Thank you. Thanks. Thank you guys. Thank you. Sit here?
Yeah.
Great. Great to see you all. I think the last time I was in here was the night before the inauguration, we had a dinner in here and it was so tightly packed that you actually couldn't get up to go to the bathroom or get, you know -- like request an additional glass of water. That's how tightly packed we were in here and you guys are doing pretty good actually.
Maybe not that tight, but, you know, comfortable, but you're doing good.
Tastefully packed.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, happy medium.
Before you like say whatever introductory thing you were going to say, I'm sure Oren has a spiel, Oren always has a spiel. But I just want to say thanks to Secretary Rubio for the very kind words of introduction. So, um, Marco -- I was very fond of him as a Senate colleague, but, you know, you learn a lot about somebody when you see them actually operate behind the scenes.
And Marco is, if anything, more impressive privately than he is publicly, which is very hard to do. But he's very thoughtful. He actually listens, which is a rare skill in politics. We're very good at talking, us politicians, we're not so good, often, at listening. He's just a very, very important part of what the president and I are trying to do and so thrilled to have him here.
And as you know, I think one of the first times I ever met -- maybe the first time I ever met Marco was in a conference room in his Senate office with Mike Needham and Oren Cass talking about some of the very things we're talking about here tonight. And some of the very things American Compass is focusing on. So, it's kind of amazing to see it come full circle to where we are today.
Well, that's a perfect segue into my spiel. So, thank you.
Great.
That's -- I had a few different spiels we could start with, but this is a good one. Um, we are thrilled to have you here. I am thrilled to have this opportunity to talk with you and so grateful that the work you're doing and, in a sense, so in awe of it, because there are politicians out there who are -- they've just been politicians, but you are someone who was an intellectual first.
Some people don't like the word intellectual. But I mean it in the good sense of the term. You were writing for National Review. You were at the bar late at night arguing about and helping shape these ideas that you are now.
I come here for free and you insult me and you call me an intellectual. Remind me that I wrote for National Review, what an asshole this guy is. [Laughter]
That's fair. I will admit that I too wrote for National Review. But as I said in my introductory remarks earlier, I have no higher compliment than this guy likes to argue. So, that is, uh -- it's a wonderful thing and I think it really distinguishes you as someone who not just cares about and believes in these ideas, but -- but has formed them.
Sure.
Sure, uh -- and so, you know, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the -- the substance of what's going on in few of these topics, but also ask a little bit about sort of how your thinking has gotten here and how being in the role you're in now affects that and what people who are not in that role -- need sort of need to understand to do it well.
And so let's -- let's start here on the substance though because, you know, obviously trade is in the news from time to time. Trade is, and I think you've articulated this well, trade is one element of what is a much broader project about reshoring reindustrialization. Um, I wanted to ask you how do you define that project?
What is the broader goal that -- that the -- that the trade agenda is part of, and where do you see it ultimately going if it's going to be successful?
Yeah, so first of all congrats. I see here on the screen, this is the five-year anniversary of American Compass. That's -- you guys have accomplished a lot in five years and I'm going to echo what Secretary Rubio said, keep doing it, because it really has influenced my thinking. It's influenced the thinking of multiple people within the administration.
And if I were to try to summarize the project, I mean I think there are a few different things going on. But maybe one thing that really worries me is you have, I think, in many ways stagnating living standards for normal Americans, for the median worker, for people who just want to start a family, work -- you know work in a decent job, earn a -- earn a living salary, and have dignified work.
I think you've seen so many evidence -- pieces of evidence of stagnation in the lives of the normal people that we serve, right, the people who actually go to work, who keep the country running. And there are different ways to -- to sort of measure this, but I think my favorite way of measuring it actually is probably you see stagnating productivity in this country for about 50 years.
Okay, and I think there are a whole host of reasons why you see that. I think number one, we've offshored a whole host of industries and so you see less innovation and a lot of the critical manufacturing sectors that actually drive the American economy. I think part of it is we've really underinvested in technology, especially in, you know, the heavily regulated spaces.
I think part of that is we've really harmed energy production in our own country. That's a critical part of, you know, the heavily regulated spaces actually doing well because the cost inputs of these industries are so heavily dependent on the price of energy. So, there are all these different policy spins that I could put on it, but I just want normal people who work hard and play by the rules to have a good life.
And I think that was very, very possible in the United States of America that I was growing up in. But you started to see some signs that it was fraying. And I think it's -- it got a lot worse over the course of the 90s and 2000s, and that has got to change. And I think that's fundamentally why Donald Trump is the President of the United States is because he was the first mainstream American politician to come along and say this isn't working.
These trade deals are not working for the normal people who power our economy. Our policies have not been productive either in the economic, national security or diplomatic space. So, it's complicated. The answer to the question is complicated. Summarizing it as necessarily very hard, but I think the best way to summarize it is we just want normal people to have a good life.
That seems reasonable.
Thank you.
There you have it folks. I think that's -- I think that's obviously exactly right. I think it's -- it's remarkable that that, is or has been, a heterodox view to some extent that it's something that has had to be said. Um, you know, especially after your book came out, uh, as you had a chance to talk with a lot of folks in a lot of different contexts than as you moved into, uh, running as a politician yourself.
You had a chance to speak both with the normal people for whom this was not working and for a lot of people who either thought it was working or didn't care.
Sure.
My own sense is there's actually more thought it was working than didn't care. Mostly are not bad people so much as oblivious, um, but I'm curious what -- what your experience has been engaging with those folks? But how would you describe -- what did they look out at America and see and what is helpful in communicating to them why this is a problem and why they need to care?
Yeah, so let me give you kind of an elite answer to that question and let me give you just a sort of normal political answer to the question. So, the elite answer to the question, I remember Oren talking to you about starting American Compass five years ago. And I think one of the things that we -- we talked about, I don't know if you remember this, but you know what is -- what is the audience of donors, because these things cost money, funding fellowships and smart people to write papers and think about this stuff like that, that costs resources.
Like what is the universe of donors who would actually support something like this. And I think my takeaway over the last five years is actually quite a bit and I think there's an assumption among whether you call it populists or whether you call it, you know, sort of trade hawks or whatever label you want to put on it, there's this assumption that donors are fundamentally misaligned and I actually think donors are much more pragmatic.
And they see this stuff, not necessarily because, you know, they're reading like a paper that Bob Lighthizer published 15 or 20 years ago. And I know Bob's in the audience and I love Bob, but because like they -- they do business in China and they know how hard it is to actually get a fair deal for their companies.
Or, you know, they've seen some of the ways in which -- You know, I met with an industry leader today who was talking about all of the ways in which trans shipping through non-Chinese Asian economies is destroying his very successful manufacturing business. And he's not worried about it for himself because his business is so successful, but he's worried about it for his industry writ large because some of his competitors are going to have their businesses destroyed.
He doesn't want that. So, there's a bit -- I think one thing to take away is that people are much less ideological and much more pragmatic than I think that a lot of intellectuals give them credit for. So, that's one thing I take away. I think the other thing that I take away from it is, um, the American people are much more aligned with our way of thinking about things than -- than people realize.
And I -- and I think the misalignment between the like, again, the normal American and the talking heads in Washington is still so profound. And I'll give you an example of this. One of the very first truly political speeches I gave when I was thinking about running for Senate in Ohio back in 2021, I spoke to this group in Butler County, Ohio.
It's actually the county that I was born and raised in, in southwestern Ohio, and I was talking about how you know big Tech was a major problem. Censorship of viewpoints was a major problem and we needed to get serious about antitrust and we need to get serious about actually treating these companies as the monopolists that they were.
And a person came up to me afterwards and they said, oh, I really liked what you said, but I didn't agree with what you said on Big Tech. And I sort of assumed that I was about to, you know, sort of hear a kind of libertarian argument from the pages of the National Review. And what the guy said is, I don't think that we should break these companies up. I think we should throw all of their executives in prison.
[Laughter] And I was like, oh. And it sort of dawned on me the -- the American people like they see these problems. They're not hyper ideological, they're not reading like conservative intellectual periodicals because they have day jobs and families to take care of, but they're much, much wiser about these things than intellectuals give them credit for.
And I take a lot of inspiration for that. But I also take a lot of willingness to kind of test the outer limits because most of our fellow Americans, they're not nearly as dumb as Washington, DC assumes that they are. They're actually very smart and they're very wise.
Yeah. It's -- it's funny, I was speaking to the American Iron and Steel Institute this morning about the idea that making things matters. And I was sharing a similar story because we've done survey research on, okay, do you think manufacturing matters or not?
Yeah.
Overwhelmingly people say yes. Yes, sure. But we actually asked them why. We gave them a bunch of options. Is this about family and community and good jobs? Is this about national security? Is this about sort of dynamism and investment and economic growth? I sort of figured it would be like, oh, it's about jobs, maybe security.
And Americans actually picked dynamism and growth as -- by a significant margin that was their top reason they cared. And that was across -- across political groups, that was across classes, less educated, more educated, high income, low income. And exactly to your point, I think it's just something we don't give people enough credit for.
I mean not only are they quite wise in this respect, they are so much wiser than the economists who -- who got this exactly wrong for so long. I was struck by the speech that you gave at the American Dynamism Conference, which I think touched on a lot of this because you -- you focused on what is on the one hand a potential, a real challenge in the new conservative coalition where on one hand you have the working class, you have labor.
On the other hand, you have technologists, folks who are very focused on innovation. And I think you made what is such a critical point, which is that these are not necessarily in conflict. Ultimately, success is defined by the extent to which we synthesize these things.
Yes.
I think conceptually in my mind that's -- that's absolutely right. In practice that can still be hard. I think there are a lot of places where you still see these collisions. Um, where do you see the biggest opportunity to actually bring these folks together to actually build on that idea and show that no, no, in fact you -- you do have the same interests.
There is a real opportunity to move forward here.
Well, I think that the -- it's interesting you mentioned the American dynamism speech because I do think that's actually where the synthesis is, right. That if you believe in growth and you believe that, you know, to -- to have any opportunity to make people's lives better, you actually need sustained GDP growth, then you actually need to have the kind of industries that can support broad based technological innovation.
And so, I think that really is the combination. Like why do I care so much about manufacturing, and why do I care so much about the kind of educational institutions we have to support those industries? It's because, yes, I care about workers and I care about their wages, but I do very much care about innovation, and I don't think you can have one without the other, right?
So -- so the classic way of -- of talking about this is to say, well, you know if you -- if you open up an iPhone and you look at the box, it will say designed in Cupertino, California, right? And of course the implication is that it's manufactured in Shenzhen. In reality, it's not necessarily even designed in Cupertino, California anymore.
It's increasingly designed in the place that's manufacturing it. This idea that we can separate the making of things from the innovating of things is I think totally farcical. You see this in pharmaceuticals in particular where I think the countries that are really good at manufacturing pharmaceuticals, especially like the next gen biologics and large molecule pharmaceuticals, those guys are increasingly really, really good at innovating in pharmaceuticals too.
And, you know, one, one way this has come up in our work in the White House and I won't get into sort of too many of the details. But, you know, we've been thinking about how to solve a particular problem, meaning a particular kind of product that right now we have access to but we're starting to ask ourselves these questions about like, well what happens if the country that we're trading with completely cut off access to this stuff?
And so, we're thinking a lot about the supply chain, about how brittle our supply chains are. And by the way, Oren, like one thing that is shocking about the prior government, about the government we inherited the white House from is, if I on January the 21 -- In fact, I did ask this question, where are the biggest deficiencies in our supply chains?
What are the 100 products that are complete -- Were completely reliant on some other entity to make for us? Where are they made and how hard would it be to onshore that manufacturing? I asked that explicit question, and the answer was, we don't know. Nobody in the prior government had actually asked these very fundamental questions.
And so what -- what is so crazy about the hyper globalized era is that you had these basic questions about the brittleness of our supply chains that were completely uninvestigated by the very people who supported globalizing those supply chains. We were actually governed by complete morons and we didn't even realize it until the Trump Administration started to get underneath the hood of -- of our -- of our government.
But take -- take it back to sort of the point that I was trying to make, okay, if you want to onshore this one piece of the supply chain, what kind of talent would you need in the labor force to make that possible? And I started talking to venture capitalists and technologists and people who run sort of industries in this space and what kept on coming back because, okay, yes, there's a tariff question.
There's a revenue guarantee question, there's a capital question. How do you actually form the capital? How do you get the capital goods necessary to make the stuff that you're going to have to make. But the thing that everybody kept on coming back to is, we don't even have the people who are skilled in this particular trade anymore because we've so offshored it. And, you know, you realize the point about trade policy.
All of this stuff is connected, but when you atrophy critical skills in the economy, it's not easy just to flip that switch back on. And I think that was the way in which the advocates of globalization were the most wrong, is they allowed are -- the best skilled trades workforce in the history of the world to become a little bit atrophied.
And I think we're still very good, like we actually have a pretty strong foundation from which to build, but we're actually not as good as we were 30 years ago. And the basic question of skilled craftsmen who are able to do a whole host of different things very rapidly. That's one of the things that we have to fix in order for us to accomplish the things that we need to accomplish.
The president is very focused on that, but it drives home, I mean how much of a national emergency we're in that we've lost critical skills and we weren't even aware that we had lost those skills until a few months ago.
Yeah, and of course, I mean the part that drives me nuts about it is it is the same people who said it does not matter where things get made.
Yes.
It does not matter if all this goes overseas. Now it's overseas, you say like, well, why can't we bring it back, and they say, oh, well, because we lost all the expertise. The expertise is super important. You want to -- at some point you wonder like do they even -- like are they trying to lose? You know, it's rough.
I think it's -- I think it's very hard for them to realize that the sum of their work, and a lot of these people are good people, a lot of them are well intentioned. It's very hard, and I saw this in the United States Senate, to look back on a 30, 40 or 50-year career and say the very thing that I tried to do, I accomplished the opposite, right?
It takes a special person to be able to actually change and pivot and accept new information, and unfortunately we just don't have a lot of those people in the leadership class of the country. I mean the way in which this is most absurd is you know the people who are most pro-globalization, the people who are most indifferent to whether a given part of the supply chain existed here or China or Russia or somewhere else, those are very often the same people who want us to fight wars all over the world with munitions that are increasingly made by the very people that we offshored our supply chains to. And the fact that -- I saw this in the Senate, the fact that you would have people say we should send an unlimited number of munitions to this conflict, even though we don't make those munitions in the United States of America anymore, the -- the complete disconnect between their views on foreign policy and economic policy made me realize again that we're governed by people who aren't up to the job.
Until -- until four months ago when the American people actually gave the country a government it deserved. And obviously we're very early days, but I think that we've -- we've done more in four months to solve these problems. But this is not a 5, a 10, or even -- this is a 20-year project to actually get America back to common sense economic policy.
Well, thank you. That was a real downer for a moment. I appreciate you brought the mood back up, which is very helpful. Let's talk about the workforce piece and education because you mentioned education system, which at this point interestingly means almost two different things. There is, what is going on with the universities, and there's what is going on with how we would actually train people in these kinds of skills that we need that would be good jobs.
Um, I guess it's a two part question. On the university side, do you see what's going on there as mostly sort of just a sideshow minimizes it? It's incredibly important, but it's -- it is unrelated to the question of how we actually reskill correctly or do you think these two things fit together somehow, that we need to get the universities more engaged in this process and also have other ways to do it?
I think of it as extremely connected, though it's not necessarily obvious at the surface level. I mean, first of all, I never expect Harvard or Yale or, you know, the -- the Ohio States of the world, they're not primarily going to be doing skilled craftsmen training, okay? Some of the state schools, you might see that, but -- but really this is going to be something that happens with particular, you know, unions are going to have a big role in this, community colleges are going to have a big role in this, industry is going to have a big role in this.
I don't think the skilled crafts are going to be brought back by the four-year plus university. That's just not their role, but what the four-year plus university, one of the most important things that it does, obviously it trains hopefully very smart people, but it produces really the ground level of the innovation that the economy is going to run on for the next 10 or 15, 20 years.
Okay, so if I want people in Indiana to be manufacturing the next generation pharmaceuticals, those pharmaceuticals have to get developed in the first place. And for them to get developed in the first place, I need places like Harvard to be doing really groundbreaking biomedical research. What I don't need out of Harvard is for the science to be so broken that 80 percent of the biology papers produced don't actually replicate.
And that reproducibility crisis is one of the main reasons why I think universities are broken. What I really don't need to happen is I can't let Harvard have such an explicitly racist and in violation of the Civil Rights Act approach to how it funds and trains scientists that the best and the brightest are being cut out of that process altogether.
So, these things are very much connected. But I mean look, I am not anti-university, I'm not anti-Harvard, what I am is a person who recognizes what should be obvious to every single person at every elite university in the country, which is the model is broken. It doesn't work and they're violating the social contract they have with the people of the country and the people are now saying we need you to change.
And these institutions are really going to be confronted and thanks to President Trump have already been confronted with a choice, you can accept democratic accountability and you can reform or you can accept that the government is not going to treat you kindly, we're not going to fund your garbage and we're not going to support you unless you do the job the American people need you to do.
Okay. Thanks. That's -- that is very well said. I found myself at one of these universities speaking to a faculty board the -- the day after the $9 billion Harvard announcement.
Did you tell them you knew me?
They may -- it may have come up, it may have come up.
I'm surprised you survived.
I -- you know the thing about the faculty board in Ivy League universities is it's not the most imposing environment in many respects.
That's true. They're not known for their toughness.
Not -- no, that is true. I'll let you stand on that particular point. But the -- This actually happened a few times. I in fact also was scheduled to go to Canada two days after you made the Canada announcement. I may need to run my travel plans by some more folks. Um, but it was -- it was fascinating to have this exact discussion and -- and essentially to try to make the point.
Nobody, nobody wants you to fail, but you are in a sense a quasi-public institution. You are relying on enormous both explicit and implicit public subsidy and participation in this contract that you have been violating wholesale for a generation and so our preference would be that that you guys decide to reform.
But -- but if you don't, this is the alternative. What do you think -- What does reform look like? You've described some of the things that, you know, are particularly problems. I guess to some extent the reform is just stop doing that, um, but -- but -- but what do you -- what do you aspire to for our -- for our higher education system?
You know, I'd say a few things, I mean one most obviously is why don't you just follow the civil rights laws of the country. That's a very easy thing to do. And that nearly every elite university in the country is explicitly not doing. OK, so that's one thing that they might consider doing. I think the second thing is they've got to be willing -- and I have a friend of mine who's a geneticist, very bright, you know, very bright young scientist.
We have got to have a scientific community that is more open to unacceptable inquiry and that actually encourages bright young minds to go wherever the truth leads them. And I think that's where the universities have become almost quasi theocratic or quasi totalitarian societies. I mean, the way that I think about this is, I don't know what the -- the voting, you know, the voting in the 2024 election of Harvard University's faculty was okay.
My guess is that at least 90 percent, and probably 95 percent of them voted for Kamala Harris, right, very brilliant Kamala Harris, of course. But, you know, if -- if you ask yourself a foreign election, a foreign country's election, and you say 80 percent of the people voted for one candidate, you would say, oh, that's kind of weird, right?
That's like not a super healthy democracy. If you said, oh, 95 percent of people voted for one party's candidate, you would say, that's North Korea, right? That's totalitarian. That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen. And so, I think the ideological diversity of these universities has to get much better.
And I think that if that got better, if you actually had a place where people were open to debating these things and weren't terrified they were going to lose their job for saying something that was a little bit outside the Overton window, then I think the science would get better, the reproducibility would get better, the quality of the institution would be so much better.
And that's what I want because we need high quality universities. Right now the problem is we don't have them.
Absolutely. I think we have time for one more question. This is usually an awful clichéd question. But in this case, it's extremely relevant. As I think you know, one of American Compasses', key activities, we have what we call our membership group. It's now more than 250 young policy professionals.
Dozens of them are in the administration, they're senior staff on Capitol Hill. They are in think tanks. Um, they are why I am so optimistic about the future and what I think is most important about our organization. And so, it is not at all a cliche to ask what is the advice you would give to younger people?
Admittedly not that much younger, who -- who are -- want to be, who are deeply engaged in bringing about this kind of change. Um, what do you need? What -- what should they be doing more of? What are the things that maybe no one's doing because it's just not as much fun, but it's incredibly important. What are the things it never occurred to you needed to be done until you got to where you are now that you would like to assign to them all before you leave?
So, I've reached the stage of my career, I guess where I'm -- I'm now the old guy.
You are the old guy.
I get to offer advice to all of you. Again, you started out by calling me an intellectual and your final question is effectively, hey, old man, give advice to all of these young people here. But here's -- let me say a couple of things, so, first of all, I -- I think that you guys should go forth with a lot of confidence because the conversations that are happening in this room and amongst all of you are far more interesting and far more influential in the policy conversation than almost anything else that's happening in Washington DC. There was a time in my life when I was incredibly -- you know, I didn't like to talk about trade policy because I didn't have a PhD in economics.
Well, it turns out that a lot of the people who had PhDs in economics were flagrantly wrong and they were given --
Would you like to be the chief economist at American Compass?
I already have a job, man.
We can do an honorary one. It turns out the title --
Ask Marco Rubio, he's got like five jobs, maybe he'll take on a sixth. But I -- I think that there is still among especially well-educated DC conservative types, there is still the sort of apprehensiveness about, well, I don't have this credential, so, should I not opine on this topic? And I think that in reality you've got to realize that the people who grant these credentials have been gatekeepers and their ideas and their entire work in Washington has served to make the people that they should be serving poorer and less happy.
Has reduced their life expectancy and has made the national security of the country weaker. Ignore those people, they don't matter and you have to beat them and not worry so much about what they think. That's -- that's one piece of advice. I mean, this is -- to me, the fundamental thing about our country.
There's still -- there's so much good in it, there's so much brilliance in it. We still have the best science and technology in the world. There is so much that I'm optimistic about. The thing that really worries the hell out of me is that you have people in Washington who have been calling the shots for 40 years and the life expectancy of their country has dropped.
And if that doesn't cause you to look in the mirror and say, maybe I should be doing something different, then there's something fundamentally wrong with you. And so, I've given up hope that we can persuade most of the think tank intellectuals of Washington DC to change. We can't change them. What we can do is replace them with all of you and that's exactly what we aim to do. That's number one.
Um, the second, I guess the second piece of advice that I'd give is look, look where we are, right? This is a beautiful, beautiful place. Again, the last time that I was here, I was about to be inaugurated as the 50th Vice President of the United States like literally the next day. Like this is a very cool place to get to spend an evening.
I'm sure the food is great. I'm sure the company is even better, but try to remember that all of this, you know, the job that I have, the white papers that you write, the work that you do, it is all in the service of making normal people have a better life. And so, try to find opportunities to actually get out there and see the effects of what you're doing has on the American population, try to get out there and get to know your fellow Americans try to not be -- The problem with the generation of DC intellectual that was so broken is they were so cloistered, they had no idea that they were about to get hit by a freight train.
Don't ever be those people. Learn the lessons. I think one of the lessons you have to learn is be more open and be more willing to sort of test the Overton Window. Another lesson is that you've got to have conversations with everybody and not like try to cloister yourself off from everything that's happening intellectually in this town.
But I think the most important lesson is to get out there and know the country that you serve. And every single one of you in some form or another are serving this country that all of us love so much. I think that if you actually get out there, it will give you an incredible optimism and hope for the country.
But it will also, most importantly, give you an incredible sense of duty. You all are lucky to be here. You're lucky to have the influence on this country that you do so get out there and do your duty with optimism and hope and a recognition that you're lucky to get to have the life that you do. Use that life to serve the people that all of us love so much.
Thank you, guys.
Thank you, sir. Please join me in thanking JD Vance.
Thank you all.
For everything you're doing.