JD VANCE: 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, like, actually couldn’t get up to go to the bathroom or here. You know, like, requested 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.
OREN CASS: Tastefully packed.
Opening Remarks
JD VANCE: Yeah. That’s 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, 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 that American Compass is focusing on. So it’s kind of amazing to see it come full circle to where we are today.
OREN CASS: Well, that’s a perfect segue into my spiel. So thank you. I had a few different spiels we could start with, but this is a good one. 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.
JD VANCE: I come here for free, and you insult me and you call me an.
OREN CASS: Intellectual, remind me that I wrote for National Review.
JD VANCE: What an asshole this guy is.
OREN CASS: 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, 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 has formed them. Sure. And so, you know, I wanted to ask you a little bit about some of the substance, what’s going on through 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 sort of need to understand to do it well. And so let’s start here on the substance, though, because, you know, obviously trade is in the news from time to time. Trade is, I think you’ve articulated this well. Trade is one element of what is a much broader project about reshoring, reindustrialization. I want to ask you, how do you define that project? What 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?
The Vision for American Reindustrialization
JD VANCE: Yeah. So, first of all, congrats. I see here on the screen, this is the five year anniversary of American Compass. You guys have accomplished a lot in five years. And I want 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 living salary and have dignified work. I think you’ve seen so many 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 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 in a lot of the critical manufacturing sectors that actually drive the American economy.
I think part of it is we’ve really under invested in technology, especially in 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 the heavily regulated space is 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 spends 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 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 your question is complicated. Summarizing it is necessarily very hard, but I think the best way to summarize it is we just want normal people to have a good life.
OREN CASS: That seems reasonable.
JD VANCE: Thank you.
Understanding the American People
OREN CASS: There you have it, folks. I think that’s obviously exactly right. I think 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, you 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. Then 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 and for a lot of people who either thought it was working or didn’t care. My own sense is there’s actually more thought it was working than didn’t care. For most of them bad people so much as oblivious. But I’m curious what your experience has been engaging with those folks. How would you describe what do 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?
JD VANCE: 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. 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? Because these things costs money. Funding fellowships and smart people to write papers and think about this stuff like that costs resources. What is the universe of donors who would actually support something like this? I think my takeaway of the last five years is actually quite a bit.
And I think there’s an assumption among whether you call it populist or whether you call it 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. I know Bob’s in the audience and I love Bob, but 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. 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 the American people are much more aligned with our way of thinking about things than people realize. And I think the misalignment between 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 like 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 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. And I was like, oh.
And it sort of dawned on me, 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, D.C. assumes that they are. They’re actually very smart and they’re very wise.
Bringing Together Innovation and Labor
OREN CASS: 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? Overwhelmingly, people say 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 dynamism and investment in economic growth? I sort of figured it would be like, 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 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 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 focused on what is 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 absolutely right. In practice, that can still be hard. I think there are a lot of places where you still see these collisions? 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 do have the same interests. There is a real opportunity to move forward here.
The Synthesis of Growth and Manufacturing
JD VANCE: Well, I think that the, it’s interesting you mention 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 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. So I think that really is the combination, like, why do I care so much about manufacturing? 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 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, 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. 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.
Supply Chain Vulnerabilities
And 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, but you know, we’ve been thinking about how to solve a particular problem, meaning a particular kind of person 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, one thing that is shocking about the prior government, about the government we inherited the White House from, is if I, on January 21st, in fact, I did ask this question. Where are the biggest deficiencies in our supply chains? What are the 100 products that 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 is so crazy about the hyper globalized era is, 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 our government.
The Skills Gap Crisis
But 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 is, 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 your 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 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’s 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.
OREN CASS: 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. At some point you wonder, do they even like, are they trying to lose? You know, it’s rough.
JD VANCE: 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 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.
OREN CASS: Right.
The Disconnect in Policy
JD VANCE: It takes a special person to be able to actually change and pivot and accept new information. 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 offshore our supply chains to.
And 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. 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 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 done more in four months now to solve these problems. But this is not a 5, a 10, or this is a 20 year project to actually get America back to common sense economic policy.
OREN CASS: Well, thank you. That was a real downer for a moment. I appreciate you brought the mood back up. Very helpful.
Education and Workforce Development
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 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. 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 minimize. It’s incredibly important, but 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?
JD VANCE: I think of it as extremely connected, though it’s not necessarily obvious at the surface level. First of all, I never expect Harvard or Yale or 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 really this is going to be something that happens with particular, you know, unions are going to have a big role in this community college is 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 is 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. 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% 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, 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.
OREN CASS: That is very well said. I found myself at one of these universities speaking to a faculty board the day after the 9 billion dollar Harvard announcement.
JD VANCE: Did you tell them you knew me?
OREN CASS: It may have come up. It may have come up.
JD VANCE: I’m surprised you survived.
OREN CASS: You know, the thing about the faculty board and Ivy League university is it’s not the most imposing environment.
JD VANCE: In many respects, they’re not known for their toughness.
OREN CASS: No, that is true. I’ll let you stand on that particular point. But this actually happened to me 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. But 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. 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 you guys decide to reform. But if you don’t, this is the alternative. What do you think? What does reform look like? You described some of the things that, you know are particularly problems. I guess to some extent the reform is just stop doing that. But what do you aspire to for our higher education system?
JD VANCE: You know, I 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. Okay, so that’s one thing that they might consider doing.
I think the second thing is they’ve got to be willing. I have a friend of mine who’s a geneticist, very bright, 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.
The way that I think about this is I don’t know what the voting in the 2024 election of Hope, Harvard University’s faculty was okay. My guess is that at least 90% and probably 95% of them voted for Kamala Harris. Right. Very brilliant, Kamala Harris, of course. But you know, if you ask yourself, a foreign election, a foreign country’s election, you say 80% 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% of people voted for one party’s candidate, you would say, that’s North Korea, that’s totalitarian, that is impossible in a true place of free exchange for that to happen.
So I think the ideological diversity of 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 same 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.
OREN CASS: Absolutely. I think we have time for one more question. Grayson is usually an awful cliched question, but in this case it’s extremely relevant as I think, you know what American companies, 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’re in think tanks. 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 want to be, who are deeply engaged in bringing about this kind of change? What do you need? 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 that 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.
Advice for Young Policy Professionals
JD VANCE: So I’ve reached the stage of my career, I guess, where I’m now the old guy.
OREN CASS: You are the old guy.
JD VANCE: 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 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.
OREN CASS: Would you like to be the chief economist at American Compass?
JD VANCE: I already have a job, man.
OREN CASS: We can do an honorary one.
JD VANCE: It turns out the title, Ask Marco Rubio. He’s got like five jobs. Maybe he’ll take on a six.
But I think that there is still, among especially well educated D.C. conservative types, there is still this 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 one piece of advice.
I mean, this is, to me, the fundamental thing about our country. 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’s 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, D.C. 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.
I guess the second piece of advice that I’d give is 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 D.C. intellectual that was so broken is they were so cloistered, they had no idea that they were about to get hit by a freight truck frame. 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.
