Archival Footage: JD Vance live at RemedyFest by Y Combinator and Bloomberg Beta

Plus audio transcript of the talk and Q&A

“There is this weird idea that something can't be tyrannical if it comes through the operation of a free market. My response to that would be, number one, the free market is not nearly as free as people suppose that it is.”

“If the new mode of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it's a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that's called a threat to democracy in 2024.”

When something big happens, I like to go straight to the source material whenever possible.

When JD Vance became Trump’s VP pick, I wanted to understand his views on technology and startups.

Trump/Vance are likely the next President/VP so it’s important to understand their perspective on our industry. The best way to learn about Vance is to hear him long-form.

Here is JD Vance at RemedyFest, a conference organized by YC and Bloomberg Beta earlier this year in Washington D.C. Aside from Vance, they had interesting speakers like Elizabeth Warren and the FTC chair Alina Khan. You can watch the entire almost 7-hour session on YouTube.

I’ve trimmed the JD Vance portion below. I also had AI transcribe the talk and Q&A.

Also, make sure to follow Roy Bahat and Bloomberg Beta on X — they are an excellent fund.

Transcript of JD Vance at RemedyFest

Note: Any errors in transcription can be attributed to our future AI overlords who are in their infant years—but growing up quickly. :)

Good to see everybody. This is assumed relatively informal. If there's time, I'm happy to take a few questions. But one of the things that sort of very much influences the way that I think about antitrust issues and I think about competition questions is my own time in the Valley. And I think that when I met Roy [Bahat of Bloomberg Beta], I was at a growth capital firm called Mithril Capital, a firm co-founded by Peter Thiel and Ajay Royan, and I think is still sort of doing pretty well and investing in a number of very good companies. Sorry, this coffee's quite hot. Grab the top of it.

But what I remember is that sort of this was 2015. So this is before my book came out. This was certainly before I had any sort of public notoriety, infamy or fame, depending on your perspective. And we were looking at all these companies that sort of came in that had kind of rapid growth from, say, a $3 million run rate to a $60 million run rate. And all of them were sort of fundamentally uninvestable. And they were all in this space that was sort of back then called ad tech. So this is almost 10 years ago. I don't know what you guys call these companies today. But what was quite striking about it is that almost any other sector, if we were looking at a company that went from a $3 million run rate to a $60 million run rate, we would say, oh, these are like really interesting businesses. And yet with these businesses, it was sort of universally acknowledged that these were dead companies. Most of them would sort of reach a kind of rapid descent. They wouldn't do especially well from there. If they were wildly successful, maybe they would go on and get acquired by Facebook or Google for $200 million. And like the idea in 2015 in the valley of a company with a $60 million revenue number getting acquired for $200 million, right, it's like what's wrong with this business?

And something I didn't realize at the time, but I think now is very clearly wrong, is that the thing that was wrong with their business wasn't their business. It's that they existed in a fundamentally noncompetitive market. There was no way that these companies would be able to acquire significant market share from where they were because the market was already dominated by such powerful incumbents. And that's sort of what I didn't fully realize at the time. I wasn't thinking about this in the context of competition policy, but it sort of highlighted something that's very important, which is if you can't build a business because the incumbents that exist are so powerful, you can't scale a business beyond, call it a $60 million run rate, you're going to harm innovation in a particular sector.

And I think there are a lot of ways, I mean I'm personally not sure whether I think advertising technology is a good thing in any context. As the father of a six, two, and four year olds, I think it's a little weird the effect that these devices and the advertisements that are pushed to children. I'm sure all of us have had the experience, right, of talking with your wife, like “what should we have for dinner tonight?” And you get it on your phone, you have a push notification for Grubhub delivery, it's like oh this is kind of weird, what the hell is going on here, right? But set aside your sort of moral judgment on advertising technologies exist in 2024, like we want innovation and we want competition and I think that it's impossible to have one without the other. That sort of influences my views on these policy issues.

You know, there are all these sort of articles like the strange bedfellows or the strange alliance between Elizabeth Warren and J.D. Vance and I think this issue is actually sort of where it fundamentally comes out of. A lot of my Republican colleagues look at Lena Kahn, who I think you either have heard from or will hear from at some point today, and they say well Lena Kahn is sort of engaged in some sort of fundamentally evil thing. And I guess I look at Lena Kahn as one of the few people in the Biden administration that I actually think is doing a pretty good job and that sort of sets me apart from most of my Republican colleagues.

But the fundamental question to me is how do we build a competitive marketplace that is pro-innovation, pro-competition, that allows consumers to have the right choices and isn't just so obsessed on pricing power within the market that it sort of ignores all the other things that really matter. Another just personal anecdote here, something that sort of persuaded me that economics just misses something very fundamental, is if you sort of look at the various consumer price index deflators and the way that we sort of measure quality in different products, one of the products on which economists seem to have universal agreement that they're a lot better at a much lower price is refrigerators. And I believe that, I sort of assumed that if I went into Best Buy or you know wherever Target and bought a refrigerator that it would sort of be better than what existed 30 or 40 years ago.

Then I bought an old house, okay, it was actually a house built in 1858 and we had a 40 year old refrigerator and my takeaway from this home purchase is that economics is fake. Because the refrigerator that we had, I'm not kidding, like you would put lettuce in the icebox of this refrigerator and it would be good a month later. I've never seen anything like it. To this day, I think this single old refrigerator that we had was a technological marvel. You cannot, and trust me I've tried, you cannot at any price point buy a refrigerator today that can do that thing, right? Well, you know, there are a lot of reasons why this has happened. I think one of the reasons is that we became less good at manufacturing in this country. We became too focused on low cost and not enough on durability. And I think some of those same issues are present in the way that we think about markets and the way that we think about antitrust policy today.

So sort of the fundamental question, as many of you may appreciate, is that we would ask a sort of forward looking economic question in antitrust, does this reduce prices? Does this increase prices? And if it doesn't increase prices, then we would sort of let any particular merger, any particular acquisition, any particular market activity go forward so long as it didn't increase prices on consumers. I think that we all should sort of know intuitively, at least I know now with the refrigerator example, that that just doesn't make a ton of sense. There's sort of something fundamentally missing from that analysis. There are questions of consumer choice, there are questions of consumer quality. And I think the one thing I appreciate about Alina Khan's approach is that she recognized there has to be sort of a broader understanding of how we think about competition in the marketplace.

Now where I think that this could go off the rails, this sort of bipartisan consensus that's emerging between people like Josh Hawley and me on the right and people like Alina Khan and Elizabeth Warren on the left, where this could go off the rails, I think is this fundamental question of information technology and how people absorb and acquire information in the 21st century economy. I get in some trouble because I actually do my own tweets. My staff doesn't have my Twitter account information, maybe they should, but I just sort of say whatever's on my mind. I saw Google's story a couple days ago and I said, "We should just break up Google. It's far past time." I actually got a pushback from a friend of mine, Michael Lind, a very smart guy who I think agrees with a lot of my basic political priors. But his argument is that if you break up Google, the fundamental argument is why is Google so big? It's not from any sort of government-granted monopoly and it's not from any sort of unfair trade practice. Those came later. The reason Google is so big is because there are network effects built into the business. There is an element of truth to that. Why is Facebook such a powerful company, meta I guess now? It's not because the Facebook technology is like oodles better than what came before it. It's because the network effect of Facebook is so powerful. It's really hard to disrupt Facebook when there are 100 million people on Facebook, a little bit easier when there are 10 million, really, really hard when there are a billion. That's sort of the fundamental power of the network effect. Of course, in the era of artificial intelligence, the algorithms are all pretty much the same. I just know that Google and OpenAI have made some innovations there, but the real advantage here is the massive input of data that they get. That again is another sort of network effect based advantage.

There is an argument here that antitrust is not the best solution to the Google problem, but I think my argument is actually even if you believe that there are network effects that make Google more powerful or make Gemini a more powerful tool within Google, there are actually some real, real issues here with one, just the integration. Does Google need to have YouTube? Does Google need to have all of these other platforms that are built underneath the Google umbrella? You can sort of make the same argument with Instagram, Facebook, and other services at Meta. I think there's a really good argument that if we want to be pro-innovation, we want to ensure that new entrants can change these things up, that you want to promote as much competition as possible and you actually want to separate all of these market verticals as much as possible. That's where I think antitrust is probably the most useful way to think about a solution to what we face.

To go back to the substantive disagreement or I think the potential for a substantive disagreement, why do I care so much about this stuff? In part, it's because I care about consumer quality. In part, it's because I care about worker wages. It's really hard for a worker to bargain against any company, but certainly a monopolist in a particular space. I really care about that. But I also care about it because I think that Google and Facebook have really distorted our political process. I think that a lot of my friends on the left would agree with me, but they might disagree with me directionally about how to fix that problem.

Because I work in politics now, I know voters pretty well. One of the things you realize very quickly about voters is that there are very, very different demographies even within a given sort of voting block. If you take the people who might be willing to vote for J.D. Vance for Senator, the next time that I run, I guess it's 2028, if you sort of segment them, look, there are people who are going to vote for me almost no matter what I do because I'm a Republican. In the same way, there are people who are going to vote against me no matter what I do because I'm a Republican. There are a lot of people who are probably going to vote for me so long as we can get them to the polls. There's a sort of a voter engagement question there.

But there are a large number of voters. In any given election, it's maybe 3% of the population. It might be 15% of the population that are open to voting for either candidate and will make the decision about who they vote for in the week before they vote. Those people, we're asking ourselves, “How do those people access information?” One of the main ways they will access information is Google.

Let's just take the 2024 election. I imagine that I'm in the minority and my preference is in the 2024 election. Let's say you go into Google and you type, "Is Joe Biden too old to be president?" or "Is Joe Biden not competent enough to be president?" There are a million different answers you could get to that question. Whether Google provides a fundamentally unbiased search result is at the heart of American democracy because Google can answer that question in a way that makes the average voter who will make their decision in the weeks leading up to an election can answer that question in a way that takes what I believe is a very live political issue and completely hides it from them. Whatever your views are on that question, the American people, I think, should have the right to decide. If the new mode of acquiring information is fundamentally biased, I think it's a far bigger threat to democracy than almost anything that's called a threat to democracy in 2024. I really, really worry about that dynamic. You can make the same argument on any search related to Donald Trump. Again, you may have different substantive views from me about what the right answer is, but I want the American people to be able to decide this stuff. My bias on these questions is fundamentally in the direction of openness, of providing more information, not providing less information. The one worry that I have on this question about tech monopolists and how they influence the public conversation is that sometimes I worry that some of the people across the spectrum who I tend to agree with on competition policy, that maybe their instinct is to be a little bit too pro-censorship. I think that's the wrong direction to go in.

One final observation I'll make just about this sort of intersection between competition and innovation, something I care a lot about. If there's a person within the Biden administration, obviously the FTC is an independent agency, but Lina Kahn is the person that I would point to as the best person, in my view, within the Biden administration. If there's a candidate for worst person, in my view, at least in terms of my substantive disagreements, I'm sure he's like a nice guy, is Gary Gensler. Gary Gensler is sort of the complete opposite of my view. There are two problems that I have with Gary, one of which is that I think he wants to inject politics way too much into the actual business of securities in the United States of America. But in some ways the more fundamental issue, or at least the most relevant issue for this particular conference is the approach that Gary has taken to regulating blockchain and crypto seems to be almost the exact opposite of what it should be. I'm oversimplifying a little bit, but the question the SEC seems to ask in regulating crypto is, “is this a token with utility?” And if it's a question, if it's a token with utility, then they seem to want to ban it. And if it's token without utility, they don't seem to care. I almost think we should be the opposite here, right? I worry about financialization. I worry about, frankly, whether a lot of the crypto stuff is fundamentally fake. But if a token actually has utility, that's the sort of thing that, by all means, regulate it. By all means, be careful about how consumers interact with it. But you don't want to just get rid of this stuff.

And here's where I really, really worry about this is a lot of the newest challengers to social media, the social media incumbents of 2024 are going to require some blockchain technology to make their business work. Maybe they'll require a token that supports verification. There are all of these ways in which the companies, when I talk to sort of friends who are still in the VC industry, the companies that are most exciting to them, they're doing actual things in communications in the 21st century, in 2024, I should say, those companies very often rely on high utility tokens to do things like verification. Well, if we're not making it possible to do verification, then we're going to make it really hard to challenge the existing incumbents in the space. And I think that would be a huge, huge mistake. We have to be honest with ourselves about how much we can do through regulation and how much we can do through antitrust.

I mean, look, if we're being honest with ourselves, as much as I think that we should be more assertive in breaking up some existing technology incumbents, that isn't going to happen, whoever is president, because there are a lot of barriers to that, right? Litigation is expensive. So we need to make that easier. We also need to recognize that one of the best ways, I think, to disrupt the existing digital ecosystem is to promote new entrants and not to have an SEC. I think that is very, very harmful towards that effort, because I think the current SEC is.

The final point that I'll make is that if you go back to sort of the fundamental arguments that were made in kind of the Sherman and Clayton era of antitrust, Sherman, by the way, was a senator from the state of Ohio. Teddy Roosevelt, arguably the most famous Republican of the 21st century or the 20th century, the famous trust busters, a lot of the arguments that they made back then, I think, really apply today.

The concern wasn't purely focused on consumers or workers, even mainly focused on consumers or workers. It was focused on the way these companies were threatening to the kind of the Democratic impulse within the United States of America.

You heard a lot of people compare, you know, they say, you know, we threw off the chains of monarchy in the early republic and we didn't mean to replace them with the chains of private monopoly. There was a recognition that concentrated private power could be just as dangerous as concentrated public power.

That insight is so important to recover on the right. And if I can beat up on my fellow Republicans a little bit, there is often this idea that something is not tyrannical so long as a private entity does it. There's kind of this famous meme of of sort of two guys. They're on their knees. And, you know, one guy has a gun pointed to his head and the other guy looks at him and says, you know, aren't you glad this was done through the free market? And the person holding the gun is Google. There is this weird idea that something can't be tyrannical if it comes through the operation of a free market. And my response to that would be, number one, the free market is not nearly as free as people suppose that it is. It's all influenced by various regulations. It's all influenced by, you know, sort of privileges that were granted, liability protections that were granted. These things matter. And they frankly make the market a lot less free than people assume that it was. And even if it was a perfectly free market, I want people to live good lives in our country.

I want people we have sort of differences of view about how to maybe get there. But I want workers to have a good wage if they do an honest day's work. I want you to participate in American democracy, to participate in the public debate. All of these things really matter. And I don't really care if the entity that is most threatening to that vision is a private entity or a public entity. We have to be worried about it in either case.

When I made my observation that we should maybe break up Google, one of the responses that I get, I'm sure I got a million times, but Elon's algo pushed this particular response into my notification for whatever reasons. And it was, you know, you have to be careful about this because I'm sure that when the left gets control, it's like, okay, well currently the left kind of controls our entire government, right? They own the presidency and one half the chambers of the legislature. The argument is once the left gets this control, they're going to use it against conservative companies. And I just think that's like a fundamentally deranged way to think about public policy. Because if the left gets control of the government, they might do the thing that they're currently doing or they might do the thing that these companies are already doing. I'm worried about what's happening right now and what's happening right now I think is a threat to American democracy. We have got to stop the craziness. And I think one way to do it is to stop the way that these companies control the flow of information in our country.

So with that, I'll shut up. If you guys have any questions, happy to take them, but appreciate you all for having me.

Q&A

Q: So thanks for your remarks. How do you think that Trump thinks about antitrust or Republicans if there's a new administration, how they would pick up these cases or not? What's the general view of the next administration, assuming it's Republican and Sahib?

A: So it's a good question. It's always hard to speak for Donald Trump, especially on a topic where I've actually never spoken to him about it. So I won't pretend that what I'm doing is anything other than a guess. So with that massive caveat, I think that if you look at what Trump has said and if you look at some of the steps that Trump has taken, he clearly does not buy into the old orthodoxy that we can't do anything about these companies because that would be a violation of some ephemeral free market principle. But I also think that, as you know, personnel is policy. And a lot of what will determine Trump administration antitrust policy is who ultimately takes the reins and the senior roles in the Trump administration because they're going to be the ones who are executing on this stuff.

So when I think about this, I think Trump's instincts on this stuff are quite good. And I think he fundamentally just rejects some of the old orthodox. He doesn't give a crap about it. He just doesn't care about it. And that's a very good thing. I also think Trump personally is appreciative of the way in which Facebook, Meta, Google and so forth have been very bad for his own political project. So there is a recognition there of a problem. And when I think about how to solve, how to put those instincts into policy, a lot of it's going to be getting the right people in some of these roles and making sure we don't, you know, sort of get rid of some of the good people from the previous administration who are doing the right thing. So I think that's the question. How do we get personnel right so that we can get policy right in the next Trump administration?

Q: Hey, Senator, Brennan Bortlon, tech policy reporter with Politico. You had some kind words for Lina Khan's leadership at the FTC. You also aligned yourself with Senator Hawley on a lot of these antitrust issues. There's currently kind of a standoff in the Senate over a couple of FTC nominees, Republican backed, actually backed by McConnell. I'm curious if you could give us an update on where that stands to the extent that you're following that and kind of like talk a little bit about, you know, your your view of that standoff, whether you'd like to see those nominees advance or whether you align yourself with Senator Hawley on that issue.

A: Yeah. So to be fair, I have not followed this as closely. My own sense of where those nominations were is that they were advancing a pace. But like so many other things in Washington, something else got held up and they kind of got held up as an ancillary side to it. I suspect that both of them will be confirmed. I suspect neither will be especially controversial. But my sense has not been that their holdup has been about them as individuals. It's been they've they've gotten attached to some leverage item and some negotiation between McConnell and Schumer and Senate leadership.

Q: And you're generally not concerned with the existing direction of the FTC already. I mean, at least on these antitrust issues, you made that clear.

A: Yeah. Look, I like a lot of the things that Lena Con is doing. I think that we really have to be careful that we don't take the insight. Google is bad for American democracy and then try to censor more. I think that's the fundamental question. But I don't see any reason to think that's sort of the direction chair Con is going. And I because of that, I'm sort of pretty happy about where things stand with the FTC.

Q: Then I'm sorry. My name's Tim Wu. I was the speaker before you I was in the White House until recently. So that gives you a little context. My comment is that first, I encourage you to give a little shout out to Jonathan Cantor as well runs the DOJ Antitrust Division, who is he's leading this who tried to break up Google. So it's a little I just want to give him a little shout out. But also I was wondering if you think it's a problem. When I was in the White House, we made a lot of efforts to try to pass tech related antitrust legislation and all of it was a zero. And I'm not going to point any fingers today, although maybe others will. Do you regard it as a problem that, you know, Congress, both parties, just can't seem to want to do anything to sort of refresh, maybe strengthen the antitrust laws in some ways?

A: Well, yes, I certainly think of it as a problem. And you know, you have to ask yourself sort of why is this happening. And that's that's always the question I ask. And I think there are a couple of things going on. So first of all, you do have this sort of existing orthodoxy that exists within the Republican Party. It's very hard to go against that orthodoxy. But look, these things take time. They don't happen overnight. But the openness towards the Republican Party in January of 2025 to some of the legislation that you were probably working on substantially different than it was 10 years ago. And again, has it happened overnight? No. But I think we're moving in the right direction? Yes. On the Democratic side, I think that it's I mean, look, it's actually a somewhat similar is a somewhat similar thing going on where, you know, maybe they're sort of Clinton style, new Democrats. Maybe they've imbibed the kind of some some of the neoliberalism of the previous generation. Maybe it's frankly, they've gotten close to these people through campaign donor events and so forth. But but it's not like the Republicans are bad and the Democrats are good on this. There are a lot of Democrats who are really, really bad on this stuff. And it's really hard to get anything moving. I just think it's going to take time. And I think that, you know, some some of the things that will happen that will that will push us in the right direction is the more it becomes obvious that a lot of these technologies are harming kids, the more it will be easier to build a consensus. But I think then then the question is a consensus towards what. And that's what I want to make sure doesn't get broken.

Q: Speaking about congressional and transit, we were a few days away from the government shutting down. I know that that's a very much live issue and that Senate Republicans have urged House Republicans to remove a lot of their policy writers so that we can move this process forward. Some of these policy writers include blocking the USDA from executing rules on the Packers and Stockyards Act, preventing the U.S. Department of Justice and a trust division from beginning full funding and the FTC from executing their non-competes rule, which has obvious harms in the American public and getting full funding under one of the main bills that Congress passed last year as part of the tech package, the merger filing fees reform bill. I was wondering what your position is on those and how you see this process moving forward.

A: Yes. So have I looked at all the policy writers that are on the House proposal? No, I haven't. So the minibus hasn't even actually come out yet, as I understand it. It'll probably come out hopefully this morning. They'll probably vote on it. So it's always tough to comment on this stuff until you actually read it. My strong suspicion is that I will agree with some of the policy writers and I'll disagree with others. And especially on the antitrust stuff, that's probably where I'll disagree most stridently with some of my Republican colleagues in the House. So my strong suspicion here is the way that this shakes out is that the Senate is voting on some sort of partial minibus this Friday and then there's some sort of CR or further minibus a week from now. And that's ultimately what happens. The fundamental issue here, and I think why this budget process is really, really broken, and this is not at all the purview of this particular conference or the focus, but it is extremely hard for Republicans to support government funding given what's going on at the southern border. There's just fundamental loggerheads where our voters are telling us and our principles, I think, dictate that we want the Biden administration to do something more meaningful at the border. There have been some talks about Biden doing something using executive orders and so forth. So maybe that will happen. But the only real leverage we have is this government funding negotiation. After we do a CR or an omnibus or whatever ends up happening here, it is going to eliminate all of our leverage to make good policy as we see it for the next year. I think that's really where the meat of this debate is. I don't think the policy riders the House sends over are going to meaningfully affect this one way or the other. I think the more relevant thing is, can you get enough Republicans to accept that the Biden administration has done something meaningful on the border? I think if there's a government shutdown, that's what it will be over and it'll probably happen on the House side, not the Senate side.

All right. With that, thank you all for having me. Good to see everybody. Thank you.