Build Up, Not Down: The Speech That Challenges the West's Comfort Trap

Tailor Brands: Check out Tailor Brands to launch your business starting at $0 + state fees: https://bit.ly/TailorBrandsSept Quince: Free shipping and 365-day returns at https://quince.com/impactpod Incogni: Take your personal data back with Incogni! Use code IMPACT at the link below and get 60% off an annual plan: https://incogni.com/impact Pipedrive: Get more leads and grow your business. Go to https://www.pipedrive.com/impact and get started with a 30-day free trial. Netsuite: For the first time ever you can try NetSuite Next for free. If your revenues are at least in the seven figures, go to https://NetSuite.ai/Theory https://netsuite.ai/Theory. Butcherbox: Go to https://ButcherBox.com/IMPACT https://butcherbox.com/IMPACT to get $20 off your first box, plus your choice of free ribeye, new york strip, or filet mignon in every box for a year — with free shipping always. Marco Rubio stood under the Parthenon and told the West it’s at a crossroads — national power or decline. Tom breaks down why this speech went viral, what Rubio is really signaling, and whether Trump can deliver on it. 00:00 Intro 03:24 Rubio at the Acropolis 05:21 The Athenians' last stand (480 BC) 06:41 America's debt to Greece 10:54 The traits that built the West 17:33 "We build downwards" 19:37 Why the West became ashamed of itself 27:27 Socrates, the 300, and Achilles 29:35 Western heroes vs. a cult of death 31:14 From Athens to Apollo 11 38:23 Sovereignty vs. alliances — how do you square it? 40:14 Who is "we"? What's up, everybody? It's Tom Bilyeu here: Want my help starting a business? Join me here inside Zero To Founder https://tombilyeu.com/zero-to-founder?utm_campaign=Podcast%20Offer&utm_source=podca[%E2%80%A6]d%20end%20of%20show&utm_content=podcast%20ad%20end%20of%20show Sign up for my AI Masterclass: AI Masterclass https://tombilyeu.com/ai-masterclass?utm_campaign=Live%20Masterclass&utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=evergreen Follow Me: Instagram:https://www.instagram.com/tombilyeu/ Tik Tok:https://www.tiktok.com/@tombilyeu?lang=en Twitter:https://twitter.com/tombilyeu YouTube:https://www.youtube.com/@TomBilyeu See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

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• 2:07Speaker 00

  We should all hunger for great leadership. Great leadership is identifiable by a very simple rubric. And that is, is it somebody that gives you a positive vision of what the country can be that is grounded in reality? So nothing is ever going to be as easy as we want it to be. So there are going to be hard and difficult choices that we're going to have to make, hard and difficult things we're going to have to do. We are going to have to do things that make us all uncomfortable. And when we do it with bread and circus and we're executing people in front of us and we're regidocio all the time and we're fucking crashing into countries willy-nilly just because we effectively can't be stopped, like that's not the kind of leadership that inspires people to follow you.

• 2:50Speaker 00

  The kind of leadership that inspires people to follow you is the point to the stars like JFK did and say that we're not going to do this because it's easy. We're doing it because it's difficult. We're doing things because they matter. We have a sense of who we are. That is critically important. I think one of the biggest things that we're suffering from right now in the West writ large is because we don't have a positive vision of who we are. We don't understand our past in a way that's intelligent and unifying. We don't understand our future in a way that's clear and meaningful and unifying. And because of that, there's all these battles back and forth between us. We need leadership that tells us a story about who we are. And we are meaning-making machines.

• 3:33Speaker 00

  There is a reason that humans need stories. And you need leadership that understands the power of a well-crafted, true narrative. It is a narrative. It's a choosing of what emphasis to put on things. It's a choosing of what interpretation to put on things. I get that. But somebody that understands the power of doing that well, of doing it honestly, but in a way that is positive and optimistic and gives us something to aim at that brings everybody together. And when I saw this speech, and I was so glad to see that it was going viral, when I saw this, I was like, holy cow. This is Rubio at his finest. He obviously had a chirp to Greece, and at some point, he had the brilliant idea of

• 4:16Speaker 00

  basically just giving a pro-America through the lens of a pro-Greek speech, pro-antiquity speech, a reinterpretation of that period that looks at the best things that it gave us, instead of just harping on all the things that humanity has ever done wrong, of cutting through all that bullshit and getting to the foundations of Western intellectual tradition and the things that gave birth to all the things that have generated so much prosperity. And then shows us how this becomes the beacon that we all move to moving forward. This is absolutely brilliant. I'm going to be light touch in my commentary. I will break in a little bit as we go, but I really want you guys to listen to this speech.

• 5:01Speaker 00

  It is very powerful. It paints a vision of where America could go if only we get the right leaders.

• 5:08Speaker 03

  There are great ruins all across the world. In many cases, they are places where history seems to have exhausted itself, remnants of distant cultures.

• 5:18Speaker 00

  That's how it feels when you're in Italy, by the way. So different.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  That have long passed, belong beyond a living memory. But the Acropolis is different. For thousands of years, the civilization that built what stands behind me has captivated the imagination of the Western world. Generations of our statesmen, artists and philosophers have looked to it, they've looked to it with wonder, and they've looked to it with awe. Now, time has a tendency to dull the senses. Great victories and catastrophic defeats, they seem to shrink to becoming like a footnote

• 6:03Speaker 03

  in a textbook, another fact for our schoolchildren to memorize and forget. But the Greeks of antiquity, they seem to have an almost mystical hold.

• 6:15Speaker 00

  They have that mystical hold only because we retell the stories. This is one of the great tragedies of the way that the American school system is, school systems in general. We teach history in a way that's easy to test, but we don't teach it in a way that shows how meaningful history is, how much it matters to our sense of self today. And one of the great things that we have to figure out right now today is, who are we? What is it that we're going to take from our past to say, this is exactly how we became what we became? And we've been for so long staring at our mistakes that we've lost belief in ourselves. And that I think is a big part of what undergirds this.

• 6:53Speaker 03

  On our memory, they call us back to them again and again.

• 7:00Speaker 00

  Only if we choose the right bits.

• 7:02Speaker 03

  480 years before Christ, the armies of Xerxes arrived in this city, and they put its sanctuaries to the torch. Most Athenians had by then evacuated by ship to a nearby island, but there was a handful of them that refused to leave their home. So instead, they barricaded themselves in the rocky fortress of the Acropolis to fight an extraordinary last stand, heaving massive stones down the cliffs onto the Persian invaders and holding the greatest empire of that age at bay for days. They were eventually overwhelmed.

• 7:45Speaker 03

  The Persians plundered the temples, they burned the shrines, they razed the Acropolis to the ground. But when the Athenians returned, they gathered the broken remains of the old Acropolis and buried them in the hill where it had stood. And decades later, under Pericles, they razed the Parthenon.

• 8:05Speaker 00

  This is the power of narrative. He could obviously tell the story in a way that's like, yeah, there were these fools that made their last stand, and it was foolish of them, and they ended up dying anyway. And what was it all for? Or you can tell it the way he just did. Perspective, the way that you frame something is critical.

• 8:21Speaker 03

  For 25 centuries since, the Parthenon has stood. Empires have risen and fallen beneath its shadow, and the progeny of the men who built it, the sons of Athens and Rome, have carried their civilization with them to the ends of the earth. Two and a half centuries after the founding of the American republic halfway across the world from where I stand now, I stand here today as the Secretary of State of that republic and as the great-grandson of settlers who arrived in the new world from Spain, I stand

• 9:01Speaker 03

  here to testify to a debt that no lapse of time, no distance of space can ever extinguish.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  The history of America, the history of my country is covered with the fingerprints of antiquity. Greece is literally carved into the architecture of our government, in the towering columns, in the domes and the monuments across our capital city. The city where our constitution was born, Philadelphia, is itself a Greek name. The men who founded my country were fascinated by the heritage we inherited from yours. They were exceptionally well-read in history. They are vividly aware of their unique place in it. But no other age of the past held their attention or their imagination quite like that of antiquity.

• 9:54Speaker 00

  We really have to ask why. And one of the fascinating things about the way that the Greeks thought is you can feel them inventing the modern West, like actually having to think through the fact that humans don't have like a default mode of logic. And that's why you see different cultures approach the world so differently and how geography ends up influencing that so tremendously. And to think that a lot of the ideas that we take for granted in the West about logic, scientific method, things like that, they all had to be invented. Somebody had to think of that. And this is one of the reasons that we revere this so much is the unique style of approaching

• 10:36Speaker 00

  the world that was born largely out of Greece, that has come to define the West, has been so effective at innovation, at avoiding certain intellectual traps. It's really pretty breathtaking, but we're certainly at risk of forgetting it.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Many, many people are surprised to learn that the most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was not an Enlightenment philosopher or a political theorist. The most commonly cited author in the Federalist Papers was Plutarch, the Greek biographer of Greece and Rome's great men. Now, much has been written and said about the influence of ancient Greece on the ideas of the American founders, and for that matter, on all of the Western philosophers and statesmen that preceded them. Most of us are familiar with the basic history. Athens gave us democracy. Plato and Aristotle gave us Western philosophy.

• 11:31Speaker 03

  Our ideas of law, of virtue, of citizenship, and republican government were shaped in the Greek city-states. Even much of our political vocabulary, words like democracy, tyranny, the word politics itself, found its origins here.

• 11:45Speaker 00

  We're all being asked right now as the West to figure out what it is that we stand for, because ultimately, and I talk about this with AI, you need AI to have intrinsic limitations. From inside of the AI itself, it must believe, to use a very human word, it must believe something is a line that it won't cross, or a thing ought not be done, or whatever. And so much of antiquity was about giving us those ideas, that this is virtue and valor and Stoicism, giving us the, the value system that would steer us well, so that we had something intrinsic that would stop us from doing dumb things.

• 12:29Speaker 00

  In a populist moment, that's like the first thing that goes out the window.

• 12:32Speaker 03

  Now, all of that is true, but the things we owe to this place as Americans and as Westerners are actually far, far deeper. These institutions and ideas, these institutions and ideas were the outward expression of more fundamental qualities we see in the ancient Greeks. Qualities that can't be reduced to any particular political system or theory. Here, in Athens, we found the first full realization of all the essential traits that would come to define the West.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  Fierce individuality and relentless ambition, daring exploration and invention, a yearning for discovery, for adventure, risk and glory, an insatiable curiosity about the world and the principles by which it operates, a hunger to know the mysteries of nature and grasp the secrets of the cosmos, and impatience with the notion of impossibility, chafing at all boundaries, at all limits, straining to peer into the depths of the unknown. These were not just the formulas or precepts of a particular school of philosophy. They were the characteristic of a people, expressed in their tradition, their stories,

• 13:58Speaker 03

  their imagination, and the qualities that they demanded of their citizens.

• 14:02Speaker 00

  That's what I'm talking about, man. We've got to reinforce this in ourselves, look around, expect that same thing from each other. In the age of AI, this is exactly the kind of human-centered orientation we are going to need to look at the tremendous change that we're going to go through and not see something that is just terrifying and paralyzing, but want to move boldly into the future that we're going to be co-creating. To have a constrictive mentality at this moment would be absolutely devastating.

• 14:37Speaker 03

  And the things they lived and fought and died for. To know them is to know ourselves. What blossomed here, in this place, was the Western desire to uncover all that ignorance, darkness, and distance had kept hidden from the mind of man. The Greeks did not just shape history. The Greeks gave us history itself. Much of, much of what we know about many ancient civilizations comes almost entirely from the records of Greek explorers and historians.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  Explorers and historians who didn't just chronicle the histories of their own people, but ventured outward to observe and record the sagas of foreign peoples and cultures all across the world. Where others looked inward, the Greeks were the first to direct their focus outward, to chase the thrill and glory of seeing all that was strange and new. It was this trait, it was this trait that would push the West to create and build things that others could not. Marking us out from so many other cultures and civilizations, where stability and subsistence were the highest ends of life.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  But it is not just the ambition to explore the unknown that we inherit from the Greeks. It is the conviction that the unknown can be known. The confidence that the world can be charted and measured and mapped and understood, and that there is a rational order to the cosmos governed by certain fundamental laws, laws that men can observe and the mind can come to understand. This was the foundation of the Western mind. Our math, our science, our medicine, our philosophy, ethics, and religion, it paved

• 16:42Speaker 03

  the way for the gospel of Jesus Christ, to find fertile soil in Europe and flourish into the empire of Christendom. It was the foundation of the riches of Christian theology, of Augustine and Aquinas and the whole tradition of natural law. It gave birth to a civilization marked not just by a common culture, it was marked by a common anthropology, a common view of man and of his place in the universe.

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• 20:48Speaker 00

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• 20:52Speaker 00

  I don't think it can be overstated that switching your mindset over to, wait, this is a rules-based universe. These rules can be understood, these rules can be mastered. And he's obviously brushing over a lot of tumult between the church and the scientific method. But setting that aside, the shift in the course of humanity that was on the other side of that decision, that, oh, wait, we can actually learn how these rules work and we can use them to our advantage, just cannot be overstated. It gave you the modern world.

• 21:26Speaker 03

  Its descendants would share not just the idea of a natural order, but a distinctive understanding of virtue, of destiny, of fate, of truth, goodness, and beauty, of a code that dictates how men ought to live, of objective standards and ideals to strive towards. For the Greeks of antiquity, the pursuit of excellence was the very principle of man's existence. They organized all of civic life around contest and ambition and competition, and philosophy, and poetry, and sculpture, and drama, and athletics, and art, and war, and statescraft.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  The classical Greek city was an arena for great men to test and prove themselves, to hone their potential through perpetual struggle, to be the best, the strongest, the most beautiful, straining to inch ever closer to perfection.

• 22:30Speaker 00

  God, I love that. We have lost that desire, man. It's wild. You should want to win, you should want to be the best. You may never achieve it, but you should be striving for it.

• 22:39Speaker 03

  Now, I know that to modern ears, what I just described, this way of life may sound odd. It may even sound cruel.

• 22:45Speaker 00

  That's wild.

• 22:47Speaker 03

  The ideal of many ideologies in our time has frankly become a world of perfect safety, a world devoid of risk or failure, where neither the glory of victory nor the shame of defeat. Too often, these days, we build downwards. We design our standards to ensure that no one will lose. We preoccupy ourselves more with the comfort of the worst than the potential of the best.

• 23:17Speaker 00

  Dude, that's becoming a defining characteristic of the modern moment. That's wild. That's wild. You hold everybody back when you're overly concerned. And I understand being concerned, not wanting to see people lose. But the reality is, when you, as he says, build down, you hold everybody else back.

• 23:35Speaker 03

  We hold the most exceptional things among us hostage to the average, the ordinary, the mediocre.

• 23:43Speaker 00

  And then more people are just incentivized to be that, to default to that.

• 23:47Speaker 03

  The men who made the Parthenon, they built upwards. They held that the highest and most noble aspiration in life was to surpass all others, to strive to be the best in all things. The ancient Greek city-states were filled. They were filled with intense passion and rivalry and faction and conflict. But from that constant struggle for distinction, from that came the great flowering of art and philosophy and political and intellectual energy that would transform a collective of Mediterranean cities

• 24:26Speaker 03

  into the birthplace of the greatest civilization in the world.

• 24:32Speaker 03

  The thumos, as the ancient Greeks called it, the fire of passion, strength, courage, pride, is the heart of great civilization. And without it, without it, nations lose their will to fight, the will to strive, the will to survive. Today, too much of the West has forgotten this quality. Over time, we in the West came to feel ashamed of the very things that made us exceptional.

• 25:01Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  We felt embarrassed that our achievements set us apart from the rest of the world. Our prosperity somehow became a source of guilt. We no longer believed we deserved and had earned our greatness.

• 25:15Speaker 00

  Things are too good for too long. People stop making contact with the reality. They forget that we only have all this stuff because there were people that were striving, trying to be the best, trying to innovate, trying to push things forward, taking risks, failing, grinding, doing the hard things. But because, hey, everything looks so easy, people start thinking that it's just a law of nature. This is all just given to us by, it's manna from heaven. And when we lose sight of that, we start to rain in as a culture.

• 25:42Speaker 03

  The word nationalism became a dirty word. And so we tore down our monuments, we condemned our own history, and in too many places, we taught our children to be ashamed of the countries they would inherit.

• 25:54Speaker 00

  A huge mistake.

• 25:55Speaker 03

  In the process, we opened our borders and outsourced our industry and allowed our militaries to wither and to decay.

• 26:02Speaker 00

  Also catastrophic.

• 26:03Speaker 03

  And with every passing year, we seemed to outsource more of our sovereignty, transferring our decisions to global bureaucracies far beyond the reach of our control.

• 26:14Speaker 00

  I don't even think people know what sovereignty means anymore.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  But others were all too happy to fill the vacuum that we left, the vacuum left behind by our weakness. And as the West's confidence faltered, its adversaries and its rivals only grew more assertive, building up their own wealth and their own power in our stead. And now, today, we find ourselves at a crossroads. Because the next decade and the decisions we make will write the story of the next century. The course we take will determine whether the West maintains its place at the head of the world or resigns itself to a future of atrophy and servitude and decline.

• 27:01Speaker 03

  We will either choose to act now or lose the choice to act at all.

• 27:08Speaker 00

  That's the thing, man. It's like people think, oh, if we help everybody that's below us, if we slow down so that other people can catch up, that the rest of the world is going to be doing the same thing. We are so blind to the fact that the world is a gigantic competition. And you can step out of the realm of competition if you want, but other people are continuing to push themselves to get stronger, to be more aggressive, and they will take the mantle. It's that simple. And I hate that this is the true way of things, but the strong will do as they will and the weak will suffer as they must. And so, the fact that humans let themselves in an endless loop, allow good times to make them weak is truly a tragedy.

• 27:52Speaker 03

  Under President Trump, the United States has made its choice. We choose the unapologetic pursuit of national power, to take back control of our critical supply chains, to re-industrialize our economy, to rebuild our defense, to fight for dominance of the technologies and industries of the future.

• 28:10Speaker 00

  People aren't going to like that word.

• 28:11Speaker 03

  We choose to reach for new frontiers in advanced manufacturing and superintelligence, in drones, weapons, and warfare, in chips, minerals, cyber, and every other domain of human possibility, to unleash our energy, to rebuild our factories, to return our astronauts to the moon and launch a new age of exploration in space.

• 28:36Speaker 03

  Now, for all their lofty ideals, the ancient Greeks were not naive. They understood that nations have interests. They understood that statecraft requires prudence and diplomacy. But they also understood that it requires the ability to wield force when prudence and diplomacy fail. They understood that power requires not only having the means to defend yourself. It requires the credibility that you are willing to use it. This is the classical understanding of politics and of statecraft that the Trump administration hopes to reclaim. Reclaim not just for our country, but for the whole of our civilization.

• 29:21Speaker 00

  I don't think Trump's gonna be able to do it, man. He's too wacky. But could a Rubio administration do it? Maybe.

• 29:27Speaker 03

  We believe that Europe can awaken from its long slumber and rekindle the fire that was lit here millennia ago. There are already signs. Across this continent, we are witnessing what we hope will be the beginning of a generational shift. Skyrocketing defense spending, a flurry of new partnerships and programs, expanded manufacturing and production, following on the historic defense commitments made last year in The Hague. Greece has been at the center of this shift. The people of this nation have proved themselves once again to be an indispensable friend to Europe and to the United States alike on everything from energy to migration to defense, where Greece has been a model ally.

• 30:12Speaker 00

  If you guys haven't been paying attention, I've thought about bringing up a couple of Greek stories recently. They've been going hard in the paint against Europe. Hard. Like, yeah, it'd be interesting to see where this goes.

• 30:22Speaker 03

  It is our sincerest hope that all of Europe will follow your example. Though passions may at times have strained the bonds of affection between the United States and Europe, it must not be allowed to break them. Together, we must strengthen an alliance capable of confronting the threats of our age. And we can, because we do not believe the transatlantic friendship should be zero sum. Quite the opposite. Our vision is an alliance whose strength is greater than the sum of its parts. It is a vision we saw in action just last month in an unprecedented new agreement between the United States, Denmark, and Greenland.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  An agreement that will reshape the Arctic and bolster the security of all of NATO. All three partners in that deal emerged victorious. All of Europe and NATO and the United States emerged safer, stronger, and more secure because of it. We want to win together. We must win together. Now, it's become fashionable today to believe that enlightened foreign policy means prioritizing the global community over one's own people. And I think here, too, we have much to learn from the men of ancient Greece, because they

• 31:47Speaker 03

  knew that there was nothing selfish or wrong about loyalty to your nation, nor anything selfish or wrong about fighting to defend its interests above all else.

• 31:57Speaker 00

  Even if fetus fights for resources, the different areas of the body fight for resources. It doesn't work in just some nice, pleasantly cooperative way. It's like everybody's looking out for themselves, and in doing so, the whole ends up working.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  They believed fiercely in the ideal of the great man, the exceptional individual who obtains immortality through his own deeds. But they believed that glory and fame, those things were won through striving, sacrificing, and achieving greatly for something larger than yourself.

• 32:32Speaker 00

  There it is.

• 32:34Speaker 03

  The recurring hero of the ancient Greek world was the man who was willing to pay any cost for a cause worthy of his loyalty.

• 32:44Speaker 00

  Tell me who your heroes are, and I will tell you all about your culture.

• 32:47Speaker 03

  We see this in Socrates, who refused to abandon the inquiry into truth, even at the cost of his own life.

• 32:54Speaker 00

  He could have left, man. If you guys don't know that story, he had the option to leave and be exiled or commit suicide, essentially. Show suicide.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  We see it in the legendary stand of 300 Spartans, surrounded and hopelessly outnumbered by the vast armies of Persia, who refused the chance to save themselves, choosing to fight to the last man rather than abandon their post or abandon their duty.

• 33:19Speaker 00

  Imagine if we had rhetoric like this all the time about the war in Iran. Boy, oh, boy, I think people would feel real different about it.

• 33:26Speaker 03

  And we see it in the epic myth of Achilles, who's offered the choice to return home and live a long and peaceful life, but chooses instead to remain at Troy and perish in pursuit of eternal glory. These, these are the qualities that would shape the Western moral imagination. From the Christian martyr who refused to betray his faith to the patriot who gave his life for his country, from St. Thomas More to the Battle of the Alamo, running through the immortal closing words of the Declaration of Independence of the United States, which

• 34:06Speaker 03

  says, "We mutually pledge to each other our lives, our fortunes, and our sacred honor." It is from the Greeks that the West inherited its sense of duty, an unbreakable loyalty to one's code, one's cause, one's country. Our heroes, the heroes of the West are those who choose to remain faithful to their duty precisely when it is most difficult and painful to do so.

• 34:35Speaker 00

  I don't think the West knows who its heroes are anymore. That's the problem. It's not shared.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  The man who is bound by his word, the soldier who will not abandon his post, the captain, the proverbial captain, who goes down with the ship. This is wholly different from what we see even now. For example, from fanatics like the radical mullahs of Iran, whose cult of death hails child suicide bombers as national heroes and portrays martyrdom as an end to itself.

• 35:04Speaker 00

  Show me who you think is a hero. I'll tell you about your culture.

• 35:08Speaker 03

  Our heroes, our heroes may be willing to die for their cause, but our heroes do not worship death. It is precisely because we value life that we come to recognize the heroism in those who would sooner sacrifice it than to betray their principles. Now, we take the West conception of these things, heroism, honor, duty, we take these things for granted. We assume that these somehow are universal to all people in all times and in all places.

• 35:38Speaker 00

  Definitely not.

• 35:39Speaker 03

  They are not. They are the product of a distinct character, a distinct character which arose here and shaped the whole story of the civilization that came after it.

• 35:51Speaker 00

  See, this is an example of, it doesn't have to be an idea from your people, your civilization. It just has to be a good idea that's useful. This is why it drives me crazy when people think, if you don't like an ideology, that you're against those people. If you've got a great idea, I'm gonna be for it. You got a bad idea, I'm gonna be against it, whether you look exactly like me or not.

• 36:16Speaker 03

  The civilization that we must fight to defend today with the same passion as our forefathers did. The men who built the Parthenon were succeeded by the architects of European Christendom, who raised the cathedrals of Milan, Cologne, and Florence. The quest to perfect the human form that moved the ancient Greek sculptors found a new expression in Michelangelo. The Greek philosopher's search for the structure of the universe was inherited by Copernicus, then Galileo, and Kepler, and Newton. The hunger for new knowledge, that's what gave birth to Magellan's first expedition

• 36:58Speaker 03

  around the world, to Columbus's discovery of the Americas, and ultimately to Apollo 11's journey to the moon. And the qualities that led Alexander to conquer the entire known world reappeared in Caesar, and Charlemagne, and Cortez. And in America, that same tradition rediscovered itself anew. An open and wild land became the site of a great revival of Western imagination and ambition. The Greek aspiration for new horizons became the American frontier spirit.

• 37:39Speaker 03

  The civilization of Athens and Rome transformed an infant seaboard republic into a continental empire. The greatest Americans of every generation have carried the unmistakable features of their forefathers. Born in Athens, formed by Rome, baptized in Christendom, hardened in the furnace of medieval Europe, endowed with the English genius for liberty, and then carried across the Atlantic to be reborn on the shores of a new world.

• 38:13Speaker 00

  This is how you story.

• 38:14Speaker 03

  Together, we must now rediscover that spirit. We are at an inflection point, an inflection point not only in the history of my nation, but an inflection point in the whole of our civilization. The threats we face today are every bit as real as they were on the dramatic stage of antiquity. National interests did not vanish in the face of international institutions. War did not disappear simply because we preferred peace. Other states continued to arm, to seek influence, to compete for territory and technology and resources and markets and energy and power.

• 38:59Speaker 03

  And now there is war again. There is new competition between great powers again. There is vulnerability, aggression, terrorism, a whole universe of new threats and attacks again. And so we must rebuild our institutions and our alliances to face these threats together, understanding that the purpose of these things is not to abolish the sovereignty of the nations that constitute them. It is to defend them, and that nations need not abandon their distinct identities in order to recognize their common interests. We have built a model of that with our partners here in Greece, in our defense partnerships,

• 39:43Speaker 03

  in energy and technology, in our shared ambition to secure Europe's borders from the threats of mass migration.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  You know, our friendship dates back to the earliest years of my nation. When Greece rose in 1821 to recover its independence after centuries of Ottoman rule, Americans recognized something familiar in that struggle. Three years later, the great American statesman, Daniel Webster, he delivered a famous address to Congress, helping bring the cause of the Greek Revolution before the representatives of the young American republic. And he began by calling their attention to everything around them. This is what he said in the speech. He said, "This free form of government, this, the popular assembly, this practice of free debate and public discussion, the contest of mind with mind, even the edifice in which

• 40:36Speaker 03

  we assemble, these proportion columns, these ornamented architecture, all remind us that Greece has existed and that we, like the rest of mankind, are greatly her debtors." Those words are as true today as they were when he said them. And all of us, not just Americans, but Europeans and our friends across the West, must relearn the lessons our forefathers took from this place and from its history. The history of Greece, the history of Greece does not just offer us a glimpse, does not offer a glimpse of our institutions in their earliest forms.

• 41:21Speaker 03

  The history of Greece shows us an image of ourselves. It shows us that ours is the inheritance of great heroes and that we should be proud, that we should be intensely proud of where we come from. We should marvel at what our forefathers carved out of this countryside. The story of our civilization is the greatest story ever known to man. And it began here, with the first men and women of the West. From them, from them, we can rediscover the virtues, the courage and the strength to confront the dangers that we face in our time. Thank you.

• 42:03Speaker 00

  That is a banger. That is a banger because it gives you something to anchor yourself around, a sense of identity. Where do we come from? Where are we going? What are the values that we stand for? Without that stuff, you drift aimlessly. Without that stuff, you begin tearing yourself apart. If you're not telling yourself a narrative about who you are and where you came from and where you want to go and why you're doing it, then the mental image that people have of themselves begins to erode first and then be filled by somebody who does have a vision. And if that vision isn't something that is useful, then you end up where much of the West is now, just tearing itself apart.

• 42:43Speaker 00

  It's absolutely heartbreaking to see and incredible speech on behalf of who I hope will be a presidential candidate at some time in the near future. But, you know, there's obviously the very cliched statement that if you don't know what you aim for, you'll fall for anything. And I think that that's very true. And I can feel Rubio trying to reestablish that, letting us know that we need to be strong, we need to be prepared to fight. And at the same time, it has to be built on the back of a set of values that are actually worth holding on to, that are actually worth fighting for, that are actually worth dying for. Absolutely killer. Loved it.

• 43:24Speaker 04

  So in the speech, he says nations shouldn't hand their decisions over to global bureaucracies is the word he uses. But then he goes on to call for stronger alliances. So how do you square those two?

• 43:34Speaker 00

  He actually squares in the speech he addresses that. He's like, "Look, this isn't about giving up your sovereignty as a nation. It's about actually defending it." And so I think that people have this sense that we need to be one sort of blob and that there's no way to have kinship with people who think differently than you, which to me is, is an absolute catastrophe. So when my wife and I, who ironically is Greek, when we were getting married, her father didn't want us to get married. And he pulls us aside and he's like, "Listen, I understand you guys are in love and by all means, keep dating. But the reason it's not going to work for you guys is as you get older, you're going to realize that you don't share values. And if you don't share values, then it's going to tear you apart."

• 44:17Speaker 00

  And what I said was, this is to Lisa, but what I said was, "I understand what he's concerned about and he's right to be concerned about it. But what he doesn't understand is we actually do share a set of core values that are very different than, we have different religions. She was religious, I wasn't at all. But there's a core set of things about, we want to share a life together, about what being honest with each other means, ambition, what we're building towards, like a core set of things that transcends our nationalities, that transcends the different ways that we were raised, that certainly transcends religion. And so when you find a partner who has a lot of differences than you, but there's core

• 44:58Speaker 00

  things that you agree on, it's very easy to find a lasting relationship with that person." Now, you can certainly find alliances even with people that you radically agree with, disagree with, excuse me. So, you know, also keep that in mind, but that one's a pretty easy circle to square.

• 45:15Speaker 04

  Gotcha. And another quote that stood out to me, it says, "We opened our borders and outsourced our industry," was the direct thing. And I'm curious who the "we" is in this situation, just given that pretty much every administration for maybe the last 40 years has been doing the exact thing and said, including his own. So do you think this is him stepping outside of party bounds and kind of disobeying?

• 45:34Speaker 00

  Aggressively. I think he's talking to the West as a whole. I don't think that was even meant just as America. Everybody's in the same position right now. Europe, maybe more than most, is in a position where they have to decide. You've leveraged China as a way to get a lot of things cheaply to mask that your economy's been dying for decades. And now what are you going to have to do when you're paying for your own military and you've hollowed out all of your manufacturing? You know, what are you going to do? So yeah, that, that is a criticism that is left, right, but it's also not just the US.

• 46:10Speaker 04

  Gotcha. And he lists some people, Alexander, Caesar, Charlemagne, Cortez, they were carriers of the same spirit. Does this list help the argument he's trying to make or do you think it hurts it?

• 46:23Speaker 00

  I, there are some people on that list, honestly, like I don't know much about Charlemagne. So I would have to research them to put a big stamp on it. Now Cortez was wild. One of the most interesting things about what we're watching Rubio do here is you can look back, back in the past and you can see nothing but a never-ending string of crimes against humanity, tragedy. And if you tell yourself that story, it's very paralyzing. You will end up losing to the person who tells themselves a different story. And I get it, people can want that not to be true, but that is true. China, same thing. China can look at its near history and see nothing but a never-ending string of human tragedies, war crimes, et cetera. Or they can tell themselves, "We're a 5,000-year-old civilization. We've been on top before. We will be on top again.

• 47:08Speaker 00

  We are the Middle Kingdom. Everybody should be basically tithing to us." And that is a far more empowering one. And so it's like, no matter what, like you can look at Cortez as somebody who did effectively the impossible, or you can look at him as just a mass murderer. Both of them are going to be accurate. So now what story do you want to tell yourself? What values do you want to instill? And that really is what I think that Rubio is asking us to do is, you've got to decide what narrative you're going to tell yourselves. We have tried the one where the West is bad and the West is evil and we've made nothing but mistakes and we've pillaged and plundered and that's our history. And that is in our history, but we are also literally the culture that gave birth to

• 47:51Speaker 00

  the scientific method, to a level of innovation and progress the world had never seen before. We ended slavery when nobody else did. It's like there are a lot of things that that value set, that mentality pointed you in a direction and has borne fruit. And what story we tell ourselves about ourselves is going to dictate our entire future. And you see him being very selective in his retelling of history. And that's the whole point. Ultimately, you have to decide, okay, what am I going to take away from this? Am I going to take away that we made mistakes, but we always try to correct those, which is true? Or is it, we made mistakes because we are fallen, because we are bad? And you can take that interpretation.

• 48:35Speaker 00

  It's right there for you if you want it. So it, people have to understand that ultimately, everything is going to get boiled down into an oversimplification. The oversimplification can stunt your growth, it can empower you, it can propel you forward, you can bake into your value system the moral checks and balances that people may lament that we don't have enough of. Put that in the story that you tell yourself. And the, a story becomes most effective when it is true. But there is so much in our background that's good and bad. It's going to determine, or our future's going to be determined by what we emphasize.

• 49:14Speaker 00

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