E540 Sen. JD Vance

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And thank you so much for the support.

I want to start by saying that we have reached out to Governor Walz and Vice President Harris,

and we would love to have them in studio as well.

Today's guest is a senator from the state of Ohio.

He's currently on the Republican ticket for vice president. Uh, he's a Yale graduate.
He's a Marine. Uh, he's an author.
Uh, he wrote the book Hillbilly Elegy. Uh, I've read about half of it and, uh, I'm really grateful to spend time with him today to discuss some issues and get to know him.
Today's guest is Mr. J.D.
Vance. But then it starts to become more interesting.
Like the last woman we had on trains cats around the country. Really? With a traveling cat circus.
That's pretty amazing. So that's who you're following up.
That's right. That's way more interesting than a politician, man.
Just so you know where you are, you know, Mr. Vance.
Call me J.D., please. Just so you know where you are, J.D., in the existence of things.
J.D. Vance, thanks for coming in today, man.
Yeah, man. It's good to be here.
I really appreciate it. I just went to Lambeau Field the other day.
Have you ever been there? I don't think I ever have been to Lambeau Field, but I think I'm going to Lambeau Field tomorrow. Nuh-uh.
Yeah, yeah. I'm pretty sure.
I mean, running for vice president, you never know where you are day to day, but I'm pretty sure we're going to the Packers game tomorrow. Wow.
Yeah. Dude, it was so good.
Did you have fun? It's amazing. Yeah, we just went.
I had a show there the night on a Saturday night last Saturday, so we just got to go do a tour. Okay.
But, yeah, it's just so wild. You drive into this, you know, it's a small city and you're like, wait, there's an NFL team here.
It doesn't make sense really. Yeah.
Like the NFL team in some ways, right? I mean, the Packers are so popular, but no, I'm looking forward to going. I mean, it's kind of like a political rite of passage because like I have a guy served with the Senate, Ron Johnson, really good dude.
He's a senator. He's a senator from Wisconsin, Wisconsin.
And he's just talking about like, you know, you go to you do the tailgate thing at Lambeau Field if you're running for office in Wisconsin and Wisconsin is like a big battleground state. Yeah.
So I'm gonna go and check it out. We're bringing our kids with us, actually, which I don't know what we do with our kids.
Cause there's seven, four, and two. I don't think they're going to be that into a tailgate.
So maybe, you know what I'm saying? So maybe my wife will take them somewhere and I'll go like have fun at the tailgate, but I'm, I'm looking forward to it because I'm a pretty big football fan. Yeah.
Lambeau field is like, you know, Oh yeah. When we saw it, Oh, I didn't know what to do when we saw it.
I didn't i didn't know yeah like and there was some kids were crying and stuff and the parents were like kind of wiping their cheeks with cheese or whatever but it was like um yeah it was really interesting but wait were they were crying because they were so excited to be at lambo field they were crying i i so are you are you a big football guy yeah okay so i'm a big college football guy yeah i'm more of a college football guy but guy? Yeah. Okay.
So I'm a big college football guy.

Yeah.

I'm more of a college football guy, but I like both.

So I'm an Ohio state guy.

I went to Ohio state, you know, born and raised in Ohio.

But you know, there, there's like the Ohio state, Michigan rivalry is one of the big, big rivalries.

And this happens of course, after, after the election.

So I'm hoping to go to the game, but you talk about like a kid crying at a football field.

This is, this reminds me of a story is like one of my my dear friends and he's like otherwise a nice guy but ohio state michigan just turns into a he turns into a total animal so this is 2006 who is he the senator you're talking about no no no it's totally different guy this is a buddy i've known so i was like five years old okay just a guy back home We go to the Ohio state Michigan game. Uh, we're number one, they're number two.
I think we win that game like 42 39. It was very, very tight game.
I don't remember the exact score and we're leaving and there's this family and this kid is like, you know, there it's a family of Michigan fans and this kid is crying. And you know, my buddy goes up to him and he, you know, I'm like, Oh, you know, Bill's going to be going to be sweet to this family.
Welcome to Ohio. Glad you guys come to the game.
Sorry it didn't work out. And my buddy goes, are you sad that Michigan lost? And the little boy goes, yeah.
And he says, well, maybe next time you won't root for a team that sucks and walks off. And I was like, oh, shit, Bill.
We should try to be nicer to the new cars. But then, like, you realize that's actually.
Bill is not a concierge. No, no.
But that's why Ohio State and Michigan hate each other, right? Because that kid was probably nine years old. So this is 2006.
I mean, he's, I don't know, close to 25 now. He probably still remembers that asshole from Ohio State.
He was crying after a game a game and like that's what makes the rivalry now that kid is tom brady yeah that's right exactly that's how it gets oh dude i remember the craziest thing i ever saw was there was a mexican father and son bawling crying when the rock came back one night at wwe yeah standing there together same height That's a bawling crying when The Rock came back one night at WWE. Yeah.
Standing there together, same height, bawling crying. They both had belts on, and it was like, yeah.
Yeah, I mean, those are – It's like the little rituals that actually make life worth it, man. Oh, yeah.
But definitely – I mean, like my son, he's seven now, but I took him to the Ohio State-Michigan game. I think the last, well, I took him to the game last year, but then we watch it even when he's like four years old.
And Michigan has beat Ohio State the last three years. And so it's just like, you know, the first time I ever saw my kid cry over sports event was last year at the Ohio State-Michigan game.
When when when when Michigan beat Ohio state yeah oh when you cry when your team wins that means something is probably you have parenting issues in your home I feel like you know that's right that's definitely right that's definitely right but I mean it's it's like I mean Ohio state just lost to Oregon a couple you know like a week ago I guess and you sort, like, I get so much joy out of watching sports and like taking my son to the Ohio State Michigan games, like one of the coolest moments of my life as a father. But then it almost always ends in heartbreak.
Yeah. Right.
Because only one team actually wins the championship. And I sometimes wonder, like, why do we put ourselves through this? It's so true.
That's such that it is. Yeah.
At a certain point, you're the odds are you're going to face not feeling great. Yeah.
That it's going to end. Right.
Yeah. I mean, like, I guess the one team in my lifetime, like the Bulls in the 90s, Chicago Bulls in the 90s and the Patriots when they had the Brady Belichick run, like most of the time you're actually happy if you're a fan of that team.
But I mean, like I'm a Bengals fan in pro sports and like they made the Super Bowl a few years ago and it was so cool. Yeah, I remember that against 49ers.
Wasn't it against the 49ers? It's funny. I don't even remember who they were playing against, but I remember they lost at the very end.
It was a very close game. We almost put it off.
But then it's like all the joy turned into complete sadness like i'm a grown man on the verge of tears because a fucking sports team that i root for lost a game like wait you know wake up man i think i wonder what it is maybe it's just like sorry i just don't say the f word or no it's okay dude make sure people still vote for me if it's too many f bombs, I'm going to lose too many votes. So I'll try to tone it down.
Okay. Yeah.
If you say more than seven or eight, I'll tap you on the shoulder. Yeah.
Dude. Oh, I actually my ribs, dude, I've been on a, um, like almost like just on bed rest the past like eight days because I, I was at the Vanderbilt game when they beat Alabama two weeks ago.

That was a big one.

And some guy, I don't even know him,

I got a little bit of a look at him,

and he squeezed me so hard he kept squeezing me.

And I was like, don't squeeze me anymore.

And then he squeezed me even more.

Was it a happy squeeze?

You could hear my ribs. Like, dude, they really.
Like the oxygen leaving your lungs. Yeah.
Please don't go. That song, babe, I love you.
Ribs that had never been away from me. Like they were leaving home for the first time.
Wait, but was he squeezing you because he was happy? He was happy. Okay, so this wasn't like a.
So I was smiling, dude. My smile hit.
I mean, the more he squeezed the edges of my smile, you could hear him ding against my earlobes. He squeezed me as much as somebody could be squeezed.
His wife is not doing well if that guy has a wife. I'll tell you that.
Because that. Anyway, my ribs, I've been having to ice them, dude.
It's been miserable. Oh, really? So you may have actually cracked a rib.
It sucks, but it was awesome. But it's like, yeah, the pain you go through to be associated with it.
I mean, look, my, so like I've only been to the game in Ann Arbor once. And, you know, Ohio State fans again.
Oh, is it weird going up in that territory? People throwing beer bottles at us, sometimes full beer cans at us. I had some kid run up.
He was like a 19-year-old kid run up from behind me, and it had been raining a lot that day. And he had like, like he'd taken a chunk of mud out of the ground and shoved it in my mouth.
I mean, again, this is like what these sports rivalries are built around is moments like this. But we had, I guess, won four years in a row.
That's reforestation, isn't it? That's right. But man, we'd won four years in a row.
And this girl, she's like 22 years old. She gets in my buddy's face and she said, this is my senior year.
You ruined my college career because you guys beat us four years in a row. And then she takes a swing at him and a cop tackles this 22 year old girl down the bleachers.
And I'm just, you know, like, man, again, yeah, people get injured. People get injured at sporting events.
It's crazy. Oh yeah.
I thought for a second, I thought you were describing a wedding in Appalachia. That's what I thought for a second.
We've had, we've had, we've had, we've had some of those too. I'm just joking i'm just joking um we had billy strings and he's a guy who does a lot of uh picking he does like a lot of guitar picking and stuff okay he talked a lot about um his environment where he grew up he grew up in like his area had a lot of addiction in it and stuff like that what part of west virginia is he from um oh who's this guy he's from lansing michigan but he grew up, he grew up in Kentucky.
I'm ruining it. Well, but a lot of people, this is like the story of my life, but a lot of people from Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, their families are all from West Virginia, East Kentucky, East Tennessee.
And then they moved up for the factory jobs. Oh yeah.
Like there's a really cool song by Dwight Yocum called a reading, writing route 23. And it's like, in some ways it's like the story of my family because he came from like two counties over, he moved to central Ohio instead of Southern Ohio.
But, um, I mean, it's like millions of people, it was a massive, massive thing. So I wouldn't be surprised even that guy's from Michigan.
If he's got like West Virginia family, I don't know that guy though. Yeah.
Billy strings's great he's and he's a new guy too and he'll take you fishing if you want to go but he um he uh just has a fascinating story of just like growing up and what his life was like um and playing music through it all and learning music and um how that kind of kept him going and kept him um gave him something to do really um yeah was that migration? Why did people migrate from there to...

Yeah, it was...

I mean, at least the biggest thing is you think about it.

So World War II ends, right?

America's the biggest industrial power in the world.

And a lot of these factories are coming online

close to where they had access to waterways

because you've got to ship iron ore and coal and all that stuff. So a lot of stuff around the Great Lakes, that's Michigan, Ohio, a lot of coal in Pennsylvania.
And so you had all these steel mills and, you know, textile factories and, you know, like automobile plants, of course, in Michigan and all this stuff is getting built. And then it's actually what's interesting about it is you had a lot of black people come from the deep South and then a lot of primarily white people come from Appalachia and they sort of migrated together to all these factories.
And like, you know, there are books written in Detroit about, you know, the, you've got like, basically the hillbillies from Appalachia, the black people from the deep South, and they're just kind of like tossed in to Detroit. And like a lot of what we think of as sort of modern Detroit culture is like the fusion of those two groups of people who just dropped in in massive, massive numbers.
And it's like one of the stories of like why is Chicago such a big blues town? Because all the black folks from the Deep South were moving in and they were bringing their music with them. That's why Chicago became such a capital for blues.
It's not really like, it's because all those folks who came from the Delta. So it's basically jobs, man.
I mean, there wasn't, my mamaw talked about this. That's what I called my grandmother.
She talked a lot about how, if you were growing up in Eastern Kentucky in the 30s and 40s, it it was like basically you could go work in the mines or get out. Like that was all there was at that time.
And so my grandfather went and worked at a steel mill, built a pretty good life, was a union welder for 40 years. Oh, yeah, we just had a union president on.
Oh, yeah, I listened to that one. I like that guy.
Sean O'Brien, he's wild. Yeah, he is's, I mean, it's funny, man.
You can tell he's from Boston. He's got that thick Boston accent, but he's a, he's a, he's a cool dude.
Um, I actually, I've talked to Sean a couple of times and you know, it's like normally, and you know, it's like normally Democrats are considered sort of the pro union. And then, you And then 30 years ago, Republicans were the anti-union.

And one of the things I've been talking a lot about, people like Sean, is a lot of union members are coming over to the Republican side.

And I think the Republican Party, we've got to do, frankly, a better job at kind of welcoming people.

But I think Trump is doing a really good job of making union voters feel at home in our coalition, which is like an interesting part of what, you know, what we're all about. I mean, I think, you know, so Sean's the head of Teamsters, I think.
Yeah. And there was some poll they did just of Teamsters members where it's like 65% of Teamsters in Pennsylvania are going to vote for Trump.
That's a crazy turnaround from even 15 years ago. Yeah, they couldn't endorse.
Usually they are. There's only been two times where they haven't endorsed a candidate in the past 30 years, I think, or maybe past 50 years.
Yeah. But this would be one of those times, they said, I think, because it's just, it's too split.
Yeah. So do you have to ask Trump places you can go to promote or to campaign? What does that relation, how does that work? Yeah, no, it's, it's, it's actually mostly driven at like the staff level.
Right. And so a strategy kind of, yeah, it's like strategy.
So, so, okay. There are seven big battleground states.
It's the three in the Midwest are Michigan, Wisconsin, Pennsylvania, and then Georgia, Arizona, Nevada, and North Carolina. And so it's like, you look at a little bit, it's driven by polling, a little bit it's driven on just like, where do you think this guy's gonna do the best? And I've spent a ton of my time, like I think I did like six or five or six events just in Pennsylvania the past week and a half.
So I've spent a lot of time in Pennsylvania, a lot of time in Michigan, a lot of time in Wisconsin. I'm actually trying to get Kid Rock to go with me to Michigan in a couple days because he's a Michigan guy.

Oh, he'll go.

Yeah, he probably will.

Yeah, he'll go, dude.

He'll love it.

Yeah.

He texted me last night.

I mean, you can't see,

but my cousin,

for those of you who are watching,

my cousin's here.

She's more like my big sister.

But we're hanging out.

I went to a wedding last night.

Oh, nice.

My little cousin got married

and Kid Rock sends me a text message.

He's like, hey, if you're in Nashville,

because I guess he knew I was doing this podcast.

I love you. hanging out.
I went to a wedding last night. Oh, nice.
My little cousin got married and Kid Rock sends me a text message. He's like, hey, if you're in Nashville, because I think he, I guess he knew I was doing this podcast.
Well, some people were going over there. What do you mind? I was texting he's like, hey, we're going over to Bob's.
And I was like, I got to prepare for this podcast tomorrow. Vance is coming on.
Yeah. Maybe that's how he knew.
Cause he texted me and I was like, oh man, I want to fly to Nashville right now just so I can party with Kid Rock. Right.
I mean, like that's a that's a that's experience of a lifetime. So now I'm trying to get him to go to Michigan with me.
But oh, I'm sure he probably would, man. Oh, yeah, dude.
He's if he's one of a kind. Yeah.
But anyway, answer your question. It's basically you go where the campaign needs you to go.
Right. And like, yeah, I could say no, but I'm like running for vice president.
So I try to do as much as I can just to be helpful. And do y'all have, do you go with Donald Trump? Do you guys go separately a lot of times? Do you guys have like strategy talks in the mornings and stuff? Like, is it, what is it like? Yeah, it's, it's more informal.
Is it like doubles tennis kind of? Yeah. It's more divide and conquer, right? So it's like, you got two people and you can be in two places so you might as well do it but if we got like a really big event like you know the president got shot in in bucks county or sorry which time are you talking about the first time okay first time he got shot in um in in pennsylvania and so we went out to pennsylvania together to do big rally.
And then Elon Musk was there. In Butler, PA, yes.
In Butler, Pennsylvania. And then, you know, like I was in Bucks County, Pennsylvania like a week earlier, but that was just me.
Right. Right.
So you sort of go, you know, some places you go together, but most of the time we're sort of dividing and conquering. How, with the attempts that they've had on Trump's life and safety, how much of a concern has that been for you? Like, because if I'm standing next to a guy and they're shooting at him, I'm next to him, you know? Yeah, I know what you mean.
I mean, I try not to think about it, man. Really? Yeah, it's just, it's one of these things you can't control.
And if you're going to do this job, you've got to go out and talk to a lot of people and you've got to go try to win, right? I fundamentally believe that we're trying to win to help the country. So either you either do it or you don't do it.
And if you do it, you just kind of accept it. I mean, I don't think there's – I don't know.
Maybe this is just me rationalizing it. I don't feel like there's that big of a target on my back but who the hell knows well you're tall are you are you a little taller than him or not yep i think we're about the same height okay yeah which is funny man the weird shit people say about you on the internet like the thing there was a long time maybe even still today if you google how tall is jd vance it would say five foot seven and I, oh, it says six to now.
Somebody updated it.

Yeah.

Somebody updated it.

Yeah.

Okay.

The first set. tall is jd vance it would say five foot seven and i oh it says six two now somebody updated it yeah um okay the first headline is jd vance is tall but americans are getting shorter what the hell is the internet's a weird it also says joe biden is six foot sleep i don't know if that's a height we'll see this is a thing though how tall is jd vance we found there was like a conspiracy on the internet that i was a really short guy but yeah no i'm sick i'm about six two i think yeah once you get better people helping you get you hype you get you get you're pretty tall you get a little bit tall i'm six feet tall yeah i'm six feet tall if this rib gets back in place i'm six foot and a half inch brother i'll tell you that um so there's did you have to ask your wife about that like say hey like did she have to weigh in because that's a little because i'm trying to think of other jobs where you get shot at really military um domestic violence i guess and then politician politician i mean normally politicians don't get shot at that much but apparently it's coming back apparently it's coming back man that's not that's not like a good thing But I also, I mean, it's, it's, I definitely grew up, um, like, and I grew up in Ohio, but I spent a lot of time in Eastern Kentucky.
Yeah. And if you go to like, there's a courthouse in Breathitt County, Kentucky, I mean, beautiful part of the country, like kind of in the mountains.
And there's like a plaque, like a historical plaque. That's basically like, you know, on this site, multiple people were killed in the Breathitt County blood feuds of the early, you know, the early 20th century.
So I don't know, you just kind of kind of accept it as bad as it is. I mean, I want us to get away from it, right, as a country, but as an individual candidate, I think you just have to kind of accept it.
I mean, I'll tell you. But I guess if you're going into battle, you're going into battle.
That's right. That's right.
You just got to do what you got to do. Yeah.
But again, I'm, you know, I'm like, I'm a, I'm a person of faith. I don't talk about it that much.
I don't wear it on my sleeve. I always sort of mistrust people who wear it too much on their sleeve.
But if you're like, you know, if God wants me to view, be vice president, I'll be vice president. If, if not, then I won't.
Yeah. You know, you just got to work your ass off and let the chips fall where they may.
Yeah. I saw, I saw where you had, your mom was out and you congratulated her on, she almost has 10 years of sobriety.
You said, that's right. Yeah.
She's in January, January of 2025. She will be 10 years clean and sober.
And that's really funny. Cause you know, she's standing next to you there.
Uh, that's Mike Johnson, the speaker of the house. Oh yeah.
Oh, yeah. And my family's not very political.

So they bring her up to this booth, and two chairs over is Donald Trump.

Of course, she knows who that is.

But she shakes Mike Johnson's hand, and he's like, you know, lovely to meet you.

And she says, lovely to meet you, too.

Who are you?

Do you work in politics?

It's like, Mom, that's the Speaker of the House.

Okay.

She's like, well, I'll take a McDouble. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
That's right. You can get a Diet Coke with extra ice.
What was – yeah, I know your mom struggled with alcoholism, right? Addiction? Mostly, yeah, mostly drugs. I never saw her, you know, drink that much, but I mean, you know, pills, opioids, heroin.
Um, what's it been like to watch her get sober? What's that been like? It's amazing, man. It's, it's amazing.
I know you're, you're, what, what are you, you're, you're recovery. Yeah.
A lot of my family's in it too. So I think that, yeah, I can, I can relate a lot to your story to be honest with you.
Yeah. But I mean, I mean, look, I mean, there was a time like I always, you know, always wanted to grow up and have a family.
And I remember when I was a teenager thinking to myself, there's no way mom's going to be around to meet. Like if I have kids, there's no way my mom's ever going to meet them.
And, um, you know, she's now like, she's now a great grandmother to, to the three grand But I don't know, man, it's just, if you've known anybody in this circumstance, it sounds like, you know, very well what it's like is there's like this, there's two feelings that you have, or at least always two feelings I had when mom was going through it is like, on the one hand, she's so smart, she's so funny. And you're just like kind of rooting for her because you just wanted to get better.
Then on the other hand, you're just pissed off. It's like, you know, because you don't quite understand it.
I think if you're not in recovery yourself, it's hard to fully understand. And, um, you know, so that you'd be frustrated with her one moment and then just desperate for her to get better the next moment.
And you're constantly bouncing back and forth, but man, it's, it's amazing. It really is.
I mean, she, you know, she was at the wedding we were at last night and just having a good time and being her like funny, quirky self. She has a good sense of humor.
She's a very good sense of humor. Um, I mean, you know, like the bride and groom, this really cool tradition where they had like an each table wine bottle with a number on it.
And then like at the table one, they'd open the bottle of wine, the first anniversary and table two, the second anniversary and so forth. And they had people write stuff in Sharpies on the wine bottle.
I'd never seen that. I thought it was a pretty cool, a little thing.
Um, and my mom, I forget what table she was in, but you know, like 10 years down the road. And she just, she writes something on, on her bottle, like, like, Hey, I love you.
Hopefully I'm still alive when you're drinking this.

She's just got like, and again, she's like a kind of a morbid, quirky sense of humor.

But yeah, man, it's really amazing because, again, I just never thought she'd be alive when I was 40 years old.

And she is.

And she's got a good relationship with her family and her grandparents or her grandkids.

And that's just a very cool thing. Yeah, it's a blessing, man.
That's awesome. It is a blessing.
It was really cool to see that. Did you ever go to meetings with her? Did she go to you have been before? Yeah, I've been to a lot of NA meetings.
When you were growing up, did you ever go or no? Yeah, I went when I was a kid. I went when I was a teenager.
I mean, I've been to a lot actually just in the past few years because she's, you know, that like she's really on the other side of it she does a lot with her local I think she's the treasurer, the secretary of her local Lene chapter do you ever go to meetings or anything? I went to one I was at one last night at 8 I mean there's actually a really special community around it which I really like like. And it almost kind of reminds me of church, right? 100%.
Where you say these prayers and you talk about what's going on. And there's like this sense of fellowship and community that I think is really awesome.
And it's like one of these things where you see just human nature and all of its good sides and its bad sides, right? Because sometimes you have people who come in and they're getting their 24 hour medallion. Yeah.
Right. Which is like, this is the first real period of sobriety I've had in a very long time.
And then sometimes you have people who are celebrating 15, 20, 25 years. And it's just amazing to see.
But I don't know if you noticed this, but something I noticed, and it's, you know, it's not to get too political here, but, you know, like five, six, seven years ago, you know, you start noticing this and then it really started picking up a few years ago where you have somebody who's been, say, six months or nine months sober, and then they don't come to a couple meetings and then they're just dead and you realize like when people relapse when mom was in the worst of it yeah there was some dangerous shit out there but it wasn't nearly as deadly as the stuff that's out there today oh yeah and i i really worry about that right because you know think about the second chance I got with my mom. And I really worry that the poison that we've got in the streets now is so dangerous that a lot of people would have that second chance.
But you fall off the wagon once, 15 years ago, it's like, oh, that sucks. I'm going to climb back on.
Today, you fall off that wagon, it might kill you about that. Cause I think a lot of, a lot of good people, you know, like mom, it didn't happen like once, right? It's not like she got clean and sober and that was it, right? It's a process.
Fall off a few times. Yeah.
You got to get back on. It's a process, man.
Yeah. I've had relapses over the years and had to get back on and it's, it's tough.
And one of the tougher things to do is to get back on. But it's funny because I think if – I don't know if I'd be sober if this stuff weren't killing people, to be honest with you.

I know that's sad to say.

But that keeps me out of the risk of it.

It just makes it too –

Makes it a little scarier.

Yeah, that's the thing.

It makes it scarier.

But it's also sad that somebody – I mean, this is ridiculous to say probably that somebody can't, you know, you can't even do cocaine in this country anymore, you know? And that seems like a crazy thing to say. Don't say that.
Don't say that. But I said it.
But, but yeah, but don't say that anymore. I'm going to steal that line.
After the election though, man, I, we had to win first. It's unfortunate.
To be clear to those watching, I've never done cocaine before. Yeah.
And nobody's saying- I've made many mistakes, but not that one. Nobody's saying, yeah.
But it's just, it's unfortunate that, it's, I don't even know where to go. I know what you mean, but it's unfortunate that like, look, everybody makes mistakes.
Right. Everybody makes mistakes.
Right. And like, I'm not, I know as a buddy of mine told me about this, um, this is hell, this has got to have been three years ago.
Um, it's been a while, but basically what happened is his daughter was like a bridesmaid in a wedding and they were going to this wedding and like the wedding got canceled because a couple of the groomsmen like had terrible overdoses the night before at the bachelor party because they took something. Like, you know, you can judge and say, oh, they shouldn't have been taking something.
But everybody takes something at some point in their lives. Like we don't want it to kill people.
We don't want stupid mistakes to kill people. That's sort of like live and learn, live and learn from stupid mistakes.
Right, you used to be able to live and learn. Yes, now it becomes a death sentence.
And that's what's really, I think, changed about from now to when my mom was struggling with addiction. Why is it so bad? Like, do you know a lot about the fentanyl crisis? I mean, I know a fair amount about it.
You know, I've, I've, I've worried about it for a long time. I've, I've, you know, worked on bills related to it.
I mean, there, there are two basic issues, right? And it's, it's like, you know, any business, there's a manufacturer, there's a wholesaler, and then there's the retail, right? And, you know, with, with fentanyl, it's, it's not, you can't like make fentanyl in a trailer in somebody's basement.

It's not like meth. It takes a really complicated, pretty sophisticated pharmaceutical process.
So we know that a lot of it, maybe even most of it, the Chinese are making, meaning Chinese companies, not like necessarily the Chinese government, but they sure as hell know about it. And then they bring it in primarily through the southern border.
and the Mexican drug cartels are like the wholesalers, right,

of the Chinese pharma pharma is the manufacturer the drug cartels are bringing in wholesale style and then it makes it in the street level wow and um i mean it's really crazy man like i was talking to a da agent about this a couple years ago and i think this was in this was, he was like, look, a few years ago, the cartels were making less than a billion dollars a year. And he's like in 22, 23, we think they'll make $14 billion a year.
So like an explosion of drug trafficking in this country. And yeah, you hear about stories and I don't think it happens that much.
Thank God. But somebody smokes a joint.
It's laced with fentanyl. They go into a coma.
Yeah. I mean, I have seven friends that have that.
I have seven friends and not even just like estranged people, you know, like, but not all best friends. Sure.
But I have seven friends that overdosed and died from fentanyl. Yeah.
Yeah. That's me.
Right. And it, yeah.

And it happened with harder stuff.

It happens a lot.

Like I think,

you know,

you hear about it being laced in marijuana,

but like not that much.

Yeah.

But I mean, you're pointing about cocaine,

pills,

like you have to be careful.

Like seriously.

It's a huge thing.

It's an unbelievable crisis.

And it's like,

yeah,

you'd think that we,

I don't know how you fight something like that. Maybe we need to have like a head of like the DEA or something on.
Maybe he would be able to help or she would be able to help us figure that out a little bit. I think that'd be a very interesting conversation.
But I think you've got to go to it at the heart. And something Trump did towards the end of his administration doesn't get a whole lot of headlines.
Obviously, I'm biased. I think it should get headlines is he was using economic leverage to try to convince the Chinese to crack down on fentanyl manufacturing.
Because if you get it at the source, right, that's, I think, really the way to address it. Oh, there's fentanyl in half the bookshelves they make over there, dude.
You put a couple – you put a fucking half a set of dictionaries and that bitch will give way. I mean, I absolutely believe that.
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But you, I mean, you do that. You go after the drug cartels.
The other thing that people don't realize about the cartels, man, is one, we're talking about some very dark and dangerous people. Like this is not some guy who's like dealing, you know, selling joints on a college campus.
These are like, they're doing sex trafficking. They're, they're, they're, they're, they're getting 11, 10 year old girls involved in the sex trade.
Yeah. They're like very evil people.
Dictator type of like. Oh, just absolutely vile.
And it's, it's like, why, why are we making it easier for these, this like massive criminal organizations to get richer and richer and richer like we should be trying to make them poor and i mean you know help yeah help people actually need it well it's also it's obviously one of the biggest enemies that's right it's like if there were an enemy that were killing if somebody if there were somebody shooting in your country every day and killing people yeah at a certain point you'd go over there or you'd send your military there or do something to say, hey, we're not going to let you do this anymore. That's basically what's happening.
That's right. Can you imagine if Mexico sent gunmen across the border and killed 70,000 Americans a year? Because that's about what dies from fentanyl.
We would be in a major war, right? We just absolutely would be the case. So the other thing that's crazy about this is, so these cartels, and you see this graphic that helps pretty interesting there, but the cartels are going to start to destabilize the country of Mexico.
Do you know his name Pablo Escobar? Yeah, I do. Okay, so like the Colombian cartels in the 70s were as powerful as like the Colombian government, right? It was a narco state.
You don't want that to happen like right at the American southern border where the drug cartels have more power than the Mexican government. That's just going to be chaotic.
It's going to be basically a warlike atmosphere on our southern border. That's bad news.
Well, it's bad news, but it'd be great to figure out a way to shut it down. I mean, it just feels like, yeah, if that many people are dying each year, if there were actual people shooting at these people, we would send people there in a heartbeat.
Right. And I think that's what we have to do.
I think not that we have to send people to Mexico, but I think that we actually have to have a military response at the southern border. A hundred percent.
Because these are such vicious people. And I think local law enforcement, they're telling us they're overwhelmed by some of these guys.
And we've got to be willing to send our best people, our best fighters to get control of the southern border. I think that's the most important issue confronting the country.
Because look, I mean, how do you even measure the human cost of 70,000 people, many of them in the prime of their life? And the ripple effect of it too, in their families. The orphans, the parents that are heartbroken.
I mean, how many kids are, like, this is my story, right? That's why my grandmother raised me is because my mom struggled with addiction. Luckily, my mom got clean.
You've got hundreds of thousands of children who are being raised by their grandparents or their aunts and uncles. Like that is an unspeakable human tragedy, man.
Especially when we can do better. We could do so much better and we're failing right now.
And that's, you know, one of the reasons why I'm here. One of the reasons why I'm running.
Yeah. What was it like growing up like with an alcoholic mother? Like no judgment against your mother.
This is just to look at it, right? Yeah, sure. I appreciate that.
Yeah. What what is that like? Like, is it hard to make a connection with your mom? Like, what are some of the side effects of that on a child? Yeah, I mean, I definitely think there's a you get very careful about who you allow yourself to get close to.

That's one big part of it.

You're never quite sure whether you can trust the particular situation that you're in.

So am I still going to be living in this house three months from now?

If I have somebody – if I give somebody my address – because this is back in the 90s, right? People still wrote letters, postcards, things like that, at least a lot more than they do today.

If I give somebody my address, are they going to send me a letter? And I'm not even going to live in this place anymore because we moved around a fair amount. But I think that the thing that I took away from it is I very, even as a young kid, I sort of very neatly divided the world into like three categories of people, right? There were the helpless people, the victims, the people who needed to be helped.
There were the bad guys who were preying on the victims. And then there were the strong people who sort of stood up for, for everybody else and stood up to the bad guys.
That's like, you know, that's overly simplistic. But definitely, you know, I saw my mom growing up very much as this person who was kind of a victim and was being preyed on by bad people, right? And then the person who was sort of looking up for us and standing up for me, especially, was my grandmother.
And I think that attitude of, you know, some people are just not as strong as we wish them to be. And bad people are going to prey on them.
But it's kind of up to, you know, try to make yourself the person who can look out for people, who can protect people. And that's always what I wanted to be.
That's one thing I think I took from it. Were you able to be that for your mom, did you feel like? You know, not always, certainly.
I mean, when I was a- It's a lot of responsibility for a kid. When I was a teenager, man, I was definitely very, very selfish.
I think I got pretty resentful just with the situation. It's like, oh, other people have more money than I do.
Other people have more stability than I do. You know, other people, you know, they've got nice cars.
We don't have that. So there's definitely like a resentment that comes from it, I think.
But, you know, I left high school and enlisted in the Marine Corps, spent four years in the Marine Corps. And I think that what that really did for me was just like gave me a cool perspective.
And I probably went into the Marine Corps. I was pretty whiny, pretty resentful kid, was pissed off at my mom, was pissed off at all these other people because I didn't have the things that I thought I should have.
And then eventually, yeah, there's me when I was much, much skinnier, much better looking. Oh yeah.
The Marines, dude, that was the original Ozempic. That's right.
That's right. That's bro-Zempic, dude.
That is good. That is good.
Marines, the original Ozempic. I'm going to steal that one.
But man, yeah, I know I say this all the time, dude. If I went back to bootcamp for two months, bootcamp's three months.
If I went back to bootcamp for two months, I'd come out with a six pack. Um, but, but you know, I've, I've anyway, so Semper Fat, dude.
Sorry, that was stupid. And I don't even know if I, if you can even joke about Semper Fi and I'm no offense to any Marines.
Not at all. No, I'm sure no Marines took offense to that.
Yeah. We've done a lot of shows on military bases and stuff.
Yeah, yeah. It's usually the Army's just waiting for the Marines to get there to tell them what to do.
Yeah, that's right. That's right.
I know the chain of command. Oh, man.
But yeah, anyway. So we had a...
Yeah. I think that...
The way that I noticed it, I mean not to get too personal, but like when I – so I met my wife in law school. And it was like, you know, I dated girls in the past.
But for her, it was like, oh, my God. This is – I'm in love with this girl, right? Like I'd known her for a week and I was like, I want to marry this girl.
Yeah. And there was definitely just an element of like, it took a long time for me to get to a place where I was like, oh, I can actually trust this person.
I actually rely on this person because that's not really the experience that I had growing up is the people you trusted, the people you relied on, they would just kind of disappear. Yeah.
Sometimes through no fault of their own, but sometimes they would just disappear. And so, you know, I don't know if you'd say I have attachment issues and that's, that's something that definitely I think comes from growing up in a pretty tough, pretty chaotic environment.
But, you know, the other thing, the flip side of it is, and again, this is, this is why I talk about the Marine Corps is you have for four years in the Marine Corps, you know, like, like one of the best Marines, maybe the best Marine that I served with is this kid who grew up. He was a Puerto Rican guy from the Bronx, was a drug dealer.
Was jewelry or not? Do you wear jewelry? Um, I mean, not with uniform, right? Cause that's, yeah, maybe he did. But by the time he, you know, by the time I met him as a Marine, he did, but, but he was like, he had had a much harder life than I had.

And there was no bullshit.

There was no complaining, no whining.

He was just doing his job

and he was a good dude.

And you meet a lot of people like that

and you start to realize,

like in some ways,

you know, not having everything handed to you

is actually a blessing.

Right.

And growing up in a tough circumstance

and being able to understand

that not everybody's always had it easy.

I used to be annoyed by that, kind of complaining about it. Oh, yeah, same.
Now I sort of see it as like a good thing, right? Because I think I have a different perspective than a lot of people I spend my life around where they were born to a rich family. They went to a private school.
Everything was kind of laid out for them. Oh, yeah.
It's kind of good to not have everything laid out for you because you have to work for it a little bit more. Yeah.
That was going to be my next, my, my follow-up question that was just like, yeah, what are the, what are the positives? Like, and also, so we don't get stuck in like, you know, just in like a Debbie Downer spiral kind of, you know, cause it's okay to talk about stuff, but sometimes, you know, it's like, things can get kind of like where you're just looking at the negative things, but there's usually something positive and everything. Exactly right.
And, um, yeah, that's what I was thinking. What were some of the positives of, um, of having a childhood like that and of being, um, and I guess it would be some self-reliance.
I think, I think it's definitely some self-reliance, um, awareness probably, which is probably a curse when you're young. Cause it's feels have to be kind of scared of stuff.
But when you get older, having awareness can be pretty helpful sometimes. Yeah, I've got my head on a swivel, right? I'm always looking around corners.
I'm always kind of worried that things that aren't exactly what they seem. But I think that's made me a little less comfortable, which is a good thing, especially in the political life political life.
It's good to have your head on a swivel.

Yeah. Everybody has,

everybody in politics has a vice that's much worse than alcoholism is the way that I put it. But we, we release the list.

Seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That, that is an important thing.
we go down that rabbit hole but anyway i i guess the other thing that i i gained from is you know i i think that i'm just much i see people as people and one thing i've picked up on like i went to law school at yale and lot of them, a lot of my classmates are good people, but you're a lawyer also. Yeah.
But I sort of, as soon as I went from law school, I went to the business world. So I never really practiced law.
I was mostly a business guy. But like a lot of my friends, they, they look at people as like, where did you go to school? What are your parents do? You know, what job do you have? What credential do you have? I've never had that.
Right. And so when people like talk about politics or policy, they'll be like, oh, well, this person has a PhD.
I don't give a shit. Yeah.
They may be smart, but I don't care about. PhD is only three.
It doesn't even spell anything. Yeah, exactly.
I don't even, but I don't care about the letters. But I, but like I meet somebody and, oh, they don't have a fancy degree or they don't have a fancy job.
I still just naturally care about what they think because the way that I grew up, I just sort of see people as people. And I think that's a, that's just a very, it's a perspective that I'm glad that I have.
I think it's very much a product of how I grew up. Yeah.
I like people that have their own thing. I have't dislike somebody if they inherited everything, but I gravitate more towards people that haven't had that experience, I think, because, yeah, I don't know.
There's just something a little bit more admirable about it. I didn like it when things were handed to people I guess maybe the truth is I got upset when other people had stuff that was handed to them which probably was just normal stuff to be handed to a kid or to you know but that made me like screw that you know I'll figure this shit.
You know what I'm saying? I'll, you know. I had that exact attitude.
Yeah. When I was like 13, 14.
Yeah. Yeah.
And some of that is, it's just that rebellion at that age. What would you say? And we have a lot of audience members that have struggled with addiction or, and these days, everybody's, you can't even like, who doesn't have somebody that's in their family or something that struggled with addiction? But what suggestion or like just advice or thoughts would you give to a young person who has a parent who has alcoholism as to how to navigate that? Because I even get messages a lot from people that are like,

hey, my dad is struggling or this, what do I do?

I don't know what to do here.

Do you have any thoughts on that?

And it's not like you're a specialist.

Yeah, I'm not a specialist.

I mean, here's what I try to do.

I mean, take this for what it's worth.

But number one is you got to, if you're a kid in your environment where there's a lot of addiction, you got to make sure that you're taken care of, right? Like don't, don't get yourself in such a situation where it's not just your parent that is struggling, but it becomes you that's struggling too, right? Because you can't help them out. You can't help them out unless you're able to take care of yourself first.
Right. Right.
That's, that's number one. I think number two is as hard as it is, man, and shit, I know this very well because there were times when I had some very angry moments with my mom.
Don't get resentful and try to keep your heart as open as possible. Right.
You got to compartmentalize a little bit, right? There's, yeah, there's the addict version, but then there's the version that, you know, that read you a book when you were a kid, or there's a version that took you to, you know, your favorite movie or try to hold onto the memories that are completely divorced from the addiction. Because I think if you allow yourself to become totally resentful, then it doesn't just affect them.
It starts to affect you too, right? Don't, don't allow your parents' addiction to become something that destroys your life too. In other words, as you've got to kind of, you got to kind of keep your soul intact here.
I mean, I just, just practically go to those NA meetings. And I learned more about mom and her addiction going to those NA meetings.
And I didn't always, you know, it's not like it was like some eureka moment. Oh, there's, you know, I'm not pissed off at you anymore.
Right. But you at least understand it a little bit more and you gain some appreciation for what's going on in their life because that's a, that's a big part of it.
Yeah. And you also think about NA meetings is, is just, again, it is human nature and all of its splendor, its virtue and its vice, man.
It's just real life. The last one I went to, some dude's selling a fucking boat at one of them.
Exactly. And we're like, you can't do it.
We're trying to get off of drugs, dude. And yeah, and some guys started bidding on the boat.
I'm like, and they had made them take it outside. Yeah, because it's outside issues or whatever.
But it was like, what is even happening here? Dude, I was in a meeting. Some guy had a fish hook stuck in his freaking cheek, dude.
Really? Yeah. Wow.
Yeah. Wow.
Man. But he had two weeks clean.
Yeah. He'd either had a really bad night or a really good night.
Yeah, definitely. Maybe both.
Jesus. Yeah, who knows what happened? God dang.
It's just like, all right, dude. Catch and release, brother.
Catch and release. He probably had tried to come across the border.
Oh, we'll do that. And I only say that because we've had a couple of Border Patrol agents on here, and so we've learned a good bit about it over the years.
No, I admit I had a Border Patrol agent who's clearly. Before you go.
He's already, yeah, sorry. That's a funny story.
That statement about trying not to be resentful against your parent, because, yeah, that resentment is the seed that can lead you down some of this or activate some of the same behaviors in you. That's right.
And I'm not preaching that, but it can activate a lot of – resentment is just it's an evil seed. No, that's right.
And so many bad things can happen there. Cause it's just, that's an important message.
I never thought of that or heard it before. Well, and what you said earlier about not getting into a negative spiral, I think is, is really important.
Just, just psychologically. I mean, look, man, I know you had a tough life in a lot of ways.
Um, there are certainly some moments in my life that were pretty tough, but I've never, again, I'm not an expert. I've, you know, I've read some books on this stuff.
This is not JD Vance's expert opinion. This is just a guy talking is I really worry that a lot of the mental health stuff in 2024 is about like focusing so much on what's bad in your life that you end up wallowing in it and it becomes a sort of self-reinforcing spiral.
Like there's only so much you can, I mean, if bad shit has happened to you, there's only so much you can do to think about it and process it. And sometimes bad shit happens because it just happens, right? There's no like rationalizing, There's no like thinking through it.
And, and, and, you know, what I, what I've always found like is, is most helpful is getting outside and going for a walk. Like that made me feel way better than trying to understand why did mom do this thing when she was 13 or when I was 13 years old and she was, you know, I guess 39, uh, 30, 36, she would have been when I was 13, but like, why, why?

Right.

Still harping on it. Yeah.
I gotta go for some walks then. I mean, I go for them, but still sometimes you got some ghosts, man, but I feel you.
Yeah. But the longer you sit there and look for ghosts, all you, it's still a ghost.
It's still a ghost. And it's almost like you find more ghosts and you keep on finding them on finding them.
And then it's like, all right, man, I just, I need to go like hang out with my buddies, go for a walk and have a drink. Well, you know, not if you're dealing with addiction, but like have a drink of coffee, just like go, you know, go hang out because I really worry that like the constant wallowing is bad for us.
Yeah. We've gotten into this, definitely into a constant, into a heavy self-help type of vibe.
Yeah, yeah. You know, like every book is a self-help book.
Because self-help is great, but also you're saying, the other side of that is that you're saying that something's wrong with me, right? And so if you're always looking for ways to improve yourself, which it can be positive to do that, I've noticed in my own life, it's also a way where you're also kind of saying there's always something wrong with you. That's interesting.
So I'm in the same way that I'm always trying to get better. It's like I've obviously created then, there's something unachievable.
Yeah. Because if I'm always trying to get better, I've set this impossible course.
So really, part of me is telling me, oh, there's something wrong with you. So it becomes a little bit more about finding ways to accept myself.
Yeah, you've got to balance it, right? You've got to balance. Like, obviously, there's all things we can work on.
But it can become a self-defeating cycle if people do it. And I try to just balance it.
I mean, like about two years ago, at the end of my Senate campaign, I was just like I had gotten very overweight. And it's like, I mean, campaign is hard on the body.
You eat Chick-fil-A for breakfast. You eat Wendy's for lunch.
You eat, you know, Waffle House for dinner. Right.
After a while, that starts to catch up. Yeah.
And, you know, like I think the self. What did you get at Waffle House? Just so we know it? Oh, man, I'm an All-America Special sub grits for home fries or hash browns.
Wow. Yeah, that's...
God, I didn't even know they had home fries. Well, they have hash browns.
Sorry, they have hash browns, not home fries. Wow, they have homeless fries over there, dude.
Dude, bro. Okay, that second photo from the top, that is the All-America Special.
But again, I'm not a grits guy. So if you swap out the grits for hash browns, they don't charge you anything.
Oh, look, dude. Dude, that is a meal of champions right there.
Well, your arteries are paying a high tariff, brother. I'll tell you that.
Yes, they are. Yes, they are.
But anyway, the point- Do you get raisin toast or stick with that regular toast? I get regular toast.

Yeah, I just put a lot of jam on it.

Wow.

I'm not a big raisin guy.

Yeah.

Do you like raisins?

I like, I mean, because I like grapes that have been through something.

You know, it's just who I am, you know?

But, so yeah, I guess I do like it, you know?

I guess I like my grapes, you know, nice and clean and un-affected.

Oh, I like grapes of rat, you know, which are basically raisins. Those are basically raisins.
But anyway, I bring that up because it's like you can get into a spiral where it's like, oh, I'm unhealthy. And you beat up on yourself about it.
But like there's a good balance where you recognize you got to, you know, go for a run every now and then and take care of yourself. And that's what I've tried to do is, you know, just balance the good and the bad.
Yeah. Yeah.
Life's balanced, man. It's a good point.
Yeah. Things aren't going to be exactly.
Yeah. Things aren't going to be perfect.
You know, I always was like, I always, yeah, I created when I was a kid, like I have to be perfect and to be like accepted or whatever, you know, that was like a, like a way that i created in my life i think yeah like i well what did that look so give me like what would you try to be perfect at like school or work or or just like you know get in shape or like what like what like what's your if you're trying to get perfect what are you trying to get perfect that's the crazy part is it was almost this blind thing. I never even asked the question, hey, what am I trying to be perfect at? Oh, that's interesting.
It was just this like, the only way you're going to be seen, you have to do everything perfect, you know? Yeah. And then you'll get the, I don't know, it was just this missing thing inside of myself.
I know what you mean. I wanted to be seen.
So it was like, you have to do it perfect. Yeah.
Right. If you, cause if you do it perfect, then there would be no way it wouldn't mathematically make sense that you wouldn't be seen then.
Sure. Because that would have to be seen.
Yeah. Right.
Nobody would not see something that was done perfectly, but, but perfection was, is impossible. And so it was always, I'd always set myself up for this.
You'd always come up short, no matter what it was. And it could be in anything, something I was presenting at school, the way I was, the way I looked while you were talking to me.
Everything had to be like this. So it was this constant, I just never let my breath go, you know, and, and, and then I was always falling short.

And so then… That can be a tough way to live, man. Yeah.
Oh, it was horrible. And it fulfilled this prophecy in my head.
Oh, we fell short. You're not enough, which is what you thought in the beginning anyway, right? And I'm not saying that now.
Like, now I have different thoughts and feelings, but those were things that I… Now I'm able to look back and see, oh, that that's how I was operating. Yeah.
And just how even when I talk about it, it sounds fucking impossibly stressful. Yeah.
Yeah, it does. I mean, that's.
Yeah. Did you ever go to ACA meetings or anything like that? ACA meetings.
Like adult children of alcoholics. Did you ever go to? No, no.
I guess it's interesting. No, I never did.
Yeah. Some people don't need it.
Yeah. I mean, I think, frankly, it probably would have helped me.
Would have been useful to go to. We did sometimes, like, there was one very long-term treatment facility that mom went to.
And I guess it was kind of like that because part of that was that we would go to meetings every couple of weeks with all the kids of the people who were in. Oh, that's pretty cool.
So that may have been an ACA meeting. I just didn't know the name of it, but that was definitely interesting.
And again, it's like you go to the meetings with some of these kids and you think your life is tough and you realize, man, there's always somebody who's got it much worse than you do. Yeah.
And that's it. I think that's a good attitude to have because then you feel grateful for what you have.
That's another thing, man. Like the feeling of gratitude is so empowering.
Like if you're just grateful for what you have, you know, like, yeah, you know, you and your wife have an argument, but if you're just grateful for her, for her existence, that's such a better attitude. Your kid does something that's annoying to you, but I'm just so grateful that I have this beautiful little baby that I get to take care of.
I don't know. The feeling of gratitude, I think is a very powerful thing.
Yeah. And people say that a lot.
Did, was being a parent scary for you? Were you scared? Like, absolutely. Yeah.
Terrifying to me. Yeah, man.
I, I was just, I was taught by my childhood that most people really screw up parenting and, you know, it's, it's not just like you make a mistake, you get a bad grade or, you know, your boss is pissed off at you. So you make a mistake and you're like screwing up.
You get a bad grade that has to go stay, that stays alive. That stays alive.
You're like, damn, this C plus is having a really tough week. And, um, you know, like do you have kids? So, so, I mean, you just, you just love your much, right? I mean, you really think the sun shines out their ass.
You know, that's kind of how you see children. Oh, yeah, like care bears or whatever? That's right.
I'm like a care bear, but a living, breathing care bear. Yeah.
That you have to take care of. And so I was just really terrified because, you know, this has certainly gotten a lot better.
But, you know, when I was 27, 28, I had like a pretty bad temper. You know, like if somebody cut me off, I'd be really pissed off.
Now I don't drive anymore because I have a secret service detail, which is probably a good thing. But, but I, but I, you know, like I just think to myself, oh my God, is my kid going to do something bad and I'm going to fly off the handle? Like, you know, I worry about that.
Right. And yeah, I mean, look, certainly kids can be frustrating from time to time, but for whatever reason, I think it's partially because my wife's so patient.
It's in part just because I'm older and a little wiser is, uh, you know, it's, it's, it's really worked out and I've, you know, I've, I've screwed up and I've made mistakes as a parent. And certainly there are days where you're like, oh man, I can can't believe that I did this or that.
But one, kids are much more resilient than people give them credit for. And two, it's a learning process, man.
Yeah. And it's amazing.
I mean, kids are so, so crazy. Like the difference between our two-year-old and our seven-year-old, just in personality

and what they say,

and kids have no filter.

So one of the things that we

call on our side of the aisle

is that we'll call the news journalists,

the corporate media, I call them fake news.

You gotta be careful about

that shit, because my kid's getting

on the plane with me, my four-year-old, to come

to an event.

And somebody gets on the loudspeaker, they're saying where to sit or whatever. And he's like, Oh no, we see, he sees all these people taking photos of us and videos because I get photographed and video, you know, I'm constantly being photographed wherever I go.
And he sees these people with cameras, he goes, daddy, is that the fake news? And you, you know, you, you realize you got to be a little bit more careful about what you say. You're like, no, that's grandma.
Now smile. Okay.
That's just grandma's getting a picture of us. But yeah, I mean, it's the most rewarding thing that I've ever done.
It's definitely changed my perspective. So it surprised you against your fears kind of? It did.
It did. I mean, one, it's just not as hard, I guess, as I thought it would be.
Yeah, because that's what I just, yeah, I guess. Yeah, I don't know if I think about it being hard.
I don't know. It just feels like it would be so scary.
That's the word that comes into my head. Man, it is scary.
But it's like one of those things where you just deal with it, right? And it's kind of good to confront that fear, and then you realize it's not as bad. I mean, you know, most people will tell you like the first kid gets completely babied.
Right. Yeah.
And, you know, you, oh, you've got to put a hand sanitizer on before you touch, touch the baby when they come home from the hospital. And by the third kid, you're like, I don't, you know, you just played in the mud.
Fine. Come up, come over here.
And, and you realize that kids are, again, they're, they're much more resilient than people give them credit for. But you also, you just learn a lot about yourself.
And like the coolest thing, right? Think about my mom. I didn't think my mom would be alive when I was 40 years old.
And now I see her play Pokemon with my little seven-year-old and build a relationship with these little kids. And it's just a really, it's a really, really rewarding thing.
Does it feel like a gift that you were able to give your mom almost a, like not you were able to give it to her, but that like, you know, God gave you this series of events in your life where you get to see your mom play with this kid and you're like, man, that almost could have been me, but it does get to be me like in a weird way. Yeah, that's exactly right.
I feel like it's a gift that God gave to us where we get to have this second chance with mom. Yeah.
And, you know, we get to, wouldn't necessarily relied on mom when I was 12 or 13 because she was still, you know, still caught up in addiction. But now, like, we'll leave our kids with mom.
Wow. Like, being able to rely on her is just a very, it's a very cool thing.
You know, my wife, I remember when our kids were first born or for all this was born in 2017. And at that point, mom had been clean and sober for about a year and a half, I guess.
And like, I remember talking with my wife and she's saying like, I love your mom. I hope that she stays clean and sober, but like, we're never letting her babysit.
Yeah, it's a little early. Right? A little early.
A little early. But now like we trust her with all three of them.
Wow. And it's an amazing thing, man.
Oh yeah. And now with three kids, you'll give anybody to watch.
You know what I'm saying? If you got three kids, bro. That's true.
Anybody can watch them, dude. Yeah, that's right.
No, we... But no, I think that's really cool.
I could have just imagined, I could imagine, like, you getting to see, like, your kids be with your mom and this, it just, like, completing the eight or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Like, that symbol or whatever, you know, infinity symbol or whatever.
Yeah, yeah. You know? I can really see that.
It's just like completing the eight or whatever. You know what I'm saying? Like that symbol or whatever, you know, infinity symbol or whatever, you know? I can really see that.
It's pretty powerful. Yeah.
It's important. That's the power of like things you see through recovery and stuff too, you know? It's like that people get to just have a different life, you know? It's like you witness it all the time in the meetings and stuff.
I do anyway. Yeah, there's something something very redemptive about it, man.
And if you want to hear a miracle or something, you want to see a miracle, go to a meeting. Yeah.
You know what I'm saying? You get to see, I mean, um, and it very much is like church. It's like, sometimes people are like, you don't go to church sometimes.
I'm like, dude, I go to four, I go to church four times a week at least. Yeah.
Right. I go, I go, It's like, that's those meetings.
It really is. It's like, you get everything you could get out of.
I mean, you witness God's work just through other people, you know, I mean, much less outside of possibly in your own life. Yeah.
And they're the testimonials you hear at meetings and the courage it takes somebody who's been clean for two days to walk in and And bid on a boat. And bid on a boat.
Yeah. Or to sell a boat.
Yeah. Like, hey, I've got.
No, I'm joking. I didn't mean to interrupt you there.
I got rid of my cocaine and now I've got a boat. You want to buy it? Oh, man.
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To every elected official and politician in America, the people stand united, desperate for you to listen. If you're not advocating for prices and transparency in healthcare, you are compromising every single American across this country.

Because when we can't see prices, hospitals, insurance, and their middlemen charge us whatever they want. Our very own healthcare system is robbing all of us.
We just need the prices. That's how our economy works.

If you want to do right by workers, employers, and unions, then you've got to do right by the people they represent and the families who depend upon them. We've got to hear it.
Prices now. Power to the patients.
Oh, dude, did you ever listen to Jelly Roll? It's funny. I met Jelly Roll at the United States Senate.
Really? Because I'm on the banking committee. He came and gave.
And what was he trying to get pardoned for something? No. No.
I don't think so at least, but he was, uh, he did a, um, like he was a witness at a hearing in the Senate banking committee. Oh, I think I saw that on C-SPAN or something.
And that was a joke jelly. He knows it was, he was, he was really good.
I talked to him briefly. I'm sure he doesn't remember.
He does remember. But I thought he gave like some very interesting testimony.

He talked about the fentanyl issue a little bit.

I want to say he maybe talked about homelessness a little bit.

But I remember him talking about fentanyl.

And yeah, he's got an amazing life.

I mean, talk about a guy who had a much tougher life than I did.

That's jelly roll.

Yeah, that's a great point.

Yeah, yeah, he's a magic man.

And when you talk to him, it's just like watching pure um it's just genuine yeah that's what it is it's like a it's like um clean water it's like what we used to have in a lot of our rivers it's like um that's what he is yeah he's just genuine i mean it like genuine human oh he'll tear up at anything it's just because it's just what's in him is just real. You know, he's a genuine guy.
That actually leads me pretty good into this next part I want to talk about. Some stuff I wrote down because I wanted to be clear, and this is important.
So you're from a region that was firsthand devastated by the money lizard Sackler family, right? Which like, you know, which Purdue Pharma and everything that happened with OxyContin, like over 500,000 people died at the hands of them. Yeah.
And- Big, big problem. Yeah.
Unbelievable, right? And it compromised, like, you know, they use loopholes, all types of stuff to be able to keep that company going, right? And really to keep killing people. I mean, it seemed undeniable at a certain point that they were murderers.
It was legalized drug dealing is what it was on an industrial scale. I mean, made billions and billions of dollars.
They just got like a slap on the wrist. Like they got a financial slap on the wrist, right? Very tiny.
But why can't we... Shouldn't they be kicked out of our country, it feels like?

If we can let in 20 million people in our country that shouldn't be here

or that are not vetted properly to be here...

Don't have the legal right to be here.

I agree.

I would say they shouldn't be here.

Why can't we put those motherfuckers on a boat

and send them back to wherever the fuck they came from uh that's a good question man uh look i i think that frankly i don't mean that angrily at you but it's like oh man i i'm i'm pissed off about it too like at what point do people lose the opportunity to be here it seemed like if you killed 500 000 people you wouldn't be able to hang out anymore or maybe maybe at least you should have a criminal investigation. Yeah.
Right. Because that's the thing that's always, I've always, I mean, like the Sackler family clearly got rich off of an extraordinary amount of human misery and death.
Yeah. Okay.
Where are they from? Bring it up real quick. I want to say they're from New York maybe, or they're from the Northeast.
I'm pretty sure. The Sackler family originated from Galassia in Poland, and their ancestors were Jewish immigrants.
Isaac Sackler. Brooklyn, New York.
Oh, and then they lived in Brooklyn, New York. That's why I thought they were from New York, Connecticut.
I mean, look, the thing that I've never understood about them is that they did get fined, but the fine was such a tiny amount. It was a couple of billion bucks.
But they made tens and tens of billions of dollars. I mean, these guys were absolutely rolling in the dough.
But they like, why isn't there a criminal investigation into this? Right. Like if I sold drugs on the street and some person has an overdose and died, like you can get felony prosecuted for that or at least investigated for it and there was never a criminal at least as i understand it never a criminal investigation into what was known yeah i think they had to breach a plea deal of some sort okay as the nation continues to grapple with that uh the sackler family had agreed to pay six billion dollars to families and states as part of an agreement to wind down purdue pharma the of Oxycontin and exchange.
The Saccharifamily would be immunized from future civil liability claims. Unreal.
Because here's my understanding about it. And by the way, I think that like, you always got to be worried about this stuff when you're the child of addiction is like, are there, whether it's drugs, alcohol, whatever, you got to be, you kind of, you're worried about making sure you do yourself, don't get hooked on anything.
Right. Like I had a minor surgery once and like a very minor surgery and I was prescribed Oxycontin and I took it for like, you know, 12 hours.
Got any left? Sorry. No, because of my wife, because of what I'm about to tell you.
Okay. And, um, my, my wife who was like, giving me my meds, she was like, Hey, you ready for your next dose? And I was like, yeah, you know, the pain's not really that bad anymore.

I don't really want to take one.

But yeah, just give me one because I feel really good when I take it.

And then she and I both had this like moment of realization like, oh, shit, right?

That is where this whole thing starts.

She took it to wherever some disposal site and we got rid of it and that was it.

But the problem with OxyContin, as I understand it at least, is that it's supposed to be delayed release oxycodone. But the problem is people figured out if you just crush it up, then you could just get it all at once.
All released right now. All released right now.
And then the Sackler family, as I understand it, knew about it. Purdue Pharma knew this was going on and they should have been like, oh, no, no.
OK, we're going to stop this because people are getting killed by overdosing all this stuff because they're taking too high of a dose and they didn't do anything. Yeah.
Like that is my understanding fundamentally of what happened is they didn't want to stop it because they were getting rich from it. Oh, yeah.
It's man, it's really gross. I just couldn't imagine that.
Imagine people dying and you're making money, but they're dying. People are dying.
Family. The ripple effect of that in this country is still, it's still haunting people.
Absolutely. And that's where the heroin epidemic, which is now a fentanyl epidemic came from.
It started as a pill epidemic. Yeah.
And it actually was like, I always used to think it was okay. Kind of like me, like, oh, you have surgery and you get too many drugs and then eventually you get hooked.
What it actually was is they were over-prescribing it so much that it was just everywhere. And so like, oh, your nephew comes over and he's 17 and he takes some to his buddies and now they're all hooked on Oxy.
And that's what actually happened. And there was just so much of this drug everywhere that it started the epidemic we have now.
Yeah. And the outside, it was like candy coat.
It was like, you just had to slurp off the outside a little bit and then you could party. Oh, I didn't realize that.
Yeah. I think you just had to slurp.
I heard about people crushing. I didn't know if you just had to slurp off the outside.
Yeah, I think you did. And yeah.
Yeah. And yeah.
And one of the worst things about it was that like medicine used to be a term that was like it was for help right yes it was like and it was in our brains i think as as humans and citizens in our society and culture medicine was help right yes and that that whole thing with them kind of tripped that word where it made it it made people question the value of medicine. Absolutely.
It made people just question then who's prescribing them medicine. It made health, it made like your doctors seem untrustworthy.
It just, it ruined so much trust. That's absolutely right.
Ruined a lot of social trust. And I agree.
I think they deserve a ton of blame for that. And it's interesting though, that was maybe the first point, the Oxy epidemic was sort of the first point where I started to question like the mainstream big pharma narrative a little bit.
And I always ask myself, and I think this is something, you know, like I'm Republican, I'm conservative, but one of the things that I think the old left was pretty smart about is like recognizing that, you know, when money gets involved, when the profit motive gets involved in health, that can lead to good things, right? It can lead to people trying to cure cancer because they know they're going to make a lot of money if they cure cancer. I'm fine with that, right? But people making money if they cure cancer, that's a great thing.
But then also sometimes it can lead to manipulation of the health system that doesn't actually benefit people's health, but does get people hooked on a lot of drugs that they wouldn't otherwise need. And this was something, again, the old left understood this, that like, well, you got to be careful.
Like, are we prescribing this medication because it's good for people, because that's good, or are we prescribing it because some big pharmaceutical company is getting rich if we do, and they're putting pressure on the government or somebody else to encourage us to prescribe this medication? And I think there are a whole host of ways in which, frankly, the old left was right about that. And, you know, I've tried to persuade, you know, modern conservatives that we should be more concerned about that issue.
It's like, you know, Bobby Kennedy makes this point all the time, right? Like, good. Some pharmaceuticals are good for us, but some actually, it's not totally clear whether we're taking them just because it makes people money.
And this is like, let me give you a concrete example, right? So, you know, this, there's obviously this big like debate about transgender issues and you don't have to wade into that. But what really worries me is when you've got pharmaceutical companies that are making billions of dollars on hormonal therapies for kids.
And are we really like, are we really being smart about whether this is good for the kids, about whether it causes long-term consequences? And why is nobody saying, well, wait a second, the people who are lobbying us to give these drugs to kids are also getting rich off of it. Right.
And I just, I worry about that. I mean, you get to follow the money mode.
Yeah, man. It definitely, of course they would want that Cause it's just another way.
It's like, well, how do we split the atom here again to make even more money off of somebody? Well, why not your gender? You know what I'm saying? You're not using it. You know, you're like, what do you mean? I'm not using my gender.
Like I'm trying, I'm trying to, I'm still developing it. Yeah.
You know what I'm saying? And you're going to like, but I agree. It's like a couple of my buddies secretly low-key date trans people right and i don't care if any somebody's trans or neapolitan or whatever i don't i don't care you know what i'm saying hell if i had a vagina i would probably wouldn't go looking for women you know so there's probably some up some up to it but um what i'm talking about is uh shit i don't know what i'm look man if you i hear're an adult but look where the money like look follow the money we're talking about kids follow the money think about what's going on like are the people pushing this what is their real or do they have some other motive you have to think about that you know well that's why i mean like you mentioned ozempic earlier um which you know i've known a couple friends who've taken it I've never taken an Ozimic or any weight loss kind of, I mean, like you mentioned Ozempic earlier, which, you know, I've known a couple of friends who've taken it.

I've never taken an Ozempic or, you know, any weight loss kind of drug.

Oh, it ended up having a black market.

There was somebody selling it outside of a Vineyard Vines illegally or something over there outside of Charlottesville.

Outside of Vineyard Vines?

It breaks my heart.

That's the most, that's the perfect encapsulation.

It breaks my heart, yeah.

Vineyard Vines selling Ozempic.

And she was a Kappa Delta.

Somebody said she was a Kappa Delta. Oh, my God.
But it's just that kind of stuff. It shakes me to my core, JD.
Oh, that's really, that's dark shit, man. That's dark.
That's darker than a lot of what goes on in politics. A Kappa Delta selling a Zimpic black market off, out of sight of vineyard fines.
I'm going to have nightmares. They call it Fozempic.
But I, you know, I like worry. Okay.
So America has a terrible obesity problem. Okay.
And I'm not, look, I'm not a doctor. I'm not telling if your doctor tells you to take Ozempic, follow your doctor's advice.
Not, you know, what you're hearing from me on a podcast. I don't mind it a little, you know.
What I worry about is, okay, you know, you create a problem and then you medicate to solve the problem instead of like maybe solving the underlying problem, right? Like, why don't we try to understand why it is that we have a terrible obesity epidemic rather than just giving people another pill to pop? Well, it's also, we get used to that then after a while and then it's hard to put the toothpaste back in the tooth. That's exactly right.
That's's one of the tough that's one of right and that's more of like a kind of a bigger look at that like um yeah it's like how much personal responsibility it's like that's something i struggle with sometimes my brother and i talk about this sometimes like you know people have problems and um specifically even like thinking about the oxycontin thing like they created a medicine that was so strong that even your ability, your God-given ability to be able to battle against it. Like you'd be in AA rooms and you'd see people that came in from opioid and it was something different than alcoholism.
Exactly right. It wasn't alcohol.
It wasn't, it was addiction, but it was something different. It was like, these people, it's zombied these people.
It's like, it's like they created this, this skip card in Uno or something. It was like, so at that point, like, shit, what were we talking about? I had a good idea.
Talking about opioids, the effect it has on people's brains, pharmaceutical companies making money from, we're talking about Ozempic, putting the toothpaste back in the tube. Right, right.
Personal responsibility. Yeah.
Yes. Okay.
You were almost there. Sorry.
You helped me. You laid all the breadcrumbs, dude.
That's good, man. So, but yeah.
I'm here to help, man. As your next vice president, I'll live to serve however I can.
You just helped me right there.

But yeah, it's like, but then they created something that was so powerful.

It kind of exceeded our ability, our natural ability to be able to fight against it, right?

So at that point, personal responsibility kind of isn't, it's still there, but it's not exactly fair

because you're allowing a company to create something that you can't naturally compete against. It turns you into a zombie, man.
Sorry, that took so long. My brain is bad.
No, I know exactly what you mean. And it's like one thing to sort of take a pill so your pain goes away or you take a pill because you've got a you've got a lung infection, lung infection goes away or like whatever.
When something can so fundamentally transform your personality and your sense of, you know, ambition and reward, like what are you, what are you going after? It's not a medicine. It's very, it's very, very weird.
Like that's the thing. It's not a medicine.
That is a drug. Yeah.
And I mean, my mom, like to her great credit, man, I don't know how she does this because like, look, there are some things where you really do need a strong pain medication. Right.
And I forget something that happened a couple of years ago where they were like, you know, maybe she had some infection, but they really wanted to give her oxy. And she was just like, no, I refuse to take it.
So she, for a couple of days, I mean, she was in agonizing pain, but she just took Advil, took Tylenol and she was fine. And she, and she, and she persevered through it.
But man, you're right. The stuff, it's just, yeah.
It's like, it changes not just your personality, but it changes whether you can take care of yourself and other people, right? Like for most normal people, there's this thing where it's like, oh, oh crap. I'm not taking care of my kids.
My kids need me. I got to change something, right? But if you're on opioids, it's like it flips a switch off where, yeah, I'm not taking care of my kids, but maybe I don't give a shit because the drugs have so affected my brain.
Yeah, I think that's it, man. And with that, so staying in medical and healthcare thoughts, one of the major, and I wrote this down so I could say it clearly and to just save everybody time who's listening, one of the major bipartisan issues that's plaguing Americans is the healthcare system, which has become outrageously expensive, right? Sure.
It's unaffordable. It's inaccessible by millions of Americans.
We're overpaying hospitals and insurance companies that hide their prices, and they charge us whatever they want. Patients overpay.
Workers overpay. Companies overpay.
The taxpayers overpay. On this podcast, Bernie Sanders came on, and he stressed the need for a healthcare price transparency.
Donald Trump did the same thing. He had an executive order.
I think it's still in place that demands price transparency. Mark Cuban stressed the need for healthcare price transparency.
How do we not have real prices and transparency in healthcare knowing that it's exactly what America needs so that our health care system will be honest and affordable and accessible?

Well, you're right that we should have it.

And the reason that we don't is, unfortunately, because there are a lot of powerful people who get rich off of keeping these things secret.

And so they don't want transparency.

They don't want sunshine.

You can say Chuck Schumer if you want.

I won't say that.

Well, I mean, look, you're right, though.

Like, obviously, Bernie and I are on the same team politically. But there are some health care things like price transparency where actually I think he and President Trump are both right that there's nothing that you – I mean, you go to Starbucks, right? You buy coffee.
You know how much you're getting. You know how much it's costing you.
You know, I remember when my wife, I think it was her second baby

Where, you know, much it's costing you. You know, I remember when my wife, I think it was her second baby, where, you know, you get like pain medications because when you're delivering a baby, at least most people do because it's like a very painful experience.
Yeah. And there was some weird thing where the doctor that she chose was out of network and she didn't realize, I mean, you know, you're not checking whether the doctor's in network at the time, right? You just sort of choosing a doctor.
And then we come home and we have like a $15,000 unexpected bill because she chose the wrong doctor an hour before she delivers a baby. And it's like, this is totally crazy.
And I'm, you know, we're in a situation where that was not a big deal for us. We were able to afford it, but think about like a normal middle-class family goes and has a baby and comes home to a medical bill.
That's like a fifth of their entire take-home pay that year. Right.
That's crazy. The number one cause of bankruptcy in America is medical debt.
Yeah. It's, it's, it's a huge, huge problem.
And I think the price transparency is a big part of it, but you asked like, why hasn't it happened? So every time that we try to force price transparency, the service providers, the insurance companies, or the pharmaceutical companies don't actually want that transparency. Here's one of the reasons why the pharmaceutical companies don't want transparency.
It's because if Americans, if we realized how much more we were paying for pharmaceuticals over the Europeans, there would be a revolution in this country. We pay a lot more than them pay way more than them.
And again, like I, my attitude is I am fine with people. You know, if you invent a life-saving cancer drug, I'm fine with people earning a great profit for doing something amazing like that.
You want to, you want to motivate people to do it, right? And a lot of people were obviously motivated by that profit motive. But if you take certain drugs that are, you know, they cost $100 in the United States of America, and they're way, way cheaper in Europe, or some of these really expensive multi-thousand dollar cancer.
Bring something up for me. These really expensive next generation

cancer therapeutics, they cost way less in Europe.

This says, in 2022, U.S. prices

across all drugs, brands, and generics

were nearly 2.78 times as high

as prices in the comparison countries.

U.S. prices for brand drugs were at least 3.22

times as high as prices in the comparison countries, even after adjustments for estimated U.S. rebates.
Wow, does it show those countries? Is there a chart with that or no? I love a chart. It's OECD countries, which is mainly Europe.
Those are like the advanced economies, basically. Okay, that's what that means.
The rich countries basically. OECD.
Yeah. So first world countries probably?

Basically. Okay.
Yeah. So Canada,

probably Israel's in there.

A lot of the European countries

I think are all in OECD. Okay, United States,

Germany, Canada, Japan.

Switzerland?

Switzerland? I can't see that.

Switzerland.

I haven't even heard of that.

Comparable county average?

You're screwing with me.

Austria?

Well, I think they misspelled it, dude.

There's not that many zits in it.

Australia, United Kingdom of Sweden.

Wow, so we pay per capita spending on prescription drugs in 2019, 900, and what does per capita mean? Just per person. Okay, per person, $963 per person, whereas in Sweden, $270.
United Kingdom, $273, dude. Yeah, that's crazy, right? Yeah, that's not fair, dude.
That's not fair. They colonize everybody, and they're paying cheaper for dope.
That's exactly right. But again, the reason we don't really know what we're paying here is because, you know.
Because they hide it. They hide it.
They hide it. And they don't want to let people know because if you let people know, then they would demand to pay less.
But something President Trump proposed, for example, I think is a very good idea, is he proposed re-importing drugs from Europe. Basically, if they're selling it in Sweden or wherever for $270 per person, and we're paying $963 per person, then we'll just buy it in Sweden and bring it in the United States.
I love that. That was a big, big thing.
Of course, the pharmaceutical companies that's why he got, that's why they tried to assassinate him twice. Well, it's probably one of the things that could happen.
I mean, I, I, I of course have no idea, no inside knowledge into, into what drove the motives of the assassins. Oh yeah.
I'm just joking. But, but yeah, I wouldn't be shocked.
But I mean, I wouldn't be shocked if there's some really dark stuff out there. Cause look, two separate people have tried to take a swing at this guy in about three months.
Yeah. Like, well, you know they didn't like Donald Trump, right? Because they wouldn't have tried to shoot him if they liked him.
But I wouldn't be... The first guy who went after Trump, I hate to put on the tinfoil out here, but we've not been able to get...
Unable to get into his phone. We know that he had all these all these like foreign encrypted apps on his cell phone.
It is crazy to me that we don't know the guy's motive. It's nuts.
He almost killed the president. Yeah.
And we don't know why he did it. We don't know anything about the guy.
Yeah. Yeah.
They're like, he had a lunchbox or something. It's like the vaguest information they keep putting out about the guy.
You know, he using a library car we're like yeah who gives a shit exactly yeah his mom's name was sharon it's like great thank you yeah dude yeah they're like oh yeah they're like oh he was a colts fan you're like who gives a shit yeah that's exactly right information yeah you know so how do we stop that do you get do you get approached by lobbyists and stuff like that like all the time do you really and what does that look like who are they what are they wearing uh like how do they're they're so lobbyists here's how you spot them okay um they're always wearing poorly fitted suits with extremely ugly ties so if go out and you see a guy with a poorly fitting suit

and extremely ugly tie, he's definitely a lobbyist.

Okay.

Okay?

It's like in Happy Gilmore.

He's a lobbyist for big fabric, huh?

It sounds like.

It's like in Happy Gilmore where the guy's like,

you know, the coach is trying to get Happy Gilmore to play golf

and Happy's like, you know, you know what you need to play golf is uh goofy goofy pants and a fat ass that's what you need to be a lobbyist is goofy pants and and that but why can't we if everybody knows i like golf i'm gonna be clear i like golf do you like all i i i i i'm not that good at it okay i'll play when i get a little bit older i don't want to slow people down. Okay.
Right now. Fair point.
You know? But anyway, yeah. So, okay.
I like Brooks Koepka. Yeah, I do too.
He's cool. Yeah, he's a really cool dude.
And I like that girl that smokes that plays, dude. Puffer McGavin or whatever her name is.
I have eyes only for one woman, Theo. I've got only my wife.
Yeah, no, I like her.

You don't have to know who I'm talking about.

No comment.

No comment from Senator Vance. She's like the hot John Daly.

I know who you're talking about.

Yeah, she's like the hot John Daly.

Yeah.

So John Daly doesn't really do it for you?

He's a good dude, though.

Oh, no, I like John, man.

I definitely.

Oh, if you need a ride in an ambulance, hang out with John.

You'll get one in a heartbeat.

And I'm just joking.

I'm just joking. I think it was Tiger.
But also, it's true. I've been at two places where John's been taken.
One time, they came in looking for him. He went out there and was sitting in the shotgun.
It's awesome. And they're like, where is he? In the ambulance.
Oh, my God. He's trying to help you guys out.
Oh, that is so funny.

He's a legend.

He's got to come on here soon.

He's a legend.

But how do we stop that if all the centers and Congress people know it?

Bernie Sanders said there's three times as many lobbyists in D.C. as there are congressmen and centers.

Then why don't we get that shit out?

Why doesn't it stop? If all you guys know it and everybody's supposed to be working for the people, then why doesn't it stop? So I actually think that we're getting a little bit better compared to maybe 10 years ago. People have no idea how much Washington was just completely run by lobbyists.
And you think about a guy on the left like Bernie Sanders, but most importantly, a guy on the right like Donald Trump completely blows the existing system up. And this is, by the way, like what I realized, because I wasn't a Trump guy back in 2016.
And obviously I'm his running mate now. So I really like him.
What people don't realize is back in 2016, how much lobbyist money and influence there was that wanted to destroy Donald Trump. They hated the guy because he didn't owe anything to them.
Right. He didn't come from the existing political process.
And if you look at some of the younger guys who have come in, you know, we're much more just open about the fact that lobbyist influence is out there, right? You can't be in DC without running into these people, but you got to be honest with people like, I'm not going to let this person write a piece of legislation for me.

I'm not going to let this person dictate how I vote. And yeah, I've gotten some, definitely some criticisms from the lobbyist groups in DC.
Some of them will say, well, you know, we don't know if we can trust this guy. And that's fine with me.
I'm okay. I'm okay with them.
If the lobbyist can't trust you, it's fucking good. You're doing your job.
That's exactly right. That's my exact attitude towards it.
They don't know if we can trust you. Who gives a fuck? Exactly.
That's exactly right.

So, but that is how the town works, is that if you come in and you don't always take their meetings, you don't always do what they want you to, then they'll start whispering about you and then they can get articles written about you. They can have people say bad shit about you.
This is why people call it the corporate media, is if you pick up a story in The Washington Post and you read it and, you know, here's this anonymous source of this, this anonymous source of that.

There is a 98 percent chance that the person who's attacking Donald Trump is on the take somehow. For sure.

Whether it's a lobbyist or whether it's a political consultant, it's all dishonest money laundering bullshit.

That's all D.C. ultimately is, is people who get paid to offer an opinion instead of having a real opinion.
Here's the thing that I think we need to fix structurally about this. So let me give you an example.
You know, my Senate staff has probably 40 or so people and, you know, all extremely good people. My staff tends to be a little bit younger because I'm one of the youngest.
I'm the second youngest U.S. senator right now.
And, you know, like if I

wanted to pay my chief of staff $30,000 more a year than what I pay him right now, I'm not allowed by law. So even though I'm a senator and I was elected to represent the people of Ohio, I'm not allowed to control who I pay and how I pay them.
It's all sort of set by law. And here's the bigger issue is that if you think about it, you know, a lot of this, a lot of these big important laws are

very common. pay them.
It's all sort of set by law. And here's the bigger issue is that if you think about it, you know, a lot of this, a lot of these big important laws are very complicated, right? They've got 800 pages, 900 pages.
And I think the law should be simpler, but if you've got a 900 page law and you've got a bunch of junior staffers who don't know the town very well, and they don't make a whole lot of money, then the people who are writing the laws are not going to be your junior staffers. It's going to be the lobbyists, right? And we've seen this multiple times with legislation that I've drafted, where the lobbyists will actually ask to get into the draft of the law and make changes for you, and say, well, yeah, we'll justify.
No, no, no, no, no. I want my staff that works for me

to write the laws that I'm drafting. But we, I actually think that we need to empower senators and congressmen to hire who they want, to make a bigger staff if they want.
Because if you think about it, the amount of staff a congressman has, a congresswoman has, is a fraction of the federal budget. I mean, we're talking about like a percent of a percent of a penny on the federal budget.
And so we could actually give people the staff that they need to be able to actually write the laws and to make sure the lobbyists don't have much influence. And you ask, like, who are the lobbyists? Okay.
The lobbyists are the people who are really good staffers. And then the staffers want to buy a nicer house and they want to start a family and they can't.
D.C. is a very expensive town.
I mean, a one-bedroom apartment in D.C. will easily run you $4,000 a month right now.
It's just a very expensive town. So then those people go and become lobbyists.
They trade in their public service for a fat check. And I think that we've got fix something.
It's the same thing that happened with, with Oxycontin and they got the people that were working with the FDA to come and work for them. That's exactly right.
That is exactly right. So it happens at our Congress.
It happens with our big bureaucratic agencies. And I think we have to fix something about that.
Like we want the people in our government to be public spirited and focus on doing the public good. I don't think that the system that we have works very well, where, you know, you do public service for a little bit and then you jump and go make a million dollars a year as a lobbyist.
No, no, no, no, no, no. You got to, I think you got to separate those functions much better than you have right now.
Yeah. Because then, then you're, then like being a public servant is just a junior college for being, becomingist, it seems like.
That is a big worry that I have, especially with my staff. I mean, these are really smart, really good guys.
And a big part of what I think about as a senator – You can't afford to keep them. A big part of what I think about is how am I going to keep these guys as they get more senior, as they become better at their job, as they become better at figuring out when a lobbyist is trying to sell them a bill of goods, right? That's a skill, right? And you acquire that skill over time.
And they can just spend whatever they want when they're the Yankees. That's exactly right.
Yeah. Damn.
Shit, dude. We're all going to be addicted.
No, we're not, man. I'm telling you.
That's a joke. I'm telling you, we're actually going in the right direction this is what people don't and i recognize you probably have of your millions of listeners some people love trump and some people hate him but but the thing that trump really changed about dc is that he was not beholden to the moneyed interests oh well that's one thing that i also like about bobby kennedy that i mean, I've known Bobby for years.
Bobby's been a friend of mine for years.

I knew him before I thought he was going to do politics or anything.

Yeah, he's a good dude, man.

I like Bobby.

He used to hold meetings at his house on Tuesdays, and we would go to him.

Yeah.

In his backyard, dude.

And one of his dogs always was slobbering stuff on me.

It was a huge dog.

It might not even have been a dog because he has a lot of animals.

What would it have been then?

I don't know, dude.

But he's had a lot of animals over the years. That's Bobby.
And he can afford probably a big animal. What was this baby dog that was slobbering all over Theo? But he doesn't need anything else.
He's got a great name. He's got a cool wife.
He's got, he doesn't, he's always cared about just making people healthy. Is he wrong sometimes on things? Sure, he probably is just like anybody else.
Everybody's going to be wrong. But I'd fucking, I'd rather have somebody just raise their hand and ask questions.
Like, that's one thing that I just love about him, that he's not beholding to any of these people, you know. The thing that I hate about politics and just media culture in this country right now, man, is people are so afraid of saying anything that's unconventional.
They're afraid of thinking thoughts that you're not allowed to think. Like the biggest ideas come from people who just follow the truth, right? And yeah, sometimes they're going to be wrong.
Sometimes they're not going to get everything right, but we've got to stop punishing people like Bobby Kennedy for saying, well, maybe this doesn't work. Yeah.
Hey, what about that? Exactly. Like that, hey, what about that is something we have to preserve.

And I do feel like we're trying to, we're kind of destroying it.

This is, so I'm going to sound like an old man, but this is what I think is really jacked up about social media is, okay, we're all social animals, right? We're all influenced by people around us. Oh, yeah.
But look, 30 years ago, an opinion, it would take it many, many days before an opinion became the accepted conventional wisdom. You'd have to be repeated in one newspaper and then repeated in another newspaper and people would talk about it.
Now you can have something happen on social media. It's viral.
And 10 minutes later, you've got like the social media feeding frenzy that says, well, here's this thing that I came up with 10 minutes ago.

And if you don't agree with that thing I came up with 10 minutes ago, then there's going to be a feeding frenzy attacking you, attacking your family, finding out where you worked and attack it, trying to attack your employer for keeping you in a job. Like that is a really jacked up thing to take the normal human social impulse to want to be liked and to want to make friends and to put it all on the internet where it operates at like the speed of light.
I think there's something very deranged about that. Yeah.
Yeah. Well, and it's also, it's like, are you a repeater? Are you a thinker? Like, that's the thing.
It's like, we get so preoccupied now and so occupied so quickly that we don't even put it through our own filter. That's exactly right.
And it's like, and then our filter starts to not even be a filter anymore because it's like, well, nobody's using me. I'll just, I'm just a pathway now.
And that's what starts to happen. That's how we all start to become desensitized to everything.
And we just become repeaters, right? That's exactly what social media does is it just turns us all into repeaters. I like that Bobby Kennedy is sort of willing to say, no, no, no, no, I'm actually going to think for myself on this topic.
I mean, it is crazy. Why do we have such a terrible obesity problem? Why do we have all these like, you know, certain types of diabetes are on the rise among children today.
It's like, okay, we're the richest country in the history of the world.

And, you know, children are getting diseases that they didn't get 30, 40 years ago.

Like somebody should be saying what the hell is going on or like.

Yeah, somebody should.

And it should be our leaders.

But it feels like there's so much compromisation in there.

I mean, dude, do you know?

Okay, this is a paper by a Nobel. Yeah, we'll take a few more minutes.
Now we're just having fun. But there's a paper by a Nobel Prize winning economist that talks about the return to education in years of life.
And do you know how much, take a person who's got a four-year degree versus a person who never went to college. Do you know how much longer the person with a four-year degree lives in the United States of America right now? Seven years.
Seven years longer. Yeah.
So going to college, you get rewarded with seven years of additional life. If that doesn't tell you something is seriously fucked up in our country, then nothing will, right? That is not okay.
And it's part of it, it's health. Part of it's that, you know, people are working more dangerous jobs if they don't have a college degree.
But part of it's just that we have, I think, made it so hard to get by in our country, if you don't have a four-year degree, that people are, you know, they're not making enough money to support their families. Then they get stressed out.
Then they turn to addiction. Of course, addiction happens to everybody, but it's much more common among those without a college degree.
So I just, this to me is like, what is this campaign about? Like, what is Trump being president about is fixing the big problems, not like the bullshit fake problems that the media gets us to focus on, not the slogans, but why are people dying seven years earlier if they don't have a college degree? Why do we have this historic obesity epidemic in the richest country in the world? Why do we have like wars breaking out like crazy all over the world? Why do pharmaceutical companies get rich by forcing therapeutics that aren't even always good for us right like these are like big big big issues that frankly i think absent trump we wouldn't even be talking about this stuff well i mean i definitely think that one of the things that certainly excited me about trump uh he first was running was, wow, this guy is fucking rogue. And you know what? Yes, he is.
And this whole thing is so messed up now that that's what you, I would, I hated politics so much. I just, I hated that.
I was like, I would hire a, I would hire a Muppet to go in there with a hammer. That's right, man.
I would hire a Muppet with a hammer. If I could vote for a Muppet with a hammer.
And that's how most people feel. It's like it doesn't even feel like it's working for us anymore.
So what does it even matter? Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah, but so that's why I think Bobby, that's one thing that I did. That's one thing that I thought was pretty amazing about bringing Bobby Kennedy into you guys' you guys's campaign is that, um, he's a sheriff for that kind of shit.
He really is, you know, for caring, I think for just for genuinely caring about people. I know, I know he cares about people.
It's like, I have friends that don't care about me. They're still my friends, some of them, but he's a friend that is a caring guy.
Yeah. Yeah.
That's absolutely right. So that is, I think why I've, uh, vouched for him a lot.
Yeah. Um, I had one more thing.
Let me see. Um, Oh, the polls and stuff.
Okay. Yeah.
Yeah. I've been looking at the polls recently.
Um, yeah. And especially at Calci is a place where I look at them.
Okay. This is the betting market stuff.
Yeah. They're a website and an app where people can bet money on regular happenings in society, not just political stuff, anything from politics to entertainment.

And I think it's a good tracker in a capitalistic society because it's people putting their money down.

Yeah, that's right.

So it's people saying, this is what I think with my money as opposed to just other polls.

What's the latest on there?

What does it say?

It's like Trump is 57, Kamala is 43. Trump, 57%.
Um, that's pretty good. Yeah, that's pretty good.
Does it say the total amount of money that people have better? Not yet. Oh, it says $32,917,000 has been put out there on this.
It just, yeah. So that's why I like to follow their stuff just because it's actually people putting their money down.
Sure. Are there, what do you think of polls that are out there these days? Do you guys follow these polls? Is that real stuff to you? Like, I know that like they had the Clinton Trump poll years ago and they had Clinton who was neck and neck or something.
And then it wasn't when it came out. Do you guys follow any of that? Or is that really part of the daily routine? Not really, man.
I mean, I can get you in the weeds a little bit, but I'll try to, I'll try to, I live and breathe this stuff. So I try not to make it, make it too intense here.
I just don't trust a lot of media. So it's like.
Yeah. Here's basically the way you shouldn't trust polls, whether they're good for us or bad for us.
And here's the reason you shouldn't trust polls is about 10 years years ago, every 10th person you called to do a poll would answer. Now it's about one in 30 people.
Okay. And another important thing is that if you're a Democrat, especially if you're a higher education level Democrat, you're much more willing to answer pollster questions.
Where if you're, excuse me, if you're like my family, if somebody called them a stranger and said, who are you going to vote for? They would say F you and hang up the phone. Right.
So the reason the polls have gotten so bad is because Trump voters are less likely to answer pollster questions and Kamala Harris voters are much more likely to answer pollster questions. So it's very hard to get an accurate sample to give you any sense of what's going on.
But do you just believe that or are you just saying that? I actually believe that. Yeah, no, I believe that.
And I've seen it in my own race, for example, you know, I ran for Senate. There were all these public polls that say, you know, the race was tied or maybe we'd even lose by a few points.
And the pollster that I had who just polls for my campaign, he's actually Trump's pollster too, and he's a very smart guy. And he said, look, the reason these polls are wrong is because they're not reaching voters who don't like to answer polls.
And those voters are going heavily for you. So I said, okay, well, how much are we going to win by? And he said, you're going to win by six points, and we won by seven points, right? So he was much more accurate than the public pollsters.

Now, you ask, why is he more accurate?

Because most of the public polls, they cost $10,000, $20,000.

Like if you see a poll published in a newspaper article, $10,000 to $20,000,

to get an accurate sample, these guys need to really, it's $60,000, $70,000,

because they've got to call thousands and thousands of people to get a representative sample of the American people. So sitting here, honestly, I think that chart's about right.
I think that we've probably got about a 60% chance of winning. I think the polls would have to be wrong, but they'd have to be wrong in a pro-Kam where normally they're wrong in a pro Trump direction.
And, you know, we've got 18 days, 17 days, man. And we're just going to like do everything that we can to win this race.
But you shouldn't believe the polls basically. Yeah.
And I say this right now because the polls are all saying we'd win. That's why that's why it's 5743.
Don't buy the polls because here's the thing. Okay.
It could keep people from voting also. It could keep people from voting, but let's say for example, that something happened.
I don't know what happened, but let's say something happened. There's a fire.
Yeah. Where the people who don't want to answer pollster questions are now Kamala voters, right? So you just, you can't trust this stuff.
You got to assume that you just got to work your ass off. That's what we're trying to do.
You know, president Trump and I do in multiple events a day at this point. And, um, if you, if you want, in my view, if you want to secure the border, have common sense, economic policy, then Donald Trump is, is your man.
And I, I gotta say, man, something about Kamala Harris. And I, I, like, I know a little bit about you and I've read about some of your political views.
We've invited her and Mr. Walls to come on.
We would love it if they would. Yeah, I'm sure you would.
I hope they will. But like Sean O'Brien, who's the head of the Teamsters, like one of the things that President Trump has sort of been known for is bringing more working class people into the Republican coalition, right? It's, I think, one of the reasons why he's been very successful politically.

If you look at, like, where Kamala is on the big pharma stuff,

or you look at where she is on the foreign conflict stuff,

she's, like, very pro-war.

Or if you look at where she is on things like,

how do we put tariffs on goods that are imported from China

so that you don't have the Chinese undercutting the wages of American workers? Right? Like the illegal immigration thing. Like, yeah, it's about fentanyl and drug trafficking.
But when you bring in millions upon millions of illegal immigrants who are willing to work under the table, that undercuts the wages of American workers. Right? So our own people get poorer.
And I don't have anything against the illegal immigrants themselves. I have something against Kamala Harris who lets these people come in.
But I want our people to be able, you know, black, white, brown, whatever. I just want our people to be able to work for a solid wage.
That doesn't work when you have people coming in like this. Well, some of it is we have to have personal responsibility too as people running companies to not hire those people as well.
And so you have to enforce that side of it as well. I agree.
You got to do both sides of it. I think we ought to make it harder to hire illegal labor.
We also ought to make it harder for illegal labor to come into the country in the first place. I agree both sides of it have got to matter.
But I think that's actually why we're doing so much better among working people is because they recognize like open borders are not good for me. Right.
Oh, that's scary. Not good for me.
Like this, this, this stuff with pharma is not good for me. And so they have become more open to Donald Trump.
And I think that's a very good thing. Cause I think, look, man, between Bobby Kennedy, me, obviously the president at the top of the ticket, I think we're going to have such a cool administration that's going to try to tackle the big things and not just govern along these bullshit slogans anymore.
So look, I hope that ends up being true because I think we'll do a lot of good if we win. If you, no matter what happens in this election, do you think you would run again in the future? I don't know, man.
It's so hard to even imagine running for anything after this because I'm so obsessed with winning right now. And, you know, like I certainly probably would do another term in the Senate, but that doesn't come up for four more years because Senate terms are six years.
It's like whatever run nationally again. I don't know, man.
That's a big, that's a big thing. It's a big, big thing to put your family through.
And I've only, I've, I've seen it for two months, three months now that I've been the VP nominee to, to run for that for two years. My attitude is let's get Donald Trump elected and let's fix as much as we can, because then, then, then I think the country will be in a much better spot.
Like, I don't to sound like a doomer. And again, I just really haven't thought about what I – I don't know if you sound like a doomer.
I haven't really thought about what I would do in 2028 no matter what. But man, if Kamala Harris is the president for the next four years, we have four more years of open borders, four more years of not putting tariffs on Chinese imports, four more years of

the crazy foreign policy that's pro-war all over the world. I really do worry that the country's

in a very, very bad spot. So I don't think too much about future politics.
I just want to win

this race. How many times do politicians say stuff that's just on the trail? And then when

it comes time to actually get in office and do stuff, it seems like that person disappears. Me? Hopefully not at all.
Some politicians definitely say one thing and then don't govern that way in the privacy of their actual office. I mean, some of it's negotiation, right? Like some of it is, okay, so let's say you have a tax plan where you want 10 things to happen, but then to get the Democrats to vote for it, you have to take out two of those 10 things.
Like that's just the give and take of governance. But I don't think that's what you're talking about.
I mean, what you do see sometimes is people who say something on the campaign trail, even though they affirmatively do not believe that thing at all. And that's just dishonesty.
not you. It's just honesty.
It's certainly not me. It's certainly not Donald Trump.
They'd say what you will about Donald Trump, but he just says what he thinks. And I think that's actually one of the reasons why people like him.
A lot of people are going to vote for him. I think also because it's just the funny who he's the funniest dude they've ever had in there.
Uh, he is incredibly funny. The shit is says is absolutely wild.
He's got, he's got a great sense of humor. Can I tell you one story? Yeah.
Uh, and then of humor can I tell you one story I know I have to go soon I've got my person over here I want you to get home to your family I'm going to have dinner with my kids tonight so it's a big deal Skyline Chili we're doing Skyline Chili in Middletown even if you have other Chili and you just say that't care if you lie about. No, man.
Skyline is good. Have you ever had Skyline? Skyline goes straight to the basement.
I know that, brother. I have had it.
I respect it. I've had it at a wedding in Covington, Kentucky.
I've had Skyline chili. That's a good wedding, man.
Those must have been good friends anyway yeah so so the the first time not that he had met ever met my wife but the first time president trump spent any like real time with my wife did he flirt with her or not he didn't flirt with her he's very sweet to her you know gave her a big hug told her she was beautiful and he's you know he's a very engaging guy yeah the media doesn't tell people about him, but he's, he's a very engaging guy, very easy to talk to. But it's so funny.
Like my wife is super diplomatic. And so he asks her, he's like, Usha, you know, what do you think about your, your husband being involved in politics? And she's, Oh, you know, it's nice.
I like, you know, supporting him. He really cares about public service, loves the people of Ohio, just gives a very diplomatic answer.
And then he kind of chuckles and says, yeah, my wife hates it too. And it just like broke the ice perfectly.
And then she could actually have a conversation with him because she wasn't trying to like talk to the president. Then she was just talking to a guy at that point.
And he's, he's just, he's, he's got a very, very good way about him. And he breaks down those barriers.
He says some funny stuff, dude. At that Al Smith dinner the other night, that shit was good.
Yeah. What if Tony Hinchcliffe helped him write that or not? I don't know.
That's a good question. But I'm telling you, a lot of the stuff he just comes up with himself.
I mean, the line where he was talking about white dudes for Kamala. Oh, yeah.
That was tough. And like he was like i forget exactly what he said but something the effect of well it's okay their their their wives and their wives boyfriends are all voting for trump that shit was pretty crazy dude and like all good jokes there's like an element of truth to it my best wasn wasn't even rubbed on lucky Chuck Schumer right there.
Squeeze a couple bucks out of the fucking insurance companies right there. Do you think our voting poll, do you think that our voting is fair? Do you think? I do.
I do. I mean, look, I think we had some problems in 2020.
I think the biggest problem in 2020 is that big tech interfered in the election. Like, I really think it's...

I can't believe that Facebook and Twitter, when it was owned then,

they admitted to, like, leaving certain things off and stuff and not facing any charges.

They admitted to censoring American citizens weeks before an election, right?

We'll have to talk about that another time.

Yeah, yeah.

We've got to get into that.