All-In PodcastJD Vance's AI Speech, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers, Tariffs, AI Court Cases with Naval Ravikant
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150 min read · 30,017 words- 0:00 – 9:07
The Besties intro Naval Ravikant!
- JCJason Calacanis
Great job, Naval. You rocked it.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Maybe I should have said this on air, but that was literally the most fun podcast I've ever recorded. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Whoa, that's on air. Cut that in.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, put it in the show. Put it in the show.
- NRNaval Ravikant
I had my theory on why you were number one, but now I have the realization.
- JCJason Calacanis
What's the actual reason? You know us for long enough.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah, what was your theory? What's the reality?
- NRNaval Ravikant
My theory was that my problem with going on podcasts is usually the person I'm talking to is not that interesting. They're just asking the same questions and they're dialing it in and they're not that interesting. It's not like we're having a peer level, actual conversation so that's why I wanted to do AirChat and Clubhouse and things like that, because you can actually have a conversation.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Ah, I see.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right? And what you guys have, very uniquely, is four people, you know, of whom at least three are intelligent. No, I'm kidding.
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughing)
- JCJason Calacanis
How could you say that? Sax isn't here!
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
How did you- Yeah. (laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
What, wait, Sax isn't even here and you say that, Naval? That is so cold.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Oh my god. That's the best. The best.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Right, of whom at least three are intelligent-
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- NRNaval Ravikant
... and all of you get along, and you can have an ongoing conversation. That's a very high hit rate. Normally in a podcast you only get one interesting person, and now you've got three, maybe four, right?
- DFDavid Friedberg
(laughs)
- NRNaval Ravikant
Okay, so that to me was why All-In was successful.
- JCJason Calacanis
Who invited this guy? Who are you talking to who's number four?
- NRNaval Ravikant
We don't know. It will remain mysterious forever. Of the four, right, the, the problem is if you get people together to talk, two is a good conversation, three possibly, four is the max. That's why at a dinner table at a restaurant, four top, right? You don't do five or six because then it splits into multiple conversations. So you had four people who were capable of talking, right? That I thought was a secret, but there's another secret. The sec- the other secret is you guys are having fun. You're talking over each other, you're making fun of each other. You're actually having fun.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Yeah.
- NRNaval Ravikant
So that's why I'm saying this is the most fun podcast I've ever been on. That's-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Awesome.
- NRNaval Ravikant
That's why you'll be successful.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
Welcome back any time, Naval.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Thank you.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
No problem.
- JCJason Calacanis
Welcome back.
- 9:07 – 14:17
Naval reflects on his thoughtful tweets and reputation
- NRNaval Ravikant
here.
- DSDavid Sacks
Naval, what happened, when you went through that phase, there was a period where it just seemed like something had gone on in your life and you just knew the answers. You were just so grounded. It's not to say that you're not grounded now, but you're, you're less active posting and writing. But there was this period where I think all of us were like, "Right, what does Naval think?"
- NRNaval Ravikant
Oh, really? Oh. Okay (laughs) . That's news to me (laughs) .
- DSDavid Sacks
I would say it'd be like the late teens, the early 20s. Jason, you can correct me if I'm getting the dates wrong. But it's in that moment where, like, these Naval-isms and this sort of philosophy really started to... I think people had a tremendous respect for how you were thinking about things. I, I'm just curious-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
... like, what... Were you going through something in that moment or, like-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
... was that-
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, yeah. That's right.
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay.
- NRNaval Ravikant
No, no. Very insightful. Yeah. 20... And so I've, I've been on Twitter since 2007 'cause I was an early investor. But I never really tweeted, I didn't get featured, I had no audience. I was just doing the usual techy guy thing, talking to each other. And then I started AngelList in 2010. The original thing about matching investors to startups didn't scale. It was just an email list that exploded early on but then just didn't scale, so we didn't have a business. And I was trying to figure out the business and at the same time, I got a letter from the Securities and Exchange Commission saying, "Oh, you're acting as an unlicensed broker dealer." And I'm like, "What? I'm not making any money. I'm not... I'm just making intros. I'm not taking anything. It's just a public service." But even then, they were coming after me. So, I was in a... And I'd raised a bunch of money from investors, so I was in a very high stress period of my life. Now, looking back, it's almost comical that I was stressed over it. (laughs) But at the time, it all felt very real. The weight of everything was on my shoulders; expectations, people, money, regulators. And I eventually went to DC and got the law changed to legalize what we do, which ironically enabled a whole bunch of other things like ICOs and incubator days and so on, demo days. But in that process, I was in a very high stress period of my life and I just started tweeting whatever I was going through, whatever realizations that was happening. It's only in stress that you sort of are forced to grow, and so whatever internal growth I was going through I just started tweeting it, not thinking much of it. And it was a mix of... There are three things that I kind of always, kind of are, are running through. One is I love science. You know, I'm an amateur, love physics. Let's just leave it at that. I love reading a lot of philosophy and thinking deeply about it. And I like making money, right? (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- NRNaval Ravikant
Truth, love and money. That's my joke on my Twitter bio. Those are the three things that I keep coming back to. And so I just started tweeting about all of them, and I think before that, the expectation was that someone like me should just be talking about money, stay in your lane, and people have been playing it very safe. And so I think the combination, the three sort of caught people's attentions because every person thinks about everything. We don't just stay in our lane in real life. We're dealing with our relationships, we're dealing with our relationship with the universe, we're dealing with what we know to be true and, you know, with science and how we make decisions and how we figure things out, and we're also dealing with the practical everyday material things of how to deal with our spouses or girlfriends or wives or husbands and how to make money and how to deal with our children. So I'm just...... tweeting about everything. I just got interested in everything, I'm tweeting about it. And, and a lot of it, my best stuff was just notes to self. It's like, "Hey, don't forget this. Don't forget that."
- DSDavid Sacks
How To Get Rich, remember that one? How To Get Rich. That was-
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
That was like one of the first threads.
- DSDavid Sacks
That was a banger. That was a super banger, dad. Super banger.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
And that one went super viral. Yeah, that was a banger. Yeah, yeah.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, I think that is still the most viral thread ever on Twitter. I like timeless things. I, I like philosophy, I like things that, uh, still apply in the future. I like compound interest, if you will, in ideas. Obviously, recently, X has become so addictive that we're all checking it every day.
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- NRNaval Ravikant
And Elon's built the perfect for you, he's built TikTok for nerds and we're all on it. But normally, I try to ignore the news. Obviously, last year things got real and we all had to pay a lot of attention to the news. But I just like to tweet timeless things. I, I don't know, I mean, people pay attention, sometimes they'll like what I write, sometimes they, they go non-linear on me. But yeah, the How To Get Rich tweet storm was a big one.
- DSDavid Sacks
Is it problematic when people now meet you because the, the hype versus the reality, there's like, it's discordant now because people, if they absorb this content, they expect to see some-
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
Guru?
- DSDavid Sacks
... quasi-deity, yeah, floating in the, in the air.
- NRNaval Ravikant
(laughs) Yeah, yeah.
- DSDavid Sacks
You know what I mean?
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
Yes.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. Like many of you, I've stopped drinking but I used to like have the occasional glass of wine.
- DSDavid Sacks
Hmm.
- NRNaval Ravikant
And there was a moment there where I went and met with an information reporter back when I used to meet with reporters. And she said, "Where are we gonna meet?" So I said, "Oh, let's meet at the, The Wine Merchant and we'll grab a glass of wine." She's like, "What, you drink?" Like it was like a big deal.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
Oh, God.
- 14:17 – 23:20
Unique views on parenting
- DSDavid Sacks
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
You did a recently, a podcast with Tim Ferriss on parenting.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
This was out there. I love this.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
And I bought the book from this guy.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
Just give a, a brief overview of this philosophy of parenting.
- DSDavid Sacks
Oh, I didn't listen to this. I have to write this down.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
Oh, this is-
- DSDavid Sacks
Tell us, what is your-
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
You're gonna love this. I, this spoke to me-
- DSDavid Sacks
I'm just gonna write this down.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
... but it was a little crazy.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah. So I'm a big fan of David Deutsch. David Deutsch, I think, is basically the smartest living human. He's a scientist who-
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
He's very brutal.
- NRNaval Ravikant
... pioneered, uh, yeah, quantum computation. And he's written a couple of great books, but it's about the intersection of the greatest theories that we have today, the theories with the most reach. And those are epistemology, the theory of knowledge, evolution, quantum physics and computation. And-
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
This is The Beginning of Infinity guy. That's the book-
- NRNaval Ravikant
The Beginning of Infinity is his second book.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
... that you always reference, yeah.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Correct. Yes, The Fabric of Reality is the other book. I've spent a fair bit of time with him, done some podcasts with him. Hired and worked with people around him. And I'm just really impressed, 'cause it's like the, the framework that's made me smarter, I feel like. 'Cause we're all fighting aging, our brains are getting slower and we're always trying to have better ideas. So as you age, you should have wisdom, that's your substitute for the raw horsepower of intelligence going down. And so scientific wisdom I take from David. Not take, but, uh, you know, I learned from David. And one of the things that he pioneered is called Taking Children Seriously. And it's this idea that you should take your children seriously, like adults. You should always give them the same freedom that you would give an adult. If you wouldn't speak that way with your spouse, if you wouldn't force your spouse to do something, don't force a child to do something. And it's only through the latent threat of physical violence, "Hey, I can control you, I can make you go to your room. I can take your dinner away," or whatever, that you intimidate children. And it resonated with me because I grew up very, very free. My father wasn't around when I was young. My mother didn't have the bandwidth to watch us all the time. She had other things to do. And so I kind of was making my own decisions from an extremely young age. From the age of five, nobody was telling me what to do and from the age of nine, I was telling everybody what to do. So I'm used to that.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
(laughs)
- NRNaval Ravikant
And I'd been homeschooling my own kids, so the philosophy resonated. And I found this guy, Aaron Stupel, on Air Chat and he was an incredible expository of the philosophy. He lives his life with it 99% as extreme as one can go. So his kids can eat all the ice cream they want and all the Snickers bars they want. They can play on the iPad all they want. They don't have to go to school if they don't feel like it. They dress how they want. They don't have to do anything they don't want to do. Everything is a discussion, negotiation, explanation, just like you would with a roommate or an adult living in your house. And it's kind of insane and extreme. But I live my own, uh, home life in that arc, in that direction. And I'm a very free person. I don't have an office to go to. I try really not to maintain a calendar. If I can't remember it, I don't wanna do it. I don't send my kids to school. I really try not to coerce them. And so obviously, that's an extreme model but I would say that he's-
- DSDavid Sacks
Sorry, sorry, sorry. Hold on a second, so...
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah, yeah.
- GIGuest (unidentified, brief interjections)
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
Your kids, if they, if they were like, "I want Haagen-Dazs" and it's 9:00 PM, you're like, "Okay"?
- NRNaval Ravikant
Two nights ago I did this. I ordered the Haagen-Dazs. It wasn't Haagen-Dazs, it was a different brand but I ordered it.
- DSDavid Sacks
Okay.
- NRNaval Ravikant
Yeah.
- 23:20 – 1:11:06
Sacks joins to talk AI: JD Vance's speech in Paris, Techno-Optimists vs Doomers
- JCJason Calacanis
All right, let's keep moving through this docket. We have David Sacks with us here, so, uh, David, give us your philosophy of parenting. Okay, next item on the docket, let's go.
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
(laughs)
- JVJD Vance
Let's talk about some real issues.
- DSDavid Sacks
Sacks is like waiting-
- JVJD Vance
This, this, this show is not a-
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
... parenting show?
- JVJD Vance
... a parenting show or-
- DSDavid Sacks
Yeah. How to make cookies.
- JCJason Calacanis
I asked David, I go, "What's your parenting philosophy?" He said, "Oh, I set up their trust four years ago, so it's done, he's good."
- CPChamath Palihapitiya
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Trust is set up, everything's good. His parent philosophy, check.
- DSDavid Sacks
What's your parenting philosophy? G-R-A-T, check.
- JCJason Calacanis
Grat. (laughs)
- DSDavid Sacks
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
You're all set guys, let me know how it works out. All right, speaking of working out, we've got a Vice President who isn't cuckoo for Cocoa Puffs and who actually understands what AI is. J.D. Vance gave a great speech, I watched it myself, he talked about AI in Paris. This was on Tuesday at the AI Action Summit, whatever that is. And he gave a 15 minute banger of a speech, he talked about over-regulating AI and America's intention to dominate this and-We happen to have with us, Naval, the czar, the czar of AI. So, before I go into all the details about the speech, I don't want to steal your thunder, Sax, this- this, uh, speech had a lot of, uh, verbiage, uh, a lot of ideas that I've heard before that maybe we've all talked about. Maybe tell us a little bit about how this all came together, and how proud you are. I mean, gosh, having a vice president who understands AI is just... it's mind-blowing. He could speak on a topic that's topical credibly. This was an awesome moment for America, I think.
- JVJD Vance
What are you implying there, J-Cal?
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
I'm implying you might have workshopped it with him.
- JVJD Vance
No.
- NANarrator
(laughs)
- JCJason Calacanis
Or that he's smart. Both of those things.
- JVJD Vance
The vice president wrote the speech, or at least directed all of it.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay.
- JVJD Vance
So, the ideas came from him. I'm not gonna take any credit whatsoever for this.
- JCJason Calacanis
Okay. Well, it was on point. Maybe you could talk about-
- JVJD Vance
Yes, I agree it was on point. I think it was a very well-crafted and well-delivered speech.
- JCJason Calacanis
He made four main points about the Trump administration's approach to AI. He's going to ensure, this is point one, that American AI continues to be the gold standard. Fantastic check. Two, he says that the administration understands that excessive regulation could kill AI just as it's taking off, and he did this in front of all the EU elites who love regulation, did it on their home court. And then he said, number three, AI must remain free from ideological bias, as we've talked about here on this program. And then number four, the White House, he said, will, quote, "Maintain a pro-worker growth path for AI so that it can be a potent tool for job creation in the US." So, what are your thoughts on the four major bullet points in h- in his, uh, speech here in, uh, Paris?
- JVJD Vance
Well, I think that the vice president, you knew he was going to deliver an important speech as soon as he got up there and said that "I'm here to talk about not AI safety, but AI opportunity." And to understand what a bracing statement that was, and really almost like a shot across the bow, you have to understand the history and context of these events. For the last couple of years, the last couple of these events have been exclusively focused on AI safety. The last in-person event was in the UK at Bletchley Park, and the whole conference was devoted to AI safety. Similarly, the European AI regulation obviously is completely preoccupied with safety and trying to regulate away safety risks before they happen. Similarly, you had the Biden EO, which was based around safety. And then you have just the whole media coverage around AI, which is preoccupied with all the risks from AI. So, to have the vice president get up there and say right off the bat that there are other things to talk about in respect to AI, besides safety risks, that actually there are huge opportunities there, was a breath of fresh air, and like I said, kind of a shot across the bow. And yeah, you could s- almost see some of the Eurocrats, they needed their fainting couches after that.
Episode duration: 1:50:18
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