414 - Sen. JD Vance

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Investing involves risk offers subject to terms and conditions. Senator, thank you so much for coming on.
I appreciate it. We're similar age.
We have similar accomplishments. And that's like the same people.
Yeah. No, it's good to have you here.
You wrote a book. I pretended to you're running for vice president.
I have a podcast. So but no, thank you so much.
I appreciate it. How has it been

running at the pace

you're running

introducing yourself to the public?

How has that felt with a family

and a life? Sure, sure. Well, yeah.

Thank you for doing this, first of all.

It was tough to rearrange your schedule and I appreciate it.

It wasn't that tough.

It's honestly just the craziest experience of my life, right? Because, you know, I ran for Senate once before in my life a couple years ago. We won, obviously, or I wouldn't be here.
You know, you drive around the state of Ohio and like the back of a used Subaru because that's what your staff is driving. And you just, you know, it's like really cool because you see the whole state.
This thing, you see the whole country. Right.
Right. And like we had some of my closest buddies from high school join us on the campaign trail a couple of days ago.
And it's, we go to Dallas, we go to Arizona, we go to Nevada, we go back to Washington, we go back to Ohio, like in two and a half days or all these places. So it's just really cool to see the country.
I mean, obviously like in some ways it ways, it's exhausting. But in other ways, it's like the most energizing thing that you're doing.
Because I'm one of these people, I like feed off the crowd, and I feed off the people that I meet. And so, you know, the energy level is off the charts right now, which is one of the reasons why I think that we're going to win.
And so like, yeah, you don't sleep as much maybe as I'd like to. But then on the other hand, you're just like so high on adrenaline that I feel like I could do this for a lot longer.
The good thing, I mean, so we have three little kids, right? We have a seven-year-old, a four-year-old and a two-year-old. And we've been able with a lot of family help to just make this kind of a family affair.
So for Trump's big rally in Madison Square Garden in a couple of days, my cousin is going to fly up with our kids and then me and my wife are going to go up. And so we'll like hang out in New York together, but then also do this rally at Madison Square Garden in a couple days, my cousin is going to fly up with our kids, and then me and my wife are going to go up.
And so we'll hang out in New York together. It's amazing.
But then also do this rally at Madison Square Garden. My son, he's seven.
He's the oldest. And it's very funny because he's really into Trump, even though he's never met him.
And so he's like, when am I going to meet President Trump? And the answer is at this rally at Madison Square Garden. But do you know Don Jr.
at all? Yeah, we chat on okay don's a really good dude he's one of my closest friends in politics well he he met my son at a at an event in charlotte a couple weeks ago and don was like you know hey who do you think's better looking me or my dad and my my son just like dead pants definitely the real donald trump So I call President Trump and I tell him that, and he's like,

that's good to hear yeah your son's now in the cabinet yeah yeah he's being vetted for the secretary that's exactly right um wait so you're traveling around the country and I'm sure you're meeting a lot of people yeah what about it has anything any perception that you had changed when you were out there because as a comedian yeah i've gone around the country not as much but a good amount and you see things and you do have a little paradigm shift and you go 20 or 30 minutes out of any major city you do see more poverty than you would think. You do see areas that have been kind of abandoned or forgotten.
In many of our cities, you see drug addiction, a lot of homelessness, a lot of kind of vacant spaces in the downtown area. You don't feel great about it.
And then there are areas that are beautiful, and there are areas where you can see people are trying to hold on and conserve the community that they have. But there's a lot of areas that you see that are struggling.
Of course. Is that more evident when you're traveling around? I think it is because you talk to people a lot more.
I mean, one of the paradigm shifts that I've had is, you know, four months ago, I'd been a senator for two years. I was, like, very frustrated with the policies of Kamala Harris and of Joe Biden, right? I'm sort of pissed off about that.
Well, the thing that I think that sometimes leads into is you kind of get this tunnel vision about like policy and not about the people who are actually affected by it. And it also I think honestly being out there has made me more fundamentally optimistic about our country.
Right. Because you're right.
There is a lot of poverty and there's a lot of problems in our cities. And I'll talk about that in a second.
But like you also you know, I met this woman really affected me about a month or so ago. And usually what we'll do is we'll do these rallies, but then we'll like, you know, do photos with volunteers and just people who are helping out the campaign in some form or another before we do these rallies.
And this woman comes up to me and she's like, I can't afford groceries. You know, I've been like working my whole life.
Things are really tough. She tells me that for like 20, 30 seconds.
And then she spends three minutes talking about how she says a prayer every single night for me, my wife, and our three kids by name. She's memorized the names of my children, a guy she's never met, so that she can pray for their safety.
And you're like, okay, there's a generosity of spirit out there that, yeah, we can be pissed off about the policies of Kamala Harris, and we should be, frankly, because she's a disaster. But we can also be, I think, more hopeful about the country.
And that's like a paradigm shift that I've had. And the second thing that I realized is, you talk about cities, right? So obviously, you're usually flying into a city, even if you're not- Has that woman who can't afford the groceries seen any of the dancing at the rallies? Because to be- No, no, to be honest, it is not nothing, the dancing that's going going on there is a lot of good dancing and if she were to perhaps see that she could stop kind of being ungrateful and kind of yeah you know i i don't think this we heard about tim walsh's time in china that's interesting that he's in china that's good i think i don't i don't know that i don't know the kamala harris dancing at the rallies it makes this woman feel better about not being able to afford groceries, right? Dude, there is just the thing that's different about the Trump rallies versus the Kamala Harris rallies is the fake joy of the Kamala Harris rallies versus like we're actually having fun.
I mean, people say like the media says all these Trump rallies are so dark. And then you watch a Trump rally for 90 minutes, and 30 minutes of it, this is the way in which running for vice president is kind of like being a stand-up comedian.
30 minutes is just being funny as hell because he has a great sense of humor. And you realize people actually are having a good time.
Yeah, they're pissed off about the policies of Kamala Harris, but they're actually really having fun. And we're having fun out there.
When I watch her rallies, I'm a terrible actor. And I was just in one of the worst films ever made, Joker 2.
Well, that's a commonality you have with Kamala Harris. Yes.
Well, you see the people at her rallies, and they'll be kind of happy. And then the face drops.
They go back to this immediately. And you go, oh, yeah, something feels off.
Something's not authentic about it yeah you know uh that's definitely true i've tried to like put my finger on what it is about kamala harris's like the very fraudulent laugh yeah that i find so off-putting yeah and it's it's it's like the laugh of somebody who just made you really uncomfortable yeah but then tries to over correct but say oh i'm just gonna laugh at it yes and then that's somehow gonna make you make it better that i just like you know stepped on your foot or like ran into your car yes right that that's like the laugh of the common hair or bankrupted the country yeah or bankrupted the country yeah all shapes and sizes are problems but it's like the border and flood it yeah it well it, like, you know, I think I've caused one car accident in my life. I was, like, 16.
Yeah. And, you know, it was late.
It was dark. You know, it was really, like, it had been raining.
Sure. And so I, like, it was like a fender bender.
Yeah. You know, ran into this elderly couple probably going five miles per hour.
Right. And then I get out of the car, and I'm, like, ha, ha, ha.
You know, like, oh yeah that's the kamala harris laugh come on to me yeah it's the laugh of somebody who just ran into your car and is trying to make it okay it's also when a when a reporter asks her a question it's a substitute teacher um giving you homework and the class is going you don't want this oh no why are you doing We don't want you to do it. That's exactly right.
Play the video. Let's not do it.
That's right. Let's just watch where the red fern grows rather than read the book.
We didn't hear from Kamala for four years. She was not a vocal vice president.
That's right. You know, we barely heard from Biden.
We didn't really hear from Kamala. Biden had a very tough debate performance.

He was replaced in a way that's, I mean, I liken it to somebody knocked on his door.

A threat to democracy, maybe, just to throw a turn around.

2 a.m., they knock on his door, and he has a sleeping cap on, and he opens it with a candle.

And it's Pelosi and Obama, I think.

This is what I imagine happens.

And he opens it up, and then they go, you're out. And she'll invoke the 25th, and then Kamala's right behind him laughing.
Like the Joker, and now she's the nominee. Yeah, that's basically how I imagine it, too.
It's, man, and I honestly think Biden is pissed off about it. He seems angry.
There are all of these weird little ways where he helps us. He wears a Trump hat at the firefighter event.
He does this thing where, you know, a couple weeks ago, she was starting one of her big rallies, and he decides to have a press conference 30 seconds into it. Right? So they're all watching Joe Biden and not Kamala Harris.
Or he'll say something nice here and there about Donald Trump. It would not shock me if Joe Biden votes for Donald Trump.
I like that he's kind of, he's ornery. I do too.
And he's showing his teeth a little bit. And he's having fun.
Because he's not running anymore. And he's an older guy.
But he's having fun. He's putting on the Trump hat.
he's getting in little fights with people at the rallies yeah that's right well you know president trump said at the al smith dinner yeah he was like you know when i was running against this this guy i really hated him now i kind of like him no and i feel like that about about biden because yeah the policies have been disastrous but he in he has these flashes of honesty right about kamala harris and man the the okay you talked about we gotta go back to something you talked about kamala harris as like getting an assignment from the media from school yeah there are all kinds of weird high school vibes running through the kamala harris campaign right so the biggest one is did you see this rally that she did with liz cheney a couple of days ago right uh no but i love dick cheney the whole cheney family and to me when i think about democracy i personally think about dick cheney he's a figure from my childhood that i love and respect some of the greatest years of my life iraq abu grabe dick cheney shout out to dick cheney no i mean and liz if you yeah if you really care about human rights and democracy dick cheney nobody better guy definitely guy so so they do this event with liz yeah i i thought maybe you were saying that because you didn't want to get you know have a drone land on your house but you know all shapes and sizes okay so they're doing this event and kamala harris like gives the affect of a vice president who's just called like the troublesome kid into her office right it's like you know, you know, you shouldn't be laughing at Donald Trump. You shouldn't think that he's funny.
And man, the joy is gone when you have somebody wagging their finger at the American people, telling them not to laugh when somebody makes a joke. Like, what the hell are you talking about? Their whole campaign, man, their whole campaign has become so dull and so boring.
But I think it's because

of what you said, they're not having fun anymore. Right.
But it's a lot of people are warning that this will be the final election and there will be no more democracy. If you and Trump are elected, there'll be no more democracy.
It'll be the final election. And these are like, these are good people.
This is Goldman Sachs. This is the Cheney family.
This is, you know, a lot of defense contractors.

The people with the best interests of the American people at heart. Absolutely.
The people who really keep the American social fabric going. How do you respond to that when you have a multi-ethnic family and they go, you and Donald Trump are racist and hate different kinds of people because you've criticized having an open border yeah I mean I can't help but roll my eyes at it at this point and there was probably a time honestly six seven years ago where I really cared you know when my book came out I really cared what the media said about me yeah I just don't care anymore because they're so obviously full of shit right like actually if you look I mean even just you talk to like working and middle-class latino voters right they hate the open border even more right than like my family from rural ohio and kentucky because they don't like having their wages undercut that you know when the cartels are doing business in their communities it's the latinos that are actually the most pissed off about it so i just kind of roll my eyes at it right, you know, you have to have a certain sense of humor about American politics.
And it's easy to do when you're running against Kamala Harris, and you're, you know, you're running with Donald Trump. Yeah, because as much as he obviously, I mean, look, I think they've done more to him than any presidential candidate in my lifetime.
He still actually has an amazing sense of humor about the whole thing.

And oftentimes, like, you know, I call him obviously like every day at this point, talking about the campaign, but he always ends up cracking a joke. And I think it's in part because he knows like, that's what's good for me in that moment is we got to laugh about some of this stuff or we're going to go crazy.
Yeah, there is now we're in October, we've got two weeks left. So now every single day there's some article coming out in a publication that Donald Trump said something Hitlerian or about Hitler or about like.
So it does seem to me that the hysteria is at a fever pitch. It really is.
What do you think about John Kelly, who did come out and say Trump is a fascist and this is fascism and all of that? Well, first of all, the amount of stock the media puts in a disgruntled ex-employee. I mean, John Kelly was fired, right? And look, he served his country, but he was fired, and he's pissed off about Trump over that.
And if you talk to the people who were in the room when Trump allegedly said these things that he said, even like Mike Pence's former chief of staff are saying it's totally made up, it's a total lie. But here's the really interesting thing, right? Three, four years ago, the media were all calling John Kelly an evil racist for helping to promote Donald Trump's border policies.
And now it shows how thin this is, right? Yeah. Like Dick Cheney, who I legitimately think is the single worst vice president easily of my lifetime.
Right. Right.
But effective. But, well, effective at like destroying the country.
Well, that's what I meant. And maybe that's why he's endorsing Kamala Harris.
It's like, finally, somebody's come along who's been even worse than I have is Kamala Harris. But the fact that the media now pretends that he's like some hero of human rights, the guy was a disaster.
I mean, we invaded Iraq. We invaded the 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan.
All of these Americans who lost their lives, who lost their limbs, that was because of very stupid leadership. And now we're going to forget about it because the media hates Donald Trump.
It's the most insane thing I've seen in politics. Okay, threat to democracy.
I figured out what a threat to democracy is, is when the American people vote for somebody the media doesn't like. Right.
And that's not, like, definitionally, that's not a threat to democracy. That's a fulfillment of democracy that even though the media lies hysterically about Trump, the American people still want like to be able to afford groceries and housing.
The worldview, whether we call it Cold War liberalism or however we want to frame the worldview that the that America is an empire and must continue to be one at all costs with running up trillions of dollars worth of debt,

getting involved in foreign conflicts anywhere from the Ukraine or the Middle East. There are people now saying we need to invade Iran.

And that if America steps back on the world stage, that it's a power vacuum that's going to be

filled by China, by Russia, and that America should continue to pay for the defense of all of these European countries, and that America should kind of, you know, shoulder that burden. And my generation, We saw Iraq.

We saw Afghanistan.

Yep.

We've also seen, you know seen lots of our friends go away to fight those wars and come back and not have mental health care and not have support from the government. We don't feel safer because we invaded Iraq.
We don't feel safer because we spent 20 years in Afghanistan. I don't know what we spent 20 years doing.
But all the people, but, you know, the 10 richest counties in America are in Virginia. And there's something interesting about that fact that all of those people are dependent upon America constantly having enemies.
And not like Virginia coal country, right? No. The collar counties around D.C.
Yeah, around D.C. And all of these people have an investment in the United States of America continually going to war.
Yep. And those are the people who seem to be speaking out the loudest Exactly.
Against your candidacy and Trump's candidacy. Exactly.
Because you threaten something, a power structure that has been in place for a very long time uh you know this has been spoken about by uh you know the military industrial complex eisenhower famously spoke about it i believe it's fdr maybe it was tr somebody said a financial element in the government has owned it since the is Van Andrew Jackson, meaning there are agendas that other people have. Now, is that why we're seeing people like Dick Cheney and people like Kamala Harris, where you would think they don't have much in common on the same side? Is it because that positioning is so important and integral to the amount of money being made.
And are you guys the greatest enemy of both of those factions of those parties? Yeah, that's how I think about it. So I think there are three issues where for 40 years, Republicans and Democrats have basically fundamentally agreed.
And I'll list them an issue of importance to that, you know, call it the uniparty, call it the conventional wisdom. Number one is foreign policy, that we should basically stick our nose in every foreign conflict.
And that doesn't mean we should never get involved, of course. But by and large, most of the wars that we fought over the last 40 years have been a total disaster for the American people, and frankly, for a lot of the countries we've been fighting.
And so foreign policy is the first and most important issue to that consensus. The second most important issue is trade, right? Massive investment in what I would call shipping our industrial base to countries like China and Mexico, which has eviscerated the American middle class, but it's made a lot of bankers rich.
And then the third thing is immigration, right? The idea that you should have effectively unlimited borders checked only by the political will, right? Every political party has tried to make it easier to bring more and more people into the United States of America.

Now, the interesting thing is that on all three of those issues, on immigration, trade, and foreign policy,

the American people have consistently been out of step with their leadership, and they keep on not actually having an alternative.

Like, who has been the candidate of, you know, free trade is not good for the American middle class? Who's been the candidate of we've got to check our immigration system? Who's been the candidate of stopping the stupid wars? Basically, nobody in 40 years with the lone exception of my running mate, right? Of Donald J. Trump.
Okay, so that's where we are. And you're right.
That's why Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney, and that's why all these people hate him. I think it's interesting, Tim, to think about the motivations here, because two years ago, I would have said it's all financial, right? Dick Cheney, you know, he's getting rich from these wars, Kamala Harris's donors are getting rich from these wars, and that's like the only reason why they're supporting them.
For what it's worth, I do think there's an element of truth to that, right? Eisenhower warned about this, the military industrial complex has its own self-fulfilling momentum. But I think there's a second thing that I've picked up on.
And, you know, a lot of my Senate colleagues disagree with me on foreign policy. They're very good people.
There's like this psychological post-World War II, you called it Cold War liberalism, where, you know, these guys like remember when America could do anything, right? We were like the agents of peace in some cases, in some cases we weren't, but we could just fix the world purely through American will, right? And they grew up in that world and they're having psychological difficulty accommodating to a world where China has gotten more powerful in part because of their policies. Russia has gotten more powerful in part because of their policies.
And we can't just dictate everything. We can't tell everybody how to behave anymore.
Because sometimes what happens is we'll try to tell another country what to do. And they'll say this, right? And that's very, very hard for these guys to wake up to the reality that we're in, you know, if we was called a unipolar world, America was the only superpower.
And we were for a while. We were for a long time.
Now we're still the lone superpower, but other countries are catching up. And I think the way to preserve our own influence, but more importantly to preserve the prosperity of our own people, is to recognize the reality that we're living in.
A lot of people can't. I mean, like, you know, they go back to, you know, Mr.
Gorbachev, tear down this wall, right? Ronald Reagan's big moment, or, you know, George H.W. Bush.
I mean, it was like a blip on the radar for us to completely crush Saddam Hussein and kick him out of Kuwait, right? They want to go back to the glory days when America could do everything and be all things. They got to wake up to the world of resource constraints.
And frankly, the reason why we're not as powerful in relative terms as we were 30 years ago is because they screwed up. That's where the trade and immigration issue comes back, is they want to pursue a foreign policy that was built on the back of smart trade and smart immigration policy.
They hollowed out the American middle class. They destroyed the industrial base of our country.
I mean, crazy statistic. China, we're still the biggest economy in the world.
China is 32% of global manufacturing GDP, okay? We're 18% of global manufacturing GDP. So even though we're still by far the biggest economy in the world, China makes nearly twice as many manufactured goods as we do.

That is the engine of real economic prosperity is manufacturing.

These guys want us to fight wars like it's 1954.

It's not 1954 in thanks in large part to them.

How do you change that?

How do you shift that?

That's very difficult, right?

Because you have a lot of unelected people. We have 19 intelligence agencies, I think.
I think it's around. That sounds right to me.
I think it's about 19, which I don't think is enough. It's a lot? I don't think it's enough, personally.
But there's 19 of them or something like that. I think if we had 22 intelligence agencies, that's actually when we would really, I think, have figured out this all.
That's who, because everybody is worried that you and Trump are going to fire some of those people. And that's what I think most Americans are worried about.
I think most people are worried about the CIA and government employees. My parents are worried about the Central Intelligence Agency and if they're making enough money.
This is what my grandmother worries about. What do you say to people that are worried about people at the NSA? No, and the DIA, the Directorate of Intelligence, people forget about that one.
It's a little room in the bigger one. Look, I want to speak from the heart here to my fellow Americans who are really worried that a CIA bureaucrat making $190,000 a year might have to find a job in the private sector.
I recognize that is the biggest crisis facing my fellow Americans. Yes.
Not that they can't afford groceries and housing. Yeah.
People can eat less. Honestly.
So that Homeland Security can be a little bigger. Yeah.
So that Homeland Security has— I like knowing that my neighbors are getting spied on. I i like it i like people getting on lists well it's it's actually really a you know a win-win right something i'll say in kamala harris's defense is yes she's made it harder for americans to afford housing right but that's been in the service so the cia can more easily spy on our fellow americans right so that look and this is this is where you're a big sometimes there's trade-offs and sometimes there's You're a big critic of online censorship.
Don't you realize it's good for people? Don't you realize it's... To not be able to speak their mind? You know, people don't even know what they want to say half the time.
Why not have a service that you, like an AI where you speak into it and it rearranges it so it gets what you mean.

Look, I'm actually, I would be okay if we just censored Kamala Harris.

Right.

I think she would be okay with that too.

I think she'd be better in the polls if she just didn't say anything.

That was, of course, the strategy of her campaign. Have you met her?

She's probably fun.

She's fun.

You know who's fun?

Yeah.

You know who I bet is fun?

Yeah.

Like, this is a rare moment of bipartisanship.

No, no, no.

Okay.

Hunter Biden.

Well, of course.

I would, with all due respect to you, I would vote for him over anyone in the race. Just because if we're going to end this thing, let's do it quick.
Let's do it in six months. Oh, man.
My cousin is like a hardcore Republican, and she's like, you know what I can't get behind you guys on is the anti-Hunter Biden stuff. Like that guy, I guarantee he's fun.
He's a fun guy to hang out with yeah right i don't know about i've met kamala harris once i honestly don't know yeah if she's fine there's too much of a school marm thing going on i just don't know i don't think that that would necessarily so how do you deal you have all these you have a bunch okay yeah kamala harris is the person who when you tell a really funny joke yeah she likes says well that was that was like kind of offensive right right yeah yeah but then i say i look at her and i go but you're a genius and then she likes me again yeah hunter biden if you say if you tell a really offensive joke he laughs his ass off and says let's let's do another let's do it again let's light the house on fire where now so how do you deal with this you get into office now people are all mad about project. People don't like it because it's a Heritage Foundation wrote a whole thing saying that, you know,

that you're going to dismantle the entire federal government and, you know, sell it off for parts.

This is the craziest thing to me.

So Project 2025, so Heritage is a nonprofit with no affiliation with the Trump campaign.

That's right.

They wrote a 900-page document, okay?

If you take any 900-page document that exists anywhere in the world, I'm going to find something that I hate about it and something that I like about it. Right.
So they've tried to pick up every little thing that is unpopular and say, this is Trump's agenda. It has nothing to do with Trump.
But to your point, like, yeah, Donald Trump and I really do want to like make the federal bureaucracy smaller. We think there are way too many bureaucrats collecting a check.
We think that's bad for Americans because they have to pay those people's salaries. But most importantly, it's bad for Americans.
Sometimes they're doing things like spying on their fellow citizens, which is fundamentally bad. Okay, so here's a crazy story.
And I just learned more about this the past couple of days. There was a Wall Street Journal story about how like the Chinese had hacked into the Verizon and AT&T networks, okay? You probably didn't see the story.
It didn't make a whole lot of waves. My understanding is that part of the infrastructure that they hacked into was built on top of surveillance systems that were implemented in 2001, Patriot Act style stuff.
So like, you know, we're we're talking, we're worried about the civil libertarian element of that. And rightfully so, like, I don't want American citizens to be spied on, but the more important in some ways is we're creating a backdoor in our own technology networks that our enemies are now using.
Like that's crazy. Right.
And again, no one is going to accept responsibility for it. No one's going to say, oh up let's do something different this is the biggest problem i have like all policy disagreements aside the refusal of people to take responsibility and say you know what i screwed up right okay that is the biggest thing that's messed up about about american government politics like look i had a lot of friends and i was 18 years old what the hell did i know i supported the supported the Iraq war when I was 18 years old.
Me too. I feel bad about that.
Yeah. Like, I genuinely feel bad that as a high school senior in Middletown, Ohio, who then enlisted in the United States Marine Corps, like I did my part, I feel bad about it.
Yeah. There were people in Washington.
Well, I stopped short of that. I was, I supported it in backyards, yelling, watching a lot of Fox, but I stopped quite short of.
Look, man, we all have to serve in our own roles. We all have a part to play.
But the guys who pushed it, they're still collecting multi-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salaries. They're on MSNBC.
They're on MSNBC. They still have influence, and they've never said, we screwed up.
Like, that is the thing that bothers me the most about Washington, D.C. is nobody accepting responsibility for failure.
Because if you can't do that, you can't fix the problem.

Well, now it seems to be that we're shoehorning domestic issues into foreign policy, meaning that you can no longer sell a war by saying we're there to democratize a country or we are there to preemptively invade a country before they attack us but we can say we are there uh so that um drag queens in whatever in russia can have more of a say well you asked why we were in afghanistan And for 20 years 20 years. It's like because they really the Afghanis really need to learn about gender studies.
Right. The important of the non-binary gender approach.
Right. We have in the United States.
I mean, you think I'm kidding. Yeah.
Your tax dollars. My tax dollars were funding programs in a country where a lot of people didn't have running water.

Yeah.

Were funding programs to teach people that there were non-binary genders out there.

That I do agree with because it is fun.

And I do want to see someone with a Kalashnikov standing in the rubble.

And then someone explaining that to them to me is fun.

And I support that.

I'm sure the Taliban had a lot of fun learning about 87 tinders. That's probably true.
Why can't a seven-year-old consent to a life-altering medical surgery? Is it because you guys are fascia? I don't understand. Why wouldn't you allow an eight-year-old to fully transition? Not only that, but they want us to use our tax dollars to try to force other countries to follow this ridiculous pathway.
Yes. Which, by the way, like, I know a little bit about your politics.
I know you're, like, pretty libertarian. Yeah.
This is actually something I agreed with the old guard left about. Yeah.
We should be, whether it's in defense or whether it's in medical industry, we should be worried about when a profit motivated entity tries to manipulate government policy. Right.
And right now we have pharma companies making billions of dollars off of cross sex hormones for children. Right.
And nobody's, nobody on the left is like, huh, that's kind of weird that the very people who are getting rich off of this are also lobbying the American Medical Association and the U.S. government to force this on American citizens.

It should have, I think it should have stopped. The show Glee was great.
Everyone was singing and everyone was happy. No, it truly was.
And like people weren't, it wasn't so contentious,

but then it got to a point where somebody like me,

who's been a gay out out-of-the-closet person for 15 years, I'm going, why in God's name would a 5-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old be taking puberty-blocking hormones, be transitioning, be making, leave kids alone, leave people alone. It's very simple.
A lot of gay people feel that way. There are trans people that feel that way.
There are people all over the spectrum that feel that way. None of them are ever listened to.
It is the most extreme, loudest voices in that movement that are listened to. Yeah.
Well, what really radicalized me on this issue was I was actually talking to a friend who, you know, like really disagrees with my views on transgender politics. And I mean, frankly, like kind of rejected our friendship because I came out against this, this, I came out in support of banning gender transition for minors during my Senate campaign.
And like what really radicalized actually is during that conversation, she said something to me that I was like, wait a second, is this real? She said the hormonal therapy for minors is totally reversible. So the way they sell this is it just delays puberty.
But then if you stop taking the drugs, everything resumes as normal. That is totally and profoundly false.
It can't be true. There's no way that's true like when i heard it i was like that sounds totally effing crazy yeah it turns out also let's say that was crazy also not a great policy yeah exactly yeah even if it was true probably not good you know it was probably not good because like you know you don't want 30 year olds going through puberty right yeah but Yeah.
But even if it was true, problem, but it's not true. Yeah.
Kids have permanent sexual dysfunction, permanent serious health problems. It's terrible.
When they take this stuff, which is totally predictable. Again, one of the humanity-long lessons we should take is that when we intervene in things in unexpected ways, whether it's a war or trying to interrupt a biological process, we very often screw up.
You need evidence before you really do something like this. I don't know how we got in this country to, why can't a nine-year-old girl have a beard? I don't know where.
From Glee, everyone's saying it was gay enough, perhaps too gay, and then it went to a place where it place where it goes. But like happy.
Yeah, it was crazy. But happy, yeah.
Okay, I have actually heard this. I'm not a gay guy, but I've heard this from gay friends of mine.
Man, damn it. You want to talk about virality? I'm talking about going viral? Yeah, that would have made some headlines.
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Investing involves risk, offers subject to terms and conditions. But I've talked to this about gay friends who feel like very personally affronted about this because they feel like if they were, you know, a gay kid and they were 14 years old and maybe they're confused.
By the way, like a lot of teenagers, even a lot of non-gay teenagers are confused because being a teenager is like inherently confusing. That's right.
But they're worried about like would somebody have had them transition? Of course, yeah. In some ways it's like the new, it's like the pharmaceutical answer to conversion therapy, right? Is, oh, no, no, no, you're not gay.
You're a totally different gender. The other thing I don't get about this, man, like the inconsistency here is crazy where it's, they want to simultaneously tell me that the gendered binary is screwed up, that male and female is way too simple, that there's all this crap in the middle.
But like when you have a person go on cross sex hormones, they put on super petite dresses and high heels and they act like the most stereotypical version of a girl, a male transitioning to female.

It's like, okay, well, wait a second. Is the gender stereotypical binary bad or is it actually good? Because every time somebody takes these hormones, they start acting like Dylan Mulvaney.
No. What happens, I think, when we've allowed the debate to be defined by a very extreme portion.

That's right.

Who, it's not about logic. It's about people throwing tantrums and people going, you have to agree with me.
I'm going to compel you to agree with me. Absolutely.
Kids should be left alone. My parents were boomers.
I was ignored. I was left alone to do whatever.
And perhaps that that's not great but we shouldn't be telling you turned out okay i turned out fine you know now i'm not the vice president you know what i mean but you know i have a rolls royce so here's you know but the thing is i think you're winning in that trade-off i can't even drive anymore thanks to the secret service it's gonna get blown up soon that's gonna soon but um but i'll tell you this um i don't see why we're telling kids about critical race theory or gender theory why are we why are we not educating people in math in reading and science why are we why are we indoctrinating children and i i don't know too many people who are for that if you meet people in the real world none of them go that's correct five-year-old should be learned should learn about identity politics yes and nobody's for that no no nobody is and i very few people and and this one i actually feel very personally passionate about because this like affects my family right? Yeah. And my wife and I talk about this all the time.
So her parents, born and raised in South India. They moved to San Diego a couple years before she was born.
So she's born and raised in San Diego, right? Okay, so she is Indian American, but she's like the most dissimilar. Like she's an American, right? Fundamentally, she's an American.
And we talk about like, okay, we were able to fall in love in part because we grew up in the nineties where everybody was like, yeah, okay, it's not perfect. Obviously there's still racism out there, but like, you know, judge people based on who they are, not on these like immutable characteristics on their skin color.
Just, just judge people based on whether you have similar values, et cetera, et cetera. Right.
And because of that, we met, fell in love. We had a family, like my family, like my family's always been welcome to her and vice versa.
And my mom actually

put this in a very interesting way that like, you know, the more that she's noticed this in the last

few years, that people are obsessed that we have mixed race children. Right.
And are they brown?

Are they white? Are they Indian? Are they American? And my mom's just like, well, there are babies,

right? That's who they are. There are babies.
I think that if you really inflame the racial consciousness of people, if they fundamentally think of themselves not as human beings or as Americans, but as members of a racial group, that's just going to fundamentally lead to strife, right? In some ways, you want to emphasize the commonality that we have as fellow citizens. you don't want to say, okay, you're black, so this means this thing about you and that thing about you.
And you're white, so this means something totally different. And that obviously to me just common sense would lead to conflict.
And again, I'm not saying it was perfect, but if you look at both black and white Americans, they say that race relations are worse now than they were 20 years ago. So we've ran this experiment of hyper-identity politics-focused racial consciousness, of constantly emphasizing, if you're black, you're oppressed.
If you're white, you're an oppressor. If you're black, you're colonized.
If you're white, you're the colonizer. We've run this experiment now for 20 years.
It's bullshit. It didn't work.
It's made people hate each other. let's get back to just trying to emphasize that we're all human beings we're all americans a thousand percent now let's talk about a topic slightly less controversial israel because no one seems to have any issues with anything they do which i like because some countries people get angry at.
Obviously, what happens on October 7th is a nightmare. Sure.
Then you have a response to that, which was also a nightmare. You have a humanitarian crisis in Gaza.
You have displacement of people. You have a looming potentially larger war in the Middle East with Iran.
You're the vice president. How does the Trump administration handle what could be a massive, you know, mid-east war, you know, after everything, obviously, we just talked about, about, like, getting America back on track and figuring out how to allocate resources to people in this country.
How do we handle that? Well, I mean, a couple of principles, right? So obviously, you know, Israel has the right to defend itself. But America's interest is sometimes going to be distinct.
Like sometimes we're going to have overlapping interests. And sometimes we're going to have distinct interests.
And our interest, I think, very much is in not going to

war with Iran, right? It would be huge distraction of resources, it would be massively expensive to our country. And it's interesting to me when when the October 7 thing happened, and like, you know, we have a couple of dear friends who live in Israel, actually, one of my wife's very good friends she grew up with married an Israeli guy, like, you know, we're like worried about our friends.
And in the reaction to it, what I noticed is that American, you know, American pro-Israel people or people who fashion themselves as pro-Israel were actually much more militaristic than the Israelis who were living in Israel, right? The Israelis were like, okay, Hamas just attacked us. We're going to go really screw Hamas up.
And of up and of course yeah there's a humanitarian side of that and we want to try to minimize civilian casualties but like you had americans saying oh this is really i mean you know this this this this attack happened on putin's birthday right so we need to go to war against russia and obviously the iranians funded part of this we need to go to war with Iran. We just have to be smarter, right?

We have to be smarter.

Now, I don't want Iran to get a nuclear weapon.

And I think we should be like very strongly encouraging the Iranians and using all, you know, all the influence that we have to encourage them to not have a nuclear weapon.

I think nuclear proliferation is just a bad idea.

Enough people have nukes.

And the more people that have nukes, I think the greater the risk of nuclear war.

But we just have to be smart about it.

And I actually think that like what this ultimately looks like. What if they promise not to use it? Like if you just had one, a fake one, something to look at.
A fake one, they can have a fake one. Something to look at.
Not a real one. Okay, here's the way I think about it.
So this is again where smart diplomacy really matters. And something that Trump didn't get enough credit for is the Abraham Accords.
Okay, what is the Abraham Accords? Fundamentally, it's Israel entering into an alliance, right? Even though they kind of hate each other, Israel entering into an alliance with Gulf Arab states. Now, why would they do that since they hate each other? Because they both have a shared enemy in Iran, right? And again, I'm not saying we stick ourselves into the Middle East and start a war here, but like we recognize, okay, Israelis, Gulf Arab states don't like Iran.
So let the Israelis and the Gulf Arab states provide the counterbalance to Iran. America doesn't have to constantly police every region of the world.
We should empower people to police their own regions of the world, right? And one, we would save a lot of money. Two, we'd save a lot of focus.
But unfortunately, I think Harris, she's got this weird thing where I actually think she kind of likes war. Maybe she feels like a tough guy about it.
I don't know why it is. But they've actually pursued, even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that maximizes those casualties.
They say that they're pro-Israel. They've pursued the pathway that has prolonged the war as long as possible, which is bad for Israel.
And they seem to be sort of sleepwalking us into a war with Iran. It's like the dumbest of all possible worlds.
Is there a way to avoid a conflict between China and Taiwan? I hope so, man. I really do, because it would be catastrophic.
It would be, you know, like, you know, I, my whole argument with Russia and Ukraine is, yeah, okay, Russia shouldn't have invaded Ukraine, but a lot of innocent people are getting killed. Like, our interest is in peace.
But part of that is motivated by my view that Ukraine is not nearly as important to us as other regions of the world, right? Just putting my cards on the table. Taiwan makes so much of the computer chips, right, which is such a driver of all economic growth, that if the Chinese took over Taiwan, it would be really bad for us.
Like, that's what I think. My hope is that the Chinese recognize that it would be so costly to invade Taiwan that it's just not worth it.
Right. And I think our policy, Donald Trump's policy of, yes, we're competitors with China, but we're also going to engage in smart diplomacy from time to time is the way to prevent China from invading Taiwan.
What I really worry about actually is, so we win in a couple of weeks and I do think we're going to win. I really worry the next couple of months, do the Chinese try to do something? Because if there was ever a time when America was at its weakest, it's with Joe Biden sort of asleep at the wheel, Kamala Harris licking her wounds from an election loss.
And if they really want it, maybe they try to make a play for it in the next couple of months. I hope they don't, but we can't really control what they do.
It is an interesting time right now because we are two weeks out, and this episode will come out Saturday from this Saturday, tomorrow. A momentous election.
We had an assassination attempt on Donald Trump's life. A couple.
A couple of them. It's crazy.
It's crazy. Are you satisfied with the accountability on the first attempt? No, I'm not.
And look, my understanding is that, frankly, the Trump campaign had requested additional resources, and those resource requests were very often denied. And what the Biden folks, what the Harris folks have been saying as well, some of those requests were granted.
Yes, some of them were, but not all of them, right? And so I think there was very serious oversight on that side of it. I mean, look, obviously somebody screwed up because the guy was 120 yards away.
Are you a shooter? No. Okay, so I mean, I served in the Marines.
I'm a pretty good shot with an AR-15. I've gone to fields, though.
Yeah. I've gone to, like, open fields and kind of walked around, kind of like a fair.
I've never climbed on a roof and shot someone, not the president. Yeah, no, I mean like a sportsman, right? Yeah, no, I got you.
Yeah, yeah. I didn't ask.
I was asking if you had a confirmed kill. Yeah.
But the thing is, if you are a sportsman or you are a person who goes to a range and shoots, 120 yards with an AR-15 is a pot shot. I mean, I could literally hit a silver dollar from 125 yards with an AR-15.
And, okay, so somebody clearly screwed up, right? And, like, obviously I've gotten to know the Secret Service over the last three months.

The guys on my detail, universally super professional good guys.

But it's not the guys on the ground who are protecting the president.

It's all the people who are, you know, canvassing the side around them.

It's the leadership that refused to grant resources.

And I actually think it's a huge scandal.

Like, why isn't Congress, why isn't the Harris administration being more forthcoming about what happened?

they seem to be a cover your ass mode when the American people just need to actually learn some details about how a guy got so close to the president of the United States. I mean, listen, obviously there's a lot of people in the intelligence community that are incredible patriots who are grateful for what they do and they've kept America safe.
But some of them aren't. Some of them aren't.
And my question is when you have social media companies agree to censor a story about Hunter Biden's laptop and because it is supposedly Russian disinformation, that request is signed on to by top members of the intelligence community, current and former. And they are spreading the narrative that it is a Russian hoax of a story.
Is that election interference by members of the intelligence community what does that say about the democratic process in this country these are the people that are lecturing constantly about democracy and how important it is and what a threat you are and president trump to democracy there's no accountability have they said sorry i mean has anyone you know like they They haven't sorry none of them have lost their security clearance right despite participating in a massive hoax right look i i firmly believe and i've seen independent analysis that suggests this that if the american people had known the full truth about the hunter biden laptop because it implicated joe biden himself in potentially criminal but at leastdoing, right? So I think it would have shifted the election. I think Donald Trump would be the president of the United States right now.
And, you know, this is always why I get into it with the media and they say, oh, there's no evidence that this thing and this thing happened. Well, there might not be any evidence that like Dominion hacked the voting machines, but there's sure as hell evidence that our intelligence community conspired with big tech to literally control the flow of information in the days and weeks before an election.
That's a way bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump making a joke that you don't like, and yet we don't talk about that. And while we're on the subject of threats to democracy, the craziest thing that happened in the Trump administration, in my view, in terms of threat to democracy is, and there was a New York Times story about this, that the leading generals in our country were lying to Donald Trump about troop redeployments in Syria, so that they could say that we were drawing troop levels down, but in reality, we weren't, right? They were staggering how they did the redeployments to hide from the commander in chief what they were actually doing with the military.
Like the most fundamental principle, going back to George Washington, is civilian control of the military. The elected president is the commander in chief.
You had generals, in particular Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman, lying to Donald Trump. That's a threat to democracy, not when Donald Trump like makes a joke at a rally.
Who are these people working for if not the president of the United States? Well, they're working for the pyramid bureaucracy. People call it the deep state.
What the deep state is is just when you have an organization that becomes self-perpetuating. These people have military contracts.
They have corporate board seats. That all becomes part of who they're really serving.
And again, people are good at lying to themselves. Do I think that Mark Milley woke up every day saying, oh, I'm serving the military industrial complex and I can't wait to get my Raytheon board seat? No, he wasn't thinking that way.
He was thinking that true democracy was the opposite of whatever Donald Trump wanted to happen. But in reality, Mark Milley doesn't determine what democracy is.
The American people determine that. And so when the American people make a decision, you have to respect that decision, even if you don't like the guy that they ultimately elected.
But I really, this is like the psychological trick that's been played on people like Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris. And I think they're all, you know, they all participate in it, but they're all honestly kind of victims of it too, is that they've convinced themselves that the real threat to American democracy, it's not when, like, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman disobeys the elected president, it's when the elected president does something they don't like.
I think that psychological trick is at the heart of a lot of our problems. Is it going to be difficult to secure a border and to deport people who are here illegally, some of whom may have committed crimes? Obviously, there's been instances of people who've been murdered by people that are here illegally.
How does that work? Are you able to do that? Is that possible? And what would that look like? Yeah, so I'm asked this question all the time. And I joked with a reporter who said, well, you can't possibly deport 25 million people.
That's too many people. and I said, it's kind of like, you know, you have like a Big Mac and you say, you can't possibly eat that whole thing.
It's bigger than your mouth. Right.
It's like, well, the way you do it is you take one bite and then a second bite and then a third bite. And that's how I think about deportations here is you start with the most hardened criminals, about 425,000 violent, illegal alien criminals.
And we know where most of them are because they've committed crimes, right? So you do law enforcement, you go and get those people, you send them back to where they came from. And that's where you start.
But then yeah, you got to deport illegal aliens. If you're not willing to deport the people who came here illegally, especially those who came here over the last few years, then you're not going to have a border.
And it's just basic law enforcement, right? I mean, people reveal themselves as illegal aliens all the time. You know, they try to apply, like, there's a lot of social security fraud that happens in our country, where somebody, and I've had friends where their social security number was stolen.
That social security number was used to get like a driver's license or a work permit or something like that. And then when they go and say, oh, I think I've had identity fraud committed against me, the social security administration will tell them, oh, we have to respect the privacy of the people who defrauded you and stole your social security number.
Okay, well, when you defraud somebody and steal their social security number, deport those people, right? And then the final point is, you got to make it harder for illegal aliens to work in the country in the first place, right? Because then a lot of people will just go back home if they can't. And I think it's really important.
Like, I think one of the biggest and most pernicious effects of illegal immigration of Kamala Harris's open border is it means that millions and millions of people are willing to work under the table. But that means a lot of Americans aren't getting good jobs because you have illegal aliens who are willing to work for much lower wages.
Do you worry at all about Aspen, about Palm Beach, about Greenwich, Connecticut or Southampton where I have a home with all due respect? I think it's a little disgusting that you would try to make us pay American workers a wage to do things that other people wouldn't do.

It's a little short-sighted.

Yeah, I mean, look, I want to say—

The Chamber of Commerce is bringing these people in clearly because they're humanitarian.

Yeah, that's right.

And the Koch family.

What changed in the Democratic Party?

Bernie Sanders was asked about this. He said it is a coke brothers fantasy to have an open border yes it'll drive down wages for bill clinton said it's a country of laws that's a little fun but he said that maybe it was uh it was maybe at one time um what changed in the democratic party and also a lot of elements of the Republican Party for many, many years.

The libertarian pro-business wing of the Republican Party is staunchly pro-immigration. And they have united with kind of the far left of the Democratic Party, which has become a lot of the Democratic Party.
and this idea that any restrictions on immigration are racist,

the idea of a border is racist. The idea of a process of which people can come into the country is insane.
How did that happen? I mean, look, this is so crazy to me, where you have people in Aspen that are paying their nanny borderline poverty wages. That's right.
And it's survivable for two reasons. One, because the nanny lives in a crowded apartment with like six other people.
Right. And two, because that nanny is receiving welfare benefits from American taxpayers.
Yeah. So these people are having their lifestyles subsidized.
They're paying their nanny's poverty wages, and their response to it is to say that you're racist if you think this arrangement is bad. The people who are paying the taxes, who are funding the welfare state so that you can have a poverty wage nanny or a poverty wage house cleaner, they're racist.
and not they just want a safe country and they don't want people to come into our country who they have to pay welfare benefits

and most important... a poverty wage house cleaner, they're racist.
Right. And not they just want a safe country and they don't want people to come into our country who they have to pay welfare benefits.
And most importantly, they don't want somebody taking away their jobs. I think it's the most disgusting thing, man.
And look, my heart breaks for the poor people of Aspen and West Hollywood who can't. There's not that much money in West Hollywood.
Who would have to pay. Bel Air, Beverly Hills, Montecito.
not that much money who would have to pay well Bel Air Beverly Hills of Montecito and Malibu who would have to pay their their nannies a livable wage right I mean let's they're obviously the most important people these are jobs Americans won't do and by that I mean retail wholesale uh gardening uh child care yeah working anywhere these are jobs Americans, because that's what I was told growing up, that Americans will only do one job, and it is finance. That's right.
My favorite is construction, right? Americans won't build houses. And it's actually a totally reasonable argument if you think about it, because in the 1960s, when we had low levels of illegal immigration, there were no homes being built, right? Mass homelessness in the United States of America in 1964 until we created this housing oasis by bringing in millions of illegal aliens.
The real truth, of course, is there are jobs Americans won't do at certain wages. And so the solution to that problem is to raise wages for working people to get more of them into the labor force and not to constantly import this surf class.
It's also, man, this is very corrosive to the idea of American democracy, right? Small D American democracy. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton, go back to the original founding fathers, they wanted there to be commonality across citizens, right? They wanted smart people who were paying attention to the issues.
They wanted whether you were a worker or a business owner or a farmer or a farmhand, they wanted some similarity across all American classes. If you have a permanent class of low-wage serfs, many of whom don't even speak English, that destroys the citizenship ethos that makes our democracy possible in the first place.
These people don't care because they want the cheap labor. I care because I love my country.
A lot of people look at America more as a financial opportunity than a country. And it's not.
It can't be that. American citizenship cannot just be a bunch of people who work and make financial transactions with one another.
You don't go and fight wars because the guy down the street makes a lot of money trading derivatives on Wall Street. You go and fight wars if you have a nation that you believe in.
And importantly, if you have faith that your leaders are only going to send you to fight a war when they have to.

And that's what's been broken.

This is not only America.

It's countries all over the world, all over Europe.

Globalization, the benefits of it have been unevenly distributed, to say the least.

You have a class of people that are, many of them own assets.

Yes.

And they've seen the value of those assets increase.

Many of them are invested in the

market. And they're incredibly happy with the freedom to move capital around the world and make lots and lots of money.
But the citizens of the countries that they live, their standards of living have been lowered and lowered and lowered. And it's not only America, it's this financial architecture that seems to be replacing people's cultures, histories, and idea of what a nation is.
Yeah, and the real economy too, right? We used to make stuff, and now we're trading derivatives and shipping dollars overseas, but also shipping assets overseas. We used to make that stuff in the United States.
I mean, crazy statistic. What do you think the life premium for having a bachelor's degree is in this country? In other words, if you have a bachelor's degree, how much longer do you live than a person without a bachelor's degree? 10 years? Seven years.
Wow. Seven years.
You live seven years longer for having gone to college in the United States of America. You put this well.
The way that I would put it is globalization, it's been very good for rich people in rich countries, and it's been very good for poor people in poor countries. It's been extraordinarily bad for poor people and middle class people in rich countries, right? And in some ways, the whole Donald Trump movement is a rebellion against, okay, well, some people have benefited from this.
Like some people benefited when my my steel mill the steel mill that employed my grandfather for 40 years when it went from 10,000 jobs to 1,800 jobs right yeah but it wasn't the people that I grew up around and it wasn't our families and it wasn't the moms and dads who got divorced because the dad usually but sometimes the mom lost a stable middle class wage I mean Republicans are like, we're supposed to be the party of family and of family values. You know what's really bad for family values? When thousands of people at the drop of a hat lose a good middle-class wage.
That's not good for family values. That destroys families.
And again, we can do so much better, but we've got to get away from this failed consensus the last 40 years. But isn't it good that BlackRock owns the homes? Because people, I feel like, don't want to own their own home.
There's a lot that goes into it. Isn't it better for them to rent? Isn't it better for them to take Ubers and have small little jobs instead of one big one? I think it's – I have friends that do DoorDash, Uber Eats, Uber, Lyft, and they rent and they really like it because they can get high a lot.
Isn't that a better country than having a family? And aren't people happier like that? Didn't you say you wanted people to have families and then people said you were sick? That's right. Yeah.
I mean, it seems sick to me. Have you ever had a dream or a podcast or a job delivering food? Isn't that better? Look, clearly the most fulfilling life is to watch Netflix all day and get high all the time.
To be clear, I want to make, make sure that that's clearly the most important. But I think the second most fulfilling life is to,

you know, have a family and participate in your community. And like, I mean, look,

to talk about ideas with your friends and spend time like having meals. Like, yeah, you know,

okay, obviously it's best to have food delivered to you by yourself and to eat it alone. But it's

also really fun to share a meal with friends and family, right? It can be, J.D., but this podcast is brought to you in part by Stash. Saving and investing can feel impossible, but with Stash, it's a reality.
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Investing involves risk, offers subject to terms and conditions. Isn't it, BlackRock, is there a way to calm that down where they're purchasing all and they're driving up the cost of real estate? You walk around New York City, there are buildings that are full of empty apartments because it's money laundering from people overseas that are stashing money, and it's raising the cost of living for the entire city.
That's exactly right. And I'm actually not a Ron Paul guy.
One of my dear friends is a big Ron Paul guy, but I've kind of come around to the Ron Paul argument. I don't fully agree with it, but the criticism of the Federal Reserve that makes the most sense to me is that it gives massive corporations a lower cost of money than the average American.
So part of the reason Black Rock has been able to buy all these homes is you ask, well, what is Black Rock borrowing at? What rate are they borrowing at? Because the average American right now, I think the average mortgage interest rate is somewhere around 7% right now. Okay, BlackRock's borrowing at like 1.5, 2.5%, right? So if they're paying a much lower cost for debt than the average American, then they have a huge advantage.
They buy up all the homes, they jack up all the costs. And again, going back to the Jeffersonian idea of Americans as owners and as citizens in their own country, well, what happens when BlackRock owns your home and they say you're not allowed to own a firearm because we own this home, you don't own this home? Okay, there goes the Second Amendment.
What if they say, well, for all residents in our places, we don't want you to put up yard signs for certain political candidates. Well, there goes the First Amendment.
There's a connection. There's a very deep connection between the idea of American citizenship, the full idea, and the liberties that actually make American society such a cool place to live.
And if we turn everybody into renters, we're going to destroy that. I mean, I think that like— Here's where you're wrong, though.
People really like these shows where people buy $20 million homes, like selling Sunset. Most—isn't that as good as owning a home? Because there's 30 shows about people buying mansions, and people get to watch them.
So you don't have to cut grass. You can watch somebody else buy a house.
can but that is what's happening by the way yeah you can live in a pod and eat and eat your roasted crickets but watch other people but by the way people do that there are people watching people buy houses yes for tens of millions of dollars who they themselves cannot afford their rent.

Yeah.

It's almost like the shows have the purpose of distracting us from the fact that material living standards in this country have been stagnating for many years. Yeah.
Yeah. And you address that by perhaps, is it the federal funds rate? Is it? Yeah.
Yeah, I mean, what I think is, and I've actually talked to a number

of, the president has a very dear friend by the name of Steve Whitcoff, who's a very smart guy. He's one of the most successful real estate investors in the world.
And Steve has all of these interesting ideas. And it's hysterical because Steve is, I assume, a multi-billionaire.
He's certainly very rich, but he has all these ideas for how to make it so that ordinary Americans are paying the same amount for debt as the big guys, right?

Because if you're paying 7% and the big guys are paying 2%, ordinary Americans are always going to get screwed. There are a lot of different ways you could do that.
I mean, you could just basically statutorily not allow BlackRock to access the federal funds directly. You could do all these things to lower the cost of capital for normal Americans.
There's like a lot of ways to address the problem, but it's a problem. And the fact that we're not talking about that, instead we're talking about, you know, like Donald Trump is a threat to democracy because he said that if people riot after he wins, then we should not allow that, which is the great, of all the criticisms of Donald Trump, the craziest one is, you know, he said at a rally that if people ride after the election law enforcement should prevent that from happening and they're like oh that's a threat to democracy it's like what the hell are you talking about yeah that's common law American law enforcement but well it's funny man people are more focused on that the media is more focused on that than on the fact that we have a set of economic policies that are turning like like our generation, I mean, I assume you're about my age, like our generation, especially younger, permanent paupers, permanent renters in the country that their parents and grandparents built.
And I see these polls that say that young people, you know, usually vote for Democrats, but maybe they're more pro-Trump this cycle than they were last cycle. My argument to them is, aren't you sick of politicians talking about fake bullshit instead

of the fact that you can't afford a home and that you won't be able to raise a family because you

won't be able to afford their health care costs and their housing costs? Like, let's talk about

real stuff. Say what you will about Donald Trump.
Say what you will about me. He talks about real

things that affect real people. Is the happy medium them owning a home in the Ukraine? You know what I mean? Because you're making a lot of points that are going to be tough to do.
Well, look, if Kamala Harris is president, here's the win-win. Again, she's always looking for that.
If they own a home in Ukraine, they can then be conscripted into her endless war in ukraine yeah and so you know if you're a young american and you'd like to own a very sweet mansion in ukraine while also fighting a war for a country that's 6 000 miles away then yeah kamala harris is your candidate if you'd like to own a nice home in the united states of america and raise a family i think donald trump is more more your flavor different shapes, different strokes for different folks, man. I don't want to judge anybody's preferences.
No, for sure. I just want to give the honest assessment of what voting for Kamala Harris does.
They're very excited about it. Many of them live in Beverly Hills, and they got the flags and everything, and they got into it, and it's fun to, it's actually fun to have something to be into.
Well, I actually, okay, so I saw a couple years ago, a buddy sent me a photo they had the black lives matter thing in the in the yard sure they had the uh trans lives matter sign in the yard and then they had the ukrainian flag yeah uh hanging up on their on their porch and he sent me this photo and he said i've just seen it the liberal holy trinity that's it yeah well that's it used to be the father the son of the holy spirit now it's those three you have it all well we're not allowed to ask why why the ukraine war happened or what we did to potentially create conditions where exactly i mean we're not allowed to ask that did american diplomacy yeah actually create conflict instead of diffusing conflict in my view it did and maybe that could maybe that was the goal. We don't know.
I mean, I don't want to sound like a nut, but there are people that, yeah. It's this psychological post-war thing of everyone is either Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill.
That's how these people think about it. Do you think Vladimir Putin is on a march through Europe that he's going to knock over Poland, that he's going to knock over? It doesn't seem...
Of all the absurd arguments I've heard, that is the most absurd. It doesn't seem likely.
He can't take half of Ukraine, which was his goal. He can't take half of Ukraine, but somehow he's going to march all the way to Berlin.
And by the way, if he marches all the way to Berlin, what the hell does that say about Germany? Maybe they should build their own security capacity to prevent it. I mean, you know, maybe they should listen to Les Rammstein and actually build a military that's worthwhile.
Though I will say, Rammstein has this crazy song from 2004, I think. You know what I'm talking about? I think I do.
We're all living in America. Yeah.
That is actually a really interesting criticism of globalization. So to the Rammstein fans out there, I apologize for criticizing.
And NATO, do you think that we redefine our relationship with NATO? Well, yeah. I mean, I think that what we have to, what President Trump has said about NATO is, look, we're not going to pull out of NATO, but NATO needs to be a true alliance, a true partner, and not basically just another welfare client of the United States of America.
I mean, okay, guess how many mechanized brigades, I won't force you to actually guess, how many mechanized brigades Germany could field right now. Germany is the fourth largest economy in the world.
They could field between zero and one mechanized brigades. If that is your country's military, you're not a partner of the United States in any security sense.
You're a welfare client of the United States. And I would like Germany.
I love Germany, by the way. I think it's a great country.
I think great people, good beer. They should be doing more to look after their own security.
Well, ironically, they rely on cheap Russian gas and oil and the United States military. So is asking NATO countries to fund more of their own defense is the direction that you want to go into? Well, I think they have to fund more of their own defense.
They have to take more ownership over their own security. And again, I don't want America to be the policeman of the world.
We can't be the policeman of Europe, the policeman of the Middle East. I want more of these allies to behave like allies, to take more ownership over their own security, and to make their own decisions.
I mean, look, if I was a European country, in some ways, I would feel kind of pathetic. They always called Tony Blair, the prime minister of the UK, Bush's poodle.
Right. It was probably being too nice to Tony Blair to call him Bush's poodle.
Right. Because these guys, they don't even have their own countries anymore.
They just do whatever the United States tells them to do. Well, London has also just become a vertical money laundering scheme where everyone from all over the world and New York, and this is happening to all these great cities, is that people that live there are being driven out.
Exactly. And you have billionaires and centimillionaires going in and buying up all this real estate, not contributing to the culture of the city at all.
And in London's case, they have Russian oligarchs throwing people out of windows, which that is good, I think. It's fine.
I think it's fine. Because it's not random, JD.
It's not like, oh, I got thrown out of a window. Are we talking first floor windows or like 10th floor windows? No, it's 10th floor, but it's people that got involved.
It's people that were involved. I can't defend that.
They knew the risk. So to me, it's like I look at these great cities and I say, listen, obviously you want people from all over the world to come and appreciate a city.
At what point does the purchasing of real estate from foreign nationals become a major problem for not only the cost of living of Americans, but the culture of a city? Huge. You know what I mean? Yes.
Like the, you know, it seems insane that nobody, you know, Ron DeSantis came out and proposed doing something about it, but very few politicians have come out and said anything about that issue. It's very important.
I mean, look, London is effectively the world's only socialist tax haven. Right.
It's just crazy. It's a socialist country, socialist government at this point.
But they let billionaires from all over shelter their assets in their country. It's a totally bizarre and screwed up way of thinking about your economy.
This is sort of what globalization does, right? This is what I really worry about. It's like London doesn't feel fully english to me anymore no right um new york of course is the classic american city yeah over time i think new york will start to feel less american yeah everything becomes flattened and becomes the same and like real diversity actually right is is like i'd kind of like to go to a different place and have it be different you want paris to be paris Exactly.
And not have it all just feel the same. Right.
That is, I think, a diversity that I can get behind. People see financial migration as an opportunity to go into a country, not respect the laws, the culture, set up a profitable business, and then send that money back to another country.
It doesn't seem like a sustainable model. No.
And you have no investment in that country. We want people who have investments in a place to care about.
Well, if the workers get really pissed, then maybe I'll have to pay higher taxes. So then we're going to focus on making the workers not pissed.
Or if people get really miserable, then they start doing crazy things. They start rioting.
Let's make it harder for people to riot. If you don't have that investment in the local community, then I think that's what this leads to.
And to your point, yeah, I think we should basically ban foreign asset purchases of American land. You grew up in an area of Virginia, or it might not have been Virginia.
Well, so yeah. It's Appalach I'm born and raised in Ohio, right? But my family's sort of all from the Appalachian part of Eastern Kentucky.
Okay. I think of that all as Virginia, but I know that that's not, I know that that's not the case.
That's a very LA way of thinking about things, right? I thought Ohio was like greater as ice and heroin but fun at like music festivals. I didn't think of it.
I thought of it like, you know,

more white rapper vibes in your mind it's like california yeah new york and then just everything and then it's now chicago and then fence but that's what it's becoming we got to stop it from becoming that right now what were the lessons that you learned because your book Elegy, was a hit. It was a bestseller.
It's a movie as well. What were your takeaways? Because I know people that loved the book and disagreed with some of your takeaways.
Of course. And these people probably know better than you because they live in Santa Monica.
But what? And they go, I don't think he's right about that. The real Appalachia is santa monica what well by the way it is if i'll take you there and it doesn't look at this at this point newsom's turned it into that um what were your takeaways because you're not the i mean the fact that you were able to you know go to yale law school sure you know mount a successful senate campaign you sitting here running for vice president, you come out of an area where circumstances for a lot of people are dire.
Yeah. And it's a deindustrialized area, there are there's drug problems.
What are the takeaways in your book when you look at the things that plague that area, and then how to restore it. Sure.
Well, it's, it's, I'd say separating categories, right? There's the personal takeaway and then there's like the policy takeaway, right? Because at some level, if you're just a person growing up in a community that's been de-industrialized, left behind, you kind of have to deal with the hand that you were dealt. And that's like what really the book was about is like, you know, what do you do now that this thing has already happened? And for me, you know, the biggest thing that I take, I took away from my youth is, you know, one, have a sense of gratitude, even though we didn't have a whole lot, I tried to be grateful for my grandparents for sacrificing for me, because that prevented me from being resentful and seeing myself as a victim, right? When I graduated from high school I was a pretty resentful kid.
I definitely saw myself as, oh, everybody else has more than I do. And seeing yourself as a victim, I think, is a really, really destructive thing for a person.
But then there's a policy takeaway from it, which is, why are we dealing so many shitty hands to people to begin with? My job as a vice president is different from my job as an 18-year-old kid who just wanted to live a good life. My job as vice president is to make sure that as many kids in our country as possible have a pretty good starting hand, as opposed to a really crappy one.
And I think the only way to do that, if you look historically, if you look at just our own country, the only way to build a sustainable middle class is to have a viable manufacturing economy.

Because think about this. If you're a lawyer, okay, you're litigating, you're doing corporate deals.
Well, who are you litigating about and who are you doing corporate deals with if there isn't a foundation to the economy, right? If you're a banker and you're doing trading or you're doing capital investment, what are you investing in if not the underlying foundation of the economy? The economy's foundation has to be the real stuff. It's ag.
It's manufacturing. It's making things.
It's doing things. And then all the other services are built up around the real economy.
I think the conceit of Americans, American leaders, I should say, in 2024 is the idea that you can have everybody working in tech and finance and advertising. Well, you can't.
What products are you advertising? What technologies are you developing if the underlying real economy isn't strong? What are the bankers investing in if there isn't anything there? And I think that's actually where, you know, while, yes, things have gotten really bad under Kamala Harris's leadership, if we go down this pathway another 10 years, and our share of manufacturing GDP goes from 18% to 10%, then the lawyers and the bankers are going to realize that they don't have good jobs either. And that's when they're actually going to realize that Donald Trump was right all along.
Right. Two more questions.
Yeah. I really appreciate doing this.
How do you prevent tech censorship? We've talked about it. It's a huge problem.
I mean, I know it's a tough thing to have an exact answer for, but what are some thoughts? So very simply, and this is like not a traditional Republican answer, but the Google antitrust lawsuit that's moving through the courts right now was actually started under Donald Trump's administration. I think you have to break these companies up.
I think they're too big. They become monopolists.
They've become too powerful. And frankly, they became too powerful thanks to government privileges, right? These aren't like natural monopolies that just came up out of the free market.
They were handed special favors by the government. They used that power to become monopolists.

And now they tell Americans what they can or can't say. I don't think there's actually a way to solve it.

Like if Google is so big, it's extremely hard to be able to like ensure that Google doesn't engage in censorship.

I just think these companies have to be separated.

So break up the companies.

Yes.

So the last question is the toughest one.

For the last five years, I have doneian missionary work in africa with governor waltz and literally we have not seen i thought you were serious for the first couple seconds where the hell is this going me and governor waltz have been in africa converting people feeding them and to the fact that we've never seen you there, and we've both been there, and they'll tell you as well. They'll tell you as well.
He seems like a fun guy. He seems like a fun guy.
Was he fun at the debate? Was he fun? He seems fun. I like making things up.
I mean, fun is one way to say it. Yeah.
You know, he honestly at the debate, I felt bad, man. Yeah.
Because, all right, so my wife, one of her great, you know, character attributes, but also one of her flaws is that she cannot be dishonest with me. Sure.
Like if I screwed something up, she won't be like, oh, yeah, you did great. She'll say it, right right so i come off the debates stage and her face is lit up right like she's so happy yeah and then i look over at glenn waltz and glenn waltz looked like she just showed up to a funeral yeah and i was like oh shit this went really well for me and this went really poorly for him yeah i look i honestly think my honest assessment is that he's probably a pretty nice guy right i don't know him well he's probably a pretty nice guy do i think that he should be vice president no no it's minnesota and it's fine yeah but it's a tundra but but aside aside from policy differences i just don't think the guy has the depth to be president like i i hate to sound like you know president trouble always says this you want your leaders to be smart right right you want them to actually care about the stuff that they're doing in government.
When I hear Tim Walz, but especially, oh Lord, when I hear Kamala Harris talk, I think to myself, she has no idea what the hell she thinks. And that is scarier than me disagreeing with her on any policy issue, right? But, you know, look, I'm thrilled to hear that Tim Walz did missionary work in Africa.
Yes. You know, you guys are both great humanitarians.
I think, did you serve with him in Iraq? Well, actually in the Ukraine. Okay, you guys.
We actually, as soon as that happened, we went over and fought valiantly for a year in the Ukraine. And then he went and marched in Tiananmen Square.
Yeah, we've done a lot. I mean, that's the thing about Tim Walsh.
He's the Forrest Gump of politics, right?

Every time something big has happened in world history,

Tim Walsh has been there to observe it and just to see it up close and personal.

And by the way, whatever your attacks on, your baseless attacks on Kamala Harris,

if she doesn't know something, I feel good as an American knowing that Dick Cheney will tell her.

J.D. Vance, thank you very much.

Thanks, man. Good to see you.

Thank you for doing this. Appreciate it.

Thank you, Bob.