SPEAKER_00: this speaker is not on the program not on the program but i did notice there was a little

SPEAKER_01: bit of security here today a little extra security this is your sex red meat moment yes okay here we

SPEAKER_06: please welcome me in joining vice presidential candidate janey vance

SPEAKER_18: all right see you hey guys welcome so sacks is going to introduce you welcome to the lions den

SPEAKER_29: who's here with us sacks well do we do we actually need a big introduction here but i'll i'll give

SPEAKER_30: i'll give a few those of you who are really bad at context clues i'm jd vance i'm running for vice

SPEAKER_34: president and normally he's he's beside his wife usha but now you get that's right she's at like

SPEAKER_36: the tar pits or whatever yeah yeah oh yeah yeah we brought three kids out here so she wanted to take

David Sacks: and see some fossil stuff so they'll have fun you know i'll say a couple of things about jd because um he's a friend i think what what i think um really made me want to support jd for for senate and also for the vp position is that i think he represents two you could almost say contradictions uh back in 2003 when jd graduated from high school uh you know this was after the twin towers that come down and we had gotten involved in the iraq war he was gung-ho to go fight america's enemies and he enlisted in the marine corps and went off uh to serve in in the middle east eventually he came to realize that that war was a mistake and i thought that that really represents uh one of the traits that we really want in in a vice president or someone next to the president uh which is that he had the patriotism and the courage to go serve america but also the wisdom to realize when america shouldn't get involved in a war so i want to just the the other uh like i said almost contradiction that jd represents is that he had worked in the tech industry he had been a venture capitalist he had been in rooms like this and he understands what it takes to make america a more innovative place at the same time he comes from a part of the the midwest appalachia that's a very poor part of the country and did not grow up in a privileged uh environment at all and he still remembers those people and he represents those people and i think his ability to understand both parts of the country makes him

SPEAKER_43: uh i'd say a pretty unique political figure so with that let me stop and do you want to react to any of

SPEAKER_36: that uh well you know first of all thanks all for having me uh been a big fan of the pod for a while

SPEAKER_45: i think my first appearance so it's good to be with you you know i the only thing i'll say to that david is i do think there is a deep connection between the the poverty that i saw growing up and the fact that our entire economy is just less innovative than we pretend that it is and you know i know you know peter teal and tyler callen others folks have talked about this but if you look at the real innovation the american economy it's been in the world of software if you look at where the economy has been most stagnant it's been in basically the heavily regulated parts of the economy which is where 90 of the people that i represent in the senate and 80 of the people that i hope to represent as their vice president actually make their living run their business and go to work every single day and i think that you know when i think about tech one of the things i'd like us to do is broaden the aperture a little bit and think about innovation not just in software but innovation in transportation and logistics and innovation uh in energy and the whole suite of things because unless our economy is actually technologically innovative then the stagnant economy is is fundamentally like the worst thing and i think a lot of actually america's pathologies right now stem from the fact that we feel like we live in a very zero-sum country because in some ways we do right when when the economy is growing four five six percent a year then democrats can kind of get what they want republicans can kind of get what they want and it all makes sense if the economy is growing between zero and one percent a year then i think it makes the whole society and our political system a much much much more insane

SPEAKER_46: and i think it's kind of a subtext of what's been going on in this country for the last 30 years

SPEAKER_48: um let me start by going back a little bit i think three of us um initially would have been described

SPEAKER_49: sort of like you know non-trump people yeah um and in different ways and shapes and form we were all vocal about it because of what was presented to us through the filter of the media and we've all

SPEAKER_52: gone through an evolution in large part by meeting the person and this is the first time actually where a presidential candidate i've known and i've kind of known a vice presidential candidate in this

SPEAKER_49: case as well get try you know they try to corner you and paint you in a certain way can you just talk about what you realized and the person that you got to know and what it says about what we need to do

SPEAKER_45: so that we don't get manipulated yeah so first of all when biden was running against trump one of the things the media tried to do is to say well you know you have these two guys who are a little bit older than average and both of them clearly aren't fully with it and i would hear the media talk about biden like this and then talk about trump like this and it's like guys donald trump remembers exactly what i said about him nine and a half years ago to the minute to the day to the exact line like trust me his memory is a hundred percent there uh even if it would be in more more in my interest if it wasn't and you know what what what changed for me i mean two things i mean one chamath you just sort of hit on this is a lot of the things the press said about donald trump and says about donald trump are just straight up fabrications and so if you think the press is like biased that's one thing but if you think the press is fundamentally trying to tell you the truth even if it's in a biased way and then you realize that like donald trump never called white supremacists very fine people after charlottesville a total fabrication of the american media it's like okay what other things am i hearing about donald trump that are actually not true right the second thing is you know we talked about this a little bit last night but look if you go back to the day of my or the year my birth which is 1984 there's this chart that's really interesting and it tracks corporate profits the wages of workers and the size of government and for pretty much my entire life the wages of workers were stagnant corporate profits were going up and the size of government was going up and there was a four-year period where the wages of workers outpace the size of government corporate profits it's the four years that donald trump was president and i think that we have to like give some credit to where it's due the policies actually work and if you go into the presidency saying i don't think donald trump's going to be a good president and then lo and behold he's the best president at least in a generation it's like okay time to change my mind admit to myself but also to all the people who listen to me i was wrong about

SPEAKER_36: donald trump he was a hell of a good president of course i'm running as his running mate

SPEAKER_49: because i think he'll do it again let's flip it around now what what does it say about him that he i mean how's that process of saying jd you said this yes i did i changed my mind i then but then he

SPEAKER_45: has to change his mind so that says something so talk us about that you know i think the president one thing i'll say about him is the again the media perception of donald trump is that he's like this deeply aggrieved guy who holds really terrible grudges the actual reality of donald trump is that yeah he remembers what you said about him because it's like part of the inputs that he takes as he tries to evaluate a human being but most importantly he's asking like what what can you do now how can you help the country now how can you help me as i try to help the country now and i think for whatever complicated set of factors he decided that i was the guy who could help him the most um but no i mean it's it's it is interesting the perception of him as this guy who holds grudges he selected a guy was very much a critic of his back in 2015 as his running mate clearly something doesn't make sense and i think that what doesn't make sense is this idea that trump is more motivated by grievance than

SPEAKER_62: he is by the public interest he's actually much more motivated by the public interest that's the truth

SPEAKER_65: that's awesome you're um thanks for coming of course um you're going to replace um mike pence

SPEAKER_68: uh i hope so yeah as uh it's gonna be a close election but um if you do um mike pence um your

SPEAKER_65: new boss trump is a little upset at mike pence because mike pence refused to overturn the election results and um if you were in that same position what would you do would you have overturned the

SPEAKER_45: election results well i think it's let me take issue with the premise a little bit jason because i don't think the argument was mike pence could overturn the election results i think the argument was that mike pence could have done more whether you agree or disagree mike pence could have done more to sort

SPEAKER_75: of surface some problems if you do not certify election would you have not certified well i think

SPEAKER_45: i think that what i would have done i mean look i i happen to think that there were issues back in 2020 particularly in pennsylvania even you know some of the courts that refused to throw out certified ballots did say that there were ballots that were cast in an illegal way they just refused to actually decertify the election results in pennsylvania do i think that we could have had a much more rational conversation about how to ensure that only legal ballots are cast yes and do i think that mike pence could have played a better role yes but i again the the two purposes that i take issue one is one pence was not asked to overturn the election he couldn't have but two the reason he was asked to not certify it sure so would you have certified election for the again i would have asked the states to submit alternative slates of electors and let the country have the debate about what actually matters and what kind of an election that we have you wouldn't have certified states to be clear i would have asked the states to submit alternative slates that's that's that's what i would have done again i've said that publicly many times but again jason the important part is we would have had a big debate and it doesn't necessarily mean the results would have been any different but we at least would have had the debate in pennsylvania and georgia about how to better have a rational election system where legal ballots are cast and again i i you know look i have no personal problem with mike pence i've never really talked to him but i think that the idea that the reason mike pence isn't on board with donald trump is over the election of 2020 that's the other thing i want to take issue with jason because i think in reality that if donald trump wanted to start a nuclear war with russia mike pence would be at the front of the line endorsing him right now and fundamentally the reason the old guard of the republican party hates donald trump it's not because of january the 6th 2021 whatever your views on it it's because donald trump doesn't think that we should start stupid wars in foreign countries and that's why

SPEAKER_81: they all hate him all right can i i have a follow-up on that let me continue my line of questioning then

SPEAKER_75: i'll give it to you because i want to hear jd's since he's here i've heard yours many times so uh how many how many follow-ups how many follow-ups are you gonna have about january 6th

SPEAKER_87: i want to 20 minutes talking about i want to hear david especially if he gets me out of answering

SPEAKER_89: tough questions so i think we've you've had like three follow-ups on on jason first of all freeberg

SPEAKER_91: you never got a chance to ask well i want to talk about let's let's talk about january 6th in the next 45 minutes i'm sure it's the most important thing going on in the country right now can we talk

SPEAKER_25: about policy for a minute that'd be great okay i'd love that i'll just i'll just reflect back on your

SPEAKER_94: comment about government growth compared to wage growth compared to corporate profits there's only so much capital it gets sucked up somewhere that's right there's competing interests that suck it up the government is a competing interest that sucks up capital fundamentally the government has been successful in sucking up capital and ultimately the government has been proven time and again to be the least efficient way to grow the economy of allocating capital allocators or labor and um trump has made this commentary that elon who's going to be here later today should come in and help right size the government you've now you've now spent a few years as a senator this is my most distressing issue right of all the panic attacks i have that jason teases me about it's government spending the debt level and ultimately you reach a tipping point i believe in democracies where the government is spending most more people are dependent on the government than are not and that ultimately leads to a very bad outcome for democracy that's how i feel and so based on what you've seen as a senator now for the last few years and based on the commentary that elon where where would you go in you know cut where where's the most kind of efficiency gaining opportunity that we can kind of execute against without needing to go and negotiate with congress what's the opportunity ahead for the executive branch yeah to right size government to make things more efficient to hold things accountable to improve the way that the government is functioning which i think ultimately leads to better economic growth and opportunity for innovation because capital flows to the right

SPEAKER_45: places so i agree with you and let me just say let me say two things and i'll try to answer briefly because i know there are a lot of topics that we can get through so so number one is one of the things that our government should do obviously i think it should be doing less than it currently does but what it does i want it to do well and most importantly i want the critical social welfare functions of our government to go to the people who actually deserve to be here so as united states senator i have asked multiple staff members i've asked officials in various government departments if you take the give or take 25 million illegal aliens that are here in this country right now how much money do we spend on illegal aliens every single year in this country and i've gotten estimates that range between a hundred billion dollars a year to 600 billion dollars a year and where does that money come from well it comes from health care benefits even though illegal aliens aren't entitled to section 8 housing their children are entitled to section 8 housing there's also a lot of social security fraud a lot of medicare fraud so one thing that we could save a lot of money on is actually focusing our national interest on american citizens people who deserve to be here we'd save a lot of money that way that'd be a huge and transformative

SPEAKER_94: seven point three trillion dollar budget what do you estimate that impact to be well again i'm trying to do that scene in the movie dave where they go in and they just like line up they're like nope nope or

SPEAKER_103: like malady pulled everything off the board if you call it a 1.7 trillion dollar deficit right

SPEAKER_45: uh again it's between 100 billion dollars to 600 billion dollars depending on how you cut the numbers now the other thing about that just to answer your question about efficiency is i think the government procurement process especially in military equipment is really broken uh if you go back to eisenhower's warning about the military industrial complex i mean i i was a seed investor in anduril i imagine you guys have some anduril people here today um great great company yeah great great chat but you know one of the things that that company as as i as you know and i haven't talked to the guys about the details of the business in a lot in the last few years but one of the things that they founded the company on was the idea that the procurement process was broken yeah and that is definitely true in the you know we do way too much cost plus procurement and way too little actual spurring of innovation and what it ends up meaning is that our equipment isn't as good as it should be and we end up spending a lot more money than we should be i actually do think you could cut the american defense budget and make our country stronger but you would have to make the procurement process much more efficient now that's a big thing to tackle but that's what we're in this business you have to pass legislation to do that i don't know that you have to pass legislation but you really as a president and vice president you have to be willing to take on some very powerful

SPEAKER_103: defense contractors and that's something that i know president trump and i very much want to do

SPEAKER_116: and how would you like your role as vice president to be cast differentially from how other vice

SPEAKER_94: presidents have have operated what would your role as an individual be just speaking about i want to do

SPEAKER_36: all of the good things and none of the bad things that's my goal as vice president that's so the

SPEAKER_122: ribbon cuttings of the new federal i mean look i mean obviously joking but the the reality is that i i want to be a second set of eyes and ears for the president's agenda right one of the things that was

SPEAKER_45: true and he will tell you this the first time he was he was president united states is there were people in government there were people in his own administration that he was a newcomer to politics he didn't fully trust everybody who was around him we want to build a team who's actually aligned on the agenda because agree or disagree with donald trump on a specific policy issue assuming the american people make him the next president and i think that they will that is the next president and his policy determinations should dictate the executive administration of government if they don't we don't have a real democracy and by the way just not to wade back into january 6 territory like what is a bigger threat to american democracy is it that we had a big fight about some of the uh some of the certification in january the 6th and of course you had some rioters at the capitol or is it that for example the joint chiefs of staff didn't obey the president of united states on troop redeployments in syria which actually happened during trump's administration like we're going to talk about threats to democracy we need the government to be responsive to the american people's elected

SPEAKER_124: president if you don't have that you don't have a real democracy how much a lot of this if you design

SPEAKER_52: it in one way has to go through congress which as we know is sclerotic and basically nothing can happen and then the other path is for you guys to go ham a little bit and say okay what can we do with

SPEAKER_49: executive order have you had a chance to discuss if you win repositioning the focus as basically that what is the totality of everything that we can do from the white house from the oval and then getting all of these and the other thing that we should talk about at some point is like it's like a avengers

SPEAKER_128: movie and now at this point you bobby kennedy elon yeah trump so but i don't the justice league the

SPEAKER_130: justice league i don't know which character in that justice league i am but the point is like you know have

Chamath Palihapitiya: you had that discussion about like all right folks let's not wait for congress and get a plan ready

SPEAKER_49: starting day one of all the stuff that can happen through eos or how are you thinking about this

SPEAKER_45: at a high level certainly you know i'm one of the co-chairs of the transition team there are a few others of us who are working on it you just sort of think about i mean look the way the founders set up our government whether you like it or not there are certain things especially when it comes to budget and appropriations you just have to go through congress right you fundamentally have to now i do think that the congress is willing to work with us at least you know the first couple of years of an administration you can largely get the budgetary and appropriations things that you need but there's a lot that you can do through eo and by the way in a lot of ways i think the enlargement of the president at the expense of congress is a bad thing but fundamentally there is a lot that happens in our government purely through executive orders through eos and yes we're thinking very deliberately about all the things that you could do through eos on day one or in the early parts of the administration and began not to make this too partisan but one of the ways that that um that biden and harris opened up the american southern border was through executive orders right it was an executive order that suspended deportations an executive order that ended the

SPEAKER_135: remain in mexico policy so you can screw up a lot through eos you can also fix a lot through eos

SPEAKER_136: which is certainly something that we're focused on let me um uh go in a different direction just in

David Sacks: the last couple of days um dick cheney endorsed kamala harris for president and that endorsement was warmly embraced by by kamala harris and the democrats the same people called him a war criminal like three years ago yeah well yeah i'm old enough to remember back in 2008 uh obama first beat hillary clinton in the democratic primary because he had opposed the iraq war and she had supported it and then he got elected president united states and the whole country seemed to recognize that the iraq war had been a disaster it destabilized the middle east it you know i don't need to go through all the litanies of horribles that that happened from it but there seems to be a widespread recognition and like you're saying dick cheney was kind of demonized as this um like the darth vader prince of darkness type figure which i think basically was right i mean he was the principal architect of the iraq war

SPEAKER_37: now i find myself agreeing with everything the democrats said in 2008 about right total coincidence

David Sacks: on a separate track a few weeks ago we had bobby kennedy endorse uh donald trump so you now have a dynamic where the bush republicans are now harris democrats and the kennedy democrats are now trump

SPEAKER_43: republicans clearly something big is happening in our politics here can you explain this realignment

SPEAKER_145: how do you see it yeah i mean look uh one way i think about it is that we traded dick cheney for bobby kennedy and that's an upgrade i'll take every single day right look i mean one way of

SPEAKER_45: understanding is you have to ask yourself who has benefited and who has harmed from the last 30 years of the bipartisan consensus in this country right so um you want to talk about a manufacturing policy that i think promoted the offshoring of millions of good american manufacturing jobs and in the in the process by the way it made us less self-reliant as a country uh that really benefited people like dick cheney and kamala harris and their donors it didn't benefit the people that i serve in the state of ohio okay if you ask yourself who actually went off and fought these ridiculous wars it was very often working in middle class kids and communities like mine it wasn't the family of our current leadership class by and large though of course there are exceptions and you go through each of these issues and what you find is increasingly republicans are the party of working in middle class people you know bobby kennedy has talked about this a lot i think he puts it better than i ever could but that you know you go back even 30 years ago and approximately 80 percent of the counties that represent sorry 80 of the wealth in american counties went in places that voted republican and about 20 of the wealth went to places that voted democrat now it's 70 of the wealth goes for democrats and about 30 of the wealth goes for republicans and you saw this in a big way i mean just one illustration is i believe that in 2012 wall street which i think wall street fundamentally has been the main beneficiary of globalization of of a lot of the policies that i pushed back against and criticized over the last 30 years wall street went three to one for romney over obama in 2012. i believe they went four to one for um for clinton over trump in 2016 and then like nine to one for biden over trump in 2020. so there was a massive shift in who makes up these parties wealthy people direct their money to democrats is what increase increasingly wealthy people direct their money to democrats working and middle class people direct their money to why why do you think that is jade i i again because i think their policies have benefited look the the uni party the kamala harris's and dick cheney's their parties have benefited a certain group of people those people are increasingly democrats uh donald trump has been pushing back against that consensus in his party in his policies i think benefit the majority of the country so increasingly i think the working middle class heart of the country is going for republicans like another another spin on this because i know we're you know focused on tech in this conference is big tech has become increasingly pro democrat little tech has become increasingly pro republican right so if you're an upstart if you're in crypto if you're 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 how they're 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 the people who have suffered from it and are pushing

SPEAKER_65: back against it are republicans i have a follow-up question on that jd which is um you were a venture capitalist sure uh for a period and lena khan has essentially taken m a off the table um you well know that if we can't get those singles and doubles in the industry um 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're you want to break up big tech from what i understand and you have a major problem with big tech you mentioned little tech what's the proper m a architecture you know to to

SPEAKER_68: balance those two uh goals there yeah so this is obviously very complicated like jason you probably

SPEAKER_31: understand this better than i do but as somebody by the way who's defended lena khan against some of her

SPEAKER_45: critics from the right i think what lena khan fundamentally gets correct is that big tech really is a threat it's a threat to free speech it's increasingly 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 lena tech lena khan goes wrong is that you're exactly right like you need the singles and doubles you need sometimes a medium-sized company to buy a smaller company for 300 million dollars right that liquidates founders that gives the venture funds some money to go back into the system and i think that you know now i don't know her super well but my basic read on lena is that she is so anti-monopoly as sort of a baseline bias and anti that becomes anti-merger and acquisition as a baseline bias that google buying youtube is a much much different thing from a two billion dollar market cap healthcare company buying a 500 million dollar market healthcare company and i think that we have to sort of draw a very big distinction between little tech and big tech and look i'm gonna keep on making that argument both in public and private to lena and hopefully

SPEAKER_160: she comes around to our view a little bit because i do think some of her ideas on big tech are right

SPEAKER_162: i think a good place for us to pivot would be the border and just talking about this issue

SPEAKER_65: 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 um but very quickly um your group walk that back a bit it's such a political hot potato and it doesn't seem to me that it needs to be but you've spent a lot of time in government now why can't politicians just do what 80 percent 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 australia and everybody else like

SPEAKER_45: 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 going to let some immigrants in we want them to be high talent high quality people you don't want to let a large number of illegal aliens in obviously that you know that that is that's president trump's view but i 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 like 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 a great president but reagan did in 1986 a massive amnesty program where in some ways he was trying to do exactly what you're talking about fix the problem of 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 uh hopefully um i'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've they brought a lot of us yeah um and but 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 luck we don't want to cradle to grave welfare state but we want to support people we don't want 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 even be here in the in the first place and i think that what what kamala harris has done at the border it's not just bad economically 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 the reason why politics is so divided is because she has turned american citizens against one another while she's placed the the the interests of illegal aliens above american citizens you want to turn the page and get back to common american citizenship

SPEAKER_123: stop putting illegal aliens to the front of the line of american citizens is the motivation

SPEAKER_94: do 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

SPEAKER_172: billion and i'll add another one guilt yeah it's the endless empathy aspect yeah yeah i mean empathy

SPEAKER_45: 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 my changing 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 and my wife was there and we talked about this as the monopoly story because the guy is just going off maybe it had too much to drink he's going off about how donald trump's immigration policies have had 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 and i'm like oh 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 chilled 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 land acknowledgements right where people say well you know i want to acknowledge that this belong 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 who 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

SPEAKER_122: i have no right to say who comes into my community and i think again it's it's deranged but i think that's

SPEAKER_45: 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 you know we're going to have an emerging democratic majority because we're going to have all these new immigrants and all the old americans well 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 himself calling it out as if it were a good thing

SPEAKER_98: i just want to ask uh on a different topic now thank you for talking about the border um just have

SPEAKER_183: one funnel on this topic okay which is um your plan is to deport tens of millions of these people tell

David Friedberg: us how that will happen practically how are you going to take millions 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

SPEAKER_190: well jason it's i like it you like the balance in the podcast yeah i do i do though in fairness jd told

SPEAKER_164: me jd told me ask the hard questions please i want to address them i did say nothing's off

SPEAKER_100: left i think jason should be on the left and david should be on my right

SPEAKER_203: he's pulling me to the right it's funny he didn't have any of these hard questions for reed hoffman i don't know why

SPEAKER_206: do you want me to leave the left and go to the right

SPEAKER_208: i'm on the left right now but i could go right okay yeah i guess it depends on perspective

SPEAKER_122: my perspective here it's good debate but but you know jason if if the if the vc thing doesn't work out you'd make a great panelist at cnn so

SPEAKER_45: but i um no i by the way i love this and i like i i genuinely think like this is what a person who wants to be your vice president should actually do is answer some tough questions i do give you

SPEAKER_218: credit for that you will face the hard questions so back to the question tell me about dragging

SPEAKER_122: millions of people out of the country jason here here's why i find this question a little off and i will answer it but i hear it's it's like somebody who comes to me and i'm like eating my lunch and they

SPEAKER_45: 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 a 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 first 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 uh that we've got a lot of colleagues who have 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 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 illegal labor as opposed to american citizens you tick 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 you'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

SPEAKER_52: 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 you know near around near asia and a lot of places that you wouldn't

SPEAKER_223: normally think people coming from middle east etc from a national security perspective what do we think is happening yeah why is that happening yeah so well part of the reason it's happening right it's

SPEAKER_45: not hondurans necessarily it's iranians it's people from you know all over asia africa you're look if you look at this um that is the open door right 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 you know 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 um but you know i actually asked a border patrol agent about this uh on one of my visits and 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 you know i feel like an idiot in hindsight because he's like we have a guy who came in here i asked

SPEAKER_122: 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 he said well he didn't speak spanish it's like oh that's a tell you know yeah guy from mexico illegal alien doesn't speak spanish that's that's probably a pretty significant tell but it's 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

SPEAKER_94: advantage of it it's really not that surprising jd let me just ask you um one more foreign policy question um 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 the the the structural relationship that the united states has with china is a very kind of codependent relationship they buy our bonds i guess they're selling them off now uh we we buy a lot of product from them it allows us to go into a walmart and get you know 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 offshore to china but you how do we rip that band-aid off and not cause massive problems with inflation how do we not um you know drive the cost of everything up by tariffing things that are coming in from china what's the 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 and kind of a peaceful transition with with china as they continue to to build up their kind of capabilities economically and um with energy which i think is one of the biggest drivers for their success well so

SPEAKER_45: 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 part of the way that you reshore american manufacturing is that you 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 reshore more american manufacturing and one of the weird things about china if you think about past eras of developing nations right so go back to like when the uk was the most advanced economy in the world and america was a developing nation well 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 you know donald trump is going to be the next president 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 okay 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 producerist society while america becomes a weaker weaker consumerist society that is the broken nature of the relationship and i think rebalancing

SPEAKER_228: is the right way to think about it but we have got to do it and i think we're way way behind the you

SPEAKER_52: maybe final question but you said something which i thought was incredibly well said so i just want to repeat it when u.s growth is one and two percent everybody's fighting exactly but when u.s growth is four to five percent everybody prospers yeah can you walk us through just how you think about

SPEAKER_49: 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

SPEAKER_241: do you think and less regulation for that energy sector yeah i mean i i i really do think that we

SPEAKER_45: have to recognize that we have massively over regulated the real world right over regulated transportation over regulated energy over regulated home construction i don't know that it's 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 and again i i'm an optimist i'm fundamentally an optimist on both you know crypto blockchain web3 stuff but also on ai and it 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 and just on this point about china uh i don't know how much time we have but i'll try to be quick about this one of the things that bob whatever time you

SPEAKER_36: need yeah okay it's more about you all right well i'm a politician so uh buckle in we're gonna be

SPEAKER_45: here for three hours later but um one of the real conceits of the 30 years of globalization that i think was really really deranged in hindsight very wrong bob lightheiser who is trump's trade representative talks a lot about this is we had this conceit that we could separate the manufacturer of things from the design of things right so 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 of course the implication is that it's manufactured in chingin or wherever they're manufacturing iphones these days that the idea that the iphone is designed in cupertino is increasingly no longer even true right 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 what why haven't why hasn't america invented an antibiotic in 30 years it probably has something to do with the manufacture of antibiotics is 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 four or five percent growth is accepting that yes we're going to have trade but we can't let everybody make all of our stuff sex yeah let me question for you yeah

David Sacks: well i want to i want to wrap this up because i think we're basically out of time by um by just observing that both donald trump and jd vance have been on this podcast and it's not because i'm a crazy right winger it's because we invited them just because not just because um it's it's because we

SPEAKER_259: invited them and they accepted we have similarly invited kamala harris and tim waltz to buy before

SPEAKER_266: that but and by before he forgot so we're we're still waiting yes he lost the he lost the zoom link

David Sacks: so we want to be on this call yeah we want to re-extend the invitation yes to be very clear kamala harris and tim waltz you're welcome to come on the podcast anytime and the format will be similar yeah and

SPEAKER_272: i just want to say jd i think your answers were fantastic here today and i really do appreciate

SPEAKER_164: 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 um who's got a lot of experience in venture capital and building things in the world and somebody who comes from humble beginnings like the four of us um and believes that a meritocracy where people work hard and get reward for it so you check all my boxes in that way yeah and i really think i feel much better i you know i have my issues with your boss but um when you talk about you know the bite-size you know steps to it you know i think one framework to look at your relationship with trump is he says things you know at the top of the at the highest vibration we're going to deport 20 million people and then you have a very practical approach 60 percent tariffs makes no sense but hey we've got to

David Friedberg: rebalance this and so i really do like your measured approach to this and i think that you're a great counterbalance and i think we understand why he picked i want to i want to say one thing

SPEAKER_52: um thanks and this is not really related to anything except that you are not supposed to be

SPEAKER_279: here that's exactly right yeah and that is really inspiring to other people who are not supposed to be here thank you well yeah i appreciate it and if you haven't read jay's book i read your book long

SPEAKER_164: 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 literally hundreds of people it's a fantastic read if you haven't read it

SPEAKER_286: well and by the way available wherever books are sold you're like jake out exactly do you have an

SPEAKER_288: affiliate 529 account for the kids can i just just just two things first of all uh jason i i appreciate

SPEAKER_122: what you said but i i also just want to defend uh my running mate here because i think that again the

SPEAKER_45: 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 uh but but but but separate from that i just want to 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

SPEAKER_294: to participate today god bless everyone thank you ladies and gentlemen jd vince that's great