensure that your taxpayer dollars are serving the interests of your community?

You know, the most active expression of our democracy is not voting right.

More people pay their taxes than vote.

Right.

And as a result of that you would think there would be really some engagement in understanding where the dollars go.

So, you know, at the very worst in a tyrannical system, you're not only going to lose your vote, you're going to lose your wallet, you're going to lose your capacity to make free determination at the ballot box and on Amazon.com.

So if you want all that autonomy to be erased, then be apathetic.

But if you want to care about how your tax dollars are serving the interests of your community, then demand that every tax year, that 17-year-old paying taxes for the first time, or that 70-year-old is seeing a pie chart of where those funds are going, it's a point that I just hone and hone and hone because I can't emphasize enough, that it matters.

If you want to uplift the morale of people and engage them in decision making about their communities.

So I would just conclude, David, by saying to your next generation of students, this summer, vote if you want to just be able to decide what, where your funds are going in the future.

MCCULLOUGH: Yeah.

And I would also say, I would add, do the research, learn where the money's going, learn what taxes passed, learn what people's policies are.

As you said, I think two people are out of apathy, not thinking very much about the things that they're doing or the money that they're spending in their spending.

HEFFNER: David McCullough III, thank you for founding the American Exchange Project.

For our viewers and listeners, visit David's work at the American Exchange Project's website.

Thank you for your time today, sir.

MCCULLOUGH: Thanks for having me, Alex.

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