The American Dream Is Built, Not Promised | David Rubenstein

Finding Peak with Ryan Hanley

David Rubenstein discusses the American Dream, historical amnesia, and the responsibilities of leadership with Ryan Hanley. He emphasizes th

Key takeaways

The decline in history education correlates with reduced civic understanding and increased polarization.
America's success stems from immigration, innovation, and a shared historical memory—elements now at risk.

Main topics

Historical amnesia in America
The role of immigration in national success

Notable quotes

If you don't remember the past, you're condemned to relive it.

We have a long way to go before people really understand history as much as I think they should.

Conclusion

The American Dream is not automatic—it requires memory, opportunity, a

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) You know, you go to the grocery store and what used to cost $200 now costs $250, and then in six months you're worried it's going to cost $300, and we're like operating the same exact life on thinner and thinner margins every day. If Speaker 1 (0:11) you just look at the wealthiest people in the country, they're doing fine. But the people in the middle class and the lower income classes, they are not in good shape. The wealth that people have made in recent years by buying and selling sports franchises has made people think that sports is now an investment class. It's a way you can make a fair amount of money. don't have a thick skin, you shouldn't own a sports team. Speaker 2 (0:39) Where I wanted to start, and we can take this any direction that you want to go, but I guess what enamored me too, I was watching Instagram and then I reached out to your rep at Simon & Schuster and just said, hey, I'd love to have David on the show. I'm very interested as to this amnesia that, so I'm 45 years old, I feel like... At my my generation or the people within maybe a standard deviation of my age have some feel for the history of this country. But I was just in Italy and I had a tour guide in Vatican and she kept she kept bringing up, do you know? And then she'd insert someone who was like famous beyond belief. Julius Caesar. You know, I mean, she's just bringing up these names and she'd say, well, have you heard of them? And after about 10 minutes, I stopped her and I said, you know, I mean this with no disrespect. You don't have to keep prefacing it. Do you know this person? Like I know, you know, at least a decent amount about history. I said, are there really people that don't know some of these famous individuals? And she's like, oh, yeah, my tour that I had yesterday. And I said, please tell me they weren't from America. And she was like, yeah, they were Americans. And I was kind of taken. And she said. Americans tend to have the least, her perception, doesn't mean it's true, the least. Speaker 2 (2:10) understanding or at least caring about history in some regard is what she had to say. And I guess my question for you was just, why do you believe, do you believe? And if so, why do you believe there seemingly is amnesia of the history of this country that it's very tough to deal with? Speaker 1 (2:28) Let me try to explain. When I was an undergraduate about 50 years ago, about 9 % of undergraduates in the United States were history majors. That percentage is now down to about 1%. And that's because today people are afraid if you're not a STEM major in college, you won't get a job at Google or Facebook or Goldman Sachs. So parents have obsessed about getting their kids to be STEM majors. The result is people know less about history. It turns out that Americans know less about our history than people overseas. For example. If you want to be a citizen in this country and you're not born here and you become a naturalized citizen, you have to take, in effect, a history test, a citizenship test. And 91 % of the people that take it pass. The same test was given to people born in this country not long ago. And in 49 out of 50 states, a majority failed the history test. So the result is we don't have people that know history very much. And why is that a problem? because the theory of history is that those people that don't remember the past are condemned to relive it in the future. The theory behind stunning history is you figure out what was done wrong and don't do it again in the future. But we don't have that love of history so much in our country. In Europe, for example, which is much older than the United States, people teach history much more. It's considered a part of their DNA, a part of their fabric. In this country, even though we're celebrating the semi-quincentennial, Many people might know Thomas Jefferson or the Declaration of Independence. Beyond that, they don't really know very much about our history, sadly. It's Speaker 2 (4:07) very difficult to have conversations about what's happening today if we don't have an understanding of the past. And do you see that? Do you think that this is part of why we have, I mean, obviously discourse has always been polarized, but seemingly today it feels exceptionally polarized. Do you think this plays a big role in why we can't have like... logical, honest conversations with each other? Speaker 1 (4:32) Well, there are many reasons for it. I think one of the principal phenomenon right now is the money that is involved in politics. You are allowed to raise unlimited amount of money. And in politics, you raise money by appealing to the far left or the far right. And nobody raises money by saying, I'm going to be right down the middle. I'm going to go to Washington and do what's right for the country. no matter it's left or right. No, you're either raised money on the left or on the right, and generally the far left or far right. And so money has taken over our political situation. Therefore, something called bipartisanship is frowned upon today. When I was young and I worked on Capitol Hill, if you were a great legislator, you were thought to be bipartisan. Today, if somebody calls you bipartisan, it's a curse word because Democrats and Republicans don't want bipartisan people. They want people that will. be part of their own church pew. So it's a sad situation. It's not going to change overnight. The semi-quincentennial was designed, among other things, to help Americans celebrate their history and remember it. But as I make talks around the country about the Declaration of Independence or American Revolution, very few people really seem to be that interested in it or really beyond a surface knowledge. They don't know much about it. So I try to do what I can. I put copies of the Declaration of Independence all over the place. I've had reproductions of my rare copies of the Declaration given to every governor to put in a statehouse, every major league baseball stadium, every NBA stadium, and many other establishments around the country, and every American embassy. So the people that go into these stadiums or embassies or statehouses can see and maybe reflect upon the Declaration of Independence. But I'm just a drop in the bucket. And we have a long way to go before people really understand history as much as I think they should. I Speaker 2 (6:22) actually have the Declaration of Copy of the Declaration of Independence. By copy, I mean, obviously, it's a copy. I don't have one of the originals. But just a framed version of the Declaration of Independence that sits right next to my door. So every day when my kids have to leave or come in the house, it literally sits right there. And then I have like I have a little corner and then Teddy Roosevelt's the portion of his speech that really is known as the man in the arena kind of sits. kitty corner there as a reminder of kind of how lucky we are to live and have been born in this country and then how much we have to keep working for it. I Speaker 1 (6:58) agree. And look, think about this. This country, when we had the Declaration of Independence, had 3 million people in the country, 2.5 million white people, 500,000 slaves. When we won the Revolutionary War, in fact, it ended in 1783, nobody thought we would necessarily survive. to be that bigger country because we're only 3 million people and without a lot of wealth. However, over the next 250 years, became the wealthiest, most successful, most powerful country on the face of the earth. How did we do that? We did it by one thing, among other things, we had immigration. Large numbers of people who are very talented left their own country. So we have today 55 million immigrants in this country. Some of them are their most talented business or cultural leaders. We're now squeezing that down a bit. So I don't think we're going to have as much immigration in the future. And that's going to be a problem for our country because we're not reproducing enough. And therefore, our population is going down, not up. And historically, when populations go down in a country, their GDP goes down and the country's civilization is not as vibrant as it once was. The Speaker 2 (8:03) reproduction thing is very interesting to me because it seems derivative of upstream problems. And when I talk to some of the younger professionals in the businesses that I work for, even as old as like 35, it's like this, they don't always know how to articulate it, but it's this idea of feeling stuck. They're still in an apartment. They're still, you know, they've been maybe fiance or engaged for years. You know what I mean? I mean, Speaker 1 (8:34) it Speaker 2 (8:35) seems like we're extending these things and they're just stuck. Speaker 1 (8:39) And for any population anywhere in the world to stay the same in terms of its size, just the same, women of childbearing age need to have 2.1 children on average, 2.1 on average. The United States number now is 1.6. So our women of childbearing age are reproducing 1.6 children on average. So that would mean that our population is going down. We're not reproducing ourselves. Speaker 1 (9:08) Unless we have immigration, we won't grow the population. That's a big challenge. Another challenge is that we have an older and older population. And as you have an older and older population, the younger people have to work to support the older population through contribution to Social Security and other kinds of social and safety net programs. So it's a problem, but it's not only here. In some countries in the world, the reproduction rate is not 1.6. It's 0.6 in Japan and Korea, for example. Women are not even reproducing at the level of one point on average, one child per woman of childbearing age. So we have a problem, but it's not as bad as other countries. What Speaker 2 (9:50) I really want to get to is like to living in Albany, staring down the river at New York City and, you know, just this. it's shocking me shocking is the wrong word because logically i understand how these cycles work but It's making me very nervous, the communist rhetoric and the way that we are attacking it from multiple angles, democratic socialists, socialists, you know, all these kinds of things. You know, now I've heard people starting to use the word co-op as a way of seemingly shielding these ideas. And as someone who's 45, as a 12 and 10 year old kid who's trying to set them up and do whatever he can through this podcast, through talking to people, through being a capitalist myself and trying to engage in society like. How worried should I be about what they're going to launch into in 10 years? Every Speaker 1 (10:44) generation throughout history is always worried that the next generation won't be as good as the current generation. That's one phenomenon. Another phenomenon is that our current generation, your age, my age, think that maybe the world is going further south, away from the United States. The values the United States has are not going to be the values that our children have. 10 or 20 or 30 years from now. So every parent should always worry. You know, the best thing to do is to try to educate your parents, your children, give them the best values you can. But sometimes there's social factors that are beyond what you can do. And in the case of the Democratic Socialists, it's now a growing part of the Democratic Party, which if it continues to grow, I think will keep the Democrats from getting elected because I don't think it's...