1 American Enterprise Institute Web Event — Personal Agency and The

American Enterprise Institute Web event — Personal agency and the promise of the American dream Discussion: John Calipari, Head Coach of Men’s Basketball, University of Kentucky Ian Rowe, Resident Fellow, AEI 11:00 a.m.–12:00 p.m. Monday, September 14, 2020 Event page: https://www.aei.org/events/personal-agency-and-the-promise-of- the-american-dream/ 1 Ian Rowe: Good morning. My name is Ian Rowe. I’m a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and much of my work focuses on ensuring the next generation of young people learns how to become agents of their own uplift. So a lot of my focus — the themes that I really hone in on are upward mobility, education, entrepreneurship, strong families. And so I’m really pleased this morning that we are going to talk about “Personal agency and the promise of the American dream.” And I’m really excited that I get to engage with someone who’s legendary in the college basketball world, John Calipari, but most folks know him as Coach Cal. Coach, welcome. Thank you for joining us. John Calipari: Thanks, Ian, and it’s a pleasure to be here. Ian Rowe: Yeah. Well, for about 30 years, you’ve been what many people call a player’s first coach. You’re in the Hall of Fame. You’ve been to the Final Four. Six times, you took University of Kentucky to a national championship. You got nearly 50 players in the NBA draft. But what I really loved about reading your bio is how much you really focus on your young people, your young men — focus on academics, developing grit, the ability to visualize their future. And it really seems that those concepts are very important now, at a time when a lot of young people might be thinking the American dream isn’t really within their grasp. And so as we start this conversation about personal agency and the promise of the American dream, it’d be helpful to hear just how do you define the American dream? And what is it that you tell your players they need to do in order to achieve it? John Calipari: Well, let me first of all, Ian, tell you that I was fired by the New Jersey Nets. So, you do talk about the climb is never one step, next step, next step. There’s always stuff that’s going to happen. And then how you approach failure and how you approach those things have as much to do with your success as having success, because I’ll say this to all that fate intervenes at times. Some people have an advantage. OK. They do. There are others that I say fate intervenes in a bad way. Medically, there are things — I have a friend who just, all of a sudden, he’s sick, and you’re like, “Wait a minute. What did he do? He didn’t do anything to deserve it.” Ian Rowe: Right. John Calipari: Yeah. I mean, so it’s that. But when you talk about the American dream that I had — my mother was a dreamer, and she would tell me, “Always dream beyond the surroundings. You’re not responsible for the surroundings. You can be whatever you want. You go get what you want in this life and in this world.” The other one was, “Nothing is given to you, and if it’s given, it’s probably not worth a whole lot. You have to earn what you want.” But the biggest thing was “Dream beyond your surroundings.” So I never felt that this is who I am. This is where I live, and this is where I was born. That came from my mother. My mother, she died in November of 2010, but she always thought I was going to be president of the United States. And I would laugh. She said, “When are you going to run?” That was her way of telling me, “You can be what you want to be.” So, you know, when you talk about my job with my players and my sense of the responsibility I have to do my job and do it well, is that I’m walking into homes where the hope and aspirations for a family a lot of times lived through that child. And you find out that 2 those families, sometimes it’s a mother. Sometimes the strongest is a grandmother. They only have the same hopes and aspirations that my family had for me, which is I want — my parents, “We want better for you than what — that we were able to do.” My parents were high school educated. They weren’t college educated. So they wanted all of us to get a college degree. So when you look at our players, one of the things I asked them at a young age, “What’s your why? What’s your why? Why do you want to do this? Tell me what’s going to move you? What gets you up in the morning? What is it?” Most cases for my kids it would be they want to have a better life for their family. They want to be able to get mother in a better place, get their family, their father. They want to make sure that they take care of their family, and it’s their why. It’s what moves them. It’s what wakes you up. And I would say to everybody listening, “What’s your why? Tell me what moves you. What is going to make you do what you’re doing to the level you’re going to have to do it to?” I’m going to say this: I’m always impressed with people born outside the stadium that get home. The guy born on third base, you know, there’s a buck, and the guy gets home, and he thinks he hit a home run. Dude, you were on third base. The pitcher blocked, and you got home. The guy outside the stadium has got to figure out, “How do I get in the stadium? Because I got to get to the dugout, but I got to get in the stadium first. How do I do that? Doors are shut. Well, I can stop. I can make you — or I keep fighting. How am I going to do this? And then when I get into the dugout, I got to create a niche for me. I got to create my space within a team. I’ve got to take basically what I want, but within a team to get up to bat to get a chance to hit a home run to get home.” That’s the person that I respect the most. Ian Rowe: Yeah. For the last decade, I’ve been running a network of public charter schools right in the heart of the South Bronx in Lower East Side of Manhattan. I agree with you. All of our families, they have the same aspirations for their children. I have for my own beautiful two children, right? But, you know, they see obstacles. And so where does it come from because people don’t just pull themselves up by the bootstrap, right? That’s the proverbial response. So, that doesn’t happen. So, where does it come from? How do you cultivate that within a young person, to look all around them and say, “You know what? This doesn’t have to be my reality,” which, by the way, doesn’t mean they have to leave their community, but they want — John Calipari: It’s a bridge, Ian. It’s a bridge that they can know they can walk both ways, but it’s a bridge that means you can be here, but you can be there, and you can come back here, and you can come back. So, it is not just leaving. It means — my mother’s point was, “This isn’t you. This is where you were born. This is where you live now, where you want to be.” And again, my hope is many why — the whys on here are because I want to make a difference in my community. I want to start a KIPP program, a private school. I want to do something back, but that’s what’s moving me to be special, which will wake me up. I didn’t mean to interrupt, but it’s kind of when I get a thought, I got to go because as I get older, I start forgetting stuff. All right. And let me say this. Ian, if I say the same thing twice, say, “Coach, you already told that story.” Ian Rowe: No, it’s all right. I’ll zap you around a few times. So, you know, the odds for many of your students of actually getting to the NBA, you know, are pretty small, right, just 3 to be totally upfront about that. So I presume a lot come with those aspirations to play in the NBA someday. So how do you balance that very vibrant aspiration and the fact that many of them actually have the talent to do it, but to know that that may not be the ultimate thing? So how do they prepare to still lead a fulfilling life even if that singular aspiration may not be the most realistic? John Calipari: All right. So, we’re going to go back to my UMass days. So, I coached at the University of Massachusetts.

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