All-In · 2025-02-15 · 110 min

JD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant

Naval RavikantDavid SacksChamath Palihapitiya

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TL;DR

JD Vance’s Paris speech repositioned U.S. AI policy around opportunity, technological leadership and worker productivity—not pre-emptive safety regulation. Sacks distilled four commitments: keep American AI the “gold standard,” resist regulation that could kill it at takeoff, remove ideological bias, and “maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI.” The strategic imperative is speed across chips, models, applications and energy because being six months behind a peer nation could matter far more than speculative consumer-safety rules.
Naval sees concentrated control—not machine extinction—as AI’s most credible systemic risk. Frontier training favors centralized supercomputer clusters, while incumbent labs can invoke safety to “pull up the ladder behind them”; the contradiction is claiming AI could capture “the light cone of all future value” yet remain safely owned by one private company. His test: “If you really think you’re going to create God, do you want to put God on a leash with one entity controlling God?”
The panel’s base case is that AI creates opportunities faster than it destroys jobs, although Jason kept pressing on drivers, cashiers and other visible displacement. Friedberg already sees analysts compress hours of work into minutes without becoming idle; throughput rises and new projects become feasible. The practical labor call was Richard Baldwin’s line—“AI won’t take your job; it’s someone using AI that will take your job”—because these are natural-language computers and “the new programming language is English.”
Naval and Sacks separated a narrow pipeline of highly skilled, assimilating entrants from open borders and low-wage labor substitution. Naval wants a brain drain toward the “freest country in the world,” but insists the oath and assimilation mean something; Sacks argued that unrestricted labor supply helped capital capture three decades of productivity gains. Friedberg rejected the premise that AI job loss should drive immigration policy at all, preserving the episode’s key disagreement.
Jason’s tariff case is that textbook comparative advantage fails in industries dominated by scale economies, hysteresis and network effects. A country can subsidize semiconductors, drones or social platforms, exclude foreign rivals, then use scale to crush any late entrant—“network effects, network effects, network effects rule the world around me.” Yet Chamath warned that tariffs arrive amid persistent inflation, rising delinquencies and roughly $1 trillion needing financing within six to nine months, potentially at rates around 5%-5.5%.
The Thomson Reuters–ROSS ruling moved AI copyright risk from abstraction to substitution economics. Naval put a 5%-10% chance on OpenAI losing hard to The New York Times, potentially forcing injunctions and a Spotify-like revenue share of one-half to two-thirds for content owners; Jason’s own Wirecutter behavior showed the mechanism, as an AI subscription displaced a publisher subscription. The technical dispute remains whether models learn like humans or perform “lossy compression,” but Naval’s fallback principle was crisp: if a model consumes the open web, it should be open source.
Naval is moving from venture investing toward harder products with less market risk and more technical risk. Airchat was a product he loved but “didn’t catch fire”; he found the team new homes, returned investors’ money and carried the product craft into an undisclosed hardware-and-software company he is not yet sure he can pull off. The operator lesson is unusually clean: build something demonstrably wanted if delivered, then make delivery itself the hard part.

Digest · the substance, structured for research

1. Naval is choosing technical risk after a product that did not catch fire

Naval resisted being defined by investing: investing is “a side job” or hobby, while his current identity is simply “building things.” Money’s purpose is the freedom to follow the work that remains interesting. David Friedberg supplied the cited investment examples, including Twitter, Uber, Notion and Postmates.
Airchat combined asynchronous audio, AI transcription and translation to make peer-level podcast conversations accessible without an interviewer. Naval loved the product and team, but because a social network “had to catch fire for it to work,” affection could not rescue weak adoption.
His outcome account was unusually specific: the team got paid and found “great homes,” participating investors received their money back, and the lessons transferred into a harder hardware-and-software project. He now prefers “more technical risk and less market risk.”
That builder turn echoes his earlier stress cycle. AngelList’s original matching email list stopped scaling, the SEC accused him of acting as an unlicensed broker-dealer, and he went to Washington to change the law; amid that pressure, his public notes on “truth, love and money” became the philosophy people remember.

2. Children gain agency by living with consequences early

Naval’s parenting framework comes from David Deutsch’s “taking children seriously”: give children the freedom and respect afforded an adult, and do not rely on the latent threat that a parent can confine them, remove dinner or otherwise force compliance.
Aaron Stupple supplied the extreme specimen: children may eat unlimited ice cream or Snickers, use an iPad indefinitely, skip school and choose their clothes. Everything becomes persuasion and explanation, “just like you would with a roommate or an adult living in your house.”
Naval stops short of that extreme. His children owe roughly one hour of math or programming and two hours of reading, although actual output may be 15-30 minutes of math and 30 minutes to two hours of reading; after that, they are “free creatures.” Jason said his own oldest probably plays iPad nine hours a day.
The hosts pushed on nutrition, passive video and long-term consequences. Naval’s answer was agency over conformity: his oldest now sometimes declines ice cream after being persuaded, nobody appears behind “in anything that matters,” and YouTube captions turn screen time into faster reading. “I would rather they have agency than turn out exactly the way I want.”

3. Vance recast AI policy from safety to national opportunity

Sacks treated Vance’s opening—“not AI safety but AI opportunity”—as a “shot across the bow.” Bletchley Park, European regulation, the Biden executive order and media coverage had centered prospective harm; Vance told the Paris audience that opportunity deserved equal billing.
The administration’s four-part posture was explicit: American AI should remain the “gold standard”; excessive rules must not kill the industry at takeoff; models should remain free from ideological bias; and policy should “maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI” supporting U.S. job creation.
Winning requires the underlying stack, not just a flagship chatbot: chips, AI models, applications and sufficient energy. Vance also warned that regulation sought by large incumbents can become regulatory capture, so restraint may produce a fairer field for smaller companies.
His offer to Europe paired partnership with conditions. Sacks called the Digital Services Act a “speed trap” disproportionately hitting successful American technology companies; Europe could align with the U.S. and its stated free-speech values—“hopefully,” in Sacks’s qualification—or deepen dependence on adversarial systems built for censorship and population control.

4. Centralized ownership, not machine extinction, is Naval’s AI fear

Naval rejects the recurring apocalyptic “religion” that shifts from climate to asteroids, COVID-19 and now AI. Frontier companies may sincerely believe the danger, but their incentives make them especially receptive to a story that lets them “pull up the ladder behind them.”
The safety claim contains a contradiction: AI is supposedly too dangerous for open-source development, yet not too dangerous for a private company to own. If this were genuinely a Manhattan Project producing nuclear weapons, Naval argued, nobody would accept one company controlling the result.
His real concern is structural: clustered compute and model-training economics naturally centralize. Open-source and “little tech AI” therefore matter even if decentralized training struggles to compete. “I’m not scared of AI; I’m scared of what a very small number of people who control AI do to the rest of us for our own good.”

5. Techno-optimists see abundance where incumbents see loss

Friedberg divided the debate between acceleration and preservation. AI, automation, bioengineering, semiconductors, quantum computing and nuclear energy create leverage, reduce prices and expand abundance; people who already possess a great deal often focus more on what they might lose than on the upside.
His GDP-per-capita comparison sharpened the incentives: roughly $82,000 in the U.S. and $60,000 in the EU, versus $12,600 in China and $2,500 in India. Lower-income societies have more reason to chase upside, while wealthy ones risk regulating themselves into stagnation and greater government control.
The automobile is his caution against static forecasts: it did not merely replace transport, but created mechanics, dealerships, roads and associated industries. AI could similarly unlock projects now dismissed as infeasible—new semiconductors, energy systems, ocean habitation, or cities on the Moon and Mars.

6. Technological supremacy underwrites prosperity and defense

Chamath reduced Vance’s argument to a national-power chain: technological supremacy drives economic supremacy and military supremacy, without which societies eventually crumble. Whoever can “harness and govern the things that are technologically superior will win.”
His concrete example was Microsoft’s reported $24 billion U.S. Army commitment: when it could not deliver the intended system, it went to Anduril, which Chamath said possessed the technical capacity to execute. DeepSeek represented the same contest from China’s side.
Chamath also framed Vance and Kamala Harris as a “tale of two vice presidents”: Harris’s early Mexico and Guatemala assignment drew criticism for meandering and evasion, whereas he found Vance focused, precise and ambitious in Paris.
Vance’s own MAGA-versus-tech formulation joined worker protection to innovation: “I dislike substituting American labor for cheap labor,” but “I like growth and productivity gains.” Consumer fraud merits concern; a peer nation becoming six months ahead of the U.S. is the larger danger.

7. Immigration works only when skill and assimilation travel together

Sacks distinguished labor substitution from productivity. Open borders and imports made with lower wages and standards pressure workers at the bottom; technology can instead raise each worker’s output and, in principle, wages. His added hypothesis was that unrestricted immigration helped capital capture productivity gains that otherwise might have reached labor.
Naval declared his bias as an immigrant whose parents moved him to the U.S. at nine and who later became naturalized: “I bleed red, white and blue.” He supports legal, high-skill immigration with enough time and room for assimilation—a brain drain bringing the best knowledge creators to the “freest country in the world.”
The qualifier is load-bearing: entrants must be skilled and become Americans, because “that oath is not meaningless.” Naval’s deliberately stark counterfactual was that if the Biden administration had admitted only people with 150 IQs, the immigration debate would look entirely different.
Friedberg rejected Jason’s premise that expected AI displacement should determine border policy. Jason argued that after two and a half years AI had not demonstrated mass job destruction. Chamath nevertheless found political common ground among asset-light workers, patriotic business owners and innovation leaders around targeted, useful immigration plus genuine assimilation.

8. AI is raising throughput before it is eliminating payrolls

Jason kept returning to autonomous vehicles, cashiers and the possibility of millions of visibly displaced workers. Sacks and Friedberg refused the certainty: Jason described current AI as largely a better search engine that helps students cheat, while forthcoming agents have not yet shown they can operate fully unsupervised and replace whole jobs.
Friedberg’s operating evidence from his company was the opposite. Tasks that consumed an analyst’s hours now take minutes, but employees do not spend the balance idle; the company develops more products and increases organizational throughput. AI is functioning as productivity leverage.
Jason noted that Uber and DoorDash created many of the driver jobs now treated as permanent, while YouTube created occupations that previously did not exist. Friedberg’s bet is that “new things will be created faster than old things will be lost.”
Sacks’s three-part framework preserved uncertainty: new technology generates productivity gains, disrupts portions of existing roles and causes some outright job loss. Historically the first two effects have dominated, but Europe’s error is pretending regulators can already predict the future accurately enough to neutralize every risk.

9. Natural-language computers widen the startup and talent funnel

AI is enabling businesses that could not previously exist. Airchat required transcription and translation, Naval’s new project depends on AI without being branded an AI company, and AngelList is adopting the tools throughout its operation.
Jason sees two- or three-person teams reaching products and potentially $1 million in revenue, alongside a growing long tail of specialized businesses—from ski tracking to meditation and fasting. Naval takes one-person companies scaling rapidly as more credible evidence than claims that every mid-level engineer has been replaced.
The immediate employment tactic was simple: download the tools, speak to them and then reapply. Richard Baldwin’s 2023 line became the episode’s labor thesis: “AI won’t take your job; it’s someone using AI that will take your job because they know how to use it better than you.”
Chamath has partly changed his mind about pushing everyone toward engineering and hard sciences. Agents and deep research can supply pieces of that toolkit, elevating creativity, judgment, history, psychology, leadership and communication; high-EQ people can now compete with pure mathematical horsepower through better questions and nonlinear thinking.

10. Techno-realism says lead the inevitable transition openly

Sacks proposed a third camp beyond optimism and pessimism: “techno realist.” Technology will happen regardless—trying to stop it is like “ordering the tides to stop”—so companies and countries should disrupt themselves and lead rather than wait for competitors to impose the transition.
DeepSeek punctured the idea that the U.S. controls the train. Chamath argued that restrictions on chips and talent pushed the Chinese team toward efficiency, after which it sent back an open-source model while U.S. companies defended closed systems on safety grounds.
Chamath’s tweak was that leadership should not mean one American gatekeeper. Open, distributed competition will leak capabilities abroad, but network effects can still reward the originator; the open internet benefited humanity while its dominant companies remained American because the U.S. embraced it early.
Naval also separated current models from AGI: “I don’t think we know how to build AGI.” What exists is an extraordinary natural-language computer with two central uses—search and paperwork/homework—and many threatened roles are administrative work created to shuffle documents rather than durable productive activity.

11. Network effects break the textbook case for unilateral free trade

Jason challenged Ricardian comparative advantage in modern winner-take-most markets. If China subsidizes TikTok, semiconductors, drones or BYD while excluding foreign competitors, early scale can secure the entire market before a nominally efficient U.S. rival has a chance.
Once scale economies and hysteresis take hold, the winner can cut prices to zero, bankrupt challengers, deter new investment and raise prices again. Static consumer savings therefore miss the option value of retaining a domestic competitor in a strategic, high-margin industry.
The internet furnished Jason’s proof of first-mover advantage: few people in the late 1990s expected Amazon to dominate e-commerce or Uber and Airbnb to consolidate their categories. “Network effects, network effects, network effects rule the world around me”—and trade policy cannot pretend otherwise.

12. Tariffs are entangled with a precarious refinancing calendar

Chamath expects tariffs, but their magnitude depends on the budget path. A slim Senate package covering border security and military spending could defer the fiscal fight; the House’s “one big beautiful bill,” with trillions in proposed cuts and tax relief, would create more immediate pressure for tariff revenue.
His caution was timing: persistent inflation, rising delinquencies and a Fed “asleep at the switch” coincide with roughly $1 trillion needing financing over six to nine months. If funding costs land around 5%, 5.25% or 5.5%, forcing a comprehensive bill before another three to five months of data could reduce Trump’s flexibility.
Friedberg highlighted retaliation: China is the largest buyer of U.S. agricultural exports, and a pullback would reverberate through farm states. During Trump’s first term, he recalled federal transfers to farmers exceeding $20 billion; another trade conflict could require similar support.
The untested experiment is the package, not tariffs alone: higher border taxes combined with lower personal and corporate income taxes could redirect capital flows. Friedberg expects other countries to capitulate “to some degree,” but treated the eventual negotiated balance and short-term damage as unresolved.

13. Drone dependence turns reshoring into a security requirement

Jason’s tariff argument was also social: a democracy needs a functioning middle class with good jobs, not all gains concentrated among asset owners while everyone else becomes an underclass. Strategic employment cannot be reduced to the cheapest current sticker price.
He called DJI “probably the largest defense contractor in the world” because much of the drone supply used by both Ukraine and Russia ultimately originates in China. The U.S. buys F-35s while China builds swarms of what Jason called “autonomous bullets,” exposing a dangerous production gap.
Reshoring drones means rebuilding motors, semiconductors, optics, lasers and the rest of the chain—not opening a single drone factory. With domestic oil, gas, fracking and nuclear fission, Jason argued the U.S. could also run an energy surplus; such physical production offers better jobs than driving or generating unread paperwork.

14. Thomson Reuters turned substitution into the copyright test

Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw’s paid summaries and legal analysis. After ROSS was denied a direct training license, it contracted with LegalEase, whose material had been copied from Westlaw; the judge reversed an earlier fair-use conclusion and found ROSS liable in the first major U.S. AI copyright win discussed.
Jason emphasized fair use’s fourth factor: the effect on the potential market and value of the original work. Crawling a Russian mirror or another open-web repository does not erase the underlying owner’s rights, particularly when the output substitutes for derivatives that owner could sell.
Naval assigned a nonzero—but only 5%-10%—chance that OpenAI loses hard to The New York Times. Injunction risk could force a Napster-to-Spotify settlement in which closed model providers return perhaps one-half to two-thirds of revenue to content owners.
Jason’s Wirecutter example made substitution concrete: he once subscribed to the Times chiefly for product recommendations; now a paid chatbot recommends purchases using information derived from Wirecutter, so he canceled the newspaper. Separately, he said Microsoft was licensing his Harper Business book for $2,500 over three years to index it for an LLM, and he planned to sign the deal as a licensing precedent.

15. Lossy compression does not settle who should own the output

Naval argued that courts lack a stable technical framework, pointing to Oracle’s copyright fight with Rimini Street and an appellate reversal. He recommended Andrej Karpathy’s three-hour explanation of language models because understanding the mechanism makes categorical legal conclusions much harder.
Jason cited Ilya Sutskever’s description of LLMs as extreme compressors; Sacks agreed that this was “lossy compression,” while Naval compared the issue with Google’s use of snippets and links that sent traffic back to publishers.
Friedberg’s dissent was philosophical: a crawler reading public information and remixing it may resemble a human learning from predecessors. Girl Talk, White Panda, Ed Sheeran and the lineage of classical composition expose the unresolved test—how much transformation turns copying into learning?
Friedberg saw only two stable outcomes: pay copyright owners, which foreign open-weight models can evade, or return models trained on open data to open source. For OpenAI, Jason and Chamath favored employee and investor incentives inside a private arm while preserving independent nonprofit control, rather than buying out the nonprofit for a discussed $40 billion and converting everything.

16. Better sleep beat every exotic longevity intervention

Jason’s dinner with Bryan Johnson reduced the protocol to “80% of the 80%”: sleep. Stop eating three or four hours before bed, put unresolved self-talk into a morning plan or journal, remove the phone, read, and create a consistent wind-down; Johnson reportedly falls asleep within three to four minutes.
Naval disclosed a terrible Eight Sleep score because he sleeps only a few hours and moves frequently. He thinks phone content matters more than the device: email and X stimulate the mind, while a book, meditation or spiritual lecture can lower arousal.
His reliable hack is to meditate in bed: “The mind will do anything to avoid meditation,” so when forced to choose between meditating and sleeping, it chooses sleep—and if it does not, the meditation still pays. A separate Khabib anecdote from Chamath credited three post-training hours plus ten nightly hours since adolescence.

17. Prediction markets and builders closed the gap between rhetoric and action

The hosts noted confirmations for RFK Jr. and Brooke Rollins after media doubt, while Polymarket had largely anticipated the outcomes: RFK briefly fell to roughly 75%, and Brooke Rollins’s market reached about 56% before rebounding. The market signal preceded the conventional narrative.
Jason’s suggested political mechanism was internal discipline. With narrow House and Senate majorities, pressure on Republican senators—from primary threats by figures such as Nicole Shanahan or Scott Presler—matters more than continued anger at the left and helps move nominees including Kash Patel and Tulsi Gabbard.
Naval once accepted that government inevitably becomes larger and slower; DOGE and Elon Musk revived the “great man theory of history.” Watching builders take responsibility made him ask whether he was doing something useful enough, helping push him toward an undisclosed hardware project that is “really difficult” and may still fail.

Jason Calacanis

Great job, Naval. You rocked it. Maybe I should have said this on air, but that was literally the most fun podcast I’ve ever recorded. I had my theory on why you were number one, but now I’ve had a realization.

Naval Ravikant

What’s the actual reason? You’ve known us for a long time. What was your theory? What’s the reality?

Jason Calacanis

My theory was that my problem with going on podcasts is usually that the person I’m talking to isn’t that interesting. They’re just asking the same questions, dialing it in, and they’re not that interested. It’s not like we’re having a peer-level, actual conversation.

That’s why I wanted to do Airchat and Clubhouse and things like that, because you can actually have a conversation.

Naval Ravikant

I see. What you guys have very uniquely is 4 people, of whom at least 3 are intelligent. I’m kidding.

Jason Calacanis

How could you say that? Isn’t he here? Sacks isn’t even here to hear you say that. That is so cold.

Naval Ravikant

These 3 are intelligent, and all of you get along and can have an ongoing conversation. That’s a very high hit rate. Normally, in a podcast, you only get 1 interesting person. Now you’ve got 3, maybe 4.

The problem is, if you get people together to talk, 2 is a good conversation, 3 is possible, and 4 is the maximum. That’s why, at a dinner table in a restaurant, you have a 4-top. You don’t do 5 or 6, because then it splits into multiple conversations.

You had 4 people who were capable of talking, and I thought that was the secret. But there’s another secret: You guys are having fun. You’re talking over each other, making fun of each other, and actually having fun.

That’s why I’m saying this is the most fun podcast I’ve ever been on.

Jason Calacanis

That’s why you’ll be welcome back anytime.

Naval Ravikant

I’ll come back. Absolutely. Three smart guys.

Jason Calacanis

For those of you who don’t know Naval, he was an entrepreneur. He kicked a bit of ass, got his ass kicked, and then started Venture Hacks. He started emailing folks and saying, “Here are some deals in Silicon Valley.” About 15 years ago, he went around writing $50,000 and $100,000 checks, hit a bunch of home runs, and turned Venture Hacks into AngelList.

He’s invested in a ton of great startups. Maybe give us some of the greatest hits there, Dave.

David Friedberg

Twitter, Uber, Notion, a bunch of others. Postmates, Udemy—a lot of unicorns, and a bunch of upcoming ones.

Naval Ravikant

It’s actually a lot of deals at this point, but honestly, I’m not necessarily proud of being an investor. Investing, to me, is a side job. It’s a hobby.

I do startups.

Jason Calacanis

How do you define yourself?

Naval Ravikant

I don’t. These days, I would say I’m more focused on building things. Every so-called career is an evolution, right? All of you are independent and do what you’re most interested in. That’s the point of making money: so you can do what you want.

These days, I’m really into building and crafting products. I built one recently called Airchat. It kind of didn’t work, but I’m still proud of what I built and got to work with an incredible team. Now I’m building a new product, and this time I’m going into hardware.

I’m building something that I really want. I’m not doing it all myself. Partially, I bring investors along. Last time, they got their money back. Previous times, they made money. Next time, hopefully they’ll make a lot of money. It’s good to bring your friends along.

Jason Calacanis

I love that you said, “I love the product, but it didn’t work.” Not enough people say that.

Naval Ravikant

I built a product that I loved and was proud of, but it didn’t catch fire. It was a social product, so it had to catch fire for it to work. I found the team great homes, they all got paid, the investors I brought in got their money back, and I learned a ton, which I’m leveraging into the new thing.

But the new thing is much harder. The new thing is hardware and software.

Jason Calacanis

What did you learn building in 2024 and 2025 that you didn’t know before then?

Naval Ravikant

The main thing was the craft—the craft of designing a software product pixel by pixel and launching it. The main thing I took away was that I really enjoyed building products, and I wanted to build something even harder and even more real.

I think, like a lot of us, I’m inspired by Elon and all the incredible work he’s done. I don’t want to build things that are easy. I want to build things that are hard and interesting. I want to take on more technical risk and less market risk.

Jason Calacanis

This is the classic VC learning, right? You want to build something where, if people get it and you can deliver it, you know people will want it. It’s just hard to build, as opposed to building something where you don’t know if people want it.

Airchat was a lot of fun. For those who don’t know, it was kind of like a social media network where you could ask a question and people could respond. It was like an audio-based Twitter. Would you say that’s the best way to describe it?

Naval Ravikant

Audio Twitter, asynchronous AI transcripts, and all kinds of AI to make it easier for you, including translation. It was a really good way to try to make podcast-style conversations more accessible to everybody.

One of the reasons I don’t go on podcasts is that I don’t like being intermediated, so to speak. You sit there, someone interviews you, and then you go back and forth through the same old things. I just want to talk to people. I want peer relationships, kind of like you guys have running here.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Naval, what happened when you went through that phase? There was a period where it just seemed like something had gone on in your life and you just knew the answers. You were so grounded. It’s not to say that you’re not grounded now, but you’re less active posting and writing.

There was this period where I think all of us were like, “What does Naval think?” I would say it was in the late teens or early 20s. Jason, you can correct me if I’m getting the dates wrong. But there was a moment when the “Navalisms” and this sort of philosophy really started to take off. I think people had a tremendous respect for how you were thinking about things.

I’m curious—were you going through something at that moment?

Naval Ravikant

Yes, that’s right. Very insightful. I’ve been on Twitter since 2007 because I was an early investor, but I never really tweeted. I didn’t get featured, and I had no audience. I was just doing the usual techie-guy thing, talking to other techies.

Then I started AngelList in 2010. The original idea of matching investors to startups didn’t scale. It was just an email list that exploded early on, but then it didn’t scale, so we didn’t have a business. I was trying to figure out the business, and at the same time I got a letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission saying, “You’re acting as an unlicensed broker-dealer.”

I was like, “What? I’m not making any money. I’m just making introductions. I’m not taking anything. It’s just a public service.” But even then, they were coming after me.

I had raised a bunch of money from investors, so I was in a very high-stress period of my life. Looking back, it’s almost comical that I was stressed over it, but at the time it all felt very real. The weight of everything was on my shoulders: expectations, people, money, and regulators.

Eventually, I went to Washington, D.C., and got the law changed to legalize what we do. Ironically, that enabled a whole bunch of other things, like ICOs, incubator deals, and demo days.

In that process, I was in a very high-stress period of my life, and I just started tweeting whatever I was going through—whatever realizations I was having. It’s only in stress that you’re forced to grow, so whatever internal growth I was going through, I just started tweeting about it without thinking much of it.

There are 3 things that are always running through my mind. One is that I love science—I’m an amateur, so let’s just leave it at that. I love reading a lot of philosophy and thinking deeply about it, and I like making money. Truth, love, and money—that’s my joke on my Twitter bio.

Those are the 3 things I keep coming back to, so I started tweeting about all of them. Before that, the expectation was that someone like me should just be talking about money and staying in his lane. People had been playing it very safe.

I think the combination of the 3 caught people’s attention, because every person thinks about everything. We don’t just stay in our lane in real life. We’re dealing with our relationships, our relationship with the universe, what we know to be true, science, how we make decisions, how we figure things out, and practical everyday material things—how to deal with our spouses, girlfriends, wives, husbands, children, and how to make money.

I was just tweeting about everything. I got interested in everything and tweeted about it. A lot of my best stuff was just notes to self: “Hey, don’t forget this.” “How to Get Rich—remember that one.”

Jason Calacanis

That tweetstorm was huge.

Naval Ravikant

Yes. I think that’s still the most viral thread ever on Twitter. I like timeless things. I like philosophy and things that still apply in the future. I like compound interest, if you will, in ideas.

X has become so addictive recently that we’re all checking it every day. Elon built the perfect For You feed. He built TikTok for nerds, and we’re all on it. Normally, I try to ignore the news. Obviously, last year things got real, and we all had to pay attention to the news.

But I just like to tweet timeless things. People pay attention sometimes. They like what I write, and sometimes they go nonlinear on me. But, yes, the “How to Get Rich” tweetstorm was a big one.

Jason Calacanis

Is it problematic when people meet you because of the hype versus the reality? There’s a discordance now. If people absorb this content, they expect to see some Yoda floating in the air. You know what I mean?

Naval Ravikant

Yes. I’m reminded of that line in The Matrix, where that agent is about to shoot one of the characters and says, “Only human,” right? That’s what I want to say to everybody: Only human.

Many of you have stopped drinking, but I used to have the occasional glass of wine. There was a moment when I met with a reporter, back when I used to meet with reporters, and she asked where we were going to meet. I said, “Let’s meet at the wine merchant and have a glass.” She was like, “What? You drink?”

It was a big deal for her. She was so disappointed. I said, “I’m an entrepreneur. Most of them are alcoholics or on psychedelics.”

Jason Calacanis

Yes, for sure. Takes 2, man. Hot tub.

Naval Ravikant

When they say, “I’m in therapy,” you know what that’s code for.

Jason Calacanis

You recently did a podcast with Tim Ferriss on parenting. It was out there. I loved it, and I bought the book from this guy. Give us a brief overview of this philosophy of parenting.

Naval Ravikant

I didn’t listen to this. I have to write this down.

Jason Calacanis

Tell us this. You’re going to love it. It spoke to me, but it was a little crazy.

Naval Ravikant

I’m a big fan of David Deutsch. I think he’s basically the smartest living human. He’s a scientist who works on quantum computation, and he’s written a couple of great books about the intersection of the greatest theories we have today—the theories with the most reach. Those are epistemology, the theory of knowledge, evolution, quantum physics, and computation.

Jason Calacanis

He’s the author of The Beginning of Infinity, correct?

Naval Ravikant

Yes. The Fabric of Reality is another book. I’ve spent a fair bit of time with him, done some podcasts with him, and hired and worked with people around him. I’m just really impressed, because it’s the framework that’s made me smarter.

We’re all fighting aging. Our brains are getting slower, and we’re always trying to have better ideas. As you age, you should have wisdom as your substitute for your raw horsepower of intelligence going down. I take scientific wisdom from David—not take, but learn from David.

One of the things he pioneered is called Taking Children Seriously. It’s the idea that you should take your children seriously, like adults. You should always give them the same freedom you would give an adult. If you wouldn’t speak that way with your spouse, if you wouldn’t force your spouse to do something, don’t force a child to do something.

It’s only through the latent threat of physical violence—“I can control you, I can make you go to your room, I can take your dinner away”—that you intimidate children.

It resonated with me because I grew up very, very free. My father wasn’t around when I was young, and my mother didn’t have the bandwidth to watch us all the time. She had other things to do, so I was making my own decisions from an extremely young age.

From the age of 5, nobody was telling me what to do. From the age of 9, I was telling everybody what to do. I’m used to that. I’ve been homeschooling my own kids, so the philosophy resonated with me.

I found this guy Aaron Stupple on Airchat, and he was an incredible expositor of the philosophy. He lives his life with it 99% as extremely as one can go. His kids can eat all the ice cream and Snickers bars they want, play on the iPad as much as they want, and don’t have to go to school if they don’t feel like it.

They dress how they want, and they don’t have to do anything they don’t want to do. Everything is a discussion, negotiation, and explanation, just like you would have with a roommate or an adult living in your house.

It’s kind of insane and extreme, but I live my own home life in that arc, in that direction. I’m a very free person. I don’t have an office to go to. I try really not to maintain a calendar. If I can’t remember it, I don’t want to do it.

I don’t send my kids to school. I really try not to coerce them. Obviously, that’s an extreme model.

Jason Calacanis

So, if your kids were like, “I want Häagen-Dazs,” and it’s 9:00 p.m.—

You’re like, “Okay. Two nights ago I did this: I ordered the Häagen-Dazs.” It wasn’t Häagen-Dazs; it was a different brand. I ordered it. I’m just going to go through a couple of examples. We do ice cream at 9:00 p.m., and we all ate, so they’re like, “Dad, I want—” and they’re happy. They’re happy kids.

“I want to be on my iPad. I’m playing Fortnite. Leave me alone. I’ll go to sleep when I want.” You’re like, “Okay.” My oldest probably plays iPad 9 hours a day.

Then your other kid pees in their pants because they’re too lazy to walk to the bathroom. They don’t do that because they like peeing their pants.

Naval Ravikant

No, I understand. I’m just saying there’s a spectrum of all of these things, right?

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, and your point of view is 100% of it is allowed and you have no judgments.

Naval Ravikant

No, no, that’s not where I am. That’s where Aaron is. My rules are a little different. My rules are that they’ve got to do 1 hour of math or programming plus 2 hours of reading every single day. The moment they’ve done that, they’re free creatures, and everything else is a negotiation.

We have to persuade them. It’s a persuasion, I should say, not even a negotiation. Even the hour of math and 2 hours of reading—you get 15 to 30 minutes of math, maybe an hour if you’re lucky, and you get half an hour to 2 hours of reading, if you’re lucky.

Jason Calacanis

What do you think the long-term consequences of that are? Also, what are the long-term consequences on health if they’re making decisions that are just not good, like the ice cream thing at 9:00 p.m.? How do you manage that in your mind?

Naval Ravikant

I think whatever age you’re at, whatever part you’re at in life, you’re still always struggling with your own habits. All of us, for example, still eat food and feel guilty, or want to eat something that we shouldn’t be eating, and we’re still always evolving our diets. Kids are the same.

My oldest already passed on the ice cream last time. He said, “I want to eat healthier,” because finally I managed to get through to him and persuade him that he should be healthier. My younger kids will eat it, but they’ll eat a limited amount. My middle kid will sometimes eat some.

If they say something, you’ll enable it, but then you’ll guide them. You’ll be like, “Hey, listen, this is not the choice I would make, I don’t think. But if you want it, I’ll try it.”

You also have to be careful. You don’t want to intimidate them, and you don’t want to be so overbearing that they just view Dad as controlling.

Jason Calacanis

I find this fascinating. What do you think happens to these kids when they’re fully formed adults? I’m sure you have a vision of what they’ll be like. What is that vision?

Naval Ravikant

I try not to have one. They’re going to be who they’re going to be. This is how I grew up. I did what I wanted.

I would rather they have agency than turn out exactly the way I want, because agency is the hardest thing: having control over your own life and making your own decisions. I want them to be happy. I have a very happy household.

Jason Calacanis

What is Plato’s goal? Eudaimonia, right?

Naval Ravikant

Eudaimonia.

Jason Calacanis

The fulfillment. Is that what you want for them?

Naval Ravikant

I don’t really want anything for them. I just want them to be free and their best selves.

Jason Calacanis

God, I want Chamath to worry about details. He’s got 17 kids now, I don’t know if you know, but Chamath has a whole punch list of things.

I love this interview because you made a really interesting point, which was that they’re going to have to make these decisions at some point. They’re going to have to learn the pros and cons—the upside and the downside—to all these things, eating, iPad use, and so on. The quicker you get them to have agency and make these decisions for themselves, with knowledge and the ability to ask questions, the more secure they’ll be.

I found it a fascinating discussion. I like cause and effect, especially in teenagers. Now that I have a teenager, it’s really good for them to learn, “Hey, if you don’t do your homework, you have a problem, and then you have to solve that problem. How are we going to solve that problem?”

I like to present it as, “What’s your plan?” Anytime they have a problem—8-year-old kids, 15-year-old kids—I just say, “What’s your plan to solve this?” Then I like to hear their plan and let them know if they want to brainstorm it. I thought it was a very interesting, super-interesting discussion.

Naval Ravikant

Overall, my kids are very happy. The household is very happy. Everybody gets along, everybody loves each other. Some of them are way ahead of their peers. Nobody’s behind in anything that matters. Nobody seems unhealthy in any obvious way. No one has aberrant eating habits. I haven’t found an aberrant behavior that’s out of line. It’s all good.

Jason Calacanis

I worry a lot about this iPad situation. I see my kids on an iPad, and it’s almost like unless they’re doing an interactive project, they end up watching—

Chamath Palihapitiya

Says the guy who has a video-game theme in the background, who probably grew up playing video games nonstop and probably spends 9 hours a day on his screen, just called a phone.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, it’s the same thing.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Yeah, it’s the same thing, man.

Jason Calacanis

I feel like watching is different.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Do they watch shows?

Jason Calacanis

No, but there’s a hypocrisy to picking up your phone and then saying to your kid, “No, you can’t use your iPad.” I grew up playing video games nonstop. I was an avid gamer until just a few years ago.

I’m not criticizing the iPad. I was obviously on a computer since I was 4 years old, so I totally get it. The question for me is that I didn’t have the ability to play a 30-minute show, then play the next 30-minute show and the next 30-minute show, and sit there for 2 hours with a show playing the whole time. I was interacting on the computer and doing things and building things, which was a little different for me from a use-case perspective.

Naval Ravikant

We used to control their YouTube access, although now we don’t do that. The only thing I ask them is that they put on captions when they’re watching YouTube, so it helps their reading. They learn to read fast.

Jason Calacanis

Good tip. I like that one.

Naval Ravikant

One of my kids is really into YouTube. The other two are not. They just got over it. To the extent that they use YouTube, it’s mostly because they’re looking up videos on their favorite games. They want to know how to be better at a game.

Jason Calacanis

All right, let’s keep moving through this docket. We have David Sacks with us here. David, give us your philosophy of parenting.

David Sacks

Okay, next item on the docket. Let’s go talk about some real issues.

Jason Calacanis

This show is not a parenting show.

David Sacks

I asked David, “What’s your parenting philosophy?” He said, “I set up their trust 4 years ago,” so he’s done. The trust is set up. Everything’s good. GRAT check. You’re all set, guys. Let me know how it works out.

Speaking of working out, we’ve got a vice president who isn’t cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and who actually understands what AI is. JD Vance gave a great speech. I watched it myself. He talked about AI in Paris. This was on Tuesday at the AI Action Summit, whatever that is, and he gave a 15-minute banger of a speech.

He talked about overregulating AI and America’s intention to dominate this. We happen to have with us Naval, the czar of AI. Before I go into all the details about the speech—and I don’t want to steal your thunder, Sacks—this speech had a lot of verbiage, a lot of ideas that I’ve heard before and that maybe we’ve all talked about. Tell us a little bit about how this all came together and how proud you are.

Having a vice president who understands AI is mind-blowing. He could speak on a topical subject credibly. This was an awesome moment for America.

Jason Calacanis

What are you implying there, Jason?

David Sacks

I’m implying you workshopped it with him.

Jason Calacanis

No.

David Sacks

Or that he’s smart.

Jason Calacanis

Both of those things.

David Sacks

The vice president wrote the speech, or at least directed all of it. The ideas came from him. I’m not going to take any credit whatsoever for this.

Jason Calacanis

It was on point. Maybe you could talk about it.

David Sacks

I agree. It was on point. I think it was a very well-crafted and well-delivered speech. He made 4 main points about the Trump administration’s approach to AI.

He’s going to ensure, first, that American AI continues to be the gold standard. Fantastic. Check.

Second, he says that the administration understands that excessive regulation could kill AI just as it’s taking off. He did this in front of all the EU elites who love regulation. He did it on their home court.

Third, AI must remain free from ideological bias, as we’ve talked about here on this program.

Fourth, the White House, he said, will “maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI,” so that it can be a potent tool for job creation in the United States.

Jason Calacanis

What are your thoughts on the 4 major bullet points and his speech here in Paris?

David Sacks

I think that you knew he was going to deliver an important speech as soon as he got up there and said, “I’m here to talk about not AI safety, but AI opportunity.” You have to understand what a bracing statement that was, almost like a shot across the bow.

You have to understand the history and context of these events. For the last couple of years, the last couple of these events have been exclusively focused on AI safety. The last in-person event was in the United Kingdom at Bletchley Park, and the whole conference was devoted to AI safety.

Similarly, European AI regulation is completely preoccupied with safety and trying to regulate away safety risks before they happen. You had the Biden executive order, which was based around safety, and then you have the whole media coverage around AI, which is preoccupied with all the risks from AI.

To have the vice president get up there and say, right off the bat, that there are other things to talk about in respect to AI besides safety risks—that there are actually huge opportunities—was a breath of fresh air and, like I said, kind of a shot across the bow. You could almost see some of the Eurocrats. They needed their fainting couches after that. Trudeau looked like his dog had just died.

I think that was a really important statement right off the bat to set the context for the speech, which is that AI is a huge opportunity for all of us. That point just has not been made enough, and it’s true. There are risks, but when you look at the media coverage and the dialogue that the regulators have had around this, they never talk about the opportunities. It’s always just around the risks.

I think that was a very important corrective. Then, like you said, he went on to say that the United States has to win this AI race. We want to be the gold standard. We want to dominate.

Jason Calacanis

That was my favorite part.

David Sacks

By the way, that language about dominating AI and winning the global race is in President Trump’s executive order from week 1. This is very much elaborating on the official policy of this administration.

The vice president went on to specify how we would do that. We have to win some of these key building-block technologies. We want to win in chips. We want to win in AI models. We want to win in applications. We need to build. We need to unlock energy for these companies. Most of all, we just need to be supportive toward them, as opposed to regulating them to death.

He had a lot to say about the risk of overregulation, how often it’s big companies that want regulation, and he warned about regulatory capture, which our friend Bill Gurley would like. He said that having less regulation can actually be more fair and can create a more level playing field for small companies as well as big companies.

Then he said to the Europeans that we want them to be partners with us. We want to lead the world. We want them to be our partners and benefit from this technology that we’re going to take the lead in creating. But they also have to be good partners to us.

He specifically called out the overregulation that Europeans have been engaged in. He mentioned the Digital Services Act, which has acted like a speed trap for American companies. It’s American companies that have been overregulated because the truth of the matter is that American technology companies are winning the race.

When Europe passes these onerous regulations, they fall most of all on American companies. He’s basically saying, “We need you to rebalance and correct this because it’s not fair, it’s not smart policy, and it’s not going to help us collectively win this AI race.”

That brings me to the last point. I don’t think he mentioned China by name, but clearly he talked about adversarial countries that are using AI to control their populations, to engage in censorship and thought control. He basically painted a picture where it’s like, “You could go work with them, or you could work with us. We have hundreds of years of shared history together. We believe in things like free speech, hopefully, and we want you to work with us. But if you’re going to work with us, then you have to cooperate and we have to create a reasonable regulatory regime.”

Jason Calacanis

Naval, did you see the speech? What are your thoughts on JD Vance generally, and on having somebody like this representing us and wanting to win American exceptionalism?

Naval Ravikant

It was very surprising and very impressive. I thought he was polite, optimistic, and forward-looking. It’s what you would expect an entrepreneur or a smart investor to say, so I was very impressed.

I think the idea that America should win is great. I think that we should not regulate. I also agree that I’m not an AI doomer. I don’t think AI is going to end the world. That’s a separate conversation.

There’s a religion that comes along in many forms, which is that climate change is going to end the world, AI is going to end the world, asteroids are going to end the world, COVID-19 is going to end the world. It has a way of fixating your attention. It captures everybody’s attention at once, so it’s a very seductive thing.

In the case of AI, it’s really been overplayed by incentive bias and motivated reasoning by the companies that were ahead and want to pull up the ladder behind them. I think they genuinely believe it. I think they genuinely believe there are safety risks, but they’re motivated to believe in those safety risks, and then they pass that along.

It’s a weird position because they have to say, “It’s so dangerous that you shouldn’t just let open source go at it, and you should let just a few of us work with you on it.” But it’s not so dangerous that a private company can’t own the whole thing. If it was truly the Manhattan Project, if they were building nuclear weapons, you wouldn’t want one company to own that.

Sam Altman famously said that AI will capture the light cone of all future value—in other words, all value ever created at the speed of light from here will be captured by AI. If that’s true, then open-source AI really matters, and little-tech AI really matters.

The problem is that the nature of training these models is highly centralized. They benefit from supercomputer-clustered compute, so it’s not clear how any decentralized model can compete.

To me, the real issue boils down to this: How do you push AI forward while not having just a very small number of players control the entire thing? We thought we had that solution with the original OpenAI, which was a nonprofit that was supposed to do this for humanity. But because they want to incentivize the team and raise money, they have to privatize at least part of it.

It’s not clear to me why they need to privatize the whole thing, or why they need to buy out the nonprofit portion. You could leave a nonprofit portion and have the private portion for the incentives. The real challenge is how you keep AI from naturally centralizing, because all the economics and the underlying technology are centralizing in nature.

If you really think you’re going to create God, do you want to put God on a leash with one entity controlling God? To me, that’s the real fear. I’m not scared of AI. I’m scared of what a very small number of people who control AI do to the rest of us for our own good, because that’s how it always works.

Jason Calacanis

That’s well said. We should probably go with the Greek model, having many gods and heroes as well.

David Friedberg, you heard the JD Vance speech, I assume. What are your thoughts on overregulation and, to Naval’s point, one person owning this versus open source?

David Friedberg

I think there’s this big definition of social balance right now around what I would call techno-optimism and techno-pessimism. Generally speaking, people fall into one of those 2 camps.

Techno-optimists are folks who believe that accelerating outcomes with AI, automation, bioengineering, manufacturing, semiconductors, quantum computing, nuclear energy, and so on will usher in an era of abundance by creating leverage, which is what technology gives us.

Technology will make things cheaper and will be deflationary. It will give everyone more, so it creates abundance. The challenge is that people who already have a lot worry more about their exposure to the downside than they desire the upside.

Techno-pessimists, generally speaking, are the EU and large parts of the United States. They’re worried about the loss of X, the loss of jobs, the loss of this, the loss of that. Countries like China and India are more excited about the opportunity to create wealth, the opportunity to create leverage, and the opportunity to create abundance for their people.

GDP per capita in the EU is $60,000 a year. GDP per capita in the United States is about $82,000, but GDP per capita in India is $2,500 and in China is $12,600. There’s a greater incentive in those countries to manifest upside than there is for the United States and the EU, which are more worried about manifesting downside.

It’s a difficult social battle that’s underway. Over time, I do think those governments, countries, and social systems that embrace these technologies are going to become more capitalist, and they’re going to require less government control and intervention in job creation, the economy, payments to people, and so on.

The countries that are more techno-pessimistic are unfortunately going to find themselves asking for greater government control and intervention in markets, governments creating jobs, governments making payments to people, and governments effectively running the economy.

My personal view is that I’m a very strong advocate for technology acceleration because in nearly every case in human history, when a new technology has emerged, we’ve largely found ourselves assuming that the technology works within the framework of today or yesterday.

The automobile came along, and no one envisioned that everyone in the United States would own an automobile. Therefore, you would need to create all of these new industries: mechanics, car dealerships, roads, all the people servicing and building roads, and all the other industries that emerged.

It’s very hard for us to sit here today and say, “AI is going to destroy jobs. What’s it going to create?” and be right. We’re very likely going to be wrong, whatever estimations we give.

The area that I think is most underestimated is large technical projects that seem technically infeasible today that AI can unlock. For example, habitation in the oceans. It’s very difficult for us to envision creating cities underwater, creating cities in the oceans, creating cities on the Moon, creating cities on Mars, or finding new places to live.

People might argue, “That sounds stupid. I don’t want to go do that,” but at the end of the day, human civilization will drive us to want to do that. Those things are technically very hard to pull off today, but AI can unlock a new set of industries to enable those transitions.

I think we really get it wrong when we try to assume that technology is a transplant for last year or last century. Then we become techno-pessimists because we’re worried about losing what we have.

Jason Calacanis

Are you a techno-pessimist or an optimist? You bring up the downside an awful lot here on the program, but you are working every day in a very optimistic way to breed better strawberries and potatoes for folks.

David Friedberg

I have no techno-pessimism whatsoever. I try to point out why the other side is acting the way they are, to put it in full context.

What I’m trying to highlight is that I think that framework is wrong. I think that frame of technology—the way it operates, the way people think about it—creates this fear because of the focus on the downside. That creates regulation, like we see in the EU, and as a result, China’s GDP will scale while the EU and the United States stagnate, if that’s where they go. That’s my assessment, or my opinion, on what will happen.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’ll give you 2 thoughts.

The first is that this is a really interesting moment where I would call this “the tale of 2 vice presidents.” Very early in the Biden administration, Kamala was dispatched on an equally important topic at that time, which was illegal immigration. She went to Mexico and Guatemala.

You have a really interesting A/B test here. You have both vice presidents dealing with what were, in that moment, incredibly important issues. JD was focused, precise, and ambitious. Even the part of the press that was very supportive of Kamala couldn’t find a lot of positive things to say about her. The feedback was that she was meandering, ducking questions, and not answering the questions that she was asked very well.

It’s interesting because it’s a bit of a microcosm of what happened over the next 4 years and with her campaign, quite honestly. You could have taken that window of feedback, and unfortunately for her it just continued to be very consistent.

That was one observation I had, because I heard him give the speech, I heard her, and I had this moment where I was like, “Wow, 2 totally different people.”

The second thought is on the substance of what JD said. I said this on Tucker, and I’ll simplify all of this into a very basic framework: If you want a country to thrive, it needs to have economic supremacy and military supremacy. In the absence of those 2 things, societies crumble.

The only thing that underpins those 2 things is technological supremacy. We see this today. On Thursday, what happened with Microsoft? They had a $24 billion contract with the United States Army to deliver some whiz-bang thing, and they realized they couldn’t deliver it. So what did they do? They went to Anduril.

Why did they go to Anduril? Because Anduril has the technological supremacy to execute. A few weeks ago, we saw an attempt at technological supremacy from the Chinese with respect to DeepSeek.

This is a very simple existential battle. Those who can harness and govern the things that are technologically superior will win, and it will drive economic vibrancy and military supremacy, which then creates safe, strong societies. That’s it.

From that perspective, JD nailed it. He saw the forest from the trees. He said exactly what I think needed to be said and put folks on notice that you’re either on the ship or you’re off the ship. I think that was really good.

Jason Calacanis

There was a secondary conversation that emerged, Sacks, that I would love to engage you on, if you’re willing. This civil war, quote-unquote, between MAGA 1.0 and MAGA 2.0—techies versus the core MAGA folks, perhaps, and the techies in the MAGA party like ourselves.

We can pull up the tweet here. In JD’s own words, he’s been engaging people in his own words. It’s very clear that he’s writing these tweets. There’s a distinct difference between other politicians and this administration: They just tell you what they think.

Here it is. I’ll try to write something to address this in detail. This is JD Vance’s tweet:

“But I think this civil war is overstated. Though, yes, there are some real divergences between the populists, which I would describe as MAGA, and the techies. But briefly, in general, I dislike substituting American labor for cheap labor. My views on immigration and offshoring flow from this.

“I like growth and productivity gains, and this informs my view on tech and regulation. When it comes to AI specifically, the risks are, number one, overstated, to your point, Naval, or, number two, difficult to avoid. One of my real concerns, for instance, is consumer fraud. That’s a valid reason to worry about safety.

“But the other problem is much worse. If a peer nation is 6 months ahead of the U.S. on AI”—again, he says he’ll try to say more.

This is JD going right at one of the more controversial topics the administration is dealing with: immigration and tech. These 2 things are dovetailing. If we lose millions of driver jobs, which we will in the next 10 years, just like we lost millions of cashier jobs, that’s going to impact how our nation and many of the voters look at the border and immigration.

We might not be able to let as many people immigrate here if we’re losing millions of jobs to AI and self-driving cars. What are your thoughts on him engaging this directly, Sacks?

David Sacks

The first point he’s making there is about wage pressure. When you throw open our borders or throw open American markets to products that can be made in foreign countries by much cheaper labor, not held to the same standards, minimum wage, union rules, or safety standards that American labor is, and that labor has a huge cost advantage, then you’re creating wage pressure for American workers. He’s opposed to that.

I think that’s an important point because the way that the media or neoliberals like to portray this argument is that somehow MAGA’s resistance to unlimited immigration is based on xenophobia. No, it’s based on bread-and-butter, kitchen-table issues. If you have this ridiculous open-border policy, it’s inevitably going to create a lot of wage pressure for people at the bottom of the pyramid.

I think JD is making that argument. But this is point 2: He’s saying he’s not against productivity growth. Technology is good because it enables all of our workers to improve their productivity, and that should result in better wages because workers can produce more. The value of their labor goes up if they have more tools to be productive.

There’s no contradiction there, and I think he’s explaining why there isn’t a contradiction. One point I would add—he doesn’t make this point in that tweet—is that one of the problems we’ve had over the last 30 years is that we’ve had tremendous productivity growth in the U.S., but labor has not been able to capture all of it. That benefit has basically gone to capital or to companies.

I think a big part of the reason why is because we’ve had this largely unrestricted immigration policy. If you were to tamp down on immigration, if you were to stop illegal immigration, then labor might be able to capture more of the benefits of productivity growth. That would be a good thing. It would be a more equitable distribution of the gains from productivity and technology, and that would help tamp down this growing conflict that you see between technologists and the rest of the country, or certainly the heartland of the country.

The final point he makes in that tweet is that we live in a world in which there are other countries that are competitive. Specifically, he doesn’t mention China, but he says we have a peer competitor, and it’s going to be a much worse world if they end up being 6 months ahead of us on AI rather than 6 months behind.

That’s a really important point to keep in mind. I think the whole Paris AI Summit took place against the backdrop of that recognition because just a few weeks ago we had DeepSeek. It’s really clear that China is not a year behind us. They’re hot on our heels, or only maybe months behind us.

If we hobble ourselves with unnecessary regulations and make it more difficult for our AI companies to compete, that doesn’t mean China’s going to follow suit and copy us. They’re going to take advantage of that fact, and they’re going to win.

Jason Calacanis

Naval, this seems to be one of the main issues of our time. 4 of the 5 people on this podcast right now are immigrants. America is a country built by immigrants and for immigrants.

Do you think that should change now in the face of job destruction, which I know you’ve been tracking? Self-driving is something we both have an interest in. Over the years, what’s the solution here if we’re going to see a bunch of job displacement, which will happen for certain jobs? We all know that.

Should we shut the border and not let the next Naval, Chamath, Max, or Friedberg into the country?

Naval Ravikant

Let me declare my biases up front. I’m a first-generation immigrant. I moved here when I was 9 years old—rather, my parents did—and then I naturalized as a citizen. Obviously, I’m in favor of some level of immigration.

That said, I’m assimilated. I consider myself an American first and foremost. I bleed red, white, and blue. I believe in the Bill of Rights and the Constitution—first, second, and fourth, and all the proper amendments.

I get up there every July 4 and deliberately defend the Second Amendment on Twitter, at which point half my followers go bananas because I’m not supposed to. I’m supposed to be a good immigrant and carry the usual set of coherent leftist and globalist policies.

I think that legal, high-skilled immigration, with room and time for assimilation, makes sense. You want to have a brain drain, with the best and brightest coming to the freest country in the world to build technology and help civilization move forward.

As Chamath was saying, economic power and military power are downstream of technology. In fact, even culture is downstream of technology. Look at what the birth-control pill did to culture, or what the automobile did to culture, or radio and television, and then the internet.

Technology drives everything. If you look at wealth, wealth is a set of physical transformations that you can affect, and that’s a combination of capital and knowledge. The bigger input to that is knowledge.

The United States has become the home of knowledge creation thanks to bringing in the best and brightest. You could even argue that DeepSeek is partly the reason why we lost that is that a bunch of those kids studied in the U.S., but then we sent them back home.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Is that actually accurate? They studied here?

Naval Ravikant

Yeah, some of them, a few of them really did.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Oh, my God. That’s exhibit A. I didn’t know that.

Naval Ravikant

You absolutely have to split skilled, assimilated immigration, which is a small set. It has to be both: They have to be skilled, and they have to become Americans. That oath is not meaningless. It has to mean something.

You have to separate skilled, assimilated immigration from open borders, where whoever can wander in just comes on in. That latter part makes no sense.

If the Biden administration had only been letting in people with 150 IQs, we wouldn’t have this debate right now. The reason we’re having this debate is because they just opened the border and let millions and millions of people in.

It was to their advantage to conflate legal and illegal immigration. Every time you’d say, “We can’t just open the border,” they’d say, “What about Elon? What about this?” They would parade them out. If they were just letting in Elon, Jensen, and Friedberg, we wouldn’t be having the same conversation today.

The correlation between open borders and wage suppression is irrefutable. We know that from the data. I think the Democrats, for whatever logic, committed an incredible error in basically undermining their core cohort.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I want to go back to what you said because I think it’s super important. There is a new political calculus on the field, and I agree with you. I think the 3 cohorts of the future are the asset-light working and middle class—that’s cohort number 1. There are probably 100 million to 150 million of those folks.

Then there are patriotic business owners, and then there are leaders in innovation. Those are the 3 cohorts. I think what MAGA gets right is that they found the middle ground that intersects those 3 cohorts of people.

Every time you see this left-versus-right dichotomy, it’s totally miscast, and it sounds discordant to so many of us because that’s not how any of us identify. That’s a very important observation because the policies that we adopt will need to reflect those 3 cohorts.

What is the common ground among those 3? Naval is right: There’s not a lot that those 3 would say is wrong with a very targeted form of extremely useful legal immigration of very, very smart people who agree to assimilate and be a part of America.

Jason Calacanis

I’m so glad you said it the way you said it. I remember growing up, my parents would try to pretend that they were in Sri Lanka, and sometimes I would get so frustrated. I’d say, “If you want to be in Sri Lanka, go back to Sri Lanka.”

I wanted to be Canadian because it was easier for me to make friends and easier for me to have a life. I was trying my best. I wanted to be Canadian. Then, when I moved to the United States 25 years ago, I wanted to be American. I feel that I’m American now, and I’m proud to be an American.

I think that’s what you want. You want people who embrace it. It doesn’t mean that we can’t dress up in a show of our culture every now and then, but the point is: What do you believe, and where is your loyalty?

Friedberg, we used to have this concept of a melting pot and assimilation, and that was a good thing. Then it became cultural appropriation. We made a right turn here. Where do you stand on recruiting the best and brightest and forcing them to assimilate, making sure that they care to be here?

David Friedberg

I reject the premise of this whole conversation.

Jason Calacanis

Wait, hold on. Look, I’m a first-generation American who moved here when I was 5 and became a citizen when I was 10. I’m fully American, and that’s the only country I have any loyalty to.

The premise that I reject here is that somehow an AI conversation leads to an immigration conversation because millions of jobs are going to be lost. We don’t know that. That’s also true. I agree that you’re making a huge assumption and buying into the doomerism around jobs. That is not a fact; there’s no evidence.

How many jobs have been lost by AI? Let’s be real. We’ve had AI for 2½ years, and I think it’s great, but so far it’s a better search engine and it helps high-school kids cheat on their essays.

You don’t believe self-driving is coming?

David Sacks

Hold on a second. You don’t believe millions of jobs will be displaced?

Jason Calacanis

Those driver jobs weren’t even there 10 years ago. Uber came along and created all these driver jobs. DoorDash created all these driver jobs.

What technology does is destroy jobs, but it replaces them with opportunities that are even better. Either you can capture that opportunity yourself, or an entrepreneur will come along and create something that allows you to capture those opportunities.

AI is a productivity tool. It increases the productivity of a worker. It allows them to do more creative work and less repetitive work. As such, it makes them more valuable. Yes, there is some retraining involved, but not a lot. These are natural-language computers. You can talk to them in plain English, and they talk back to you in plain English.

I think David is absolutely right. We will see job creation by AI that will be as fast or faster than job destruction. You saw this even with the internet. YouTube came along, and look at all these YouTube streamers and influencers. That didn’t used to be a job.

New jobs are really opportunities, because “job” is the wrong word. “Job” implies someone else has to give it to me, as if it’s handed out. It’s a zero-sum game. Forget all that. It’s opportunities.

After COVID, look at how many people are making money by working from home in mysterious little ways on the internet that you can’t even quite grasp.

David Sacks

Here’s the way I categorize it. Whenever you have a new technology, you get productivity gains. You get some job disruption, meaning that part of your job may go away, but then you get other parts that are new and hopefully more elevated and more interesting. Then there is some job loss.

I just think that the third category will follow the historical trend, which is that the first 2 categories are always bigger. You end up with more net productivity and more net wealth creation. We’ve seen no evidence to date that that’s not going to be the case.

It’s true that AI is about to get more powerful. You’re going to see a whole new wave of what are called agents this year. Agentic products will be able to do more for you. But there’s no evidence yet that those things are going to be completely unsupervised and replace people’s jobs.

We have to see how this technology evolves. One of the mistakes of the European approach is assuming that you can predict the future with perfect accuracy, with such good accuracy that you can create regulations today that are going to avoid all these risks in the future. We just don’t know enough yet to be able to do that.

The companies promulgating that view are the ones Naval mentioned: Those that have an economic vested interest in convincing the next incremental investor that this could be true, because they want to make the claim that all the money should go to them so they can hoover up all the economic gains.

If you stratify these reactions, there are small startup companies in AI that believe there’s a productivity leap to be had and that there’s going to be prosperity, everybody on the sidelines watching, and then a few companies with an extremely vested interest in being a gatekeeper because they need to raise the next $30 billion or $40 billion trying to convince people that that’s true.

Chamath Palihapitiya

If you view it through that lens, you’re right, Sacks. We have not accomplished anything yet that proves this is going to be cataclysmically bad. If anything, history would tell you it’s probably going to be like the past, which is generally productive and creates prosperity.

David Sacks

To bring it back to J.D.’s speech, where we started, I think it was a quintessentially American speech in the sense that he said we should be optimistic about the opportunities here, which is basically right.

We want to lead. We want to take advantage of this. We don’t want to hobble it. We don’t even fully know what it’s going to be yet. We are going to center workers. We want to be pro-worker.

If there are downsides for workers, we can mitigate those things in the future, but it’s too early to say that we know what the program should be. It’s more about a statement of values at this point.

Jason Calacanis

Do you think it’s too early, Friedberg, given all these optimists and all these robots being created? What we’re seeing in self-driving, you’ve talked about the ramp-up with Waymo—do you really think it’s too early to say that we will not see millions of jobs and millions of people displaced from those jobs?

What do you think, Friedberg? That’s the counterargument.

David Friedberg

My experience in the workplace is that AI tools doing things an analyst or knowledge worker was doing with many hours in the past are allowing them to do something in minutes. That doesn’t mean they spend the rest of the day doing nothing.

What’s great for our business and for other businesses like ours that can leverage AI tools is that those individuals can now do more. Our throughput and our productivity as an organization have gone up, and we can now create more things faster. Whatever the product is that my company makes, we can now make more things more quickly. We can do more development.

Jason Calacanis

You’re seeing it on the ground?

David Friedberg

At a high level, I’m seeing it on the ground. I don’t think this extrapolation of how bad AI will be for jobs is the right framing. It’s about an acceleration of productivity.

This is why I go back to the point about GDP per capita and GDP growth. Countries, societies, areas, and industries that are interested in accelerating output, accelerating productivity, and making and selling things are going to rapidly embrace these tools because they allow them to do more with less. That’s what I really see on the ground.

The second point is the one that I mentioned earlier. We’re underestimating the new industries that will emerge, drastically and dramatically. There is going to be so much new stuff that we’re not really thinking deeply about right now. We could do another 2-hour brainstorming session on what AI unlocks in terms of large-scale projects that are traditionally or typically held back because of constraints on their technical feasibility.

That ranges from accelerating new semiconductor technology to quantum computing, energy systems, transportation, habitation, and so on. There are all sorts of transformations in every industry that are possible as these tools come online. That will spawn insane new industries.

The most important point is the third one: We don’t know the overlap between job loss and job creation, if there is one, or the rate at which these new technologies impact and create new markets.

I think Naval is right. What happens in capitalism and free societies is that capital and people rush to fill the hole of new opportunities that emerge because of AI. Those grow more quickly than the old bubbles deflate.

If there’s a deflationary effect in terms of job need in other industries, I think the loss will happen more slowly than the rush to take advantage of creating new things will happen on the other side. My bet is that new things will be created faster than old things will be lost.

Jason Calacanis

As a quick side note, the fastest way to help somebody get a job right now—if you know somebody in the market who’s looking for a job—is to say, “Go download the AI tools and just start talking to them. Start using them in any way.”

Then you can walk into almost any employer in almost any field and say, “I understand AI,” and they’ll hire you on the spot.

Naval, you and I watched this happen. We had a front-row seat to it back in the day, when you were doing Venture Hacks and I was doing Open Angel Forum. We had to fight to find 5 or 10 companies a month.

Then the cost of running these companies went down massively: from $5 million to start a company, to $2 million, then to $250,000, then to $100,000. I think what we’re seeing is 3 things concurrently.

You’re going to see all these jobs go away through automation—self-driving cars, cashiers, and so on. We’re also going to see static team sizes at places like Google. They’re just not hiring because they’re having the existing bloated employee base learn the tools.

I don’t know if you’re seeing this, but the number of startups able to get a product to market with 2 or 3 people and get to $1 million in revenue is booming. What are you seeing in the startup landscape?

Naval Ravikant

Definitely what you’re saying in terms of leverage. But at the same time, I think the more interesting part is that new startups are enabled that could not exist otherwise.

My last startup, Airchat, could not have existed without AI because we needed transcription and translation. Even the current thing I’m working on—it’s not an AI company, but it cannot exist without AI. It is relying on AI.

Even at AngelList, we’re significantly adopting AI. Everywhere you turn, it’s more opportunity, more opportunity, more opportunity.

People like to go on Twitter, formerly known as Twitter, and exaggerate. “Oh, my God, we’ve hit AGI. Oh, my God, I just replaced all my mid-level engineers. Oh, my God, I’ve stopped hiring.” To me, that’s moronic.

The 2 valid ones are the one-man entrepreneur shops, where there’s one guy or one gal scaling up crazy things through AI, or people embracing AI and saying, “I need to hire. I need to hire anyone who can even spell AI. Anyone who’s even used AI, just come on in.”

Again, the easiest way to see that AI is not taking jobs but creating opportunities is to brush up, learn a little bit, watch a few videos, use AI, tinker with it, and then reapply for the job that rejected you. Watch how they pull you in.

In 2023, an economist named Richard Baldwin said, “AI won’t take your job. It’s someone using AI who will take your job because they know how to use it better than you.” That’s become a meme, and you see it floating around X, but I think there’s a lot of truth in that.

As long as you remain adaptive, keep learning, and learn how to take advantage of these tools, you should do better. If you wall yourself off from the technology and don’t take advantage of it, that’s when you put yourself at risk.

Another way to think about it is that these are natural-language computers. Everyone who was intimidated by computers before should no longer be intimidated. You don’t need to program anymore in some esoteric language or learn obscure mathematics to use these. You can just talk to them, and they talk back to you. That’s magic. The new programming language is English.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’m pretty unconvinced anymore that you should bother even learning many of the hard sciences and mathematics that we used to think of as underpinnings.

I used to believe that the right thing to do was for everybody to go into engineering. I’m not necessarily as convinced as I used to be because I used to say, “That’s great—first-principles thinking, and you’re going to get trained in a toolkit that will scale.”

I’m not sure that’s true. You can use these agents and deep research, and all of a sudden they replace a lot of that skill. What’s left over? It’s creativity, judgment, history, psychology, and all of these other things—soft skills, leadership, communication—that allow you to manipulate these models in constructive ways.

When you think about the prompt engineering that gets you great answers, it’s actually just thinking in totally different, orthogonal ways and nonlinearly.

That’s my last thought. It does open up the aperture. For every smart mathematical genius, there are many, many, many other people who have high EQ. All of a sudden, this tool takes the skill away from the person with just a high IQ and says, “If you have these other skills, now you can compete with me equally.” I think that’s liberating for a lot of people.

Jason Calacanis

I’m in the camp of more opportunity. I got to watch the movie industry when digital cameras came out. More people started making documentaries, more people started making independent films and shorts, and then there was the YouTube revolution. People started making videos on YouTube and podcasts like this.

Look at what happened with the special-effects industry as well. We need far fewer people to make a Star Wars movie, a Star Wars series, or a Marvel series. We can get The Mandalorian, Ahsoka, and all these other series with smaller numbers of people, and they look better than the original Star Wars series or even the prequels.

There are going to be so many more opportunities. We’re now making more TV shows and more series—everything we wanted to see about every little character.

The same thing is happening in startups. I can’t believe there’s an app now called Slopes just for skiing, and there are 20 really good apps just for meditation. There are 10 really good ones just for fasting. We’re going down this long tail of opportunity, and there will be plenty of million- to $10 million businesses for people who learn to use these tools.

David Sacks

I love how the thing that tips you over is that you get an extra Marvel movie or an extra Star Wars show.

Jason Calacanis

For a lot of people, it feels great that AI may take over the world, but we’re going to get the next Star Wars movie, so I’m cool.

David Sacks

I mean, are you not entertained?

David Sacks

My final point is that given the choice between the 2 categories of techno-optimist and techno-pessimist, I’m definitely in the optimist camp, and I think we should be.

But I think there’s actually a third category that I would submit: the techno-realist. Technology is going to happen. Trying to stop it is like ordering the tides to stop. If we don’t do it, somebody else will. China’s going to do it, or somebody else will.

It’s better for us to be in control of the technology, to be the leader, rather than passively waiting for it to happen to us. I think that’s always true. It’s better for businesses to be proactive and take the lead and disrupt themselves instead of waiting for someone else to do it. I think it’s better for countries, too.

You saw this theme a little bit—I don’t want to ascribe my own views to the vice president, but I think you saw a hint of the techno-realist idea in his speech and in his tweet. AI is going to happen. We might as well be the leader.

If we don’t, we could lose in a key category that has implications for national security, our economy, and many other things. That’s just not a world we want to live in.

A lot of this debate is academic because whether you’re an optimist or pessimist is sort of a glass-half-empty or glass-half-full question. The question is just whether it’s going to happen or not. I think the answer is yes. So then we want to control it.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Let’s boil it down. There’s not a tremendous amount of choice in this.

I agree heavily with one point, and I would tweak another. The point I agree with is that it’s going to happen anyway. That’s what DeepSeek proved. You can turn off the flow of chips to them and turn off the flow of talent. What do they do? They just get more efficient, and then they exported it back to us. They sent us the best open-source model when our guys were staying closed source for safety reasons.

DeepSeek exploded the fallacy that the U.S. has a monopoly in this category, and that therefore we can slow down the train and have total control over the train. What DeepSeek showed is that if we slow down the train, they’re just going to win.

David Sacks

Exactly.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The part I would tweak slightly is the idea that we’re going to win when you say “America.” The problem is that the best way to win is to be as open, distributed, and innovative as possible.

If this all ends up under the control of one company, they’re actually going to be slower to innovate than if there’s a dynamic system. That dynamic system, by its nature, will be open. It will leak to China. It will leak to India.

But these things have powerful network effects. We know this about technology. Almost all technologies have network effects underneath. Even if you are open, you’re still going to win and you’re still going to control it.

Look at the internet. That was all true for the internet, right? The internet is an open technology based on tons of open source. Who are the dominant companies? All the dominant companies are U.S. companies because they were in the lead.

David Sacks

Exactly right.

Chamath Palihapitiya

We embraced the open internet.

David Sacks

That was different.

Chamath Palihapitiya

There will be benefits for all of humanity, and I think the vice president’s speech was really clear: We want you guys to be on board. We want to be good partners. However, there are definitely going to be winners economically and militarily.

In order to be one of those winners, you have to be a leader.

Jason Calacanis

Who’s going to get to AGI first?

Naval Ravikant

Is it going to be open source or closed source? Who’s going to win the day? If we’re sitting here 5 or 10 years from now and looking at the top 3 language models, I don’t think we know how to build AGI.

Jason Calacanis

That’s a much longer discussion.

Naval Ravikant

Who’s going to have the best model 5 years from now?

Jason Calacanis

Hold on. I 100% agree with you. I just think it’s a different thing.

Naval Ravikant

What we’re building are these incredible natural-language computers. David, in a very pithy way, summarized the 2 big use cases: It’s search and homework.

It’s paperwork. A lot of these jobs that we’re talking about disappearing are actually paperwork jobs. They’re paperwork-shuffling jobs. These are made-up jobs.

The federal government, as we’re finding out through DOGE, is a third people digging holes with spoons, another third filling them back up, and the rest filling out paperwork and burying it in a mine shaft.

Chamath Palihapitiya

They’re burying it in a mine shaft?

Naval Ravikant

They’re burying it in a mine shaft.

Jason Calacanis

They’re burying the paperwork in the mine shaft.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’m going to get them some thumb drives. We can increase the throughput of the elevator with some thumb drives.

Jason Calacanis

It would be incredible.

Naval Ravikant

What we found out is that the DMV has been running the government for the last 70 years.

Jason Calacanis

It’s been compounding. That’s really what’s going on. The DMV is in charge.

If the world ends in nuclear war, God forbid, the only things left will be the cockroaches and a bunch of government documents, status reports, and TPS reports down in the mine shaft.

David Sacks

Basically.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s take a moment to thank our czar. We miss him. We wish he could be here for the whole show.

Naval Ravikant

Thank you, czar.

Jason Calacanis

Thank you to the czar. See you guys.

David Sacks

We miss you, little buddy.

Jason Calacanis

I wish we could talk about Ukraine, but we’re not allowed.

Naval Ravikant

Get back to work. We’ll talk about it another time over coffee.

Jason Calacanis

I’ll see you in the commissary.

Naval Ravikant

Thanks for the invite. Bye, man.

Jason Calacanis

I’m so excited. Sacks invited me to go to the military mess. I’m going to be in the commissary.

David Sacks

No, he didn’t. Jason, you invited yourself. Be honest.

Jason Calacanis

I did, yes. I put it on his calendar to keep the conversation moving.

Let me segue a point that came up that was really important into tariffs. Even though the internet was open, the United States won a lot of the internet. A lot of U.S. companies won the internet because we got there firstest with the mostest, as they say in the military.

That matters because a lot of technology businesses have scale economies and network effects underneath. Even basic brand-based network effects matter. If you go back to the late 1990s and early 2000s, very few people would have predicted that we would have ended up with Amazon basically owning all of e-commerce. You would have thought it would be perfectly competitive and very spread out.

That applies to how we ended up with Uber as basically one taxi service, or Airbnb and Meta. It’s network effects, network effects, network effects. Network effects rule the world around me.

But when it comes to tariffs and trade, we act like network effects don’t exist. The classic Ricardian comparative-advantage dogma says that you should produce what you’re best at. I produce what I’m best at, you produce what you’re best at, and we trade.

Even if you want to charge me more for it, if you want to impose tariffs for me to ship to you, I should still keep tariffs down because I’m better off. You’re just selling me stuff cheaply. Great. Or if you want to subsidize your guys, great—you’re selling me stuff cheaply.

The problem is that this is not how most modern businesses work. Most modern businesses have network effects. As a simple thought experiment, suppose we have 2 countries: China and the United States.

I start out by subsidizing all of my companies and industries that have network effects. I’ll subsidize TikTok. I’ll ban your social media but push mine. I’ll subsidize my semiconductors, which tend to have winner-take-all dynamics in certain categories. I’ll subsidize my drones, BYD, self-driving, and so on.

Then, when I win, I own the whole market and can raise prices. If you try to start a competitor, it’s too late. I’ve got network effects. Or if I have scale economies, I can lower my price to zero, crash you out of business, make sure no one in their right mind will invest, and raise prices right back up.

You have to understand that certain industries have hysteresis, network effects, or economies of scale. These are all the interesting ones. These are the high-margin businesses. If somebody is subsidizing or raising tariffs against you to protect their industries and let them develop, you do have to do something. You can’t just completely back down.

Chamath, what are your thoughts about tariffs and network effects? It does seem like we want to have redundancy in the supply chain, so there are some exceptions here.

Any thoughts on how this might play out? Trump brings up tariffs every 48 hours, and then it doesn’t seem like any of them land.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I’m still on my 72-hour Trump rule, which is: Whatever he says, wait 72 hours and then maybe see if it actually comes to pass.

Jason Calacanis

Where do you stand on all these tariffs and the tariff talk?

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think the tariffs will be a plug. Are they coming? Absolutely. The quantum of them, I don’t know.

The way you can figure out how extreme they will be is by looking at what the legislative plan is for the budget. There are 2 paths right now.

Path 1, which I think is a little bit more likely, is that they’re going to pass a slimmed-down plan in the Senate just on border security and military spending. Then they’ll kick the can down the road for probably another 3 or 4 months on the budget plan.

Plan 2 is the “one big, beautiful bill” that’s working its way through the House. They’re proposing trillions of dollars of cuts. In that mode, you’re going to need to raise revenue somehow, especially if you’re giving away tax breaks. The only way to do that is probably through tariffs, or one way to do it is through tariffs.

My honest opinion, Jason, is that we’re in a very complicated moment. I think the Senate plan is actually, on the margins, more likely and better.

The reason is that Trump is better off getting the next 60 to 90 days of data. We’re in a real pickle here. We have persistent inflation and a broken Fed. They are totally asleep at the switch.

The thing that Yellen and Biden did, which in hindsight was extremely dangerous, is that they issued so much short-term paper that in totality we have $1 trillion we need to finance in the next 6 to 9 months.

It could be the case that we have rates at 5%, 5¼%, or 5½%. I think that’s extremely bad at the same time that inflation and delinquencies are ticking up.

I think tariffs are probably going to happen, but I think Trump will have the most flexibility if he has time to see what the actual economic conditions will be, which will be clearer in 3, 4, or 5 months.

I almost think this big, beautiful bill is counterproductive because I’m not sure we’re going to have all the data we need to get it right.

Jason Calacanis

Friedberg, any thoughts on these tariffs? You’ve been involved in the global marketplace, especially when it comes to produce, wheat, corn, and everything. What do you think the dynamic here is going to be? Is it saber-rattling and a tool for Trump?

David Friedberg

The biggest buyer of U.S. exports is China. China’s exports are a major revenue source, a major income source, and a major part of the economy for a large number of states.

There will be, as there was in the first Trump presidency, very likely very large transfer payments made to farmers because China is very likely going to tariff imports or stop making import purchases altogether. That’s what happened during the first presidency.

When they did that, the federal government had transfer payments of north of $20 billion to farmers. This is not a negligible sum, and it’s a non-negligible economic effect because there’s a rippling effect throughout the economy.

In the early 20th century, we didn’t have an income tax, and federal revenue was almost entirely dependent on tariffs. When tariffs were cut, there was an expectation that there would be a decline in federal government revenue. What actually happened is that volume went up. Lower tariffs increased trade and increased the size of the economies.

This is where a lot of economists take their basis: “If we do these tariffs, it’s going to shrink the economy and cause a reduction in trade.”

The counterbalancing effect is one that has not been tested in economics, which is what’s going to happen if we simultaneously reduce the income tax and reduce the corporate income tax and basically increase capital flows through reduced taxation while implementing the tariffs at the same time.

It’s a grand economic experiment, and I think we’ll learn a lot about what’s going to happen here as this moves forward. I do think these countries are ultimately going to capitulate to some degree, and we’re going to end up with a negotiated settlement that will hopefully not be too short-term impactful on the economies, people, and jobs that are dependent on trade.

The economy feels like it’s in a very precarious place.

Chamath Palihapitiya

It does to asset holders, obviously. They left it in a bad place in the last administration. We shut down the entire country for a year over COVID. The bill for that has come due, and that’s reflected in inflation.

Jason Calacanis

I think there are a couple of other points about tariffs.

First, it’s not just about money. It’s also about making sure we have a functional middle class with good jobs. If you have a non-tariff world, maybe all the gains go to the upper class and an underclass. You can’t have a functioning democracy when the average person is on one of those 2 extremes.

Another issue is strategic industries. If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They have all the drones. Even in Ukraine, both sides are getting all their drone parts from DJI.

They’re getting them through different supply chains and so on, but Ukrainian drones and Russian drones, the vast majority of them, are coming through China and DJI. We don’t have that industry. If we have a kinetic conflict right now, and we don’t have a good drone supply chain internally in the United States, we’re probably going to lose because those things are autonomous bullets. That’s the future of all warfare.

We’re buying F-35s, and the Chinese are building swarms at scale. We do have to reshore some of these critical supply chains. What is a drone supply chain? It’s not just one thing called “drone.” It’s motors, semiconductors, optics, lasers, and everything across the board.

I think there are good arguments for at least reshoring some of these industries. We need them.

The United States is very lucky in that it’s very agrarian. We have all the resources and all the supplies. We can be upstream of everybody with all the energy.

To the extent that we’re importing any energy, that is a choice we made. It’s not because fundamentally we lack the energy. Between all the oil resources, natural gas, fracking, and all the work we’ve done in nuclear fission and small reactors, we should absolutely be energy-independent.

We should be running the table on energy. We should have a massive surplus.

If you’re worried about a couple million DoorDash and Uber drivers losing their jobs to automation, there are going to be factories to build the parts for these drones that we’re going to need. There’s a lot of opportunity for people.

There is a difference between different kinds of jobs. Those are better jobs—building difficult things at scale, physically, that we need for both national security and innovation. Those are better jobs than paperwork, writing essays for other people to read, or even driving cars.

All right, listen. I want to get to 2 more stories here.

We have a really interesting copyright story that I wanted to touch on. Thomson Reuters just won the first major U.S. AI copyright case, and fair use played a major role in the decision. This has huge implications for AI companies here in the United States.

Obviously, OpenAI and The New York Times, Getty Images versus Stability AI—we’ve talked about these. It’s been a little while because the legal system takes a little bit of time, and these are very complicated cases.

Thomson Reuters owns Westlaw. If you don’t know that, it’s kind of like LexisNexis. It’s one of the legal databases that lawyers use to find cases. They have a paid product with summaries and analysis of legal decisions.

Back in 2020, 2 years before ChatGPT, Reuters sued a legal-research competitor called Ross for copyright infringement. Ross had created an AI-powered legal search engine. It sounds great, but Ross had asked Westlaw if they would pay a license for its content for training. Westlaw said no.

This all went back and forth, and then Ross signed a similar deal with a company called LegalEase. The problem is that LegalEase’s database was just copied and pasted from a bunch of Westlaw answers.

Reuters and Westlaw sued Ross in 2020, accusing the company of being vicariously liable for LegalEase’s direct infringement. Super-important point.

The judge originally favored Ross on fair use, but this week the judge reversed that ruling and found Ross liable, noting that after further review, fair use does not apply in this case.

This is the first major win. We debated this, so you heard it here first on the All-In podcast. Here’s a clip:

“What I would say is, when you look at the fair-use doctrine, I’ve got a lot of experience with it. The fourth-factor test, I’m sure you’re well aware of, is the effect of the use on the potential market and the value of the work.

“If you look at the lawsuits that are starting to emerge, it is Getty’s right to make derivative products based on their images. We would all agree that Stable Diffusion, when it used the open web, has no excuse to use an open-web crawler to avoid getting a license from the original owner of that content.

“Just because you can technically do it doesn’t mean you’re allowed to do it. The open-web projects that provide this say explicitly, ‘We do not give you the right to use this.’ You have to read the copyright laws on each of those websites.

“On top of that, if somebody were to steal the copyrighted works of other people and put them on the open web, which is happening all day long, you still need to get a license if you’re building a derivative work. It’s no excuse that I took some site in Russia that did a bunch of copyright violation and indexed it for my training model.”

I think this is going to result in—

Friedberg, can you shoot me in the face and let me know when this is over?

David Friedberg

I feel the same way. Same way.

Jason Calacanis

Exactly. I know. Me too.

Since these guys don’t give a damn about copyright holders, what do you think?

I’m so glad you’re here, Naval, to actually talk about the topics. I’m going to go out on an even thinner limb and say I largely agree with you.

I think it’s a bit rich to crawl the open web, hoover up all the data, and offer direct substitution for a lot of use cases. Now you start and end with the AI model. It’s not even like you link out, as Google did, and then close off the models for safety reasons.

I think if you trained on the open web, your model should be open source.

Naval Ravikant

Absolutely. That would be a fine thing.

I have a prediction here. I think this is all going to wind up like the Napster or Spotify case. For people who don’t know, Spotify pays, I think, 65 cents on the dollar to the original rights holders of that content—the music industry. They figured out a way to make a business, and Napster is roadkill.

I think there’s a nonzero chance—maybe 5% or 10%—that OpenAI is going to lose the New York Times lawsuit, and they’re going to lose it hard. There are going to be injunctions, and I think the settlement might be that these language models, especially the closed ones, are going to have to pay some percentage in a negotiated settlement of their revenue—half, two-thirds—to the content holders.

This could make the content industry have a massive uplift and a massive resurgence. I think the problem is that there’s an example on the other side. There’s a company that provides technical support for Oracle. It’s a third-party company, and Oracle has tried to sue them into oblivion, using copyright infringement as part of the justification.

It’s been a pall over the stock for a long time. The company’s name is Rimini Street. Don’t ask me why. It’s on my radar. I’ve been looking at it.

They lost this huge lawsuit. Oracle won, then it went to an appellate court, and then it was all vacated. Why am I bringing this up? I think the legal community has absolutely no idea how these models work.

You can find one case that goes one way and another case that goes the other. What I would say should become standard reading for anybody bringing these lawsuits is an incredible video that Andrej Karpathy just dropped. He does a deep dive into LLMs and explains ChatGPT from the ground up.

It’s on YouTube. It’s 3 hours, and it’s excellent. It’s very difficult to watch that and not reach the same conclusion that you guys did.

Jason Calacanis

There’s also a good old video by Ilya Sutskever, who I believe was the founding chief scientist or CTO of OpenAI. He talks about how these large language models are basically extreme compressors. He models them entirely as their ability to compress.

David Sacks

Lossy compression.

Jason Calacanis

Exactly. Lossy compression.

Naval Ravikant

Google got sued for fair use back in the day, but the way they managed to get past the argument was that they were always linking back to you. They showed tiny snippets and sent you the traffic.

This is lossy compression.

Jason Calacanis

I hate to say this, Naval, but you were right.

Naval Ravikant

You were right. You were right.

Jason Calacanis

That’s all I wanted to hear after all these years.

Naval Ravikant

I was shaking my head when I saw those videos because I thought, “Jason was right. Jason was right.”

Jason Calacanis

I’ve been through this so many times. Rupert Murdoch said we should hold the line with Google and not allow them to index our content without a license. Google navigated it successfully, and they were able to avoid being forced to stop.

I think what’s happened now is that The New York Times remembers losing their content in the snippets and the one-box to Google, and they couldn’t get that genie back in the bottle.

The New York Times realizes this is their payday. I think The New York Times will make more money from licenses from LLMs than it will eventually make from advertising or subscriptions.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The New York Times content is worthless to an LLM, but that’s a different story. I think the actual value is political, or whatever the reason is.

Jason Calacanis

As a user, I loved Wirecutter. I think you knew Brian and everybody over at Wirecutter. That was a great product. I used to pay for The New York Times, but I no longer pay for it.

My main reason was that I would go to Wirecutter and just buy whatever they told me to buy. Now I go to ChatGPT, which I pay for, and it tells me what to buy based on Wirecutter. I’m already paying for it, so I stopped paying for The New York Times.

David Friedberg

I philosophically disagree with all of your nonsense on this topic. All 3 of you are wrong, and I’ll tell you why.

Number 1: If information is out on the open internet, I believe it’s accessible and viewable. I view an LLM or a web crawler as basically a human who’s reading and can store information in its brain.

If it’s out there in the open, it’s accessible. If it’s behind a paywall or some protected password, 100%.

Jason Calacanis

Wait, wait, wait. David, in that case, can a Google crawler just crawl an entire site and serve it on Google? Why can’t they do that?

David Friedberg

The fair use is that you cannot copy or repeat the content. You cannot take the content and repeat it. That is how the law is currently written.

But now I have a tool that can remix it with 50 other pieces of similar content, change the words slightly, and maybe even translate it into a different language. Where does it stop?

Do you know the musical artist Girl Talk? We should have done a Girl Talk track here today.

Jason Calacanis

He’s got musical taste, this guy.

David Friedberg

He basically takes small samples of popular tracks and made music, and he got sued for the same problem. There was another guy named The White Panda, I believe, who had the same problem. Ed Sheeran got sued for this.

Jason Calacanis

Their entire sites—Stack Overflow and Wikipedia—have basically disappeared now because you can just swallow them all up and spit them all back out in ChatGPT with slight changes.

David Friedberg

I think the fair-use question is exactly the right question: How much are you changing?

Jason Calacanis

That’s the question. It actually boils down to the AGI question. Are these things intelligent? Are they learning, or are they compressing and regurgitating? That’s the question.

I wonder this about humans, and that’s why I bring up The White Panda and Girl Talk in audio, but also visual art. There have always been artists, and even in classical music, there were composers who learned from the next composer.

You can track music as standing on the shoulders of what came before. The same is true in almost all art forms, human knowledge, media, and communication. It’s very hard to figure out.

David Friedberg

That’s exactly right. It’s very hard to figure out, which is why I come back to there being only 2 stable solutions, and one of them is going to happen anyway.

If we don’t crawl it, the Chinese will crawl it. DeepSeek proved that. There are only 2 stable solutions.

Either you pay the copyright holders—which I actually think doesn’t work, because someone in China will crawl it and dump the weights—or, if you crawl it, make it open. At least contribute something back to open source.

You crawled open data and contributed it back to open source. The people who don’t want to be crawled are going to have to go to a huge length to protect their data. Now everybody knows how to protect the data.

Jason Calacanis

Something is happening here. I have a book out from Harper Business on the shelf behind me, and I’m getting $2,500 for the next 3 years for Microsoft indexing it.

They’re licensing this stuff. They’re paying $2,500 for my book, through Harper, to go into an LLM—specifically Microsoft’s. I’m going to sign it because I want to set a precedent. Maybe next time it’s $10,000, maybe next time it’s $250,000. I don’t care. I just want to see people have their content respected.

I’m hoping that Sam Altman loses this lawsuit and they get an injunction against OpenAI.

He’s such a weasel in terms of turning OpenAI into a closed thing. I like Sam personally, but I think what he did was the ultimate weasel move for his own personal benefit.

David Sacks

He does it for the love.

Jason Calacanis

What was the statement? He does it for the “job benefit”? He does it for the benefits? He got health care, I think.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I think in OpenAI’s defense, they do need to raise a lot of money, and they have to incentivize their employees. But that doesn’t mean they need to take over the whole thing.

The nonprofit portion can still stay the nonprofit portion and get the lion’s share of the benefits and be the board. Then Sam can have an incentive package and employees can have an incentive package.

Jason Calacanis

Why don’t they get a percentage of the revenue? I don’t understand why the nonprofit has to be bought out right now for $40 billion and then the whole thing disappears into a closed system.

That part makes no sense to me.

Chamath Palihapitiya

That’s called a shell game and a scam.

Jason Calacanis

I think Sam and his team would do better to leave the nonprofit part alone, leave an actual independent nonprofit board in charge, and then have a strong incentive plan and a strong fundraising plan for the investors and employees.

I think this is workable. Trying to grab it all just seems way off, especially when it was built on open-source algorithms from Google, open data from the web, and nonprofit funding from Elon and others.

What a great proposal. We just workshopped this here. What if they made, say, $6 billion a year and took 10% of it—$600 million every year—and put it into a bonus pool?

David Sacks

They’re losing money, Jason, so they have to—

Jason Calacanis

Eventually they won’t. Even if it’s equity, they could give equity to the people building it, but they could still leave it under the control of the nonprofit.

I just don’t understand this conversion. There was a board coup, right? The board tried to fire Sam, and now it’s self-dealing.

Chamath Palihapitiya

They’ll get an independent valuation.

Jason Calacanis

We all know that game. You hire a valuation expert who’s going to say what you want them to say, and they check the box.

If you’re going to capture the light cone of all future value or build superintelligence, that’s worth a lot more.

Chamath Palihapitiya

That’s why Elon just bid $100 billion.

Jason Calacanis

You’re saying the things that the regulators and legal community have no insight into. They’ll see a fairness opinion and think, “It says ‘fairness’ and ‘opinion’ side by side, so it must be fair.” They don’t know how all this stuff is gamed.

David Friedberg

I have stories about 409A valuations that would make that exact point.

Jason Calacanis

The 409A valuations are gamed. These fairness opinions are gamed. The reality is that I don’t think the legal and judicial community has any idea.

Imagine, in a totally imaginary situation, that Naval had a great term sheet at some incredible dollar amount, didn’t take it, ran the valuation down to under $1 million, gave himself a bunch of shares, and then took it 3 months later. What would that be called?

Chamath Palihapitiya

Securities fraud.

Jason Calacanis

Let’s wrap on your story. I had an interesting dinner on Monday with Bryan Johnson, the “don’t die” guy. He came over to my house.

Chamath Palihapitiya

How’s his erection doing overnight?

Jason Calacanis

We talked about how he gets 3 hours a night of nighttime erections.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Wow.

Jason Calacanis

Look at this, by the way. First of all, I think that—

Chamath Palihapitiya

Which one of those is giving him the erection?

Jason Calacanis

No, he measures his nighttime erections. I think his regimen is giving him the erections.

He said that when he started, he was 43. He was basically clinically obese, and over the next 4 years he became a specimen. He now has 3 hours a night of nighttime erections.

His skin, in person, is like a porcelain doll’s. Both my wife and I were like, “We’ve never seen skin like this.” It’s incredibly soft.

Chamath Palihapitiya

How do you know his skin is soft? Did you brush your hand against his forearm or something?

Jason Calacanis

You give the guy a hug at the end of the night. I’m telling you, the guy’s skin is supple. It’s the softest skin I’ve ever touched in my life.

Anyway, that’s not the point. It was a really fascinating dinner. He walked me through his whole protocol.

At the end of it, I think it was Nash, the CEO of [?] Networks, who was just like, “Give me the top 3 things.” Of the top 3 things, I’ll boil it down to the top 1 thing, which is 80% of the 80%: It’s all about sleep.

Chamath Palihapitiya

I was about to guess sleep.

Jason Calacanis

He walked me through his nighttime routine, and it’s incredible and straightforward. It’s really simple.

Let’s say our normal time is 10:00 or 10:30. I try to go to bed by 10:30. He says you need to be in bed by 9:30 or 10:00. First of all, stop eating 3 or 4 hours before bed. I do that. I eat at 6:30, so I have about 3 hours.

You’re in bed by 9:30 or 10:00. You deal with the self-talk: “Here’s the active mind telling you all the things you have to fix in the morning.” Talk it out. Put it in its place. Say, “I’m going to deal with this in the morning.” Write it down in a journal—whatever you do—so that you put it away.

You cannot be on your phone. It has to be in a different room, or you have to be able to shut it down. Then read a book so that you’re engaged in something.

He said he typically falls asleep within 3 or 4 minutes of getting into bed and starting this. I tried it. I’ve been doing it since I had dinner with him on Monday. Last night, I fell asleep within 50 minutes.

David Friedberg

The hardest part for me is putting the phone away.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Of course.

Jason Calacanis

What about you, Naval? Tell us your wind-down routine.

Naval Ravikant

I know Bryan pretty well, actually, and I joke that I’m married to the female Bryan Johnson. My wife has some of his routines, but she’s the natural version—no supplements—and she’s intense.

I think when Bryan saw my sleep score from my Eight Sleep, he was shocked. He was like, “You’re going to die. You’re literally going to die.”

Jason Calacanis

You got a 70 or 80?

Naval Ravikant

No, it’s terrible. It’s awful. But it’s also because I don’t sleep much. I only sleep a few hours a night, and I move around a lot in the bed. It’s fine. I never have trouble falling asleep.

I would say Bryan’s skincare routine is amazing and his diet is incredible. He’s a genuine character. I do think a lot of what he’s saying, minus the supplements—I’m not a big believer in supplements—does work.

I don’t know if it’s necessarily going to slow down your aging, but you’ll look good and feel good. Sleep is the number-one thing.

In terms of falling asleep, I don’t think it’s really about whether you look at your phone or not. Believe it or not, I think it’s about what you’re doing on your phone.

If you’re doing anything cognitively stressful or getting your mind to spin, then yes, it will keep you up. But if you’re scrolling TikTok, that’s fine. Anything entertaining can be fine. You could read a book on your Kindle or iPad, and I think that would be fine. You can listen to a meditation video or some spiritual teacher, and that will actually help you fall asleep.

But if you’re on X or checking your email, that’s going to keep you up.

My hack for sleep is a little different. I normally fall asleep within minutes.

Jason Calacanis

Do you have a set time?

Naval Ravikant

No. I sleep whenever I feel like it, usually around 1:00 or 2:00 in the morning.

Jason Calacanis

God damn. I’m in bed by 10:00.

Naval Ravikant

I’m an owl. But if you want to fall asleep, the hack I found is that everybody has tried some kind of meditation routine.

Just sit in bed and meditate. Your mind will hate meditation so much that if you force it to choose between the fork of meditation and sleeping, you’ll fall asleep every time.

If you don’t fall asleep, you’ll end up meditating, which is great too. Just do a body scan.

Chamath Palihapitiya

The coda to this story was that a friend of mine came to see me from the UAE. He was here on Tuesday, and I was telling him about the dinner with Bryan.

He told me a story because he’s friends with Khabib, the UFC fighter. He said that when Khabib goes to his house, he eats anything and everything—fried food, pizza, whatever—but he trains consistently.

My friend asked him, “How are you able to do that? How does it not affect your physiology?” Khabib said, “I’ve learned this since I was a kid. I sleep 3 hours after I train in the morning, and I sleep 10 hours at night. I’ve done it since I was 12 or 13 years old.”

Jason Calacanis

That’s a lot of sleep.

Chamath Palihapitiya

It’s a lot of sleep. The direct correlation for me is that if I do something cognitively heavy, like big, heavy-duty conversations, I don’t sleep well. No heavy conversations at the end of the night. No existential conversations at night.

If I go rucking, I have a 35-pound weight vest on the ranch. I walk 1 to 2 miles with the 35-pound weight vest, and it just tires my whole body out. When I lay down, I’m ready to sleep.

Jason Calacanis

Is that why you don’t prepare for the podcast? This podcast is one of the top 10 podcasts in the world. Chamath, do you think that’s an accident?

David Friedberg, what’s your sleep routine? Can you just go to bed?

David Friedberg

I take a nice warm bath.

Jason Calacanis

You do that every night?

David Friedberg

I do. I take a warm bath every night with candles, too.

Jason Calacanis

Do you do it right before you go to bed?

David Friedberg

Usually after I put the kids down, I’ll start to wind down for bed. I do watch TV sometimes, but I have the problem and the mistake of looking at my phone for probably too long before I turn the lights off.

Chamath Palihapitiya

Do you have a consistent time when you go to bed?

David Friedberg

Usually 11:00 p.m. to midnight, and then I’m up at 6:30.

Jason Calacanis

I need 8 hours, otherwise I’m a mess.

I go to bed somewhere between 11:00 p.m. and 1:00 a.m. I'm trying to get 8 hours. I consistently get between 6 and 7.

Naval Ravikant

I try to go to bed in the 11:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. window and get up in the 7:00 to 8:00 window. My problem is, if I have work to do, I’ll get on the computer or my laptop, and once I start that in my evening routine, I can’t stop. All of a sudden, it’s 3:00 in the morning, and I’m like, “Oh no, what did I just do?”

Then I still have to get up at 6:30, so that does happen to me. Last night was unusual for me, but it was kind of funny. I thought, “I should go to bed early because I’m on All-In,” but I ended up eating ice cream with the kids late.

Jason Calacanis

Wait, what was the brand? You said you went for another brand. I want to know the brand.

Naval Ravikant

I think it’s Van Leeuwen or something like that—the New York one, the Holiday Cookies & Cream. Oh my God, so good.

Jason Calacanis

Yeah, it’s so good.

Naval Ravikant

After I polished that off, I was like, “I probably ate too much to go to bed, so I better work out.” So I did a kettlebell workout.

Jason Calacanis

You sound like me. I have 8 kettlebells right here next to me. This is called working out, Friedberg.

Naval Ravikant

While I was doing my kettlebell suitcase carry, I was texting with an entrepreneur friend. He’s in Singapore, so it was the middle of the night for me and early for him. When it was time to go to bed, I was like, “Okay, now I’ve got to get to bed. How do I get to bed?”

My body was all amped up, I had food in my stomach, the kettlebells, and my brain was all amped up. The All-In podcast was tomorrow. What time is it? 1:30 in the morning. I better get to bed.

I put on one of those spiritual videos to calm me down, and then I got in bed and was like, “There’s no way I’m falling asleep.” I started meditating, and 5 minutes later I was asleep.

Jason Calacanis

You know, actually, the Dalai Lama has these great discussions on his YouTube channel. They’re about 2 hours long. You get about 20 or 30 minutes into one, and you will fall asleep.

Naval Ravikant

Well, my lesson is to watch any Dharma lecture from the Dalai Lama.

Jason Calacanis

Exactly. My lesson is that the mind will do anything to avoid meditation.

By the way, did you guys see, just before we went on, all the confirmations? RFK Jr. was confirmed, Brooke Rollins was confirmed. If you look at Polymarket, Polymarket had it all right a couple of weeks ago. There was a moment when Brooke Rollins fell to 56%, and there was a moment when RFK fell to 75%, but then they bounced back and it was done. You could have sniped that, man. You could have made money.

The media was like, “No way he’s getting confirmed. This is not going to happen,” but Polymarket knew. It’s so interesting.

I saw a very insightful tweet, and I forget who wrote it, so I’m sorry I can’t give credit. The guy basically said, “Look, Trump has a narrow majority in the House and the Senate, and he can get everything he wants as long as Republicans stay in line.”

So all the pressure and all the anger that the MAGA movement is directing against the left is pointless. It’s all about keeping the right wing in line. All the people saying to the senators, “Hey, I’m going to primary you”; Nicole Shanahan saying, “I’m going to primary you”; Scott Presler saying, “I’m moving to your district”—that’s the stuff that’s moving the needle and causing the confirmations to go through.

That’s how you get Kash Patel. That’s how you get Tulsi Gabbard as the DNI. That’s how you get RFK.

Do you worry about any of these? Do you think any of them are too spicy for your taste, or do you just like the whole “burn it down, put in the crazy outsiders” thing?

Naval Ravikant

That’s such a bad characterization. That’s not a fair characterization. Honestly, I never thought I’d see it, but I think between Elon and Sacks and people like that, we actually have builders and doers, financially intelligent people and economically intelligent people, in charge.

Despite all the craziness, Elon’s not doing this for the money. He’s doing it because he thinks it’s the right thing to do. He moved into the Roosevelt Room. I think, like many of us, I had bought into the great-forces-of-history mindset, where it’s just like, “Okay, it’s inevitable. This is what’s happening. Government always gets bigger and slower, and we just have to try and get stuff built before they shut everything down and we turn into Europe.”

But then what happened was, Caesar crossed the Rubicon. The great-man theory of history played out, and we’re living in that time. It’s an inspiration to all of us.

Despite Sam Altman and Elon’s current fighting, I know Sam was inspired by Elon at one point, and I think all of us are inspired by Elon. The guy can be a Diablo player, do DOGE, and run SpaceX, Tesla, The Boring Company, and Neuralink. It’s incredibly impressive.

It makes me want to do something useful with my life. That’s why I’m doing a hardware company now. Elon always makes me question, “Am I doing something useful enough with my life?”

That’s why I don’t want to be an investor. Peter Thiel, ironically, is an investor, but he’s inspirational that way too, because he’s like, “Yeah, the future just doesn’t happen. You have to go make it.” So we get to go make the future, and I’m just glad that Elon and DOGE and others are making the future.

Jason Calacanis

What do we got going on here?

Naval Ravikant

Maybe I’ll come on the All-In podcast in a couple of months, but it’s really difficult. I’m not sure I can pull it off, so let me try. Let me just make sure it’s viable.

Jason Calacanis

Is it drone-related? Is it a self-driving drone?

Naval Ravikant

Drones are cool, but no, it’s not.

Jason Calacanis

Maybe the All-In podcast should be an angel investor.

Naval Ravikant

Oh, yes, absolutely.

David Friedberg

No, no syndicate, Jason. Just our money. What are you talking about?

Jason Calacanis

You know how I learned about syndicates? It was Naval. The first syndicate I ever did on AngelList—I think it’s still the biggest. I don’t know, 5%—and Naval is my partner on this, for sure.

Naval Ravikant

I think you’ll love what I’m working on if I pull it off. I think you guys will love it. I’d love to show you the demo.

Jason Calacanis

Let us know where to send the check. Get that black cherry chip Van Leeuwen. I love you guys.

Jason Calacanis

What have we learned? I gotta go. Big shout-out to Bobby and Tulsa. That’s a huge, huge, huge room for America. I’m stoked about both of them. Congratulations.