Winning the AI Race Part 2: Vice President JD Vance

I'm very excited to announce that the vice president JD Vance can be with us today. The last time that we saw um the vice president on stage like this at an all-in summit, he wasn't the vice president yet. It was about 10 months ago at the all-in summit that we did last year and uh obviously a lot has changed. I think he's been doing a phenomenal job and making us all proud and uh it's going to be great to catch up with him. So with without further ado, Vice President JD Vance. Guys, how are you? Good to see you, man. Good to see you, David. >> Good to see you. What's up, brother? How are you? Nice to see you. Good to see you. How are you, man? Good to see you. How you doing? >> Good. So, the last time I did this podcast, I think Jason was a huge to me because the vice president, you seem to be nice to me now, Jason. >> Oh, it's on. Well, okay. Let me get my list of topics. >> He was hoping you'd give him a White House tour later today, so we'll see how this goes. You're you're welcome to have a White House tour. >> Really? >> I know a guy. >> I asked David three times. >> I know a guy. >> His his invitation's been lost in the mail a few times, but >> Well, no, actually, listen, if we're starting it out, um, congratulations on a great run. >> Thank you. I appreciate it. It was fun. >> You know, we can differ on some of the margins. Um, but I just think all Americans appreciate the pace at which, especially in the technology industry, you're going and the effectiveness. So, I just want to congratulate you on that. Sincerely, >> I appreciate that. >> Uh, okay. So, let's get into uh some topics, >> right? >> Uh immigration. >> When we last talked, you said uh I said, "Hey, you're going to deport 20 million people all at once. That seems quite chaotic." And you said, "No, we're going to we're going to do it like a sandwich. Take a couple of bites." Uh how's that going? >> I think it's going well. I mean, we are criticized, interestingly, by some folks on the right who want the pace of deportations to be higher. And I certainly understand that, frankly, and share that frustration. The counterargument is the courts are trying to step stop us at every step of the way. And until about a month ago, we didn't have the resources for ICE to actually get this massive invasion that Joe Biden led into our country. We didn't have the resources necessary to actually process a lot of those people. That has changed because of the big beautiful bill. We've also gotten some court case wins. So, I expect uh that the pace of deportations will increase a little bit. But importantly, when people criticize us and they say, you know, sometimes I'll hear this criticism, well, the pace of deportations from the Trump administration is actually lower than it was in the B administration. And that's actually a completely fake statistic. It's based on the fact that if you come into the country illegally and then the Biden administration processes you and sends you out, that counts as a deportation. It counts as an illegal immigration and then it counts as deportation. So, you have to look at the net number, right? If you do plus one minus one, I'm not a math expert, but I'm pretty sure that's zero. The net number is what really matters. And where the Trump administration, where we've been most wildly successful is that we have I think in 2025, we will have the first net negative immigration number in about 50 or 60 years in the United States. And so there has been a major a major major shift in immigration policy. Now again, I I'm I'm like, you know, me and Steven Miller are probably the two most hardline people in the entire administration when it comes to immigration. So there's always more that we can do. And like I said, I think that there is more that we can do. But if you just look fundamentally what people said is that if you actually take border enforcement seriously, the entire economy is going to collapse. Inflation's going to go through the roof. Housing costs are going to go through the roof. And if you look, while there's still a lot more to do, inflation has cooled. Housing costs are now showing signs of peaking. I think according to Zillow, over the past 12 months, housing costs have gone up8%. Uh the previous the Biden administration, they basically nearly doubled the cost of a mortgage for an average family. So there there are a lot of things that we're showing work and we're showing importantly that it turns out if you put your faith in American workers, you can build great companies, you can build a great economy. You don't have to build an entire economy on illegal labor, which is what the Democrats told us we had to do. So, we're not just doing a good job. I think we're also proving out the use case and proving out what the Trump campaign said that it was going to do in the Trump administration. >> And President Trump, I think, um, came out and said, "Hey, we maybe should appreciate some of these immigrants who've been here for 20 years and maybe give them a path to citizenship. Maybe think about restaurants and farms and maybe show some compassion to those people." And I think the objection perhaps uh that some of us have is the the style in which you're doing it a little aggressive what happened in LA and um you seem to maybe internally in uh the administration found a middle ground maybe and listen to the other side and maybe our opinions on it. >> Well, first the the Trump administration obviously is a big group of people with a lot of different opinions and we all have to talk about this stuff and try to come up with the right decision. But the the Trump the administration the decision maker is of course one man. Yeah. >> And while he listens to everybody he's ultimately going to make the decisions that he thinks are best for the country and then we go and execute that after of course having a big a big conversation around the inner circle. You know what what the president has said is number one we're not going to do amnesty in this country. We're we're actually not going to tell people who have come into the country illegally that they're allowed to break our laws and be rewarded for it. We're just not going to do that. But there are a whole host of other ways when we talk to you know agricultural um industries and others where they say well you know we really need labor. Well there are a whole host of ways in which you can try to solve those problems. My favorite solution for those problems is automation right. Uh I actually think there's a lot of evidence that the American agricultural economy is a little behind the eightball when it comes to using technology. There are ways where we're talking about facilitating the use of automation. So we're not going to have amnesty. We also recognize that there are a lot of industries out there we want to thrive and I think the president is trying to strike the right balance. And Jason, you said something about compassion and I think this is really important. I I do think that we we we have to make a stronger argument here. There's nothing discompassionate or there's nothing hateful about enforcing your own borders. It's a question of do you facilitate Thank you guys. But do you facilitate these Mexican drug cartels, the drug trafficking that they're engaging? Of course not. the hundreds of thousands. I'm not saying you would ever say this, but the hundreds of thousands of missing children under the Biden administration. The fact that some of these young girls are being sex traffked by Mexican drug cartels. When you enforce the nation's border laws, that is the most compassionate thing to do both for your own people, but also for the people who are legally. >> Yeah, I agree on the border. >> Let me uh shift to AI for one second. In I think it was February, I want to get the date right. Um you went to France and then you went to Germany and these were two incredibly iconic speeches. one on AI and then one at the Munich Security Conference. Um, and I think it was a in many ways an incredible moment where you just started to establish American priorities again abroad. Can you just go into the strategy of those speeches and where they came from and just the bigger arc of the first six to nine months and what the goals were? >> Yeah. So for the AI summit, the president really wanted me to do this and of course, you know, happy to go to Paris and give a speech and talk about American priorities. But there there was this big moment we thought we had an opportunity to sort of p plant our flag and say America is done with the overregulating with the constant worrying about the future. We're going to lean into the future. We're going to embrace the future and try to make sure America dominates in the future. And that's such a radical departure from both the safetyism of the Biden administration, but also frankly the safety of a lot of our friends in Europe. And I had been, you know, there for about 24 hours. I had met with with with Emanuel Mcronone, the leader of of France. Had a good conversation and and a lot of the other people in Europe. And the thing that I kind of picked up is that they're so terrified about the problems with AI. And to be clear, there are problems with AI. But if you're so terrified with the problems with AI, you don't actually embrace the potential, then you're going to get the worst of the problems without any of the benefits, the upside of it. And that's what I think was so broken about our administration's um approach during the Biden years. And it's what's so different about our our actual administration here uh during the Trump years. So our attitude is yeah, there are some consumer protection issues. There are some data privacy issues. We don't want the AI companies to do what the big tech companies did in 2020 and 2021, which is steal people's data and then censor an entire large swath of the American people for saying things that were said to be conspiracies, but later turned out to be true. We're not going to do that, but we're also going to embrace innovation. We're going to make sure that America stays at the the the leading edge of the artificial intelligence boom. And we think when that happens, it's going to create a lot of jobs. It's going to create a lot of productivity. We talked about agriculture. I think it's going to lead to a new food revolution where we can grow a lot more food on a lot less land. There there's just a whole host of things that being forward focused on technology can bring to this country. And that is the story. I think the story of American entrepreneurship and American economic growth is that when we grow through technology and development and productivity that enters to the benefit of all Americans and makes us more powerful and more wealthy. When we try to grow our economy, frankly, through importing cheap labor, that I think is a dead end. We've taken that pathway for far too long in this country. The Trump administration is going to take a different path. >> What about relativism? So, uh, just framing up the big open question about our relationship with China. There's there's trade discussions going on, but China this week, it was it was revealed or announced has sold off half their treasury, US Treasury holdings. Um, as you look at the technology uh curve in China, the fiscal situation and the difference between the two, how much should our policy be informed relative to China where we sit with China versus >> forget about China, let's just make America great and focus on creating jobs and moving our industries forward. >> Yeah, it's it's got to be a little bit of both. And I you know, it's always tough to strike the right balance. I mean, look, China is our biggest economic competitor in the entire world. uh when you look at their technology industry, I think it's the only tech industry, especially when it comes to things like AI where they're even sort of knocking on the door of America. Now, I still think that we have the best hardware. I think that we have the best software. I still think that we're the most technologically forward economy. Uh but our but our, you know, our edge is not something we can sort of rest on our laurels. So I think it is useful to look to the Chinese to benchmark our own progress and to say that if we're regulating ourselves to death and allowing the Chinese to catch up to us. That's not something frankly we should blame the Chinese for. That's something we should blame our own leaders for for having stupid policies that allow other countries to catch up to America. So it's a useful benchmark, but I still think fundamentally we have to take the attitude of, you know, we want the world to be built, I think, on an American technology stack, not on a Chinese or some other country's technology stack. And if you're too focused on the relative comparison and not focused enough on just building and creating great things, I think that it can become a little bit of a crutch and a little bit of a I I don't know, an impediment to focusing on your own stuff and doing your own thing. And it's why we have a great AISAR here and David Sachs. But we're we're really focused on how does America just do as well as we possibly can. Yes, we want to stay ahead of China, but we want to stay ahead of everybody else because this is America and we want it to stay the greatest country in the world. >> And related to that, does that mean American businesses should be allowed to sell into China, participate there as a customer market? And if so, in the trade negotiations, is there a push for par so that American businesses can operate in China or elsewhere in the world as easily as those companies can operate in America? >> Yeah. So, as the president said, it's it's a bit of a balance, right? There are certain critical elements of our technology stack. There are certain critical technologies. We know that some Chinese firms engage in IP theft. So, we don't want to give them our very best stuff because we're worried a little bit that they might steal it. But of course there are certain industries that we want to sell into China. We actually want to broaden American workers access to the world. And part of our frustration with China is on the one hand they steal some of our newest technology and on the other hand they don't let Americanmade products into their country. What we want to do is actually reverse that. We want to sell Americanmade products into China but we don't want to allow them to steal our critical intellectual property. And we have to strike that balance in a much better way than not just the Biden administration, but better than the the the the Obama administration and the Bush administration did, too. But striking that balance is something I think the president's very focused on. I'm certainly very focused on. And we've now got a much better approach now than we have in a long time in this country. >> How do you think it plays out for not China or the United States, but all of the other sort of smaller countries when AI gets to scale? Can how do you think strategically the chessboard ends up being organized? Is there a new form of the United Nations? Is there a new form of NATO but more productive? Like how do you think it plays out for the 180th country in the world when they need things? >> Yeah, it's it's a very interesting question and I don't want to you know predict the future too much here. It's always a fraugh business especially in politics. But you know what one of the things that's interesting a foreign leader came to me relatively recently. This is actually last week. um small country but very important country strategically very good ally of the United States and basically pitched me on creating a NATO alternative outside of Europe but where countries that were aligned with the United States built on the same technology stack there was a shared sort of you know shared access to technology shared access to certain weaponry and so forth and he was like we really want to be part of team America but there isn't even an existing infrastructure that would allow us to be team America And I had never thought about it in that way. I haven't even talked to the president yet about it. But it's interesting that world leaders are coming and saying this is how we're thinking about the future. And and the technology piece of it is a very critical angle because as you guys probably appreciate, I assume the audience appreciates is that you know sometimes when you build with with Chinese firms or Chinese technology, it seems like a pretty good deal, right? Larry Summers once had this famous quote that you know when in Africa when developing countries talk to the United States and talk to um China. The the Americans show up with a moral lecture and the Chinese show up with a bag of money. Well, you know the bag of money obviously I prefer that to the moral lecture. But you realize that bag of money sometimes comes with debt servitude. It sometimes comes with a sort of neoc colonial control of the host country. What a lot of nations are realizing is they're not just showing up with a bag of money and we'd much rather be on team America, but it does require much more forward leadership. And you the B administration I I don't know what it was, but there was just this deepseated fear of the future. I'm sure it was motivated by having a president who didn't necessarily know where he was from from day to day, but there was there was on the Sorry, >> it's over. You won, JD. You won. >> We still get to have a little fun with a couple. It's okay. But look, but there was just this really weird fear of the future that I think is totally absent in the Trump administration. It makes our politics much better. >> Are you comfortable with a multi-olar world or do you still think that there should be American primacy on a global stage? >> I I mean I I I I think it's an abstract question that's interesting, but fundamentally in some ways the world is going to be multipolar in the sense that there are different Yeah, we want regional allies to step up. I mean, you've heard the president say this before. you know, we we'd love a Middle East where we have to spend a little bit less time and a little bit less money and our regional allies, both, you know, Israeli and Arabs, step up in a bigger way. We'd like to see that, of course, in Europe. And I think one of the big accomplishments of the president in the first term, something that the media still doesn't give him enough credit for, is he actually got NATO to step up and make major security commitments about their own sector of the world. Now, that's sometimes interpreted as, well, America doesn't like Europe anymore. No, we like Europe so much that we want Europe to step up and take a little bit more self-control of its own continent. Of course, we're going to be their friends and of course we're going to work with them, but we we definitely see a world where some of our regional allies step up a little bit more. I think that's a good thing. Of course, they're going to be ali allied with the United States, aligned with the United States in important ways. But other countries taking a bigger a bigger role in their own self-defense and in their own region. That's fundamentally a good thing for America. >> It also feels, I think, more fair to the American people when the president is able to negotiate the rare earth deal with Ukraine and say, "Hey, if you want weapons, that's fine, but it's on a loan lease. You got to pay for them. They're not free." Um, I think one of your great strengths is your empathy for the working men and women of this country. And uh one of the big discussions we're having in our industry, which will fall on your plate, um in your career is going to be job displacement. So I'm wondering how the administration thinks about that. For every self-driving car we put on the road, that's four drivers who are going to have their jobs retired. They'll be displaced. For every Optimus robot or humanoid robot that eventually makes it into a factory, that'll be five or six factory jobs. Uh you spoke about the agricultural jobs as well. So how do you think about that automation and the pace at which it's going to happen? Because if you ask anybody in technology, none of us have the answer of how quickly this will happen. We are optimistic of course, but there could be displacement. If there is displacement, who's responsible? The administration, the technologists who cause it, the free market, nobody. And we'll just let the chips fall where they may. What do you think, JD? >> Well, a a couple of thoughts on this. So f first of all, I am a little bit more optimistic about automation. And I if if you look at some of the doom narratives about automation, you know, the robots are coming to take all of our jobs. If the robots were coming to take all of our jobs, you would see labor productivity skyrocketing in this country, but you actually see labor productivity flatlining. And what that means actually is that our country is underexed in technology and not overindexed in technology. Maybe we're overindexed in software, but we're underindexed in the real kind of technology that boosts productivity. So, I'm not saying there won't be job displacement, but I always think of the example of the bank teller. And in the 1970s, when the ATM machine, the automated teller machine was created, there was a whole host of articles about how this would destroy a ton of middle class jobs in the banking sector. What actually happened is we have more bank tellers now than we did in the 1970s. they do slightly different jobs and they're more productive and they earn higher wages, but I think that's the story of technology. Productivity is fundamentally good. Now, now there is a a displacement that I worry about and I I you know I was frankly not even aware this was an issue until a couple of weeks ago and I'm trying to dig into it a little bit which is where on the one hand you see some Silicon Valley technology firms especially the big firms say that they are desperate for workers that they can't find for work workers that they have to use you know overseas visa programs to find workers and yet at the same time the college educated employment rate for STEM graduates in this country seems to be declining. Yep. >> Well, wait a second. If you're not hiring American workers coming out of colleges for these jobs, then how can you say that you have a a massive shortage in these jobs? And by the way, you see some big tech companies where they'll lay off 9,000 workers and then they'll apply for a bunch of overseas visas. And I I sort of wonder that doesn't totally make sense to me. The math doesn't that that displacement and that math worries me a bit. And what the president has said, he said very clearly, we want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies and so forth. But I don't want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then to go and say we can't find workers here in America. That's a story. >> What did Microsoft say when you uh brought that up with Microsoft? >> I have I I it's >> Have you talked to them about it? >> I have I have not. I just became aware of this a couple weeks ago. Somebody sent me an article about this and they said, "Well, you know," and it maybe it was Microsoft that fired, I think, 9,000 people. And then I was like, "Wait a second." >> Record profits, record market cap, >> and but also saying they're they're desperate for workers. So, I have not yet had that conversation with Microsoft. In my defense, I just found out a four-year college degree the wrong answer. So the this is this is really important because like so much of our system the American dream sorry to cut your mouth off but just a follow on to this like has been degraded by this idea that everyone should get a college degree then they end up with $100,000 of debt and they can't get enough of an income to get themselves out of that debt. What's the right solution in this evolution in the workforce and this evolution under this uh this AI transition that we're experiencing? >> Yeah. So one I I agree with that though I think it's it's a slightly different question right you can believe that you want American firms to hire American college graduates but then also wonder if the college education system we have in this in this country is broken and I certainly think that it is. I mean, you know, one, I I really, you know, when I went to I went to Ohio State for undergrad and then Yale Law School. When I was at Yale, I guess this is 2010 to 2013, I felt like it was a very leftleaning place, but it was still fundamentally a place where you could debate ideas, where you wouldn't be penalized for stepping outside of the orthodoxy. When I talk to college kids, when I talk to 21-year-olds at some of these universities, some of them feel like they're living in like a North Korean totalitarian style dictatorship where the social unemployment cost of saying anything outside of the Overton window is so severe. That's not a useful social institution. Like I want colleges to promote free thinking, even dangerous ideas. You know, challenge those ideas. Maybe some of them are wrongs, maybe some of them are right. But if you as a college are actually promoting social conventional thinking, then you're not serving your fundamental purpose. And I think the entire university system in this country is broken because of that fact. >> I want to go back to building great companies for a second. Um, America, I think sometimes we lost our footing over the last 20 years because we weren't able to think strategically outside the lenses of just the United States. And what I mean specifically is if you look in China, they were able to pick eight or nine industries and say we need to have national champions because they are just so fundamentally critical to national security, population health, economic vibrancy, etc. I think it was a couple weeks ago and Jim Latinsky is going to come on later, but we did a version of that deal where the DoD partnered with an American company who has a mine in America. We're going to bring these rare earths. We're going to manufacture them here. We're going to do the entire supply chain here. Do you think that that's a one-off thing or how do you see the public private partnership in that gray area in the middle evolve when we think about these strategic priorities like AI? >> Yeah. So Shabbath, if you think about the great era of American economic dominance, right? It's the 40s, it's the ' 50s, it's the 60s, it's when we were so far ahead of the rest of the world that, you know, e economically it just felt like nobody could possibly catch up to us. And back in that area era, one of the great things that worked was true public private partnerships where we let the free market, we let private industries do what private industries were really good at. But we had a discrete goal in public policy and we tried to facilitate it. Right? There were certain basic research things that didn't make sense in a um in a private sector context, but maybe they made sense for the country overall. There are certain, you know, weapon systems that maybe weren't profitable. We were going to make them profitable because they were important for American national security. Of course, the entire moon landing is a story of a great public private partnership that produced a whole host of great technological development and economic benefit downstream. I I I I do think that we're taking a very discreet view of certain industries, of certain core technologies, certain core weapons systems, and saying the United States is not going to allow our industrial base, our technology base to atrophy anymore. You've seen some stuff out of that. I mean, we're only six months into this thing, and I think we've done a hell of a job. I'm obviously biased, but we we're only six months into this. You're going to see a lot more over the next three and a half years. >> You've been working with uh as we wrap here. I know you're very busy. Um you've been working with David for the last 6 months at the White House. Take us into uh you know the cafeteria, the messaul, you and Sachs and Trump. Do you have do you have a recollection of a great Sax story behind the scenes with the president yourself maybe going downstairs getting like a little Mickey De's or something? I know you're a fan. >> Well, okay. I I I have one David Sach story. I was actually in the Navy mess, which is sort of the cafeteria and the White House. And we're sitting down there and we're eating lunch and uh some some young kid, I don't I I don't know if it was a White House intern or somebody walks over, they see David Sax, oh, David Sachs. And they were so impressed and they look at me and they go, "Oh, shit." >> Also impressive. >> Yeah. And so like, oh, there's there's the vice president. So, you know, even even for the vice president of the United States, we're all just shadows and this is not famous. >> You can always, you know, start a podcast. >> That's where you get real fame is podcast. >> It's it's crazy how many people watch these things. >> It is. It is. It's definitely crazy. And >> JD, we are uh rooting for you. We appreciate your service. you've been working very hard and uh we really appreciate how open you are to having these discussions full contact uh and being um just really supportive of our industries and that was something uh we didn't have uh in the Biden administration uh not to make it political but we didn't have a seat at the table and now we have David Sachs in the White House. So this is a real turnaround and and we really appreciate you um >> and what you've done I think you have done an incredible job >> as a vice president. I don't think you go back in history like the last 10 15 who's had as many icon iconic moments as you have had. It's really incredible. >> So thank you. >> Appreciate you guys. Appreciate. Good to see you guys. Good >> stuff. >> Thank you. Thank you.