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

You're making a huge assumption that's buying into the doomerism that AI is going to wipe out millions of jobs. That is not, those are facts not in evidence. And furthermore, have any jobs been lost by AI? Let's be real. We've had AI for two and a half years and I think it's great, but so far it's a better search engine and it helps high school kids cheat on their essays. I mean, come on.

AI is a productivity tool. It increases the productivity of a worker. It allows them to do more creative work and less repetitive work. As such, it makes them more valuable. Yes, there is some retraining involved, but not a lot. ... But I think David is absolutely right. I think we will see job creation by AI that will be as fast or faster than job destruction.

And if you view it through that lens, you're right, Sacks. We have not accomplished anything yet that proves that this is going to be cataclysmically bad. And if anything right now, history would tell you it's probably going to be like the past, which is generally productive and a creative society.

So if there's a deflationary effect in terms of job need in other industries, I think that the loss will happen slower than the rush to take advantage of creating new things will happen on the other side. So my bet is probably on the order of I think new things will be created faster than old things will be lost.

Because, yeah, Trump brings up tariffs every 48 hours and then it doesn't seem like any of them land. So I don't know. I'm still on my 72-hour Trump rule, which is whatever he says, wait 72 hours and then maybe see if it actually comes to pass.

Well, I think the tariffs will be a plug. Are they coming? Absolutely. The quantum of them? I don't know. And I think that the way that you can figure out how extreme it will be, it'll be based on what the legislative plan is for the budget.

I do think ultimately many of these countries are going to capitulate to some degree and we're going to end up with some negotiated settlement that's going to hopefully not be too short-term impactful on the economies and the people and the jobs that are dependent on trade.

Ag exports are a major revenue source, major income source and a major part of the economy for a large number of states. And so there will be, as there was in the first Trump presidency, very likely very large transfer payments made to farmers. Because China is very likely going to tear up imports or stop making import purchases altogether, which is what happened during the first presidency. When they did that, the federal government, I believe, had transfer payments of north of $20 billion to farmers.

So on Thursday, what happened with Microsoft, they had a $24 billion contract with the United States Army to deliver some whiz-bang thing. And they realized that they couldn't deliver it. And so what did they do? They went to Anderil. Now, why did they go to Anderil? Because Anderil has the technological supremacy to actually execute.

If you look at it today, probably the largest defense contractor in the world is DJI. They got all the drones. ... If we have a kinetic conflict right now and we don't have good drone supply chain internally in the US, we're probably going to lose because those things are autonomous bullets. That's the future of all warfare. We're buying F-35s and the Chinese are building swarms of narrowzones.

My honest opinion, Jason, is that I think we're in a very complicated moment. I think the Senate plan is actually on the margins more likely and better. And the reason is because I think that Trump is better off getting the next 60 to 90 days of data. I mean, we're in a real pickle here. We have persistent inflation. We have a broken Fed. They're totally asleep at the switch. And the thing that Yellen and Biden did, which in hindsight now was extremely dangerous, is they issued so much short-term paper that in totality, we have $10 trillion we need to finance in the next 6 to 9 months. So it could be the case that we have rates that are like 5, 5.25, 5.5%.

And I'm just hoping that Sam Altman loses this lawsuit and they get an injunction against it. Hey, well, just because he's just such a weasel in terms of like making open AI into a closed thing.

But even equity, they could give equity to the people building it, but they could still leave it in the control of the non-profit. I just don't understand this conversion. I mean, there was a board coup, right? The board tried to fire Sam, and Sam took over the board. Now it's his hand-picked board, so it also looks like self-dealing, right? And yeah, they'll get an independent valuation, but we all know that game. You hire a valuation expert who's going to say what you're going to say, and they'll check the box.

You know, GDP per capita in the EU, $60,000 a year, GDP per capita in the United States, like $82,000, but GDP per capita in India is $2,500 and China's $12,600. There's a greater incentive in those countries to manifest upside than there is for the United States and the EU who are more worried about manifesting downside. ... And the countries that are more techno-pessimistic are unfortunately going to find themselves asking for greater government control, government intervention in markets, government's creating jobs, government making payments to people, government's effectively running the economy.

I'm going to go out even thinner limb and say I largely agree with you. I think it's a bit rich to crawl the open web, hoover up all the data, offer direct substitution for a lot of use cases, because now you start and end with the AI model. It's not even like you link out like Google did. And then you just close off the models for safety reasons. I think if you trained on the open web, your model should be open source.

I have a prediction here. I think this is all going to wind up like the Napster Spotify case. ... I think that there is a non-zero chance, like it might be 5 or 10 percent, that OpenAI is going to lose the New York Times lawsuit and they're going to lose it hard and there could be injunctions. And I think the settlement might be that these language models, especially the closed ones, are going to have to pay some percentage in a negotiated settlement of their revenue, half, two-thirds, to the content holders. And this could make the content industry have a massive, massive uplift and a massive resurgence.

This is lossy compression. It is absolutely... I'm now on your page. I hate to say this, Jason. I agree with you. You were right.

I philosophically disagree with all of your nonsense on this topic. All three of you are wrong. And I'll tell you why. Number one, if information is out in the open internet, I believe it's accessible and it's viewable. And I view an LLM or a web crawler as basically being a human that's reading and can store information in its brain.

But when it comes to tariffs and when it comes to trade, we act like network effects don't exist. The classic Ricardian comparative advantage dogma says that, you should produce what you're best at, I produce what I'm best at and we trade. ... So you have to understand that certain industries have hysteresis, or they have network effects, or they have economies of scale. And these are all the interesting ones. These are all the high-margin businesses. So in those, if somebody is subsidizing or they're raising tariffs against you to protect your industries and let them develop, you do have to do something. You can't just completely back down.

What do they do? They just get more efficient, and they exported it back to us. They sent us back the best open source model when our guys were staying closed source for safety reasons.

We have to win some of these key building block technologies, we want to win in chips, we want to win in AI models, we want to win in applications. He said we need to build, we need to unlock energy for these companies.

And it creates this, you know, because of this manifestation about worrying about downside, it creates this fear that creates regulation like we see in the EU. And as a result, China's GDP will scale while the EUs will stagnate, if that's where they go. That's my assessment or my opinion on what will happen.

And by the way, that language about dominating AI and winning the global race, that is in President Trump's executive order from week one. So this is very much elaborating on the official policy of this administration.

I think that the whole Paris AI Summit took place against the backdrop of this recognition, because just a few weeks ago, we had deep sea. And it's really clear that China is not a year behind us. They're hot on our heels or only maybe months behind us. And so if we hobble ourselves with unnecessary regulations, if we make it more difficult for our AI companies to compete, that doesn't mean that China is going to follow suit and copy us. They're going to take advantage of that fact and they're going to win.

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