Vice President JD Vance speaks at the American Compass Fifth Anniversary Gala in Washington, D.C.
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00:00Thank you guys, thank you.
00:09You sit here?
00:12Yeah.
00:13Great.
00:14Great to see you all.
00:16I think the last time I was in here was the night before the inauguration.
00:19We had dinner in here, and it was so tightly packed that you, like, actually couldn't get up to go to the bathroom
00:25or, you know, like, request an additional glass of water.
00:29That's how tightly packed we were in here.
00:31And you guys are doing pretty good, actually.
00:33Maybe not that tight, but, you know, comfortable.
00:35But you're doing good.
00:36Tastefully packed.
00:37Yeah.
00:38That's the happy medium.
00:40Before you, like, say whatever introductory thing you were going to say, I'm sure Orrin has a spiel.
00:44Orrin always has a spiel.
00:45But I just want to say thanks to Secretary Rubio for the very kind words of introduction.
00:50So, you know, Marco, I was very fond of him as a Senate colleague.
00:55But, you know, you learn a lot about somebody when you see them actually operate behind the scenes.
01:00And Marco is, if anything, more impressive privately than he is publicly, which is very hard to do.
01:07But he's very thoughtful.
01:09He actually listens, which is a rare skill in politics.
01:11We're very good at talking, us politicians.
01:13We're not so good often at listening.
01:15He's just a very, very important part of what the President and I are trying to do.
01:18And so thrilled to have him here.
01:20And as you know, I think one of the first times I ever met, maybe the first time I ever met Marco,
01:25was in a conference room in his Senate office with Mike Needham and Orrin Cass talking about some of the very things we're talking about here tonight
01:33and some of the very things that American Compass is focusing on.
01:36So it's kind of amazing to see it come full circle to where we are today.
01:40Well, that's a perfect segue into my spiel.
01:42Great.
01:43So thank you.
01:44I had a few different spiels we could start with, but this is a good one.
01:49We are thrilled to have you here.
01:51I am thrilled to have this opportunity to talk with you and so grateful that the work you're doing and, in a sense,
01:58so in awe of it because there are politicians out there who are, they've just been politicians.
02:08But you are someone who was an intellectual first.
02:11Some people don't like the word intellectual, but I mean it in the good sense of the term.
02:15You were writing for National Review.
02:17You were at the bar late at night arguing about and helping shape these ideas that you are now...
02:26I come here for free and you insult me and you call me an intellectual, remind me that I wrote for National Review.
02:31What an asshole this guy is.
02:36That's fair.
02:37I will admit that I too wrote for National Review.
02:39But as I said in my introductory remarks earlier, I have no higher compliment than this guy likes to argue.
02:45So that is, it's a wonderful thing and I think it really distinguishes you as someone who not just cares about
02:54and believes in these ideas, but has formed them.
02:57Sure.
02:58And so, you know, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the substance that's going on in a few of these topics,
03:05but 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
03:12and what people who are not in that role sort of need to understand to do it well.
03:17And so let's start here on the substance though because, you know, obviously trade is in the news from time to time.
03:26Trade is, and I think you've articulated this well, trade is one element of what is a much broader project.
03:32Sure.
03:33I think you've got a lot of interest in ensuring, reindustrialization.
03:36I want to ask you, how do you define that project?
03:39What is the broader goal that the trade agenda is part of and where do you see it ultimately going if it's going to be successful?
03:49Yeah.
03:50So, first of all, congrats.
03:52I see here on the screen this is the five-year anniversary of American Compass.
03:55Five years.
03:56That's, you guys have accomplished a lot in five years.
03:58And I'm going to echo what Secretary Rubio said.
04:00Keep doing it because it really has influenced my thinking.
04:03It's influenced the thinking of multiple people within the administration.
04:06And if I were to try to summarize the project, I mean, I think there are a few different things going on.
04:12But 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 in a decent job, earn a living salary, and have dignified work.
04:31I think you've seen so many evidence, pieces of evidence of stagnation in the lives of the normal people that we serve, right?
04:38The people who actually go to work, who keep the country running.
04:42And there are different ways to sort of measure this.
04:45But I think my favorite way of measuring it actually is probably you see stagnating productivity in this country for about 50 years, okay?
04:52And I think there are a whole host of reasons why you see that.
04:55Number one, we've offshored a whole host of industries, and so you see less innovation in a lot of the critical manufacturing sectors that actually drive the American economy.
05:05I think part of it is we've really underinvested in technology, especially in, you know, the heavily regulated spaces.
05:12I think part of that is we've really harmed energy production in our own country.
05:16I think 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.
05:26So there are all these, like, 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.
05:34And I think that was very, very possible in the United States of America that I was growing up in.
05:39But you started to see some signs that it was fraying.
05:42And I think it got a lot worse over the course of the 90s and 2000s.
05:48And that has got to change.
05:50And 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.
05:59These trade deals are not working for the normal people who power our economy.
06:04Our policies have not been productive either in the economic, national security or diplomatic space.
06:11So it's complicated.
06:12The answer to the question is complicated.
06:14Summarizing it is necessarily very hard.
06:16But I think the best way to summarize it is we just want normal people to have a good life.
06:20That seems reasonable.
06:24There you have it, folks.
06:26I think that's obviously exactly right.
06:31I think it's remarkable that that is or has been a heterodox view to some extent.
06:36That it's something that has had to be said.
06:39You know, especially after your book came out, as you had a chance to talk with a lot of folks in a lot of different contexts.
06:46Then as you moved into running as a politician yourself, you had a chance to speak both with the normal people for whom this was not working.
06:55Yeah.
06:56And for a lot of people who either thought it was working or didn't care.
07:00Sure.
07:01My own sense is there's actually more thought it was working than didn't care.
07:05For most of them are not bad people so much as oblivious.
07:10But I'm curious what your experience has been engaging with those folks.
07:15But how would you describe what do they look out at America and see?
07:19And what is helpful in communicating to them why this is a problem and why they need to care?
07:25Yeah, so let me give you kind of an elite answer to that question.
07:28And let me give you just a sort of normal political answer to the question.
07:31So the elite answer to the question, I remember, Warren, talking to you about starting American Compass five years ago.
07:37And I think one of the things that we talked about, I don't know if you remember this, but, you know, what is the audience of donors?
07:45Because these things cost money, funding, fellowships, and smart people to write papers and think about this stuff.
07:51Like that costs resources.
07:53Like what is the universe of donors who would actually support something like this?
07:56And I think my takeaway of the last five years is actually quite a bit.
08:00And I think there's an assumption among whether you call it populists or whether you call it, you know, sort of trade hawks or like whatever label you want to put on it.
08:10There's this assumption that donors are fundamentally misaligned.
08:13And 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.
08:22I know Bob's in the audience and I love Bob.
08:24But because like 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.
08:50And 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.
08:59He doesn't want that.
09:00So there's a bit there.
09:02I 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.
09:10So that's one thing I take away.
09:12I think the other thing that I take away from it is the American people are much more aligned with our way of thinking about things than people realize.
09:23And I think the misalignment between the like, again, the normal American and the talking heads in Washington is still so profound.
09:32And I'll give you an example of this.
09:33One of the very first truly political speeches I gave when I was thinking about running for Senate in Ohio back in 2021.
09:41I spoke to this group in Butler County, Ohio.
09:43It's actually the county that I was born and raised in in southwestern Ohio.
09:48And I was talking about how, you know, big tech was a major problem.
09:52Censorship of viewpoints was a major problem.
09:55And we needed to get serious about antitrust and we need to get serious about actually treating these companies as the monopolists that they were.
10:02And a person came up to me afterwards and they said, oh, I really like what you said, but I didn't agree with what you said on big tech.
10:08And 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.
10:15And what the guy said is, I don't think that we should break these companies up.
10:18I think we should throw all of their executives in prison.
10:21And I was like, oh, and it's sort of dawned on me.
10:28The American people like they see these problems.
10:31They're not hyper ideological.
10:33They're not reading like conservative intellectual periodicals because they have day jobs and families to take care of.
10:39But they're much, much wiser about these things than intellectuals give them credit for.
10:45And I take a lot of inspiration for that, but I also take a lot of willingness to kind of test the outer limits.
10:50Because most of our fellow Americans, they're not nearly as dumb as Washington, D.C. assumes that they are.
10:57They're actually very smart and they're very wise.
11:04It's funny.
11:05I was speaking to the American Iron and Steel Institute this morning about the idea that making things matters.
11:11And I was sharing a similar story because we've done survey research on, okay, do you think manufacturing matters or not?
11:18Yeah.
11:19Overwhelmingly, people say yes.
11:20Yes.
11:21Sure.
11:22But we actually asked them why.
11:23We gave them a bunch of options.
11:24Is this about, you know, family and community and good jobs?
11:26Is this about national security?
11:28Is this about sort of dynamism and investment in economic growth?
11:32I sort of figured it would be like, it's about jobs, maybe security.
11:36And Americans actually picked dynamism and growth by a significant margin.
11:41That was their top reason they cared.
11:43And that was across political groups.
11:45That was across classes.
11:47Less educated, more educated, high income, low income.
11:50And exactly to your point, I think it's just something we don't give people enough credit for.
11:55I mean, not only are they quite wise in this respect, they are so much wiser than the economists who got this exactly wrong for so long.
12:03I was struck by the speech that you gave at the American Dynamism Conference, which I think touched on a lot of this.
12:10Because you focused on what is on one hand a potential, a real challenge in the new conservative coalition,
12:18where on one hand you have the working class, you have labor.
12:21On the other hand, you have technologists, folks who are very focused on innovation.
12:25And I think you made what is such a critical point, which is that these are not necessarily in conflict.
12:29Ultimately, success is defined by the extent to which we synthesize these things.
12:34Yes.
12:35I think conceptually, in my mind, that's absolutely right.
12:39In practice, that can still be hard.
12:42I think there are a lot of places where you still see these collisions.
12:46Where do you see the biggest opportunity to actually bring these folks together?
12:53To actually build on that idea and show that, no, no, in fact, you do have the same interests.
12:58There is a real opportunity to move forward here.
13:01Well, I think that the, it's interesting you mentioned the American Dynamism speech,
13:06because I do think that's actually where the synthesis is, right?
13:10That if you believe in growth and you believe that, you know, to have any opportunity to make people's lives better,
13:17you actually need sustained GDP growth, then you actually need to have the kind of industries that can support broad-based technological innovation.
13:26And so I think that really is the combination.
13:28Like, why do I care so much about manufacturing?
13:30Why do I care so much about the kind of educational institutions we have to support those industries?
13:35It's because, yes, I care about workers and I care about their wages, but I do very much care about innovation.
13:41And I don't think you can have one without the other, right?
13:44So the classic way of talking about this is to say, well, you know, if you open up an iPhone and you look at the box,
13:52it will say designed in Cupertino, California, right?
13:55And, of course, the implication is that it's manufactured in Shenzhen.
13:58In reality, it's not necessarily even designed in Cupertino, California anymore.
14:02It's increasingly designed in the place that's manufacturing it.
14:06This idea that we can separate the making of things from the innovating of things is, I think, totally farcical.
14:12You see this in pharmaceuticals in particular, where I think the countries that are really good at manufacturing pharmaceuticals,
14:19especially like the next-gen biologics and large molecule pharmaceuticals,
14:23those guys are increasingly really, really good at innovating in pharmaceuticals, too.
14:28And, you know, 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 hairy details,
14:34but, you know, we've been thinking about how to solve a particular problem, meaning a particular kind of product
14:40that right now we have access to, but we're starting to ask ourselves these questions about, like, well,
14:46what happens if the country that we're trading with completely cut off access to this stuff?
14:51And so we're thinking a lot about the supply chain, about how brittle our supply chains are.
14:55And, by the way, one thing that is shocking about the prior government, about the government we inherited the White House from,
15:02is if I, on January the 21st, in fact, I did ask this question, where are the biggest deficiencies in our supply chains?
15:10What are the 100 products that were completely reliant on some other entity to make for us?
15:16Where are they made, and how hard would it be to onshore that manufacturing?
15:20I asked that explicit question, and the answer was, we don't know.
15:24Nobody in the prior government had actually asked these very fundamental questions.
15:28And so what is so crazy about the hyper-globalized era is that you had these basic questions about the brittleness of our supply chains
15:38that were completely uninvestigated by the very people who supported globalizing those supply chains.
15:44We were actually governed by complete morons, and we didn't even realize it
15:49until the Trump administration started to get underneath the hood of our government.
15:55But to take it back to sort of the point that I was trying to make,
15:59okay, if you want to onshore this one piece of the supply chain,
16:05what kind of talent would you need in the labor force to make that possible?
16:10And I started talking to, you know, venture capitalists and technologists
16:14and people who run sort of industries in this space.
16:17And what kept on coming back is, okay, yes, there's a tariff question.
16:21There's a revenue guarantee question. There's a capital question.
16:24You know, how do you actually form the capital?
16:26How do you get the capital goods necessary to make the stuff that you're going to have to make?
16:29But the thing that everybody kept on coming back to is we don't even have the people who are skilled
16:37in this particular trade anymore because we've so offshored it.
16:41And, you know, you realize the point about trade policy, all of this stuff is connected.
16:46But when you atrophy critical skills in the economy, it's not easy just to flip that switch back on.
16:52And I think that was the way in which the advocates of globalization were the most wrong,
16:58is they allowed the best skilled trades workforce in the history of the world to become a little bit atrophied.
17:08And I think we're still very good.
17:10Like, we actually have a pretty strong foundation from which to build,
17:13but we're actually not as good as we were 30 years ago.
17:15And the basic question of skilled craftsmen who are able to do a whole host of different things very rapidly.
17:22That's one of the things that we have to fix in order for us to accomplish the things that we need to accomplish.
17:27The president's very focused on that.
17:29But it drives home, I mean, how much of a national emergency we're in that we've lost critical skills,
17:35and we weren't even aware that we had lost those skills until a few months ago.
17:39And, of course, the part that drives me nuts about it is it is the same people who said it does not matter where things get made.
17:46Yes.
17:47It does not matter if all this goes overseas.
17:49Now it's overseas, you say, like, well, why can't we bring it back?
17:52And they say, oh, well, because we lost all the expertise.
17:55The expertise is super important.
17:57Yeah.
17:58Right.
17:59Somewhere you wonder, like, are they trying to lose?
18:01You know, it's rough.
18:03I 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.
18:10A lot of them are well intentioned.
18:12It's very hard.
18:13And 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.
18:21Right.
18:22It takes a special person to be able to actually change and pivot and accept new information.
18:27Unfortunately, we just don't have a lot of those people in the leadership class of the country.
18:32I 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.
18:47Those 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.
18:58And the fact that, you know, 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.
19:11The, the, the, the, 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.
19:26Until, 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.
19:40But this is not a, a five, a 10, or, this is a 20 year project to actually get America back to common sense economic policy.
19:48Well, thank you. That was, it was a real downer for a moment. I appreciate you brought the mood back up.
19:52It's just very helpful.
19:56Thank you, Mr. President.
19:57Thank you, Mr. President.
19:58I will.
19:59Let's talk about the workforce piece and, and education, because you, you mentioned education system, which at this point interestingly means almost two different things.
20:04Yes.
20:05There's what is going on with 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.
20:15Um, I guess it's a two part question.
20:18So on the university side, do you see what's going on there as mostly sort of just a sideshow minimizes it?
20:27It's incredibly important, but it is unrelated to the question of how we actually reskill correctly?
20:34Or 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?
20:44I think it is extremely connected, though it's not necessarily obvious at the surface level.
20:49First of all, I never expect Harvard or Yale or the Ohio states of the world, they're not primarily going to be doing skilled craftsman training.
21:01Some of the state schools, you might see that, but really this is going to be something that happens with particular, 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.
21:13I don't think the skilled crafts are going to be brought back by the four-year-plus university.
21:19That's just not their role.
21:20But 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.
21:36So if I want people in Indiana to be manufacturing the next generation pharmaceuticals, those pharmaceuticals have to get developed in the first place.
21:46And for them to get developed in the first place, I need places like Harvard to be doing really groundbreaking biomedical research.
21:53What I don't need out of Harvard is for the science to be so broken that 80% of the biology papers produced don't actually replicate.
22:03And that reproducibility crisis is one of the main reasons why I think universities are broken.
22:08What 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.
22:23So these things are very much connected, but I mean, look, I am not anti-university.
22:31I'm not anti-Harvard.
22:33What 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.
22:43It doesn't work.
22:44And they're violating the social contract they have with the people of the country.
22:47And the people are now saying, we need you to change.
22:50And these institutions are really going to be confronted, and thanks to President Trump, have already been confronted with a choice.
22:57You 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.
23:16That is very well said.
23:18I found myself at one of these universities speaking to a faculty board the day after the $9 billion Harvard announcement.
23:28Did you tell them you knew me?
23:30It may have come up.
23:32It may have come up.
23:33I'm surprised you survived.
23:35You know, the thing about the faculty board and Ivy League universities, it's not the most imposing environment in many respects.
23:44They're not known for their toughness.
23:45No, that is true.
23:48I'll let you stand on that particular point.
23:50But this actually happened a few times.
23:54I, in fact, also was scheduled to go to Canada two days after you made the Canada announcement.
23:58I may need to run my travel plans by some more folks.
24:01But it was fascinating to have this exact discussion and essentially to try to make the point, nobody wants you to fail, but you are, in a sense, a quasi-public institution.
24:14You are relying on enormous, both explicit and implicit, public subsidy and participation in this contract that you have been violating wholesale for a generation.
24:27And so our preference would be that you guys decide to reform, but if you don't, this is the alternative.
24:34What do you think, what does reform look like?
24:38You described some of the things that, you know, are particularly problems.
24:42I guess to some extent the reform is just stop doing that.
24:45But what do you aspire to for our higher education system?
24:51Yeah, I'd say a few things.
24:52I mean, one, most obviously, is why don't you just follow the civil rights laws of the country?
24:57Like, that's a very easy thing to do and that nearly every elite university in the country is explicitly not doing.
25:04Okay, so that's one thing that they might consider doing.
25:06I 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.
25:20We 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.
25:30And I think that's where the universities have become almost quasi-theocratic or quasi-totalitarian societies.
25:38I mean, the way that I think about this is, you know, I don't know what the voting, you know, the voting in the 2024 election of Harvard University's faculty was.
25:47Okay, my guess is that at least 90% and probably 95% of them voted for Kamala Harris, right?
25:55Very brilliant Kamala Harris, of course.
25:57But, you know, if you ask yourself a foreign election, a foreign country's election, and you say 80% of the people voted for one candidate, you would say, oh, that's kind of weird, right?
26:10That's like not a super healthy democracy.
26:12If you said, oh, 95% of people voted for one party's candidate, you would say that's North Korea, right?
26:18That's totalitarian.
26:19That is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen.
26:24And so I think the ideological diversity of these universities has to get much better.
26:28And 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,
26:39then I think the science would get better, the reproducibility would get better, the quality of the institution would be so much better.
26:45And that's what I want, because we need high-quality universities.
26:49Right now, the problem is we don't have them.
26:51Absolutely.
26:53I think we have time for one more question.
26:56This is usually an awful cliched question, but in this case, it's extremely relevant.
27:03As I think you know, what American Compass is key activities, we have what we call our membership group.
27:07It's now more than 250 young policy professionals.
27:10Dozens of them are in the administration, they're senior staff on Capitol Hill, they're in think tanks.
27:17They are why I am so optimistic about the future and what I think is most important about our organization.
27:23And 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,
27:31who want to be, who are deeply engaged in bringing about this kind of change?
27:39What do you need?
27:40What should they be doing more of?
27:42What are the things that maybe no one's doing because it's just not as much fun, but it's incredibly important?
27:46What are the things that never occurred to you needed to be done until you got to where you are now
27:50that you would like to assign to them all before you leave?
27:53So I've reached this stage of my career, I guess, where I'm now the old guy.
27:57You are the old guy.
27:58I have to offer advice to all of you.
28:00Again, you started out by calling me an intellectual, and your final question is effectively,
28:04hey, old man, give advice to all of these young people here.
28:07But here's, let me say a couple of things.
28:10So first of all, I think that you guys should go forth with a lot of confidence
28:18because the conversations that are happening in this room and amongst all of you
28:23are far more interesting and far more influential in the policy conversation
28:27than almost anything else that's happening in Washington, D.C.
28:31There was a time in my life when I was incredibly, you know,
28:35I didn't like to talk about trade policy because I didn't have a Ph.D. in economics.
28:39Well, it turns out that a lot of the people who had Ph.D.s in economics
28:42were flagrantly wrong, and they were given...
28:47Would you like to be the chief economist at American Compass?
28:52I already have a job, man.
28:54We can do an honorary one.
28:55It turns out the title...
28:57Ask Marco Rubio.
28:58He's got like five jobs.
28:59Maybe he'll take on a sixth.
29:01But I think that there is still among especially well-educated D.C. conservative types,
29:08there is still this sort of apprehensiveness about,
29:11well, I don't have this credential, so should I not opine on this topic?
29:15And I think that in reality, you've got to realize that the people who grant these credentials
29:21have been gatekeepers, and their ideas and their entire work in Washington
29:27has served to make the people that they should be serving poorer and less happy,
29:33has reduced their life expectancy, and has made the national security of the country weaker.
29:38Ignore those people.
29:39They don't matter.
29:40And you have to beat them and not worry so much about what they think.
29:43That's one piece of advice.
29:47I mean, this is to me the fundamental thing about our country, right?
29:51There's still...
29:52There's so much good in it.
29:54There's so much brilliance in it.
29:56We still have the best science and technology in the world.
29:58There's so much that I'm optimistic about.
30:00The thing that really worries the hell out of me is that you have people in Washington
30:05who have been calling the shots for 40 years, and the life expectancy of their country has dropped.
30:10And if that doesn't cause you to look in the mirror and say,
30:12maybe I should be doing something different, then there's something fundamentally wrong with you.
30:16And so I've given up hope that we can persuade most of the think tank intellectuals
30:22of Washington, D.C. to change, we can't change them.
30:25What we can do is replace them with all of you, and that's exactly what we aim to do.
30:29That's number one.
30:32The second, I guess, the second piece of advice that I'd give is, look, look where we are, right?
30:38This is a beautiful, beautiful place.
30:41Again, the last time that I was here, I was about to be inaugurated as the 50th vice president
30:47of the United States, like literally the next day.
30:49Like, this is a very cool place to get to spend an evening.
30:51I'm sure the food is great.
30:53I'm sure the company is even better.
30:55But try to remember that all of this, you know, the job that I have, the white papers that you write,
31:03the work that you do, it is all in the service of making normal people have a better life.
31:11And so try to find opportunities to actually get out there and see the effects of what you're doing
31:17has on the American population.
31:19Try to get out there and get to know your fellow Americans.
31:22Try to not be...
31:23The problem with the generation of D.C. intellectual that was so broken is they were so cloistered,
31:30they had no idea that they were about to get hit by a freight train.
31:34Don't ever be those people.
31:37Learn the lessons.
31:37I think one of the lessons you have to learn is be more open and be more willing to sort of test the Overton window.
31:43So 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.
31:53But I think the most important lesson is to get out there and know the country that you serve.
31:58And every single one of you in some form or another are serving this country that all of us love so much.
32:03I think that if you actually get out there, it will give you an incredible optimism and hope for the country,
32:10but it will also, most importantly, give you an incredible sense of duty.
32:15You all are lucky to be here.
32:17You're lucky to have the influence on this country that you do.
32:20So 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.
32:28Use that life to serve the people that all of us love so much.
32:31Thank you, guys.
32:32Thank you, sir.
32:33Keep joining me in thinking, J.D.
32:35Thanks.