JD Vance | All-In Summit 2024

22:50Well, people direct their money to Democrats. Increasingly, wealthy people direct their money to Democrats, working in middle class people direct their money to Republicans. Why do you think that is, Jimmy? Again, because I think their policies have benefited, look, the uniparty, the Kamala Harris' and Dick Cheney's, their parties have benefited a certain group of people, those people are increasingly Democrats. Donald Trump has been pushing back against that consensus and his party and his policies. I think benefit the majority of the country. So increasingly, I think the working middle class, hard of the country, is going for Republicans.

23:22Another spin on this, because I know we're focused on tech in this conference, says, Big Tech has become increasingly pro -democrat, little tech has become increasingly pro -Republican. So if you're an upstart, if you're in crypto, if you're like a small AI company, I think you're much more likely to be pro -Republican. If you're a monopolist in Big Tech, I mean, look at Facebook, Google, how they're putting their resources, it's much, much more pro -democrat. So there are a lot of different spins on it, but fundamentally, I think the people who've benefited from the American decline are becoming Democrats, that people who have suffered from it and are pushing back against the Republicans.

23:58I have a follow -up question on that, JD, which is you were a venture capitalist for a period. And Lena Khan has essentially taken M &A off the table. And you well know that if we can't get those singles and doubles in the industry, it kind of freezes the industry. And we have a problem with returns, which then is having creating a secondary order problem where we can't get LPs to put more money into funds because we're not getting those returns. What's the proper way to look at M &A? Because you want to break up big tech from what I understand, and you have a major problem with big tech. You mentioned little tech.

24:34What's the proper M &A architecture to balance those two goals there? Yeah, so this is obviously very complicated. Jason, you pull I understand this better than I do. But as somebody by the way who's defended Lena Conn against some of her critics from the right, I think what Lenicon fundamentally gets correct is that big tech really is a thread. It's a threat to free speech. It's increasing a lot of oligarchic. It controls too much of what we're allowed to say. And also, it controls a lot of the ways in which capital gets invested in these various ecosystems. But where I think Lenicon goes wrong is that you're exactly right.

25:10Like, you need the singles and doubles. You need sometimes a medium -sized company to buy a smaller company for $300 million. $1 ,000, right? That liquidates founders that gives the venture funds some money to go back into the system. And I think that, you know, not, I don't know, we're super well. But my basic read on Lena is that she is so anti -monopoly as sort of a baseline bias. And that becomes anti -mergerant acquisition as a baseline bias. That Google buying YouTube is a much, much different thing from a $2 billion market cap healthcare company buying a $500 million market cap healthcare company.

25:44And I think that we have to sort of draw a very big distinction between little tech and big tech. And look, I'm going to keep on making that argument, both in public and private to Lena, and hopefully she comes around to our view a little bit, because I do think some of her ideas on big tech are right. I think a good place for us to pivot would be the border. And just talking about this issue, more from first principles when President Trump came on the podcast, we talked about, hey, maybe really talented people, we should recruit them to our country and give them green cards. But very quickly, your group walked that back a bit.

26:14It's such a political hot potato, and it doesn't seem to me that it needs to be, but you spent a lot of time in government now. Why can't politicians just do what 80 % of the country wants, which is allow very talented people into the country, close the border, and make it like a more point -based system like Canada or Australia and everybody else. It's like, why is this so weaponized by both of your parties? Well, I think the reason why it's so difficult right now, and I mean, look, generally, I agree that, okay, we're gonna let some immigrants in, we want them to be high -telling, high -quality people.

26:50You don't wanna let a large number of illegal aliens in. Obviously, that's President Trump's view. But I think that the reason why it's so broken down right now is because you have 25 million illegal aliens in this country. And you can't fix what I would call the minor or sort of less important immigration question until you fix the real problem. And part of that goes back by the way to the way in which the system got broken in the first place. So Ronald Reagan, of course, great governor of California and a great president, but Reagan did a 1986, a massive amnesty program where in some ways he was trying to do exactly what you're talking about.

27:25Fix the problem with people who are already here, make sure that our immigration system is more pro -skill, but also close down the border. and what happened is we got all the amnesty, but we didn't get the closing down of the border. And so in order to do anything, I think meaningful on immigration policy, meaning legal immigration policy, you've got to close down the border and establish some basic order. And to go back to first principles here, I think that people who are generally, I mean, look, this is, I'm sure a very diverse crowd and I'm sure there are a lot of immigrants in this crowd, legal immigrants, hopefully.

27:57I'm married to the daughter, I'm married to the daughter of legal immigrants to this country. And I, of course, love not just my wife, but the whole extended family. I do think they brought a lot of money to the country. Right, but certainly immigrants. Yeah. And but here's the thing. When you allow 25 million people into this country, it breaks down the entire social compact, right? So think about this. Okay, you're down on your luck. You lost your job. You get unemployment insurance. You're really down on your luck. You need food assistance from the federal government. I believe as a conservative, that part of being in the same American family, whether your family's been here for a generation or 10 generations is that we support people who are down on the look.

28:34We don't want to cradle to grave welfare state, but we want to support people. We don't kids who are dying because of starvation, because of no fault of their own. We want to promote some basic fairness, and we want to help people out when times get tough. But you can't do that if you extend that generosity to tens of millions of people who can't be here in the first place. And I think that what Kamala Harris has done at the border, it's not just bad economic it's not just bad for public safety, she has eroded the very foundation of the social contract in this country. And we talk about division in our politics and Kamala has this ridiculous slogan, we're not going back.

29:11The reason why politics is so divided is because she has turned American citizens against one another while she's placed the interest of illegal aliens above American citizens. You want to turn the page and get back to common American citizenship? Stop putting illegal aliens to the front of the line of American citizens. Is the motivation?

29:33Do you believe the motivation is endless empathy? Or is it as simple as we want new democratic voters? Or is there a kind of not publicly spoken about economic argument, about bringing wages down, having economic growth, having new buyers in the economy, that there's some benefit despite the 100 to 600 billion dollars? and I'll add another one. Guilt. Yeah, the end of empathy aspect. Yeah, I mean, empathy is different than guilt. It's all of these things, right? I mean, so let me tell you a brief story, and this goes back to my changing in my mind on Donald Trump. I was probably, it's like 2017, 2018, I was at a business conference, and I happened to be seated next to one of the largest hotel chain CEOs in America.

30:18And my wife was there, and we talk about this as the monopoly story, because the guy is just going off. Maybe he'd had too much to drink. He's going off about how Donald Trump's immigration policies have forced him to raise the wages of his workers. And I was like, oh, that's an interesting fact. Like explain more about this, sir, please. I want to understand. And he said, well, because we can hire a lot of immigrants. And frankly, we can hire a lot of illegal immigrants under the table. And we can't do that because there are fewer legal immigrants. So we have to pay our American citizen workers more money.

30:47And I'm like, oh, shit, that sounds pretty good, actually. Isn't that like what we want is for people to be earning higher wages for doing a good job. So there's definitely an economic piece of it. But I also think, I mean, look, this is, this is shown out a little bit partially because we're in election year if Kamala Harris won, I think it would come back with a vengeance. But think about all these like ridiculous landing knowledgements, right? Where people say, well, you know, I want to acknowledge that this be long to like this tribe before I was here. And if you genuinely think that you have to acknowledge a Native American tribe from 300 years ago, then one attitude that comes along with this is, why can I control it all?

31:24Who comes into the country? right, I have no right. There's this basic, I think this is the empathy, it's the guilt, it's sort of all these things. But all structural norms degrade. Exactly. I have no right to say who comes into my community. And I think, again, it's deranged, but I think that's part of it. I think the economic piece of it is part of it. It's certainly a vote argument. I mean, Democrats will say this, of course, Republicans are accused of racism for just repeating what Democrats have said when somebody like Chuck Schumer says, well, we're going have an emerging democratic majority because we're going to have all these new immigrants and all the old Americans.

31:57Well, they're going to vote for Republicans, but we're going to replace them with a bunch of new people who vote for Democrats. It's like, that's pretty sick. But again, if you call it out, you're somehow a racist, even though Chuck Schumer is self -falling it out as if it were a good thing. I just want to ask on a different topic now, thank you for talking about the border. You just have one funnel on this topic, which is your plan is to deport tens of millions of these people. Tell us how that will happen practically. How are you going to take a million of people? Put them in cuffs, drag them out while people have their cell phones out, recording this, or is that just Trump being Trump?

32:31Well, Jason, it's... I like it. You like the balance in the podcast? Yeah, I do. I do. No.

32:43I infernized J .D. Tommy. I think asked the hard questions, please. I want to address them. I didn't say that. I didn't. Nothing's off like that. I think Jason should be on the left and David should be on my right. He's not perfectly. He's been pulling me to the right. I'm going to do it. It's funny. He didn't have any of these hard questions for Reed Hoffman. I don't know why.

33:04Sack. Sack. Well Jason. Wait. Do you want me to leave the left and go to the right? Jason, I'm on the left right now, but I could go right. Okay. Yeah. I guess it depends on perspective. It's my perspective. of your, but Jason, if the VC thing doesn't work out, you'd make a great panelist at CNN. So, by the way, I love this. And I genuinely think this is what a person who wants to be your vice president should actually do is answer some time. I do give you credit for that. Now, you will face the hard question. So, back to the question. Tell me about dragging millions of people out of the country.

33:42Jason, here's why I find this question a little off. and I will answer it, but I hear it's like somebody who comes to me and I'm like eating my lunch and they say, look, that sandwich is 10 times the size of your mouth. How are you possibly going to eat that whole sandwich? And it's like, well, I'm going to take a first bite and then I'm going to take a second bite and I'm going to take a third bite. And eventually the problem is going to be, look, you start out with the million people who are what we call criminal migrants, people who have committed violent crimes in some form or another, get them out of our country, yes, handcuff those people and force them out of the country, but you also do other things simultaneously.

34:15First of all, you stop the bleeding, right? You undo Kamala Harris's policies that open the southern border in the first place. I've got a piece of legislation in the United States Senate that we've got a lot of colleagues who are signed up for it, which would tax remittances, right? Because we know a lot of people are earning money and then sending it back to Central America or wherever they came from. If you end of that practice, then you have a lot of people who go back willingly. I think you ought to make it harder for people to hire a legal labor as opposed to American citizens. You take through these things and I do think that you know that's the sandwich approach to this is you try to take it one step at a time but the most important thing and I think the deportations focus again it is important because we're eventually we are going to deport people but the most important thing is to stop the bleeding.

35:00You've got to stop the millions of people flowing across the southern border every single year. It happened because of Kamala Harris's policies. It's going to stop when Donald Trump is president. Let me ask a national security question. Yeah. There's a lot of videos. Elon's gone down there. Bobby Kennedy's gone down there. You've gone down there. Sure. And the interdictions are not necessarily coming from countries in Central and South America anymore. They're coming from places in near around the Asian. And a lot of places that you wouldn't normally think people coming from, Middle East, et cetera.

35:31From a national security perspective, what do we think is happening? Why is that happening? Yeah, so well, part of the reason is happening is that Honduran is that. No, it's not. It's Iranian since it's people from all over Asia, Africa. Look, if you look at this, that is the open door. So if you want to come to this country, that is the open door. And God knows why some of them want to be here. I mean, given what's going on in the Middle East, I do worry about military age males from Iran coming into this country through the southern border. But I actually asked a board of patrol agent about this on one of my visits.

36:07And, you know, great guy was actually kind of heartbroken because he signed up to protect his country. And he's a relatively recent immigrant. I could tell that by his accent. This guy's like very nervous and very heartbroken about the fact that he can't do his job. And he told me this story and I feel like an idiot on hindsight because he's like, we have a guy who came in here. I asked the guy like, you know, why do you think this guy's Iranian? and he said, well, because he came through and he said that he was Mexican, and I was like, well, couldn't he have been Mexican? And he said, well, he didn't speak Spanish.

36:36Oh, that's a tell. You know? Yeah, a tell. Like, Lately, it doesn't speak Spanish. That's probably pretty significant tell. But it's happening because this is what Kamala Harris has done. She's created this massive gap in our national security and people are taking advantage of it. It's really not that surprising. JD, let me just ask you one more foreign policy question on China. So there's a balancing act with China. But the rhetoric is, that's our enemy, there's going to be a cold war. The structural relationship that the United States has with China is a very kind of co -dependent relationship.

37:10They buy our bonds, I guess they're selling them off now. We buy a lot of products from them. It allows us to go into a Walmart and get $40 scooters for our kids, or $20 scooters for our kids. The technology industry is deeply dependent on a supply chain coming from China. There's a great commercial interdependency with China. They have historically been a very important partner to the United States and our economic prosperity. And I know the argument about hollowing out the middle class and so on because of moving everything off shore to China, but how do we rip that bandaid off and not cause massive problems with inflation?

37:46How do we not drive the cost of everything up by terrifying things that are coming in from China? What's the way forward with China? Is it necessarily a deeply kind of divisive Cold War? Or is there a path here that allows us to maintain a balanced trading relationship and kind of a peaceful transition with China as they continue to build up their kind of capabilities economically and with energy, which I think is one of the biggest drivers for their success. Well, so there's a lot there. And let me try to sort of take a few pieces of it because I know we're relatively short on time. So number one is the energy piece of it's very important.

38:22part of the way that you reach more American manufacturing is the open up American energy. It matters for crypto, it matters for AI. You've got to open up American energy or you're never going to have whether it's the next generation of manufactured goods or the past generations, you've got to open up American energy. Okay, that's number one. Number two is, look, I don't want to go to war with China. I think it would be hugely destructive, but I do think that we have to reach more American manufacturing. And one of the weird things about China, if you think about past eras of developing nations, So go back to like when the UK was the most advanced economy in the world and America was developing nation.

38:57Well, one of the things that happened is that like capital was flowing from the UK into the United States, right, from the developed into the developing nation. What's really weird about China is that it's like Americans borrow money from Chinese peasants to then buy the things the Chinese peasants are making for us, right? So it's not just the goods flow that's jacked up, it's the capital flows that are jacked up. And I really think that the next Donald Trump is going to be the next President of the United States and this is something we're going to have to figure out is that you need to balance both the capital and the goods flows.

39:29Okay? I'm not saying we're going to have absolutely no trade with China, but right now the relationship is fundamentally that the Chinese have figured out they can create a massively powerful producer of society while America becomes a weaker, weaker consumer of society. That is the broken nature of the relationship. But I think rebalancing is the right way to think about it, but we have got to do it and I think we're way, way behind the end. You may be final question, but you said something which I thought was incredibly well said. So I just want to repeat it. When US growth is one and two percent, everybody's fighting.

39:59Exactly. But when US growth is four to five percent, everybody prospers. Can you walk us through just how you think about how we get that extra two or three hundred basis points of growth and where you need to have less regulation so that you can have more entrepreneurship or more regulation to kind of constrain folks? How do you think? And less regulation for that energy sector. Yeah, I mean, I really do think that we have to recognize that we have massively overregulated the real world, right? Overregulated transportation, overregulated energy, overregulated home construction. I don't know how easy it is to get another 300 bips of growth, but I think you get a lot more growth, whether it's 300 or 150, just by massively reducing the amount of regulatory burden in the real economy.

40:42And again, I'm an optimist. I'm fundamentally an optimist on both, you know, crypto blockchain, web three stuff, but also on AI. And you know, the way out of this may very well be to radically open up the way the technological innovation drives things in the United States. And just on this point about China, I don't know how a China we're at. We have, I'll try to be quick about this. One of the things that Bob wanted. What about Bernie? Yeah. Okay. All right. Well, I'm a politician. So Bucklin, we're going to be in reality. But one of the real conceits of the 30 years of globalization that I think was really, really deranged and hindsight very wrong, Bob Leihiser, who is Trump's trade representative, talks a lot about this is we have this conceit that we could separate the manufacture of things from the design of things, right?

41:32So if you get an iPhone right now and you get it out of the box, you will see that it says designed in Cupertino, California. And of course, the implication is that it's manufactured in Xinjiang or wherever they're manufacturing iPhones these days. The idea that the iPhone is designed in Cupertino is increasingly no longer even true. It's something that we lie to ourselves about because the people who are doing all the manufacturing of the hardware of the iPhone are getting much better at design and innovation. And part of the reason why I care so much about this manufacturing thing is whether it's antibiotics, for example.

42:02Why hasn't American been an antibiotic in 30 years? It probably has something to do with the manufacturer antibiotics has done almost entirely in very low -cost manufacturing areas. You can go through a whole host of goods like this, but if you want to build a high -tech, high -dynamic growth economy, you have to have some native manufacturing and some self -reliance. And so these two things are very related, and I think it's a big part of getting back to 4 -5 % growth is accepting that, yes, we're going to have trade, but we can't let everybody make all of our stuff. Thanks. Yeah. Let me... I want to wrap this up because I think we're basically out of time by just observing that both Donald Trump and JD Vance have been on this podcast.

42:50And it's not because I'm a crazy right -winger. It's because we invited them... Just because. Not just because.

42:58It's because we invited them and they accepted. We have similarly invited Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz to be on the show. And Biden for that, but he forgot.

43:12So we're still waiting. He said yes. He lost a Zoom link. So we want to re -extend the invitation to be very clear. Kamala Harris and Tim Waltz, you're welcome to come on the podcast anytime. time and the format will be similar. Yeah, and I just want to say, JD, I think your answers were fantastic here today. And I really do appreciate you coming on and answering these questions very thoughtfully. And you know, from my perspective, when I heard that you were announced as the VP, I thought, well, this is great. A young person who's got a lot of experience in venture capital and building things in the world.

43:51And somebody who comes from humble beginnings, like the four of us, and believes that a meritocracy where people work hard and get reward for it. So you check all my boxes in that way. And I can really think, I feel much better. I have my issues with your boss. But when you talk about the bite size steps to it, I think one framework to look at your relationship with Trump is he says things at the top of the highest vibration, we're going to default 20 million people. And then you have a very practical approach. 60 % tireless makes no sense. but hey, we've got to rebalance this. And so I really do like your measured approach to this, and I think that you're a great counterbalance.

44:31And I think we understand why he picked. I want to say one thing. I want to say one thing. I want to say one thing. Thanks.

44:41And this is not really related to anything, except that you are not supposed to be here. That's exactly right. Yeah. And that is really inspiring to other people who are not supposed to be here. Thank you. Well, I appreciate you. And if you haven't read Jake's book, I read your book long before all of this and I just want to say your book was so inspiring and I I have Recommended it long before today to you know It's a fantastic read if you haven't read well and by the way available wherever books are sold You're like Jake Owl. Yeah, exactly. Do you have an affiliate? 529 account for the kids' digital account.

45:19Let me just two things. First of all, Jason, I appreciate what you said, but I also just want to defend my running made here because I think that, again, the media doesn't often tell you the truth about Donald Trump. Donald Trump cares more about the details of public policy than almost anyone I've ever met in public life. That's actually real. He thinks about how this stuff affects the real economy and real Americans. So if you're on the fence, whether you like what I said or dislike what I said, I just encourage you listen to what he actually says because I think that you'll become a believer that he can make the country great again as he promises.

45:54But separate from that, I just wanna say, this is such an important conversation and you guys hold and host important conversations every single day. We should do more of it as a country, but I'm glad to participate today. God bless everyone. Thank you ladies and gentlemen, Katie Vance. APPLAUSE Next, Brad. Thank you, everybody. That was great. That's great. Thank you.