Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - How Intellectual Curiosity Built America | Live at Liberty University | TRUTH Ep. #65

A nation without its history is like a tree without roots. It s dead. That s similar to what Malcolm X said some time ago. And it s going to be the theme of today s podcast, through a deep dive on a part of our founding culture in American history that we don t often talk about. And it's a little bit different of a kind of episode. This week we re doing something a little different because earlier today I gave a speech to about 8,000 people or more in a packed stadium at Liberty University, mostly of the next generation. And I didn t want to go in there and preach to them about the importance of talking more about American history. I used it as a chance to talk about the founding culture that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by people who were not that much older than the people in that stadium. And that s a history we owe it to ourselves to remember. And most importantly, by the end of the episode, we ll talk about what the implications are for us in the year 2024, and what we might expect in terms of the lessons that we can take away from it. And I ll tell you what I plan to give you today is a speech about achieving the impossible: I ve written best selling books, founded multi-billion dollar companies, became the youngest person ever to run for president at the age of 37, and was born in Ohio, at the same age as I was at the start of the campaign. Thank you for making that such a success, and I appreciate that from younger people than me, as a lot more than I appreciate the lessons I ve taken away from the lessons we can learn from that we ve taken from our past and from what we ve learned from our history. Tweet me to let me know what you ve learned in this episode. Timestamps: 1:00:00 - What are you looking forward to in 2020? 3:30 - How to live a more fulfilling life outside of politics? 6:15 - What do you would you like to learn from our founding? 8:00 9: What are the lessons you could you take from our own history? 11: How do we live more fulfilling lives? 14:00- What do we could we learn from the founding of our country? 16: How can we live a better life? 17:40 - What would you want to live more fulfilled lives outside of Politics?

00:00:00.000 A nation without its history is like a tree without roots.

00:00:11.000 It's dead.

00:00:12.000 That's similar to what Malcolm X said some time ago, and it's going to be the theme of today's podcast, through a deep dive on a part of our founding culture in American history that we don't often talk about.

00:00:23.000 And it's a little bit different of a kind of episode.

00:00:25.000 But before we get into it, I first want to say thank you to everybody who's following this podcast, who's listening to this on a weekly basis, for helping propel my recent book, Truths, to the top of the bestseller list.

00:00:36.000 It was the most successful book on Amazon last week.

00:00:39.000 It's a New York Times bestseller as well.

00:00:41.000 And I want to say thank you for making that such a success in not only rolling out this book, but the message of this book.

00:00:47.000 It's called Truths, The Future of America First.

00:00:49.000 I'm grateful to those of you who have gotten it for not only reading it, but using the toolkit in this book to help persuade your friends who might have a different point of view.

00:00:58.000 To be able to rethink their point of view on some of the most contentious questions of our day, from the existence of God, to the modern climate fixation, to transgender ideology, to the importance of the nuclear family, to the arguments for and against the existence of the administrative state.

00:01:13.000 We cover a lot of chapters in this book on different subject matter, and my number one goal in writing it was to reach as many people as we could with its message.

00:01:21.000 It's now the second week the book is out, and I'm asking every one of you to not only get a copy for yourself, I appreciate that, go to Amazon, go anywhere, get Truths, The Future of America First.

00:01:31.000 But more importantly, use this as the toolkit to do what I tried to do during the campaign, to be able to actually talk to the people who disagree with us and even persuade them.

00:01:40.000 I don't want to be alone in doing that.

00:01:42.000 I want people across the country doing it with me.

00:01:44.000 That's what this book is designed to do to give you the toolkit to accomplish that.

00:01:48.000 So thank you for making it a top bestseller this last week, number one in the country, and I'm proud of it.

00:01:54.000 Now this week's podcast we're doing something a little bit different because earlier today I gave a speech to about 8,000 people or more in a packed stadium at Liberty University, mostly of the next generation.

00:02:06.000 And I didn't want to go in there and preach to them about the importance of talking more about American history.

00:02:11.000 I used it as a chance to talk about American history itself, not about the legal principles of our Constitution, which I talk about in many other occasions, But to talk about the founding culture that produced the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution by people who were not that much older than the people in that stadium in Liberty, people who are younger than even myself today.

00:02:31.000 That's a history we owe it to ourselves to remember.

00:02:33.000 We're going to walk through that history today and most importantly by the end talk about what the implications are for us in the year 2024. It's a little different than you might expect in terms of the lessons that we take away.

00:02:45.000 A lot of them are practical ways that maybe we could even live more fulfilling lives outside of politics.

00:02:50.000 But I'll let all of you be the judge of that.

00:02:52.000 That's going to be what we use as this week's podcast, and I hope you're able to spread the message.

00:02:57.000 And again, thanks for the support, both with the book Truths and with this podcast.

00:03:01.000 We'll be back again next week.

00:03:02.000 Wow.

00:03:12.000 Wow.

00:03:14.000 It's an honor to be here, Liberty.

00:03:15.000 Thank you for the warm welcome and give another round of applause to your singers right before you came on stage.

00:03:22.000 I had a chance to meet them backstage and they're such superstars.

00:03:26.000 It's great to be here.

00:03:27.000 I'll tell you what I plan to give you today is a speech about achieving the impossible.

00:03:33.000 My parents came to this country with no money about 40 years ago.

00:03:38.000 And for me, I've founded multi-billion dollar companies.

00:03:40.000 I've written best-selling books.

00:03:43.000 Last year, at the age of 37, I became the youngest person ever to run for U.S. President as a Republican.

00:03:49.000 Thank you.

00:03:50.000 I appreciate that from younger people than me.

00:03:53.000 At the start of the campaign, nobody knew my name, and by the end of it, I had the honor of having beaten multiple U.S. senators, governors, and a former vice president.

00:04:04.000 I did that while marrying my lovely wife, Apoorva, who is herself a successful throat surgeon in Ohio, and raising our two sons in Columbus, where we live today.

00:04:18.000 Love our two boys.

00:04:19.000 It's exactly the kind of family-centric lifestyle that some people would call weird.

00:04:25.000 But we think it's actually the way to raise our boys.

00:04:28.000 I would say, though, that all of that pales in comparison to the one achievement that I thought was truly impossible when I set out to run for president.

00:04:37.000 And that's that most of you now know how to actually pronounce my name, which I appreciate.

00:04:44.000 It's Vivek like cake and Ramaswamy like Ramaswamy.

00:04:51.000 So thank you for that.

00:04:53.000 But my speech today isn't about me.

00:04:54.000 It is about all of you.

00:04:57.000 You're entering your adulthood, I believe, at a truly special moment in American history.

00:05:03.000 I believe deep in my heart that it's actually going to be your generation that saves our country, but it wouldn't be the first time that that actually happened.

00:05:11.000 That dates all the way back to 1776. I'm talking about our founding fathers, who were not much older than most of you in the audience today when they founded our nation.

00:05:23.000 And though I'm talking about our founding fathers, I'll actually start with a quote often attributed to the founder of Dubai.

00:05:30.000 It goes like this.

00:05:32.000 My father rode a camel.

00:05:34.000 I ride a Mercedes.

00:05:36.000 My son rides a Land Rover.

00:05:39.000 My grandson is going to ride a Land Rover.

00:05:41.000 But my great-grandson is going to have to ride a camel again.

00:05:47.000 Hard times create strong men.

00:05:49.000 Strong men create easy times.

00:05:52.000 Easy times create weak men.

00:05:54.000 And weak men create hard times.

00:05:58.000 He was the founder of Dubai, but he might as well have been talking to modern America and our own generation.

00:06:03.000 When our nation was born in 1776, we were a nation of underdogs.

00:06:08.000 We were a nation of insurgents.

00:06:10.000 Our founding fathers stood up to the most powerful empire in the world, declared their independence and then somehow turned assertion into reality.

00:06:19.000 We're a band of rebels who defeated a reigning incumbent of their era, an incumbent that went on to become just another small nation on the other side of an ocean.

00:06:30.000 But eventually the insurgent becomes the incumbent.

00:06:33.000 The underdog becomes the favorite.

00:06:36.000 And then the new incumbent starts to apologize for its own success.

00:06:40.000 Instead of working even harder to create even more of it.

00:06:43.000 And eventually that incumbent is then unseated by a new insurgent born on the other side of a different ocean.

00:06:50.000 Personally, I think that's what many of us remembered, what we sensed when we rallied behind the cry to make America great again several years ago.

00:06:58.000 But here's what we missed.

00:07:00.000 In order to make America great again, we have to know the story of what made America great the first time around.

00:07:07.000 That's the story of our nation.

00:07:09.000 That's the story of our history, and it's a story that we've forgotten.

00:07:13.000 It was actually Malcolm X who famously said that a nation without its history is like a tree without roots.

00:07:22.000 It's dead.

00:07:23.000 And one of the things I think we've lost in modern history is an aspect of our founding culture That's personally important to me.

00:07:32.000 It's one that I think we've abandoned in recent years.

00:07:35.000 And it's one that has nothing to do, absolutely nothing to do with politics, actually.

00:07:39.000 And one that if we do revive it, it's going to help every one of us lead more prosperous and more meaningful lives.

00:07:46.000 It's reviving the death of intellectual curiosity in America.

00:07:52.000 If you think about who are the most intellectually groundbreaking thinkers of the 18th century, They actually weren't our founding fathers.

00:08:01.000 Most of them were actually on the other side of the Atlantic in Europe.

00:08:04.000 They were the likes of Locke, Montesquieu.

00:08:08.000 Montesquieu, Locke, you could talk about David Hume, you could talk about Newton, Leibniz, who led the way in math and physics, Adam Smith in psychology and philosophy.

00:08:16.000 They were on the other side of the ocean.

00:08:19.000 And the thing that distinguished our founding fathers, though, wasn't their genius in any one of those disciplines.

00:08:25.000 They actually weren't the mathematical savants.

00:08:27.000 They weren't the philosophical savants, but they learned from the people who were.

00:08:31.000 And what distinguished our founding fathers was their ability to combine those intellectual foundations with a future that simply didn't exist in the old world.

00:08:41.000 Locke and Leibniz, Newton and Hume, these men were the true geniuses, but the European society into which they were born was different from ours in a big way.

00:08:51.000 They valued hierarchy and expertise over curiosities.

00:08:56.000 The monarchs and aristocrats who were supposed to run the government, they ran the government.

00:09:00.000 The people who were supposed to philosophize about economics and sociology, they philosophized about it.

00:09:05.000 But they weren't the same people.

00:09:07.000 And the people who were supposed to make discoveries in math or invent new tools, they were in a different place altogether, another corner to themselves.

00:09:14.000 Virtually everybody stayed in their lane.

00:09:17.000 Because you see, the old world, they were reluctant to break boundaries. 0.96

00:09:20.000 They believed that boundaries exist for a reason.

00:09:22.000 The ruling class exists to rule.

00:09:25.000 The expert class exists to advise them.

00:09:27.000 The doctor's guilt exists to treat patients.

00:09:29.000 The guilt of barristers exists to argue cases in court.

00:09:33.000 It was a culture that valued expertise over curiosity.

00:09:39.000 But our founding fathers, they were different.

00:09:41.000 They didn't believe in those boundaries.

00:09:43.000 They didn't even believe in acquiescence to expertise.

00:09:46.000 They believed that no man is confined to the circumstances of his birth or his upbringing, and that each of us is so much more than just a product of what we happen to be doing at a given moment.

00:09:59.000 For example, you all probably surely know that Benjamin Franklin, he was one of the authors of the Declaration of Independence, he was a true Renaissance man.

00:10:07.000 Who, in addition to founding this country, founded multiple universities and hospitals.

00:10:12.000 He was also a prolific author, a dabbler in medicines, who discovered a treatment to the common cold.

00:10:17.000 People don't know that he actually was also an inventor of musical instruments, including one that went on to be used by Mozart and Beethoven.

00:10:24.000 And some of his devices actually ended up being incredibly practical.

00:10:28.000 A lightning rod for the home.

00:10:30.000 Bifocal glasses.

00:10:31.000 People don't know.

00:10:32.000 That was invented by Benjamin Franklin.

00:10:34.000 Even the lightning rod on the top of our homes was derived from breakthroughs made by Benjamin Franklin.

00:10:40.000 The tool for heating houses was called the Franklin stove.

00:10:42.000 Came from one of the recent breakthroughs in the field of thermodynamics at the time.

00:10:46.000 He was the archetype of what we call the Renaissance man.

00:10:48.000 I think most of you know that.

00:10:49.000 He was a polymath.

00:10:51.000 But here's the remarkable part.

00:10:54.000 He was not the exception, actually.

00:10:56.000 He was actually the norm at that time.

00:10:59.000 There were five men who served on the committee that drafted the Declaration of Independence.

00:11:03.000 And actually all of them were similarly intellectually curious and versatile in their capabilities.

00:11:10.000 Two of the lesser known ones are two guys by the name of Robert Livingston and Roger Sherman.

00:11:15.000 Robert Livingston worked with Robert Fulton to build the first steamship.

00:11:19.000 That was a fundamental building block of the Industrial Revolution as a side project while serving as an ambassador to France.

00:11:27.000 Roger Sherman, who was also a signatory to the Constitution, was a self-educated attorney who never actually went to college.

00:11:35.000 He never actually went to law school.

00:11:37.000 he taught himself the law in the library of his local parish while working as a shoemaker he wanted body of Yale and of course in addition to these guys Franklin, Livingston, Sherman there were of course the two most famous drafters of the Declaration of Independence That's John Adams and Thomas Jefferson.

00:12:00.000 Bitter rivals in politics.

00:12:01.000 More rivalrous than probably any of the politicians you've seen in your lifetime.

00:12:05.000 Jefferson and Adams, they used to butt heads back then.

00:12:08.000 But they became friends again in their retirement.

00:12:11.000 Jefferson's interest, he was more scientific, and Adams was a little bit more the humanities guy.

00:12:15.000 But they were deeply curious about everything the other ones studied.

00:12:18.000 And I will tell you, they were unafraid to compete to the end with one another over it.

00:12:24.000 Intellectually speaking, they were competitors.

00:12:27.000 One of the famous quotes attributed to John Adams in the letter that he wrote to his wife Abigail was this.

00:12:32.000 He said, I must study politics and war so that our sons may have the liberty to study mathematics and philosophy.

00:12:38.000 Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history, naval architecture, navigation, commerce, and agriculture in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry, and porcelains.

00:12:55.000 But that was a bit of a humble brag on his part, actually.

00:12:57.000 It's true that Adams has studied politics and war, but he also studied math and philosophy.

00:13:02.000 He also wrote poetry, while also being educated in Greek, Latin, and the other classics.

00:13:07.000 In fact, a little-known fact about John Adams that I find personally interesting is that after serving as our second president, he immersed himself in Hindu scripture and wrote a letter to Thomas Jefferson to say that if he were going to live his life again, he'd have become a scholar of Sanskrit literature even earlier.

00:13:23.000 The man was a lifelong learner, and so was his great rival Thomas Jefferson.

00:13:28.000 Think about this.

00:13:29.000 Jefferson, he was 33 when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, not that much older than most of you in this room, younger than I am speaking to you right now.

00:13:37.000 He was fluent in five languages, capable of reading two more.

00:13:41.000 Over the course of his life, He wrote nothing short of 16,000 letters.

00:13:48.000 I think about people today hearing that.

00:13:50.000 You do the math, you'd say, okay, 16,000 letters, that's like 4,000 words.

00:13:55.000 I've done that before.

00:13:56.000 No, I'm not talking about 16,000 letters of the alphabet.

00:13:58.000 I'm talking about 16,000 letters as in full-length essays.

00:14:04.000 That's just not something people do in the United States of America today.

00:14:07.000 So that's basically unheard of by today's standards.

00:14:09.000 You might wonder...

00:14:10.000 Was it uncomfortable for him back then because he didn't have a laptop or a cell phone to do it?

00:14:15.000 It turns out that he was writing them by hand and he invented the swivel chair while writing the Declaration of Independence to make it easier to actually swivel and think at the same time.

00:14:24.000 The swivel chair you sit in today was invented by Thomas Jefferson.

00:14:27.000 We're sitting here in Virginia.

00:14:28.000 He was also an amateur architect who designed the Virginia State Capitol building right here in the state where we're gathered right now designed by none other than Thomas Jefferson.

00:14:39.000 Both of them, Jefferson and Adams, they had large sums of money to build their own personal libraries to continue their learning.

00:14:45.000 And in fact, Jefferson himself almost went bankrupt several times over.

00:14:49.000 It's easy to make fun of him for his taste in wine, but he wasn't just a drinker of wine, he was a scientist of wine too.

00:14:56.000 Traveled to southern France to learn about wine production and to figure out how to build a homegrown industry right here in the United States.

00:15:03.000 It was knowledge directed at every step of the way, and the fact that sometimes it left you drunk was, as the French like to say, just an unintended side effect.

00:15:14.000 But there was something in the water back then.

00:15:17.000 Maybe it was the wine.

00:15:18.000 Something in the culture.

00:15:21.000 That's different than what we have today.

00:15:22.000 It was a culture that valued education, that valued autodidacts, people who taught themselves, exploration, a fundamental curiosity about how the world works, and an unyielding confidence that even if you weren't an expert in something, you could still figure it out with the right combination of self-education and curiosity.

00:15:41.000 Compared to nations like France and England, It's true that America was actually pretty provincial at the time.

00:15:47.000 We were nothing more than a backwater cluster of small towns scattered along an eastern seaboard.

00:15:53.000 Economically, militarily, geopolitically.

00:15:55.000 It seemed that we were destined to be nothing more than a tiny footnote in global history.

00:15:59.000 Yet the people who wrote those footnotes, they were deeply curious about the world they inhabited, about the history to which they contributed, and deeply confident in their ability to change every part of it for the better.

00:16:11.000 So what's the message for us?

00:16:14.000 I think we need to revive your generation.

00:16:17.000 I would say our generations need to revive that special combination of curiosity and self-confidence.

00:16:23.000 Yes, we want to be a country of people who tinker in their garages.

00:16:26.000 We want people to write great essays in the evenings while working at an insurance company or a business during the day.

00:16:32.000 We should expect more of one another as citizens.

00:16:34.000 We should expect more of ourselves.

00:16:36.000 We should expect more of our leaders.

00:16:38.000 Back then presidents who left the White House went on to study ancient works in Latin and Sanskrit.

00:16:43.000 Today they sign Netflix deals and play around a golf in Martha's Vineyard.

00:16:47.000 That's easy to say today.

00:16:49.000 How cool were our founding fathers and then go back to the daily drudgery of our modern technocracy.

00:16:55.000 But the question for you is, why can't we behave a little bit more like our founding fathers?

00:17:01.000 Political conservatives like me like to talk a lot about staying true to the political and legal principles of the Constitution and no doubt that's important.

00:17:09.000 But as Americans, we should also be inspired to stay true to that founding culture of exploration and curiosity.

00:17:18.000 The irony, thank you, I appreciate that.

00:17:20.000 I think it's going to take, I'm here for a reason, I think it's going to take people like you, whose best days in life are still yet ahead, to see a nation whose best days are actually still ahead of us.

00:17:31.000 And the irony is it should be a lot easier for us to do this today than it was for our founders back then.

00:17:37.000 For starters, the main language of scholarship back in 1776, it wasn't English.

00:17:41.000 It was French and Latin.

00:17:43.000 You had to wait weeks or even months to just get a physical copy of a book that you might have wanted to read.

00:17:48.000 Today, everything's available to us in any language you want.

00:17:51.000 You're two swipes away on your iPhone from any book you want to read or listen to on demand.

00:17:55.000 The only thing stopping us is our own incuriosity, our own veneration of somebody else's expertise, and our own lack of self-confidence to build our own.

00:18:07.000 You might think our founding fathers didn't have the time.

00:18:09.000 They were too busy fighting this thing called the American Revolution and setting up a new country to afford the luxuries of intellectual curiosity.

00:18:15.000 But actually the opposite was true.

00:18:18.000 We were never more curious than when we were fighting for our survival as a country.

00:18:23.000 That special sauce that allowed America to succeed as an insurgent was that unmitigated curiosity and the totally unjustified confidence of our founding fathers.

00:18:32.000 And it wasn't just a matter of self-indulgence.

00:18:35.000 The reason our founding fathers were so curious about the world around them wasn't just to get drunk on it.

00:18:41.000 It was because they strived to make America, their nation, a better nation.

00:18:45.000 It wasn't idle interests that moved them.

00:18:47.000 It was a desire to create a thriving country that would outlive them.

00:18:53.000 And they made that country great.

00:18:55.000 They made our nation a magnet for minds that were as curious and courageous as their own.

00:18:59.000 One of the most important chemists of the 18th century was a man by the name of Joseph Priestley.

00:19:04.000 He was a British author and a teacher who had some unusual beliefs that were outside the mainstream Anglican thought at the time.

00:19:12.000 In 1791, a mob looted and razed his home to the ground.

00:19:16.000 It became unsafe for him to remain in England.

00:19:18.000 So he moved to Pennsylvania, where he was welcomed with open arms by our own founding fathers, including Benjamin Franklin.

00:19:24.000 It may have been the first example of a brilliant scientist moving to America precisely because we're a free society, a tradition that so many others, including my own mother and father, continued centuries later.

00:19:36.000 My parents came here for the same reason that Joseph Priestley did.

00:19:40.000 It's because we're a free society where creative people are able to pursue their dreams however they see fit.

00:19:46.000 Priestley didn't come to America because we had great universities or funding for his research.

00:19:50.000 In fact, we had neither of those things back then.

00:19:54.000 He came here because he had freedom.

00:19:56.000 Freedom to explore ideas without the fear of being attacked.

00:19:59.000 Freedom to be himself, including even the freedom to discover who he was.

00:20:03.000 That is the unspoken part of the American dream.

00:20:06.000 Not just the freedom to achieve whatever you want, but also the freedom to discover what it is you actually want to achieve.

00:20:15.000 It's precisely at the moment in our history when we stopped being insurgents and started becoming incumbents, That we ourselves lost that sense of curiosity and confidence.

00:20:26.000 Why can't we just remain an incumbent and coast for as long as it lasts?

00:20:30.000 Because pretty soon, then we're on track to become the next Great Britain to somebody else's insurgency.

00:20:36.000 And if we're being very honest, it's already starting to happen.

00:20:40.000 The way we remain a magnet for the most curious and ambitious people around the world is actually by cultivating the culture that drew Joseph Priestley here.

00:20:48.000 The same culture that drew my own parents here.

00:20:50.000 A culture that prizes free and open debate and inquiry.

00:20:53.000 A culture that does not force a monolithic cultural ideology on everybody.

00:20:57.000 A culture that doesn't force you to bow down to what a politically appointed expert says on a given day, but instead gives you the latitude to question dogmas in the pursuit of truth.

00:21:06.000 That is the greatest thing our founding fathers invented.

00:21:09.000 It was not a lightning rod.

00:21:10.000 It was not a stove.

00:21:11.000 It was a country that offered freedom of thought.

00:21:14.000 The greatest invention of their era that actually produced all of the other ones.

00:21:18.000 And that's the invention we risk losing in a country that now focuses on suppressing dissent instead of fostering creativity.

00:21:25.000 Can we sustain that special combination of curiosity and confidence?

00:21:29.000 That, I believe, is the defining question of our era.

00:21:34.000 And it actually starts with all of you.

00:21:36.000 The next generation of Americans.

00:21:39.000 You hear some people object to this vision, I hear it, to say that, no, no, we shouldn't make their exclusive North Star of education in this country, curiosity, confidence, no, that's not enough.

00:21:48.000 We can't just teach our children to be explorers or courageous or confident, but we also have to teach them to be socially just, to rectify the injustices created by the likes of our founding fathers who blindly pursued enlightenment values without actually abiding by the values that they preached.

00:22:05.000 Well, you know what, I'd argue exactly the opposite.

00:22:08.000 That intellectual curiosity and courage, combined with a willingness to traverse boundaries that go beyond your preordained area of expertise, beyond your own lane, that's actually the most important building block of empathy.

00:22:19.000 And empathy is the most important building block of justice.

00:22:23.000 The arc of the moral universe is long, said Martin Luther King, but it bends towards justice.

00:22:30.000 And I believe that empathy is the force that causes it to bend.

00:22:33.000 And I believe that curiosity is the foundation of empathy.

00:22:38.000 So what's the take-home message from our reflection this morning on our founders?

00:22:43.000 I'll leave you with a few.

00:22:45.000 The first is this.

00:22:46.000 It takes about as much effort to do something really small and to do it really well as it does to do something really big and to do it really well.

00:22:55.000 And it's your choice how you spend your time on the short time we're all given on this earth.

00:22:59.000 It's your choice whether you want to do the small thing or the big thing.

00:23:03.000 There's no right answer to that question, but as somebody who myself ran for U.S. president at the age of 37, I'll tell you that I have my bias on that question.

00:23:11.000 When the PAC runs in one direction, that's my second piece of advice to you, you run the other way.

00:23:16.000 That's what our founding fathers did.

00:23:18.000 Today, calling the other side weird is considered a political insult.

00:23:22.000 I'm sure a lot of you have heard about how weird Liberty University might be.

00:23:26.000 I'm sure it's irritating when rival schools mock your beliefs coincidentally by scheduling their Pride Day on the same day that they face Liberty University in football like they did a couple of years ago.

00:23:37.000 But don't be afraid of being called weird by anybody else.

00:23:40.000 Our founders would have worn that as a label and a badge of honor.

00:23:44.000 they ended up winning the American Revolution and as I understand it Liberty ended up beating UMass a couple of years ago too so so we're a little proud of that For most of human history, the idea that you get to express your opinion, no matter what it is, no matter who you are or what your opinion is, that was a truly weird idea.

00:24:07.000 The idea that we the people get to create a government that is accountable to us rather than the other way around, that was downright strange, but that's what made America great the first time around.

00:24:15.000 And reviving that is how we're going to make America great again.

00:24:18.000 Thank you.

00:24:19.000 And number three.

00:24:23.000 As the older man in the room with a few gray hairs now starting to show up in the last couple of months, I'll keep giving you guys some of your unsolicited advice.

00:24:31.000 If you ever find yourself in your time, even here at Liberty, to be the smartest person in the room, here's my advice to you.

00:24:39.000 Find a different room.

00:24:40.000 That's what our founding fathers did.

00:24:42.000 I studied biology.

00:24:44.000 I went on to work at a financial institution, a hedge fund, then went to law school for fun.

00:24:48.000 I started a biotech company, a technology company, left all that behind to write a few books and then started an asset management firm before running for president.

00:24:56.000 Do not make your own identity a product of your occupation.

00:25:00.000 You are so much bigger than the thing that you happen to be doing at any one given time, and there is no better time to cultivate that sense of adventure and curiosity than right here in your experience at college.

00:25:12.000 Take an elective you wouldn't have otherwise taken.

00:25:14.000 Join a club you otherwise wouldn't have considered.

00:25:16.000 Learn a new instrument.

00:25:17.000 Go on a service trip, whether that's halfway around the world or as close as Boone, North Carolina, where I understand a team of Liberty students is heading right now to help with hurricane relief, and I'm proud of them for it.

00:25:28.000 That's how you actually push yourself out of your comfort zone.

00:25:33.000 And I take inspiration from that.

00:25:35.000 You know, I get a lot of questions, including from some of you here, about what am I doing next?

00:25:39.000 Well, that's my final lesson for you, and I'm pretty sure it's one that Thomas Jefferson or Benjamin Franklin would affirm if they were here with us today.

00:25:48.000 Every time, and I did a lot when I was in your seats, every time that I went on planning exactly how my career would go, laying that 10-year plan out, it never went according to that plan, not once.

00:26:00.000 My advice to you is your plans are silly, okay, and accept that, but your purpose is not.

00:26:07.000 Find your true purpose and I promise you the plan tends to reveal itself every time.

00:26:14.000 We have a long-standing tradition that we've forgotten in our country of those who return to public service at every stage of their career, even after having served at even the highest level.

00:26:26.000 I'll leave you with a story about the first person who led the United States of America who wasn't our founding father, who, perhaps like all of you, took inspiration from them anyway.

00:26:37.000 That was John Quincy Adams.

00:26:39.000 He was the son of the second president, John Adams, who I talked about earlier.

00:26:44.000 He became the president after serving as Secretary of State, but he only served for one term, and by many measures at the time, it wasn't a particularly successful first term either.

00:26:52.000 That bothered him.

00:26:53.000 He was an abolitionist.

00:26:54.000 He didn't get to accomplish everything that he planned to in that one term.

00:26:58.000 He toiled with it.

00:26:59.000 He started a nonprofit, entered the private sector, but felt that he had not fulfilled his actual purpose.

00:27:06.000 And so he did something unprecedented, something that nobody thought you would do after you'd been president.

00:27:11.000 And it turns out he's the only guy in the last 250 years that's done it.

00:27:15.000 He went back to serve in Congress after having been a U.S. president.

00:27:20.000 He was elected to Congress at a moment when the abolition question was the main question in American politics.

00:27:26.000 He went back with the objective of abolishing slavery in the United States.

00:27:31.000 Now, at the time he entered Congress, after having been a former U.S. president, there was a gag order.

00:27:37.000 Believe it or not, they put gag orders on former U.S. presidents then, too.

00:27:41.000 It was a gag rule that stopped you from saying the word slavery on the Congress floor.

00:27:47.000 They didn't want to have the debate.

00:27:48.000 What did he do?

00:27:49.000 He's a congressman now.

00:27:50.000 He's been the president.

00:27:51.000 He's got nothing to lose.

00:27:52.000 He says the word slavery, slavery, slavery, slavery, and intentionally got himself censured.

00:28:00.000 And then he used his trial to make the case for abolition.

00:28:06.000 Did that over the two weeks, morning to night.

00:28:08.000 By the end of his own trial for personally getting kicked out of Congress, he'd actually made the case so beautifully that they ended the gag rule at the end of his trial.

00:28:16.000 He continued to serve in that Capitol building for another number of years until he was giving a speech right in the middle of the Congress floor when he had a stroke.

00:28:25.000 They were able to keep him alive for two more days in the congressional chamber upstairs before he finally died in that building where he went back to serve his country.

00:28:35.000 They came back downstairs to ask for volunteers for who was going to carry out his funeral rites and carry his body out.

00:28:42.000 And the person who raised his hand was none other than a little-known first-term congressman from the state of Illinois by the name of Abraham Lincoln.

00:28:52.000 These are the stories of American history that we deserve to revive.

00:28:56.000 Our children and our grandchildren deserve to hear.

00:28:59.000 That's the story of American exceptionalism.

00:29:02.000 So who are we now?

00:29:05.000 I'll end on a reflection of where we are in the year 2024. Our generation.

00:29:10.000 I'm a millennial.

00:29:12.000 You all are part of Gen Z. I'll tell you, I think that so many of us, we are...

00:29:19.000 Maybe not those in this room, but so many of us outside of this room in our generation, we are lost.

00:29:25.000 We are starved for purpose and meaning and identity, hungry to be part of something bigger than ourselves.

00:29:35.000 And yet we cannot even answer what it means to be an American today.

00:29:40.000 We're hungry to be part of something bigger.

00:29:42.000 There's a vacuum in our heart, and when that black hole runs that deep, that is when the poison fills the void.

00:29:48.000 You pick your favorite one, it almost doesn't matter what it is.

00:29:51.000 Wokeism, transgenderism, climatism, COVIDism, anti-Semitism. 0.80

00:29:59.000 You go straight down the list.

00:30:01.000 These are symptoms of a deeper void.

00:30:05.000 And I think we, and I'm not criticizing anybody else even but myself here, we as a conservative movement, we've done a really good job of criticizing the other side for their poison.

00:30:14.000 We've got to do some of that.

00:30:16.000 Their vision of race, gender, sexuality, and climate, we reject that.

00:30:21.000 But now is our time to level up and say we stand for our own vision.

00:30:26.000 We're not just running from something.

00:30:28.000 We're running to something.

00:30:30.000 Individual, family, nation, and God.

00:30:33.000 Beat race, gender, sexuality, and climate if we have the courage to actually stand for something.

00:30:40.000 What does it mean to be an American in the year 2024?

00:30:44.000 It means we believe in the ideals of 1776. It means that we believe in merit, that the best person gets the job regardless of their skin color, that you get ahead in this country, not on the color of your skin, but on the content of your character and your contributions.

00:31:01.000 That is why we stand against the woke DEI agenda, because we stand for merit.

00:31:09.000 It means you stand for the rule of law.

00:31:11.000 And I say this as the kid of legal immigrants to this country.

00:31:16.000 That means your first act of entering this country cannot break the law.

00:31:20.000 And that is why, if we've had the largest influx of illegals into the United States, it stands to reason that we ought to have the largest mass deportation in American history as well.

00:31:30.000 That's not racist.

00:31:32.000 That's not xenophobic.

00:31:34.000 That's what it means to stand for the rule of law in the United States of America.

00:31:38.000 It means the people we elect to run the government ought to be the ones who actually run the government, not the shadow government of unelected bureaucrats who are really running the show today.

00:31:52.000 I know many of my fellow conservatives like to talk a lot about those mass deportations of illegal aliens, but I tell them, don't forget about the second mass deportation of millions of unelected federal bureaucrats out of the Washington, D.C. bureaucracy.

00:32:03.000 That, too, is how you save a country.

00:32:07.000 A tale of two mass deportations.

00:32:10.000 But you see, the thing about these ideals, these are not really Republican ideas or Democrat ideas.

00:32:15.000 They're certainly not black ideas or white ideas.

00:32:18.000 They're American ideals that we fought a revolution to secure in our country.

00:32:24.000 And the question for you is, do you believe those ideals still exist or not?

00:32:30.000 I actually do.

00:32:33.000 Not in some fake, cheesy politician way, but in a true way.

00:32:36.000 I believe those ideals exist, but the only way we're going to revive them is by all of us.

00:32:43.000 Not just me, not just your leaders at this university, but by all of you.

00:32:50.000 Starting to speak your mind in the open again.

00:32:53.000 When you are the only person in a room who believes what you do, I'm asking you, I'm demanding of you to say it.

00:33:01.000 Say it with a spine.

00:33:02.000 Say it with conviction.

00:33:04.000 Say it with respect.

00:33:07.000 But part of respect is that you respect your neighbor enough to tell him what you actually think.

00:33:14.000 Not some woke-washed version of it, but the real thing.

00:33:17.000 That's what we've lost in this country.

00:33:18.000 We have a culture of fear that has swept across the United States of America like an epidemic.

00:33:25.000 Fear of losing your job.

00:33:26.000 Fear of getting a bad grade in school.

00:33:28.000 Fear of becoming an outcast in your own community.

00:33:31.000 And that culture of fear Has replaced our culture of free speech in America.

00:33:37.000 You hear a lot of reflections on certain cable networks these days about threats to our democracy.

00:33:44.000 You want to hear the best measure of the health of our democracy?

00:33:47.000 I'll tell you what it is.

00:33:48.000 It isn't the number of green pieces of paper in your bank account.

00:33:51.000 It isn't even the number of ballots we cast every November.

00:33:56.000 These things are important.

00:33:58.000 But they're not the most important thing.

00:34:01.000 The best measure of the health of American democracy is the percentage of people who feel free to say what they actually think in public.

00:34:10.000 And right now we're doing poorly, but it doesn't have to stay that way.

00:34:14.000 The way we do it is all of us starting to speak our minds in the open again.

00:34:19.000 That's what our founding fathers did.

00:34:21.000 And that's what it's up to us to do in our 1776 moment today.

00:34:26.000 Speak the truth.

00:34:27.000 Speak it with conviction.

00:34:28.000 Don't be afraid to say that God is real.

00:34:32.000 That there are two genders.

00:34:36.000 That the climate change agenda is a hoax because fossil fuels are a requirement for human prosperity.

00:34:44.000 That reverse racism is racism.

00:34:48.000 That an open border is not a border.

00:34:51.000 That parents should determine the education of their children.

00:34:54.000 That the nuclear family is not a bad word. 0.99

00:34:56.000 It is the greatest form of governance known to mankind.

00:35:00.000 Capitalism lifts us up from poverty.

00:35:02.000 There are three branches of government in the United States, not four.

00:35:06.000 And the U.S. Constitution is the strongest and greatest guarantor of freedom in U.S. history.

00:35:12.000 That is the truth.

00:35:14.000 We fight for the truth.

00:35:16.000 We stand up for the truth.

00:35:18.000 That is what won us the American Revolution.

00:35:22.000 That is what reunited us after the Civil War.

00:35:25.000 That is what won us two World Wars and the Cold War.

00:35:28.000 That is what still gives hope to the free world.

00:35:32.000 And if we can revive that dream...

00:35:34.000 Over group identity and victimhood and grievance, then nobody in the world, not a nation, not a corporation, not a virus, not China, is going to defeat us.

00:35:45.000 That is what American exceptionalism is all about, and that is what we will revive to save this great nation.

00:35:53.000 Thank you all for coming out this morning, Liberty.

00:35:55.000 God bless you and your families, and may God bless our United States of America.

00:36:03.000 Do not stop fighting until we get this job done.

00:36:06.000 This nation is worth saving, and save it we will.

00:36:10.000 Thank you guys, and God bless.

00:36:11.000 Thank you.

00:36:12.000 Thank you.

Truth Podcast - Vivek Ramaswamy - October 03, 2024

How Intellectual Curiosity Built America | Live at Liberty University | TRUTH Ep. #65

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript