Winning the AI Race Part 2: Vice President JD Vance

I'm very excited to announce that Vice President JD Vance can be with us today. The last time we saw the vice president on stage like this at an All-In Summit, he wasn't the vice president yet. It was about 10 months ago, at the All-In Summit we did last year, and obviously a lot has changed.

I think he's been doing a phenomenal job and making us all proud, and it's going to be great to catch up with him. So, without further ado, Vice President JD Vance.

Guys, how are you? Good to see you, man. Good to see you, David.

Good to see you. What's up, brother? How are you? Nice to see you. How are you doing?

Good. So, the last time I did this podcast, I think Jason was a huge dick to me because I wasn't the vice president, but you seem to be nice to me now, Jason.

Oh, it's on. Okay, let me get my list of topics.

He was hoping you'd give him a White House tour later today, so we'll see how this goes. You're welcome to have a White House tour.

Really?

I know a guy.

I asked David three times.

I know a guy.

His invitation's been lost in the mail a few times, but—well, no, actually, listen, if we're starting it out, congratulations on a great run.

Thank you. I appreciate it. It was fun.

You know, we can differ on some of the margins, but I just think all Americans appreciate the pace at which, especially in the technology industry, you're going and the effectiveness. I just want to congratulate you on that, sincerely.

I appreciate that.

Okay, so let's get into some topics.

Right?

Immigration. When we last talked, you said—I said, "Hey, you're going to deport 20 million people all at once. That seems quite chaotic." And you said, "No, we're going to do it like a sandwich: take a couple of bites." How's that going?

I think it's going well. We are criticized, interestingly, by some folks on the right who want the pace of deportations to be higher. I certainly understand that, frankly, and share that frustration.

The counterargument is that the courts are trying to stop us at every step of the way. Until about a month ago, we didn't have the resources for ICE to actually deal with this massive invasion that Joe Biden led into our country. We didn't have the resources necessary to actually process a lot of those people.

That has changed because of the big, beautiful bill. We've also gotten some court-case wins, so I expect that the pace of deportations will increase a little bit.

But importantly, when people criticize us and say, "Sometimes I'll hear this criticism: The pace of deportations from the Trump administration is actually lower than it was in the Biden administration," that's actually a completely fake statistic. It's based on the fact that if you come into the country illegally and then the Biden administration processes you and sends you out, that counts as a deportation. It counts as illegal immigration, and then it counts as deportation.

You have to look at the net number, right? If you do plus 1 minus 1, I'm not a math expert, but I'm pretty sure that's 0. The net number is what really matters.

Where the Trump administration—where we've been most wildly successful—is that, I think, in 2025, we will have the first net-negative immigration number in about 50 or 60 years in the United States. There has been a major, major, major shift in immigration policy.

Now, again, me and Stephen Miller are probably the 2 most hard-line people in the entire administration when it comes to immigration, so there's always more that we can do. Like I said, I think there is more that we can do.

But if you just look fundamentally at what people said—that if you actually take border enforcement seriously, the entire economy is going to collapse, inflation is going to go through the roof, and housing costs are going to go through the roof—while there's still a lot more to do, inflation has cooled. Housing costs are now showing signs of peaking.

I think, according to Zillow, over the past 12 months, housing costs have gone up 8%. Under the previous Biden administration, they basically nearly doubled the cost of a mortgage for an average family.

There are a lot of things that we're showing work on, and we're showing, importantly, that it turns out if you put your faith in American workers, you can build great companies and you can build a great economy. You don't have to build an entire economy on illegal labor, which is what the Democrats told us we had to do.

We're not just doing a good job. I think we're also proving out the use case and proving out what the Trump campaign said it was going to do in the Trump administration.

And President Trump, I think, came out and said, "Hey, maybe we should appreciate some of these immigrants who've been here for 20 years and maybe give them a path to citizenship. Maybe think about restaurants and farms and maybe show some compassion to those people."

I think the objection perhaps that some of us have is the style in which you're doing it—a little aggressive, what happened in L.A.—and you seem to have perhaps, internally in the administration, found a middle ground and listened to the other side, including our opinions on it.

First, the Trump administration obviously is a big group of people with a lot of different opinions, and we all have to talk about this stuff and try to come up with the right decision. But the Trump administration's decision-maker is, of course, 1 man.

While he listens to everybody, he's ultimately going to make the decisions that he thinks are best for the country, and then we go and execute that after, of course, having a big conversation around the inner circle.

What the president has said is, number 1, we're not going to do amnesty in this country. We're actually not going to tell people who have come into the country illegally that they're allowed to break our laws and be rewarded for it. We're just not going to do that.

But there are a whole host of other ways, when we talk to agricultural industries and others, where they say, "Well, we really need labor." There are a whole host of ways in which you can try to solve those problems.

My favorite solution for those problems is automation. I actually think there's a lot of evidence that the American agricultural economy is a little behind the 8-ball when it comes to using technology. There are ways we're talking about facilitating the use of automation.

We're not going to have amnesty. We also recognize that there are a lot of industries out there that we want to thrive, and I think the president is trying to strike the right balance.

Jason, you said something about compassion, and I think this is really important. I do think that we have to make a stronger argument here. There's nothing uncompassionate or hateful about enforcing your own borders.

It's a question of: Do you facilitate these Mexican drug cartels and the drug trafficking that they're engaging in? Of course not. The hundreds of thousands of missing children under the Biden administration—the fact that some of these young girls are being sex-trafficked by Mexican drug cartels.

I'm not saying you would ever say this, but when you enforce the nation's border laws, that is the most compassionate thing to do, both for your own people and also for the people who are here legally.

Yeah, I agree on the border.

Let me shift to AI for 1 second. In—I think it was February; I want to get the date right—you went to France and then you went to Germany, and these were 2 incredibly iconic speeches: 1 on AI and then 1 at the Munich Security Conference.

I think it was, in many ways, an incredible moment where you just started to establish American priorities again abroad. Can you go into the strategy of those speeches, where they came from, and just the bigger arc of the first 6 to 9 months and what the goals were?

For the AI summit, the president really wanted me to do this. Of course, I was happy to go to Paris and give a speech and talk about American priorities, but there was this big moment where we thought we had an opportunity to plant our flag and say, "America is done with the overregulating and the constant worrying about the future. We're going to lean into the future. We're going to embrace the future and try to make sure America dominates in the future."

That's such a radical departure from both the safetyism of the Biden administration and, frankly, the safetyism of a lot of our friends in Europe. I had been there for about 24 hours. I had met with Emmanuel Macron, the leader of France, had a good conversation, and met with a lot of the other people in Europe.

The thing that I picked up was that they're so terrified about the problems with AI. To be clear, there are problems with AI. But if you're so terrified of the problems with AI that you don't actually embrace its potential, then you're going to get the worst of the problems without any of the benefits or the upside of it.

That's what I think was so broken about our administration's approach during the Biden years, and it's what's so different about our actual administration here during the Trump years.

Our attitude is, yes, there are some consumer-protection issues and some data-privacy issues. We don't want the AI companies to do what the big tech companies did in 2020 and 2021, which is steal people's data and then censor an entire large swath of the American people for saying things that were called conspiracies but later turned out to be true.

We're not going to do that, but we're also going to embrace innovation. We're going to make sure that America stays at the leading edge of the artificial intelligence boom. And we think when that happens, it's going to create a lot of jobs. It's going to create a lot of productivity.

We talked about agriculture. I think it's going to lead to a new food revolution where we can grow a lot more food on a lot less land. There's just a whole host of things that being forward-focused on technology can bring to this country. And that is the story.

I think the story of American entrepreneurship and American economic growth is that when we grow through technology, development, and productivity, that accrues to the benefit of all Americans and makes us more powerful and wealthier. When we try to grow our economy, frankly, through importing cheap labor, that, I think, is a dead end. We've taken that pathway for far too long in this country. The Trump administration is going to take a different path.

What about relativism? Just framing up the big open question about our relationship with China, there's trade discussions going on, but China this week—it was revealed or announced—has sold off half of its U.S. Treasury holdings. As you look at the technology curve in China, the fiscal situation, and the difference between the two, how much should our policy be informed relative to China, where we sit with China, versus—

Forget about China. Let's just make America great and focus on creating jobs and moving our industries forward.

Yeah, it's got to be a little bit of both.

And it's always tough to strike the right balance. China is our biggest economic competitor in the entire world. When you look at their technology industry, I think it's the only tech industry, especially when it comes to things like AI, where they're even sort of knocking on the door of America.

I still think that we have the best hardware. I think that we have the best software. I still think that we're the most technologically forward economy. But we can't rest on our laurels when it comes to our edge. So I think it is useful to look to the Chinese to benchmark our own progress and to say that if we're regulating ourselves to death and allowing the Chinese to catch up to us, that's not something, frankly, we should blame the Chinese for. That's something we should blame our own leaders for—for having stupid policies that allow other countries to catch up to America.

So it's a useful benchmark, but I still think fundamentally we have to take the attitude that we want the world to be built, I think, on an American technology stack, not on a Chinese or some other country's technology stack. And if you're too focused on the relative comparison and not focused enough on just building and creating great things, I think that it can become a little bit of a crutch and an impediment to focusing on your own stuff and doing your own thing.

And that's why we have a great AI czar here in David Sacks. But we're really focused on how America can just do as well as we possibly can. Yes, we want to stay ahead of China, but we want to stay ahead of everybody else because this is America, and we want it to stay the greatest country in the world.

And related to that, does that mean American businesses should be allowed to sell into China and participate there as a customer market? And if so, in the trade negotiations, is there a push for parity so that American businesses can operate in China or elsewhere in the world as easily as those companies can operate in America?

As the president said, it's a bit of a balance, right? There are certain critical elements of our technology stack. There are certain critical technologies. We know that some Chinese firms engage in IP theft, so we don't want to give them our very best stuff because we're worried a little bit that they might steal it.

But of course there are certain industries that we want to sell into China. We actually want to broaden American workers' access to the world. And part of our frustration with China is, on the one hand, they steal some of our newest technology, and on the other hand, they don't let American-made products into their country.

What we want to do is actually reverse that. We want to sell American-made products into China, but we don't want to allow them to steal our critical intellectual property. And we have to strike that balance in a much better way—not just than the Biden administration, but better than the Obama administration and the Bush administration did, too.

Striking that balance is something I think the president's very focused on. I'm certainly very focused on it. And we've now got a much better approach than we've had in a long time in this country.

How do you think it plays out for not China or the United States, but all of the other smaller countries when AI gets to scale? How do you think strategically the chessboard ends up being organized? Is there a new form of the United Nations? Is there a new form of NATO, but more productive? How do you think it plays out for the 180th country in the world when they need things?

Yeah, it's a very interesting question, and I don't want to predict the future too much here. It's always a fraught business, especially in politics. But one of the things that's interesting is that a foreign leader came to me relatively recently. This was actually last week.

A small country, but a very important country strategically and a very good ally of the United States, basically pitched me on creating a NATO alternative outside of Europe, where countries aligned with the United States and built on the same technology stack would have shared access to technology, shared access to certain weaponry, and so forth.

And he was like, “We really want to be part of Team America, but there isn't even an existing infrastructure that would allow us to be Team America.” And I had never thought about it in that way. I haven't even talked to the president yet about it. But it's interesting that world leaders are coming and saying, “This is how we're thinking about the future.”

And the technology piece of it is a very critical angle because, as you guys probably appreciate—I assume the audience appreciates this—sometimes when you build with Chinese firms or Chinese technology, it seems like a pretty good deal, right? Larry Summers once had this famous quote: When developing countries in Africa talk to the United States and talk to China, the Americans show up with a moral lecture and the Chinese show up with a bag of money.

Well, the bag of money—obviously, I prefer that to the moral lecture. But you realize that bag of money sometimes comes with debt servitude. It sometimes comes with a sort of neocolonial control of the host country. What a lot of nations are realizing is that they're not just showing up with a bag of money, and we'd much rather be on Team America, but it does require much more forward leadership.

And the Biden administration—I don't know what it was, but there was just this deep-seated fear of the future. I'm sure it was motivated by having a president who didn't necessarily know where he was from day to day, but there was this deep-seated fear of the future.

It's over. You won, JD. You won.

We still get to have a little fun with a couple. It's okay. But look, there was just this really weird fear of the future that I think is totally absent in the Trump administration. It makes our politics much better.

Are you comfortable with a multipolar world, or do you still think that there should be American primacy on a global stage?

I think it's an abstract question that's interesting, but fundamentally, in some ways, the world is going to be multipolar. Yeah, we want regional allies to step up. I mean, you've heard the president say this before. We'd love a Middle East where we have to spend a little bit less time and a little bit less money, and our regional allies, both Israeli and Arab, step up in a bigger way.

We'd like to see that, of course, in Europe. And I think one of the big accomplishments of the president in the first term—something that the media still doesn't give him enough credit for—is that he actually got NATO to step up and make major security commitments about their own sector of the world.

Now, that's sometimes interpreted as, “America doesn't like Europe anymore.” No, we like Europe so much that we want Europe to step up and take a little bit more control of its own continent. Of course, we're going to be their friends, and of course we're going to work with them, but we definitely see a world where some of our regional allies step up a little bit more.

I think that's a good thing. Of course, they're going to be allied with the United States, aligned with the United States in important ways. But having other countries take a bigger role in their own self-defense and in their own region is fundamentally a good thing for America.

It also feels, I think, more fair to the American people when the president is able to negotiate the rare earth deal with Ukraine and say, “Hey, if you want weapons, that's fine, but it's on a lend-lease. You got to pay for them. They're not free.”

I think one of your great strengths is your empathy for the working men and women of this country. And one of the big discussions we're having in our industry, which will fall on your plate in your career, is going to be job displacement. So I'm wondering how the administration thinks about that.

For every self-driving car we put on the road, that's 4 drivers who are going to have their jobs retired.

They'll be displaced. For every Optimus robot or humanoid robot that eventually makes it into a factory, that'll be 5 or 6 factory jobs. You spoke about the agricultural jobs as well. So how do you think about that automation and the pace at which it's going to happen?

Because if you ask anybody in technology, none of us have the answer for how quickly this will happen. We are optimistic, of course, but there could be displacement. If there is displacement, who's responsible? The administration, the technologists who cause it, the free market, nobody? We'll just let the chips fall where they may. What do you think, JD?

Well, a couple of thoughts on this. First of all, I am a little bit more optimistic about automation. If you look at some of the doom narratives about automation—the robots are coming to take all of our jobs—you would see labor productivity skyrocketing in this country if that were true. But you actually see labor productivity flatlining.

What that means is that our country is underexposed to technology, not overindexed in technology. Maybe we're overindexed in software, but we're underindexed in the real kind of technology that boosts productivity. So I'm not saying there won't be job displacement, but I always think of the example of the bank teller.

In the 1970s, when the ATM, the automated teller machine, was created, there were a whole host of articles about how this would destroy a ton of middle-class jobs in the banking sector. What actually happened is that we have more bank tellers now than we did in the 1970s. They do slightly different jobs, they're more productive, and they earn higher wages, but I think that's the story of technology. Productivity is fundamentally good.

Now, there is a displacement that I worry about, and I was frankly not even aware this was an issue until a couple of weeks ago. I'm trying to dig into it a little bit. On the one hand, you see some Silicon Valley technology firms, especially the big firms, say that they are desperate for workers—that they can't find workers and have to use overseas visa programs to find them.

At the same time, the college-educated employment rate for STEM graduates in this country seems to be declining.

Well, wait a second. If you're not hiring American workers coming out of colleges for these jobs, then how can you say that you have a massive shortage in these jobs? By the way, you see some big tech companies where they'll lay off 9,000 workers and then apply for a bunch of overseas visas. I sort of wonder about that. It doesn't totally make sense to me. The math doesn't add up. That displacement and that math worries me a bit.

What the president has said very clearly is, "We want the very best and the brightest to make America their home. We want them to build great companies," and so forth. But I don't want companies to fire 9,000 American workers and then say they can't find workers here in America. That's a story. What did Microsoft say when you brought that up with them?

I have not—it's—

Have you talked to them about it?

I have not. I just became aware of this a couple of weeks ago. Somebody sent me an article about it, and maybe it was Microsoft that fired, I think, 9,000 people. Then I was like, "Wait a second."

Record profits, record market cap—

—and also saying they're desperate for workers. So I have not yet had that conversation with Microsoft.

In my defense, I just found out that a 4-year college degree is the wrong answer. This is really important because so much of our system—the American dream, sorry to cut you off, but just a follow-on to this—has been degraded by the idea that everyone should get a college degree. Then they end up with $100,000 of debt and can't get enough income to get themselves out of that debt.

What's the right solution in this evolution of the workforce and this evolution under the AI transition that we're experiencing?

Yeah. I agree with that, though I think it's a slightly different question. You can believe that you want American firms to hire American college graduates but then also wonder if the college education system we have in this country is broken. I certainly think that it is.

I went to Ohio State for undergrad and then Yale Law School. When I was at Yale, from 2010 to 2013, I felt like it was a very left-leaning place, but it was still fundamentally a place where you could debate ideas, where you wouldn't be penalized for stepping outside of the orthodoxy.

When I talk to college kids—when I talk to 21-year-olds at some of these universities—some of them feel like they're living in a North Korean totalitarian-style dictatorship, where the social and employment cost of saying anything outside of the Overton window is so severe. That's not a useful social institution.

I want colleges to promote free thinking, even dangerous ideas. Challenge those ideas. Maybe some of them are wrong, and maybe some of them are right. But if you as a college are actually promoting socially conventional thinking, then you're not serving your fundamental purpose. I think the entire university system in this country is broken because of that fact.

I want to go back to building great companies for a second. America, I think, sometimes lost its footing over the last 20 years because we weren't able to think strategically outside the lens of just the United States.

Specifically, if you look at China, they were able to pick 8 or 9 industries and say, "We need to have national champions because they are so fundamentally critical to national security, population health, economic vibrancy," and so on. A couple of weeks ago—and Jim Litinsky is going to come on later—we did a version of that deal where the DoD partnered with an American company that has a mine in America. We're going to bring these rare earths here, manufacture them here, and do the entire supply chain here.

Do you think that's a one-off thing, or how do you see the public-private partnership in that gray area in the middle evolving when we think about these strategic priorities, like AI?

Yeah. So, Chamath, if you think about the great era of American economic dominance, it's the ’40s, the ’50s, and the ’60s, when we were so far ahead of the rest of the world that economically it felt like nobody could possibly catch up to us.

Back in that era, one of the great things that worked was true public-private partnerships. We let the free market and private industries do what private industries were really good at, but we had a discrete goal in public policy and tried to facilitate it.

There were certain basic research projects that didn't make sense in a private-sector context, but maybe they made sense for the country overall. There were certain weapons systems that maybe weren't profitable, but we were going to make them profitable because they were important for American national security. Of course, the entire moon landing is a story of a great public-private partnership that produced a whole host of great technological development and downstream economic benefit.

I do think that we're taking a very discrete view of certain industries, certain core technologies, and certain core weapons systems, and saying the United States is not going to allow our industrial base or our technology base to atrophy anymore. You've seen some things come out of that. We're only 6 months into this thing, and I think we've done a hell of a job. I'm obviously biased, but we're only 6 months into this. You're going to see a lot more over the next 3.5 years.

You've been working with David for the last 6 months. As we wrap here—I know you're very busy—take us into the cafeteria, the mess, you and Sacks and Trump. Do you have a recollection of a great Sacks story behind the scenes, with the president, yourself, maybe going downstairs and getting a little Mickey D's or something? I know you're a fan.

Well, okay. I have one David Sacks story. I was actually in the Navy mess, which is sort of the cafeteria in the White House. We were sitting down there eating lunch, and some young kid—I don't know if it was a White House intern or somebody—walked over. They saw David Sacks and said, "Oh, David Sacks." They were so impressed, and they looked at me and went, "Oh, shit."

Also impressive.

Yeah. So they were like, "Oh, there's the vice president." Even for the vice president of the United States, we're all just shadows, and no one is famous.

You can always start a podcast.

That's where you get real fame: podcasting.

It's crazy how many people watch these things.

It is. It is. It's definitely crazy.

JD, we are rooting for you. We appreciate your service. You've been working very hard, and we really appreciate how open you are to having these full-contact discussions and being really supportive of our industries. That's something we didn't have in the Biden administration—not to make it political, but we didn't have a seat at the table. Now we have David Sacks in the White House, so this is a real turnaround, and we really appreciate you.

I think you've done an incredible job as vice president. I don't think you can go back in history and find, among the last 10 or 15 vice presidents, anyone who's had as many iconic moments as you have had.

It's really incredible.

So thank you.

Appreciate you guys. Appreciate it. Good to see you guys. Good stuff.

Thank you. Thank you.