Tim Dillon Show #414: w/ Sen. JD Vance (Transcript)

Because you’re right. There is a lot of poverty and there’s a lot of problems in our cities. But you also, I met this woman about a month or so ago who really affected me. Usually what we’ll do is we’ll do these rallies, but then we’ll do photos with volunteers and just people who are helping out the campaign in some form or another before the rallies. And this woman comes up to me and she’s like, “I can’t afford groceries. I’ve been working my whole life. Things are really tough.” She tells me that for like 20, 30 seconds. And then she spends three minutes talking about how she says a prayer every single night for me, my wife, and our three kids by name. She’s memorized the names of my children, a guy she’s never met, so that she can pray for their safety.

And you think, okay, there’s a generosity of spirit out there. Yeah, we can be pissed off about the policies of Kamala Harris and we should be, frankly, because she’s a disaster. But we can also be more hopeful about the country. And that’s a paradigm shift that I’ve had.

And the second thing that I realized is you talk about cities, right? So obviously you’re usually flying into a city even if you’re not—

Trump Rallies vs. Kamala Harris Rallies

TIM DILLON: That woman who can’t afford the groceries — seen any of the dancing at the rallies? Because, to be honest, it is not nothing. The dancing that’s going on. There is a lot of good dancing. And if she were to perhaps see that, she could stop kind of being ungrateful. Or heard about Tim Walz’s time in China. That’s interesting that he’s in China. That’s good.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I don’t know that Kamala Harris dancing at the rallies makes this woman feel better about not being able to afford groceries.

TIM DILLON: Right?

SENATOR JD VANCE: And, dude, the thing that’s different about the Trump rallies versus the Kamala Harris rallies is the fake joy of the Kamala Harris rallies versus, like, we’re actually having fun. People say, the media says all these Trump rallies are so dark. And then you watch a Trump rally for 90 minutes and 30 minutes of it — this is the way in which running for vice president is kind of like being a stand up comedian — 30 minutes is just him being funny as hell because he has a great sense of humor. And you realize people actually are having a good time. They’re pissed off about the policies of Kamala Harris. But they’re actually really having fun, and we’re having fun out there.

TIM DILLON: When I watch her rallies — I’m a terrible actor, and I was just in one of the worst films ever made, Joker 2 —

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, that’s a commonality you have with Kamala Harris.

TIM DILLON: Yes. You see the people really bad at acting at her rallies, and they’ll be kind of happy. And then the face drops. They go back to this immediately. And you go, “Oh, yeah, something feels off. Something’s not authentic about it.”

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s definitely true. I’ve tried to put my finger on what it is about Kamala Harris — it’s the very fraudulent laugh that I find so off putting.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It’s the laugh of somebody who just made you really uncomfortable, but then tries to overcorrect by saying, “Oh, I’m just going to laugh at it.” And that’s somehow going to make it better that I just stepped on your foot or ran into your car.

TIM DILLON: Yes.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Right. That’s the laugh of Kamala Harris.

TIM DILLON: Or bankrupted the country.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, we’re bankrupt. Problems of all shapes and sizes.

TIM DILLON: Open the border and flood it.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. Well, it reminds me, I think I’ve caused one car accident in my life. I was like 16. And it was late. It was dark. It had been raining. So it was like a fender bender, ran into this elderly couple probably going 5 miles per hour. And then I get out of the car, and I’m like, “Ha ha ha.” You know, like, “Oh, it’s okay, guys. We’re all fine.” Yeah, that’s the Kamala Harris laugh. It’s the laugh of somebody who just ran into your car and is trying to make it okay.

TIM DILLON: It’s also when a reporter asks her a question — it’s a substitute teacher giving you homework, and the class is going, “We don’t want this. Why are you doing it? You don’t want to do it. We don’t want you to do it.” Right. Let’s not do it.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Let’s just watch where the red fern grows rather than read the book for four years.

Biden’s Exit and the Democratic Nomination

TIM DILLON: She was not a vocal vice president. We barely heard from Biden. We didn’t really hear from Kamala. Biden had a very tough debate performance. He was replaced in a way that — I liken it to somebody knocking on his door.

SENATOR JD VANCE: A threat to democracy.

TIM DILLON: Right. Maybe at 2am they knock on his door, and he has a sleeping cap on, and he opens it with a candle, and it’s Pelosi and Obama — I think this is what I imagine happens. And he opens it up, and then they go, “You’re out.” And they’ll invoke the 25th. And Kamala’s right behind him, laughing like the Joker. And now she’s the nominee.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, that’s basically how I imagine it, too. Man, I honestly think Biden is pissed off about it.

TIM DILLON: He seems like it. There are all of these weird little ways —

SENATOR JD VANCE: These weird little ways.

TIM DILLON: He’s wearing Trump hats.

SENATOR JD VANCE: He wears a Trump hat at the firefighter event. He does this thing where, a couple weeks ago, she was starting one of her big rallies, and he decides to have a press conference 30 seconds into it. So they’re all watching Joe Biden and not Kamala Harris. Or he’ll say something nice here and there about Donald Trump.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It would not shock me if Joe Biden votes for Donald Trump.

TIM DILLON: I like that he’s kind of ornery.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I do, too.

TIM DILLON: He’s showing his teeth a little bit, and he’s having fun because he’s not running anymore, and he’s an older guy, but he’s having fun. He’s putting on the Trump hat. He’s getting in little fights with people at the rallies.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, that’s right. Well, President Trump said at the Al Smith dinner, he was like, “When I was running against this guy, I really hated him. Now I kind of like him.”

TIM DILLON: No.

Biden, Kamala Harris, and the High School Vibes of the Campaign

SENATOR JD VANCE: You know, and I kind of feel like that about Biden because, yeah, the policies have been disastrous, but he has these flashes of honesty about Kamala Harris. And, okay, we got to go back to something. You talked about Kamala Harris as, like, getting an assignment from the media from school.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: There are all kinds of weird high school vibes running through the Kamala Harris campaign.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: So the biggest one is, did you see this rally that she did with Liz Cheney a couple of days ago?

TIM DILLON: No, but I love Dick Cheney and the whole Cheney family and to me, when I think about democracy, I personally think about Dick Cheney. He’s a figure from my childhood that I love and respect. Some of the greatest years of my life. Iraq, Abu Ghraib. Dick Cheney. Shout out to Dick Cheney and Liz if you…

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. If you really care about human rights and democracy, Dick Cheney. Nobody better guy. Definitely. So they do this with Liz. Yeah, I thought maybe you were saying that because you didn’t want to, you know, have a drone land on your house, but, you know, all shapes and sizes. Okay. So they’re doing this event, and Kamala Harris, like, gives the affect of a vice president who’s just called, like, the troublesome kid into her office. It’s like, “You shouldn’t be laughing at Donald Trump. You shouldn’t think that he’s funny.” And, man, the joy is gone when you have somebody wagging their finger at the American people, telling them not to laugh when somebody makes a joke. Like, what the hell are you talking about? Their whole campaign, man, their whole campaign has become so dull and so boring. But I think it’s because of what you said. They’re not having fun anymore.

TIM DILLON: Right. But a lot of people are warning that this will be the final election and there will be no more democracy if you and Trump are elected. There’ll be no more democracy. It’ll be the final election. And these are like, these are good people. This is Goldman Sachs. This is the Cheney family. This is, you know, a lot of defense contractors.

SENATOR JD VANCE: So the people with the best interests of the American people at heart.

TIM DILLON: Absolutely.

SENATOR JD VANCE: The people who really keep the American social…

TIM DILLON: How do you respond to that when you have a multiethnic family and they go, “You and Donald Trump are racist and hate different kinds of people because you’ve criticized having an open border”?

Rolling His Eyes at the Media

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. I mean, I can’t help but roll my eyes at it at this point. And there was probably a time, honestly, six, seven years ago where I really cared. When my book came out, I really cared what the media said about me.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I just don’t care anymore because they’re so obviously full of sh. Like, actually, if you look, I mean, even just you talk to, like, working and middle class Latino voters, they hate the open border even more than, like, my family from rural Ohio and Kentucky, because they don’t like having their wages undercut. When the cartels are doing business in their communities, it’s the Latinos that are actually the most pissed off about it. So I just kind of roll my eyes at it.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I think that you have to have a certain sense of humor about American politics. And it’s easy to do when you’re running against Kamala Harris and you’re running with Donald Trump, because as much as he obviously, I mean, look, I think they’ve done more to him than any presidential candidate in my lifetime, he still actually has an amazing sense of humor about the whole thing. And oftentimes I call him, obviously every day at this point, talking about the campaign, but he always ends up cracking a joke. And I think it’s in part because he knows that’s what’s good for me in that moment, is we got to laugh about some of this stuff or we’re going to go crazy.

The October Hysteria and John Kelly

TIM DILLON: Yeah, there is. Now we’re in October. We’ve got about two weeks left. So now every single day, there’s some article coming out in a publication that Donald Trump said something Hitlerian or about Hitler. So it does seem to me that the hysteria is at a fever pitch.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It really is.

TIM DILLON: What do you think about John Kelly, who did come out and say Trump is a fascist and this is fascism and all of that?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, first of all, the amount of stock the media puts in a disgruntled ex-employee. I mean, John Kelly was fired, right? And look, he served his country, but he was fired. And he’s pissed off about Trump over that.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And if you talk to the people who were in the room when Trump allegedly said these things that he said, even like Mike Pence’s former chief of staff are saying it’s totally made up. It’s a total lie. But here’s the really interesting thing, right? Three, four years ago, the media were all calling John Kelly an evil racist for helping to promote Donald Trump’s border policies. And now it shows how thin this is, right?

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Like Dick Cheney, who I legitimately think is the single worst vice president easily of my lifetime. But effective. Well, yeah, I mean, effective at, like, destroying the country.

TIM DILLON: That’s what I meant.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And maybe that’s why he’s endorsing Kamala Harris. He’s like, “Finally somebody’s come along who’s been even worse than I have,” and that is Kamala Harris. But the fact that the media now pretends that he’s like some hero of human rights, the guy was a disaster. I mean, we invaded Iraq, we invaded the 20-year quagmire in Afghanistan. All of these Americans who lost their lives, who lost their limbs, that was because of very stupid leadership. And now we’re going to forget about it because the media hates Donald Trump. And it’s the most insane thing I’ve seen in politics.

Okay, “threat to democracy.” I figured out what a threat to democracy is — it’s when the American people vote for somebody the media doesn’t like. And that’s not, definitionally, a threat to democracy. That’s a fulfillment of democracy. That even though the media lies hysterically about Trump, the American people still want to be able to afford groceries and housing.

The Military Industrial Complex and the Uniparty

TIM DILLON: The worldview, whether we call it Cold War liberalism or however we want to frame it, that America is an empire and must continue to be one at all costs, with running up trillions of dollars worth of debt, getting involved in foreign conflicts anywhere from Ukraine or the Middle East. There are people now saying we need to invade Iran and that if America steps back on the world stage, it’s a power vacuum that’s going to be filled by China, by Russia, and that America should continue to pay for the defense of all of these European countries and should kind of shoulder that burden.

And my generation, we saw Iraq, we saw Afghanistan. We’ve also seen lots of our friends go away to fight those wars and come back and not have mental health care and not have support from the government. We don’t feel safer because we invaded Iraq. We don’t feel safer because we spent 20 years in Afghanistan. I don’t know what we spent 20 years doing. But the 10 richest counties in America are in Virginia. And there’s something interesting about that fact — that all of those people are dependent upon America constantly having enemies.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And not like Virginia coal country. No, the collar counties around…

TIM DILLON: Yeah, around D.C. And all of these people have an investment in the United States of America continually going to war.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yep.

TIM DILLON: And those are the people who seem to be speaking out the loudest against your candidacy and Trump’s candidacy. Because you threaten something. A power structure that has been in place for a very long time. This has been spoken about by, you know, the military industrial complex. Eisenhower famously spoke about it. I believe it’s FDR. Maybe it was TR. Somebody said “a financial element in the government has owned it since the days of Andrew Jackson.” Meaning there are agendas that other people have. Now, is that why we’re seeing people like Dick Cheney and people like Kamala Harris, where you would think they don’t have much in common, on the same side? Is it because that positioning is so important and integral to the amount of money being made? And are you guys the greatest enemy of both of those factions of those parties?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, that’s how I think about it. So I think there are three issues where for 40 years, Republicans and Democrats have basically fundamentally agreed, and I’ll list them in order of importance to that — call it the uniparty, call it the conventional wisdom.

Number one is foreign policy. That we should basically stick our nose in every foreign conflict. And that doesn’t mean we should never get involved, of course, but by and large, most of the wars that we fought over the last 40 years have been a total disaster for the American people and frankly, for a lot of the countries we’ve been fighting in. So foreign policy is the first and most important issue to that consensus.

The second most important issue is trade. Massive investment in what I would call shipping our industrial base to countries like China and Mexico, which has eviscerated the American middle class, but it’s made a lot of bankers rich.

And then the third thing is immigration. The idea that you should have effectively unlimited borders checked only by the political will. Every political party has tried to make it easier to bring more and more people into the United States of America.

Now the interesting thing is that on all three of those issues — on immigration, trade, and foreign policy — the American people have consistently been out of step with their leadership, and they keep on not actually having an alternative. Like, who has been the candidate of “free trade is not good for the American middle class”? Who’s been the candidate of “we’ve got to check our immigration system”? Who’s been the candidate of stopping the stupid wars? Basically nobody in 40 years, with the lone exception of my running mate, Donald J. Trump. Okay? So that’s where we are.

And you’re right. That’s why Kamala Harris and Dick Cheney, and that’s why all these people hate him. I think it’s interesting, Tim, to think about the motivations here because two years ago I would have said it’s all financial. Dick Cheney, he’s getting rich from these wars. Kamala Harris donors are getting rich from these wars, and that’s the only reason why they’re supporting them. For what it’s worth, I do think there’s an element of truth to that. Eisenhower warned about this. The military industrial complex has its own self-fulfilling momentum.

But I think there’s a second thing that I’ve picked up on, and a lot of my Senate colleagues disagree with me on foreign policy. They’re very good people. There’s like this psychological, post-World War II — you call it Cold War liberalism — where these guys remember when America could do anything. We were like the agents of peace in some cases. In some cases we weren’t. But we could just fix the world purely through American will. And they grew up in that world, and they’re having psychological difficulty accommodating to a world where China has gotten more powerful in part because of their policies, Russia has gotten more powerful in part because of their policies. And we can’t just dictate everything. We can’t tell everybody how to behave anymore. Because sometimes what happens is we’ll try to tell another country what to do and they’ll say no. And that’s very, very hard for these guys to wake up to the reality that we’re in.

If we were in what was called a unipolar world, America was the only superpower.

TIM DILLON: We were for a while.

SENATOR JD VANCE: We were for a long time.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Now we’re still the lone superpower, but other countries are catching up. And I think the way to preserve our own influence, but more importantly to preserve the prosperity of our own people, is to recognize the reality that we’re living in. A lot of people can’t. I mean, they go back to, “Mr. Gorbachev, tear down this wall.” Ronald Reagan’s big moment. Or George H.W. Bush — I mean, it was like a blip on the radar for us to completely crush Saddam Hussein and kick him out of Kuwait. They want to go back to the glory days when America could do everything and be all things. They got to wake up to the world of resource constraints. And frankly, the reason why we’re not as powerful in relative terms as we were 30 years ago is because they screwed up.

The Intelligence Bureaucracy Problem

TIM DILLON: Right?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Right. That’s where the trade and immigration issue comes back, is they want to pursue a foreign policy that was built on the back of smart trade and smart immigration policy. They hollowed out the American middle class. They destroyed the industrial base of our country.

Crazy statistic — China. We’re still the biggest economy in the world. China is 32% of global manufacturing GDP. We’re 18% of global manufacturing GDP. So even though we’re still by far the biggest economy in the world, and China makes nearly twice as many manufactured goods as we do, that is the engine of real economic prosperity, is manufacturing. These guys want us to fight wars like it’s 1954. It’s not 1954. And thanks in large part to them.

TIM DILLON: How do you change that? How do you shift that? That’s very difficult. Because you have — we have 19 intelligence agencies. I think it’s around — I think it’s about 19, which I don’t think is — I don’t think it’s enough personally, but there’s 19 of them.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You know, I think we had 22 intelligence agencies. That’s actually when we would really have figured out this.

TIM DILLON: Because everybody’s worried that you and Trump are going to fire some of those people. And that’s what I think most Americans are worried about. I think most people are worried about the CIA and government employees. My parents are worried about the Central Intelligence Agency and if they’re making enough money. This is what my grandmother worries about. What do you say to people that are worried about people at the NSA and the DIA, the Directorate of Intelligence — forget about that one. It’s a little room in the bigger one.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Look, I want to speak from the heart here to my fellow Americans who are really worried that a CIA bureaucrat making $190,000 a year might have to find a job in the private sector. I recognize that is the biggest crisis facing my fellow Americans. Not that they can’t afford groceries and housing. So people can eat less, honestly.

TIM DILLON: So that Homeland Security can be a little bigger.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. So the home —

TIM DILLON: I like knowing that my neighbors are getting spied on. I like it. I like people getting on lists.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, it’s actually really, a win-win. Something I’ll say in Kamala Harris’s defense is, yes, she’s made it harder for Americans to afford housing. But that’s been in the service so the CIA can more easily spy on our fellow Americans. So look — this is where — sometimes there are trade offs.

TIM DILLON: You’re a big critic of online censorship. Don’t you realize it’s good for people? Don’t you realize it’s good to not be able to speak their mind? People don’t even know what they want to say half the time. Why not have a service that uses an AI where you speak into it and it rearranges it so it gets what you mean?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Look, I’m actually okay if we just censored Kamala Harris. I think she would be okay with that, too. I think she’d be better in the polls if she just didn’t say anything.

TIM DILLON: Have you met her? She’s probably fun. She’s fun.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You know who’s fun? And I like — this is a rare moment of bipartisanship. No, no, no. Hunter Biden.

TIM DILLON: Well, of course. I would vote for him over anyone in the race. Just because if we’re going to end this thing, let’s do it quick. Let’s do it in six months.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Oh, man. My cousin is like a hardcore Republican and she’s like, “You know what I can’t get behind you guys on is the anti-Hunter Biden stuff.” Like, that guy, I guarantee is fun. He’s a fun guy to hang out with. I’ve met Kamala Harris once. I honestly don’t know.

TIM DILLON: Yeah. If she’s fine.

SENATOR JD VANCE: There’s too much of a schoolmarm thing going on. I just don’t think that would necessarily — Kamala Harris is the person who, when you tell a really funny joke, says, “Well, that was kind of offensive.”

TIM DILLON: Right?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Right. Yeah, I look at her and I go, “But you’re a genius.” And then she likes me again.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Hunter Biden, if you tell a really offensive joke, he laughs his ass off and says, “Let’s do another one.”

Project 2025 and the Federal Bureaucracy

TIM DILLON: Let’s do it again. Let’s light the house on fire. So how do you deal with this? You get into office now, people are all mad about Project 2025. People don’t like it because the Heritage Foundation wrote a whole thing saying that you’re going to dismantle the entire federal government.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You know, this is the craziest thing to me. Heritage is a nonprofit with no affiliation with the Trump campaign. They wrote a 900-page document. If you take any 900-page document that exists anywhere in the world, I’m going to find something that I hate about it and something that I like about it. So they’ve tried to pick up every little thing that is unpopular and say, “This is Trump’s agenda.” It has nothing to do with Trump.

But to your point — yeah, Donald Trump and I really do want to make the federal bureaucracy smaller. We think there are way too many bureaucrats collecting a check. We think that’s bad for Americans because they have to pay those people’s salaries. But most importantly, it’s bad for Americans because sometimes they’re doing things like spying on their fellow citizens, which is fundamentally bad.

Here’s a crazy story, and I just learned more about this in the past couple of days. There was a Wall Street Journal story about how the Chinese had hacked into the Verizon and AT&T networks. My understanding is that part of the infrastructure that they hacked into was built on top of surveillance systems that were implemented in 2001, Patriot Act-style stuff. So we’re worried about the civil libertarian element of that, and rightfully so. I don’t want American citizens to be spied on. But more importantly, in some ways, we’re creating a backdoor in our own technology networks that our enemies are now using. That’s crazy.

And again, no one is going to accept responsibility for it. No one’s going to say, “We screwed up, let’s do different.” This is the biggest problem I have — all policy disagreements aside — the refusal of people to take responsibility and say, “You know what, I screwed up.” That is the biggest thing that’s messed up about American government and politics.

Look, I had a lot of friends — I mean, I was 18 years old. What the hell did I know? I supported the Iraq War when I was 18 years old.

TIM DILLON: Me too.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I feel bad about that. I genuinely feel bad that as a high school senior in Middletown, Ohio, who then enlisted in the United States Marine Corps — I did my part, and I feel bad about it. There are people in Washington who stopped short of that.

TIM DILLON: I supported it in backyards, yelling, watching a lot of Fox, but I stopped quite short of it.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Look, man, we all have to serve in our own roles. We all have a part to play. But the guys who pushed it — yeah, they’re still collecting multi-hundred-thousand-dollar-a-year salaries. They’re on MSNBC. They still have influence and they’ve never said, “We screwed up.” That is the thing that bothers me the most about Washington D.C. — nobody accepting responsibility for failure. Because if you can’t do that, you can’t fix the problem.

Foreign Policy, Culture Wars, and Afghanistan

TIM DILLON: Well, now it seems to be that we’re shoehorning domestic issues into foreign policy. Meaning that you can no longer sell a war by saying we’re there to democratize a country, or we are there to preemptively invade a country before they attack us. But we can say we are there so that drag queens in Russia can have more of a say.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, you asked why we were in Afghanistan for 20 years. It’s like, because the Afghans really need to learn about gender studies and the important non-binary gender approach that we have in the United States of America. You think I’m kidding? Your tax dollars, my tax dollars, were funding programs in a country where a lot of people didn’t have running water. We’re funding programs to teach people that there were non-binary genders out there.

TIM DILLON: That I do agree with, because it is fun. And I do want to see someone with a Kalashnikov — I’m sure it was really in the rubble — and then someone explaining that to them. To me, that is fun and I support that.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I’m sure the Taliban had a lot of fun learning about 87 genders. That’s probably true.

TIM DILLON: Why can’t a 7-year-old consent to a life-altering medical surgery? Is it because you guys are fascist? I don’t understand. Like, why wouldn’t you allow an 8-year-old to fully transition?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Not only that, but they want us to use tax dollars to try to force other countries to follow this ridiculous pathway.

TIM DILLON: Yes.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Which, by the way — I know a little bit about your politics and you look pretty libertarian. This is actually something I agreed with the old guard left about. Whether it’s in defense or whether it’s in the medical industry, we should be worried about when a profit-motivated entity tries to manipulate government policy.

Right now we have pharma companies making billions of dollars off of cross-sex hormones for children. And nobody on the left is saying, “Huh, that’s kind of weird that the very people who are getting rich off of this are also lobbying the American Medical Association and the US government to force this on American citizens.”

The Gender Debate and Leaving Kids Alone

TIM DILLON: It should have stopped at — I think it should have stopped at Glee. Glee was great. Everyone was singing and everyone was happy. No, it truly was. And people weren’t — it wasn’t so contentious. But then it got to a point where somebody like me, who’s been a gay, out-of-the-closet person for 15 years, I’m going, “Why in God’s name would a 5-year-old, a 7-year-old, a 12-year-old, a 14-year-old be taking puberty-blocking hormones, be transitioning?” Leave kids alone. Leave people alone. It’s very simple.

A lot of gay people feel that way. There are trans people that feel that way. There are people all over the spectrum that feel that way. None of them are ever listened to. It is the most extreme, loudest voices in that movement that are listened to only.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, well, what really radicalized me on this issue was I was actually talking to a friend who really disagrees with my views on transgender politics. And frankly, she kind of rejected our friendship because I came out against this. I came out in support of banning gender transition for minors during my Senate campaign.

What really radicalized me, actually, was during that conversation she said something to me that made me think, “Wait a second, is this real?” She said the hormonal therapy for minors is totally reversible. The way they sell this is it just delays puberty, but then if you stop taking the drugs, everything resumes as normal. That is totally and profoundly false.

TIM DILLON: It can’t be true. There’s no way that —

SENATOR JD VANCE: When I heard it, I was like, “That sounds totally f*ing crazy.” Yeah, it turns out — also, let’s say that was crazy.

Gender Identity, Race Relations, and Education

TIM DILLON: Also not a great policy.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Exactly.

TIM DILLON: Even if it was true, probably not good.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Even if it was true, probably not good. Because you don’t want 30 year olds going through puberty.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But even if it was true, problem. But it’s not true. Kids have permanent sexual dysfunction. Permanent, serious health problems when they take this stuff, which is totally predictable. One of the lifelong, the humanity-long lessons we should take is that when we intervene in things in unexpected ways, whether it’s a war or trying to interrupt a biological process, we very often screw up.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You need evidence before you really do something.

TIM DILLON: I don’t know how we got in this country to “why can’t a 9 year old girl have a beard?” I don’t know where, from Glee, everyone singing was gay enough, perhaps too gay. And then it got to a place. Yeah, it was.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But happy. Yeah. Okay.

TIM DILLON: Okay.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I’ve actually heard this, and I’m not a gay guy, but I’ve heard this from gay friends of mine.

TIM DILLON: Man, that. Damn it, we would have. You want to talk about virality? I’m talking about going viral.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, that would have made some headlines.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But I’ve talked about this with gay friends who feel very personally affronted about this because they feel like if they were a gay kid and they were 14 years old and maybe they’re confused — by the way, a lot of teenagers, even a lot of non-gay teenagers are confused, because being a teenager is inherently confusing.

TIM DILLON: That’s right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But they’re worried about, would somebody have had them transition? Of course.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: In some ways it’s like the new pharmaceutical answer to conversion therapy. Right? “Oh, no, no, no, you’re not gay. You’re a totally different gender.” The other thing I don’t get about this, the inconsistency here is crazy. They want to simultaneously tell me that the gendered binary is screwed up, that male and female is way too simple, that there’s all this stuff in the middle. But when you have a person go on cross-sex hormones, they put on super petite dresses and high heels and they act like the most stereotypical version of a girl — a male transitioning to female. It’s like, okay, wait a second. Is the gendered stereotypical binary bad or is it actually good? Because every time somebody takes these hormones, they start acting like Dylan Mulvaney.

TIM DILLON: What happens, I think, is we’ve allowed the debate to be defined by a very extreme portion who — it’s not about logic. It’s about people throwing tantrums and people going, “You have to agree with me. I’m going to compel you to agree with me.” Kids should be left alone. My parents were boomers. I was ignored. I was left alone to do whatever. And perhaps that’s not great, but we shouldn’t be telling.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You turned out okay.

TIM DILLON: I turned out fine. Yeah. Now I’m not the vice president, but I have a Rolls Royce. So here’s the thing.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I think you’re winning in that trade off. I can’t even drive anymore, thanks to the Secret Service.

TIM DILLON: Going to get blown up soon.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It’s going to be.

TIM DILLON: But I’ll tell you this. I don’t see why we’re telling kids about critical race theory or gender theory. Why are we not educating people in math, in reading and science? Why are we indoctrinating children? I don’t know too many people who are for that. If you meet people in the real world, none of them go, “Correct, 5 year olds should learn about identity politics.” Nobody’s for that.

SENATOR JD VANCE: No, nobody is.

TIM DILLON: Very few people.

Race, Identity Politics, and American Values

SENATOR JD VANCE: This one I actually feel very personally passionate about because this affects my family. Right?

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: My wife and I talk about this all the time. So her parents were born and raised in South India. They moved to San Diego a couple years before she was born. So she’s born and raised in San Diego. She is Indian American, but she’s the most assimilated — she’s an American, fundamentally. She’s an American.

We talk about how we were able to fall in love in part because we grew up in the 90s where everybody was like, “Yeah, okay, it’s not perfect. Obviously there’s still racism out there. But judge people based on who they are, not on these immutable characteristics, on their skin color. Just judge people based on whether you have similar values.” And because of that, we met, fell in love, we had a family. My family has always been welcome to her and vice versa.

My mom actually put this in a very interesting way. She’s noticed in the last few years that people are obsessed that we have mixed race children. Are they brown, are they white, are they Indian, are they American? And my mom’s just like, “Well, they are babies. That’s who they are. They’re our babies.”

I think that if you really inflame the racial consciousness of people, if they fundamentally think of themselves not as human beings or as Americans, but as members of a racial group, that’s just going to fundamentally lead to strife. You want to emphasize the commonality that we have as fellow citizens. You don’t want to say, “Okay, you’re black, so this means this thing about you and that thing about you, and you’re white, so this means something totally different.” That obviously, to me, just common sense would lead to conflict.

And I’m not saying it was perfect, but if you look at both black and white Americans, they say that race relations are worse now than they were 20 years ago. So we’ve run this experiment of hyper identity politics, focused racial consciousness — of constantly emphasizing, “If you’re black, you’re oppressed. If you’re white, you’re an oppressor. If you’re black, you’re colonized. If you’re white, you’re the colonizer.” We’ve run this experiment now for 20 years. It’s bullshit. It didn’t work. It’s made people hate each other. Let’s get back to just trying to emphasize that we’re all human beings, we’re all Americans.

TIM DILLON: 1000%.

Israel, Iran, and the Middle East

TIM DILLON: Now let’s talk about a topic slightly less controversial. Israel. Because no one seems to have any issues with anything they do, which I like, because some countries people get angry at. Obviously what happened on October 7th is a nightmare.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Sure.

TIM DILLON: Then you have a response to that, which was also a nightmare. You have a humanitarian crisis in Gaza. You have displacement of people. You have a looming, potentially larger war in the Middle East with Iran. You are the vice president. How does the Trump administration handle what could be a massive Middle East war?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Right.

TIM DILLON: After everything we just talked about — about getting America back on track and figuring out how to allocate resources to people in this country — how do we handle that?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, a couple of principles. Obviously, Israel has the right to defend itself, but America’s interest is sometimes going to be distinct. Sometimes we’re going to have overlapping interests, and sometimes we’re going to have distinct interests. And our interest, I think, very much is in not going to war with Iran. It would be a huge distraction of resources. It would be massively expensive to our country.

It’s interesting to me — when the October 7th thing happened, we have a couple of dear friends who live in Israel. Actually, one of my wife’s very good friends she grew up with married an Israeli guy. We were worried about our friends. And in the reaction to it, what I noticed is that American pro-Israel people, or people who fashioned themselves as pro-Israel, were actually much more militaristic than the Israelis who were living in Israel.

The Israelis were like, “Okay, Hamas just attacked us. We’re going to go really screw Hamas up.” And of course, there’s a humanitarian side of that and they want to try to minimize civilian casualties. But you had Americans saying, “This attack happened on Putin’s birthday, so we need to go to war against Russia. And obviously the Iranians funded part of this, so we need to go to war with Iran.”

We just have to be smarter. Now, I don’t want Iran to get a nuclear weapon. And I think we should be very strongly encouraging the Iranians, using all the influence that we have, to encourage them to not have a nuclear weapon. I think nuclear proliferation is just a bad idea. Enough people have nukes, and the more people that have nukes, the greater the risk of nuclear war. But we just have to be smart about it. And I actually think that what this ultimately looks —

TIM DILLON: What if they promise not to use it? Like, if you just had one — a fake one, something, a fake one.

SENATOR JD VANCE: They can have a fake one. Okay, here’s the way I think about it. This is again where smart diplomacy really matters. And something that Trump didn’t get enough credit for is the Abraham Accords. What is the Abraham Accords? Fundamentally, it’s Israel entering into an alliance — even though they kind of hate each other — Israel entering into an alliance with Gulf Arab states.

TIM DILLON: Right?

The Middle East, Taiwan, and Global Strategy

SENATOR JD VANCE: Now, why would they do that since they hate each other? Because they both have a shared enemy in Iran. Right? And again, I’m not saying we stick ourselves into the Middle East and start a war here, but we recognize, okay, Israelis, Gulf Arab states don’t like Iran. So let the Israelis and the Gulf Arab states provide the counterbalance to Iran. America doesn’t have to constantly police every region of the world. We should empower people to police their own regions of the world. Right? And one, we would save a lot of money. Two, we’d save a lot of focus.

But unfortunately, I think Harris, she’s got this weird thing where I actually think she kind of likes war. Maybe she feels like a tough guy about it. I don’t know why it is, but they’ve actually pursued, even though they say they want to minimize Palestinian civilian casualties, they pursued the pathway that maximizes those casualties. They say that they’re pro-Israel. They’ve pursued the pathway that has prolonged the war as long as possible, which is bad for Israel. And they seem to be sort of sleepwalking us into war with Iran. It’s like the dumbest of all possible worlds.

TIM DILLON: Is there a way to avoid a conflict between China and Taiwan?

SENATOR JD VANCE: I hope so, man. I really do, because it would be catastrophic. It would be. My whole argument with Russia and Ukraine is, yeah, okay, Russia shouldn’t have invaded Ukraine, but a lot of innocent people are getting killed. Our interest is in peace. But part of that is motivated by my view that Ukraine is not nearly as important to us as other regions of the world.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Just putting my cards on the table. Taiwan makes so much of the computer chips, which is such a driver of all economic growth, that if the Chinese took over Taiwan, it would be really bad for us. That’s what I think. My hope is that the Chinese recognize that it would be so costly to invade Taiwan that it’s just not worth it. Right.

And I think our policy, Donald Trump’s policy of, yes, we’re competitors with China, but we’re also going to engage in smart diplomacy from time to time, is the way to prevent China from invading Taiwan. What I really worry about, actually, is so we win in a couple weeks, and I do think we’re going to win. I really worry the next couple of months. Do the Chinese try to do something? Because if there was ever a time when America was at its weakest, it’s with Joe Biden sort of asleep at the wheel, Kamala Harris licking her wounds from an election loss. And if they really want it, maybe they try to make a play for it in the next couple of months. I hope they don’t. But we can’t really control what they do.

The Assassination Attempts on Donald Trump

TIM DILLON: It is an interesting time right now because we are two weeks out. And this episode will come out this Saturday, tomorrow. A momentous election. We had an assassination attempt on Donald Trump’s life. A couple of them.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Crazy.

TIM DILLON: Crazy. Are you satisfied with the accountability on the first attempt?

SENATOR JD VANCE: No, I’m not. And look, my understanding is that, frankly, the Trump campaign had requested additional resources, and those resource requests were very often denied. And what the Biden folks, what the Harris folks have been saying is, “Well, some of those requests were granted.” Yes, some of them were, but not all of them. Right. And so I think there was very serious oversight on that side of it. I mean, look, obviously somebody screwed up because the guy was 120 yards away. Are you a shooter?

TIM DILLON: No. Okay.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I mean, I served in the Marines. I’m a pretty good shot.

TIM DILLON: I’ve gone to fields.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah.

TIM DILLON: I’ve gone to, like, open fields and kind of walked around like a, kind of like a fair. I’ve never climbed on a roof and shot someone.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah.

TIM DILLON: President.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. No, I mean, like a sportsman, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I was asking if you had a confirmed kill. Yeah, but the thing is, if you are a sportsman or you are a person who goes to a range and shoots, 120 yards with an AR-15 is a pot shot. I mean, I could literally hit a silver dollar from 125 yards with an AR-15.

TIM DILLON: And.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Okay, so somebody clearly screwed up. Right? And I’ve gotten to know the Secret Service over the last three months. The guys on my detail, universally super professional, good guys. But it’s not the guys on the ground who are protecting the President. It’s all the people who are canvassing the area around him. It’s the leadership that refused to grant resources. And I actually think it’s a huge scandal. Like, why isn’t Congress, why isn’t the Harris administration being more forthcoming about what happened? They seem to be in cover-your-ass mode when the American people just need to actually learn some details about how a guy got so close to the President of the United States.

Intelligence Community, Censorship, and Election Interference

TIM DILLON: I mean, listen, obviously there’s a lot of people in the intelligence community that are incredible patriots who are grateful for what they do and they’ve kept America safe.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But some of them aren’t.

TIM DILLON: Some of them aren’t. And my question is, when you have social media companies agree to censor a story about Hunter Biden’s laptop, and because it is supposedly Russian disinformation, that request is signed onto by top members of the intelligence community, current and former, and they are spreading the narrative that it is a Russian hoax of a story, is that election interference by members of the intelligence community? What does that say about the democratic process in this country? These are the people that are lecturing constantly about democracy and how important it is and what a threat you are, and President Trump, to democracy. There’s no accountability. Have they said sorry? I mean, has anyone?

SENATOR JD VANCE: They haven’t said sorry. None of them have lost their security clearance. Right. Despite participating in a massive hoax. Look, I firmly believe, and I’ve seen independent analysis that suggests this, that if the American people had known the full truth about the Hunter Biden laptop, because it implicated Joe Biden himself in potentially criminal, but at least corrupt wrongdoing. Right. So I think it would have shifted the election. I think Donald Trump would be the President of the United States right now.

And this is always why I get into it with the media, and they say, “Oh, there’s no evidence that this thing and this thing happened.” Well, there might not be any evidence that, like, Dominion hacked the voting machines, but there’s sure as hell evidence that our intelligence community conspired with big tech to literally control the flow of information in the days and weeks before an election. That’s a way bigger threat to democracy than Donald Trump making a joke that you don’t like. And yet we don’t talk about that.

And while we’re on the subject of threats to democracy, the craziest thing that happened in the Trump administration, in my view, in terms of threat to democracy, and there was a New York Times story about this, is that the leading generals in our country were lying to Donald Trump about troop redeployments in Syria so that they could say that we were drawing troop levels down, but in reality we weren’t. Right. They were staggering how they did the redeployments to hide from the commander in chief what they were actually doing with the military.

The most fundamental principle going back to George Washington is civilian control of the military. The elected president is the commander in chief. You had generals, in particular Mark Milley, the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman, lying to Donald Trump. That’s a threat to democracy. Not when Donald Trump makes a joke at a rally.

TIM DILLON: Who are these people working for if not the President of the United States?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, they’re working for the permanent bureaucracy. People call it the deep state. What the deep state is, is just when you have an organization that becomes self-perpetuating. These people have military contracts, they have corporate board seats. That all becomes part of who they’re really serving.

And again, people are good at lying to themselves. Do I think that Mark Milley woke up every day saying, “Oh, I’m serving the military industrial complex and I can’t wait to get my Raytheon board seat?” No, he wasn’t thinking that way. He was thinking that true democracy was the opposite of whatever Donald Trump wanted to happen. But in reality, Mark Milley doesn’t determine what democracy is. The American people determine that. And so when the American people make a decision, you have to respect that decision, even if you don’t like the guy that they ultimately elected.

But this is the psychological trick that’s been played on people like Dick Cheney and Kamala Harris. And I think they all participate in it, but they’re all honestly kind of victims of it too, is that they’ve convinced themselves that the real threat to American democracy is not when the Joint Chiefs of Staff chairman disobeys the elected president. It’s when the elected president does something they don’t like. I think that psychological trick is at the heart of a lot of our problems.

Immigration, Deportation, and the Border

TIM DILLON: Is it going to be difficult to secure a border and to deport people who are here illegally, some of whom may have committed crimes? Obviously, there’s been instances of people who’ve been murdered by people that are here illegally. How does that work? Are you able to do that? Is that possible? And what would that look like?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, so I’m asked this question all the time, and I joked with a reporter who said, “Well, you know, you can’t possibly deport 25 million people. That’s too many people.” And I said, it’s kind of like, you have a Big Mac, and you say, “You can’t possibly eat that whole thing. It’s bigger than your mouth.” Well, the way you do it is you take one bite and then a second bite, and then a third bite. And that’s how I think about deportations here.

You start with the most hardened criminals, about 425,000 violent illegal alien criminals. And we know where most of them are because they’ve committed crimes, right? So you do law enforcement. You go and get those people, you send them back to where they came from, and that’s where you start. But then, yeah, you’ve got to deport illegal aliens. If you’re not willing to deport the people who came here illegally, especially those who came here over the last few years, then you’re not going to have a border. And it’s just basic law enforcement, right?

I mean, people reveal themselves as illegal aliens all the time. There’s a lot of Social Security fraud that happens in our country where somebody, and I’ve had friends where their Social Security number was stolen, that Social Security number was used to get a driver’s license or a work permit or something like that. And then when they go and say, “Oh, I think I’ve had identity fraud committed against me,” the Social Security Administration will tell them, “Oh, we have to respect the privacy of the people who defrauded you and stole your Social Security number.” Okay, well, when you defraud somebody and steal their Social Security number, deport those people, right?

And then the final point is you’ve got to make it harder for illegal aliens to work in the country in the first place, right? Because then a lot of people will just go back home if they can’t. And I think it’s really important. I think one of the biggest and most pernicious effects of illegal immigration, of Kamala Harris’s open border, is it means that millions and millions of people are willing to work under the table. But that means a lot of Americans aren’t getting good jobs because you have illegal aliens who are willing to work for much lower wages.

TIM DILLON: Do you worry at all about Aspen, about Palm Beach, about Greenwich, Connecticut, or Southampton, where I have a home?

SENATOR JD VANCE: With all due respect, I think it’s a little dis—

TIM DILLON: Disgusting that you would try to make us pay American workers a wage to do things that other people wouldn’t do. It’s a little shortsighted.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. I mean, look, I want—

TIM DILLON: To say the Chamber of Commerce is bringing these people in, clearly because they’re humanitarian.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah, that’s right.

TIM DILLON: And the Koch family. What changed in the Democratic Party? Bernie Sanders was asked about this. He said, “It is a Koch brothers fantasy to have an open border.”

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yes.

TIM DILLON: It’ll drive down wages. Bill Clinton said it’s a country of laws. That’s a little fun.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But he said that, maybe it was—

Immigration, Labor, and the Cost of Globalization

TIM DILLON: It was maybe at one time. What changed in the Democratic Party and also a lot of elements of the Republican Party for many, many years. The libertarian pro-business wing of the Republican Party is staunchly pro-immigration. And they have united with kind of the far left of the Democratic Party, which has become a lot of the Democratic Party. And this idea that any restrictions on immigration are racist. The idea of a border is racist. The idea of a process by which people can come into the country is insane. How did that happen?

SENATOR JD VANCE: I mean, look, this is so crazy to me where you have people in Aspen that are paying their nanny borderline poverty wages. And it’s survivable for two reasons. One, because the nanny lives in a crowded apartment with like six other people. And two, because that nanny is receiving welfare benefits from American taxpayers.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: So these people are having their lifestyles subsidized. They’re paying their nannies poverty wages. And their response to it is to say that you’re racist if you think this arrangement is bad.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: The people who are paying the taxes, who are funding the welfare state so that you can have a poverty wage nanny or a poverty wage house cleaner. They’re racist.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: They just want a safe country. And they don’t want people to come to our country who they have to pay welfare benefits for. And most importantly, they don’t want somebody taking away their jobs. It’s, I think it’s the most disgusting thing, man. And look, my heart breaks for the poor people of Aspen and West Hollywood who can’t, who have that much money, who would have to pay — well, Bel Air and Malibu — who would have to pay their nannies a livable wage. I mean, they’re obviously the most

TIM DILLON: important people. But these are jobs Americans won’t do. And by that I mean retail, wholesale, gardening, childcare, working anywhere. These are jobs Americans — because that’s what I was told.

SENATOR JD VANCE: The argument growing up.

TIM DILLON: Americans will only get one job and it is finance.

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s right. My favorite is construction. Americans won’t build houses. And it’s actually a totally reasonable argument if you think about it. Because in the 1960s when we had low levels of illegal immigration, there were no homes being built. Mass homelessness in the United States of America in 1964, until we created this housing oasis by bringing in millions of illegal aliens.

The real truth, of course, is there are jobs Americans won’t do at certain wages.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And so the solution to that problem is to raise wages for working people, to get more of them into the labor force, and not to constantly import this serf class.

It’s also very corrosive to the idea of American democracy. Small D American democracy. Thomas Jefferson, Alexander Hamilton — go back to the original founding fathers. They wanted there to be commonality across citizens. They wanted smart people who were paying attention to the issues. They wanted, whether you were a worker or a business owner or a farmer or a farmhand, they wanted some similarity across all American classes.

If you have a permanent class of low-wage serfs, many of whom don’t even speak English, that destroys the citizenship ethos that makes our democracy possible in the first place. These people don’t care because they want the cheap labor. I care because I love my country.

Globalization and Its Discontents

TIM DILLON: A lot of people look at America more as a financial opportunity.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Exactly.

TIM DILLON: Than a country.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And it can’t be that. American citizenship cannot just be a bunch of people who work and make financial transactions with one another. You don’t go and fight wars because the guy down the street makes a lot of money trading derivatives on Wall Street. You go and fight wars if you have a nation that you believe in. And importantly, if you have faith that your leaders are only going to send you to fight a war when they have to.

TIM DILLON: And this is not only what’s been broken. This is not only America, it’s countries all over the world, all over Europe. Globalization — the benefits of it have been unevenly distributed, to say the least. You have a class of people that own assets, and they’ve seen the value of those assets. Many of them are invested in the market and they’re incredibly happy with the freedom to move capital around the world and make lots and lots of money.

But the citizens of the countries that they live in, their standards of living have been lowered and lowered and lowered. And this is not only America. It’s this financial architecture that seems to be replacing people’s cultures, histories, and idea of what a nation is.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. And the real economy too. We used to make stuff, and now we’re trading derivatives, shipping dollars overseas, but also shipping assets overseas, where we used to make that stuff in the United States.

Crazy statistic. What do you think the life premium for having a bachelor’s degree is in this country? In other words, if you have a bachelor’s degree, how much longer do you live than a person without a bachelor’s degree?

TIM DILLON: Ten years.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Seven years. Wow, seven years. You live seven years longer for having gone to college in the United States of America.

The way that I would put it is: globalization has been very good for rich people in rich countries, and it’s been very good for poor people in poor countries. It’s been extraordinarily bad for poor people and middle-class people in rich countries.

And in some ways, the whole Donald Trump movement is a rebellion against that. Okay, well, some people have benefited from this. Like some people benefited when my steel mill — the steel mill that employed my grandfather for 40 years — went from 10,000 jobs to 1,800 jobs. But it wasn’t the people that I grew up around, and it wasn’t our families, and it wasn’t the moms and dads who got divorced because the dad — usually, but sometimes the mom — lost a stable middle-class wage.

Again, Republicans are like, “We’re supposed to be the party of family and of family values.” You know what’s really bad for family values? When thousands of people at the drop of a hat lose a good middle-class wage.

TIM DILLON: Right, right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s not good for family values. That destroys families. And again, we can do so much better, but we’ve got to get away from this failed consensus of the last 40 years.

BlackRock, Housing, and the Gig Economy

TIM DILLON: But isn’t it good that BlackRock owns the homes? Because people, I feel like, don’t want to own their own home. There’s a lot that goes into it. Isn’t it better for them to rent? Isn’t it better for them to take Ubers and have small little jobs instead of one big one? I think it’s — I have friends that do DoorDash, Uber Eats, Uber, Lyft, and they rant and they really like it because they can get high a lot. Isn’t that a better country than having a family? And aren’t people happier like that? Didn’t you say you wanted people to have families and then people said you were sick?

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s right. Yeah. I mean, it seems sick to me.

TIM DILLON: Have you ever had a dream or a podcast or a job? Delivering food isn’t that bad.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Look, clearly the most fulfilling life is to watch Netflix all day and get high all the time.

TIM DILLON: That’s right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: To be clear, I want to make sure that’s clearly the most important. But I think the second most fulfilling life is to have a family and participate in your community. And to talk about ideas with your friends and spend time having meals. Yeah, okay. Obviously it’s best to have food delivered to you by yourself and to eat it alone. But it’s also really fun to share a meal with friends and family.

TIM DILLON: BlackRock — is there a way to calm that down where they’re purchasing all and they’re driving up the cost of real estate? You walk around New York City, there are buildings that are full of empty apartments because it’s money laundering from people overseas that are stashing money, and it’s raising the cost of living for the entire city.

The Federal Reserve, BlackRock, and Housing Affordability

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s exactly right. And I’m actually not a Ron Paul guy, one of my dear friends is a big Ron Paul guy. But I’ve kind of come around to the Ron Paul argument. I don’t fully agree with it, but the criticism of the Federal Reserve that makes the most sense to me is that it gives massive corporations a lower cost of money than the average American.

So part of the reason BlackRock has been able to buy all these homes is — you ask, well, what is BlackRock borrowing at? What rate are they borrowing at? Because the average American right now, I think the average mortgage interest rate is somewhere around 7%. BlackRock’s borrowing at like 1.5, 2.5%. So if they’re paying a much lower cost for debt than the average American, then they have a huge advantage. They buy up all the homes, they jack up all the costs.

And again, going back to the Jeffersonian idea of Americans as owners and as citizens in their own country — well, what happens when BlackRock owns your home and they say, “You’re not allowed to own a firearm because we own this home. You don’t own this home.” Okay, there goes the Second Amendment. What if they say, “For all residents in our places, we don’t want you to put up yard signs for certain political candidates?” Well, there goes the First Amendment.

There’s a very deep connection between the idea of American citizenship, the full idea, and the liberties that actually make American society such a cool place to live. And if we turn everybody into renters, we’re going to destroy that.

TIM DILLON: Here’s where you’re wrong, though. People really like these shows where people buy $20 million homes. Like Selling Sunset — isn’t that as good as owning a home? Because there’s 30 shows about people buying mansions and people get to watch them, so you don’t have to cut grass. You can watch somebody else buy a house. But that is what’s happening, by the way.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You can live in a pod and eat your roasted crickets, but watch other people live the American dream.

TIM DILLON: People do that. There are people watching people buy houses —

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yes.

TIM DILLON: — for tens of millions of dollars, who they themselves cannot afford their rent.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. It’s almost like the shows have the purpose —

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: — of distracting us from the fact that material living standards in this country have been stagnating for many years.

TIM DILLON: Yeah, yeah. And you address that by — perhaps, is it the federal funds rate? Is it?

Lowering the Cost of Capital for Ordinary Americans

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah. I mean, what I think is — and I’ve actually talked to a number of people about this. The President has a very dear friend by the name of Steve Witkoff, who’s a very smart guy. He’s one of the most successful real estate investors in the world. And Steve has all of these interesting ideas for how to make it so that ordinary Americans are paying the same amount for debt as the big guys. Because if you’re paying 7% and the big guys are paying 2%, ordinary Americans are always going to get screwed.

There are a lot of different ways you could do that. I mean, you could basically statutorily not allow BlackRock to access the federal funds directly. You could do all these things to lower the cost of capital for normal Americans. There are a lot of ways to address the problem, but it’s a problem.

And the fact that we’re not talking about that — instead we’re talking about how Donald Trump is a threat to democracy because he said that if people riot after he wins, we should not allow that. Of all the criticisms of Donald Trump, the craziest one is that he said at a rally that if people riot after the election, law enforcement should prevent that from happening. And they’re like, “Oh, that’s a threat to democracy.” It’s like, what the hell are you talking about? That’s common law, American law enforcement.

But it’s funny, man. People are more focused on that. The media is more focused on that than on the fact that we have a set of economic policies that are turning our generation — I mean, I assume you’re about my age — our generation, especially younger, into permanent paupers, permanent renters in the country that their parents and grandparents built.

And I see these polls that say that young people usually vote for Democrats, but maybe they’re more pro-Trump this cycle than they were last cycle. My argument to them is: aren’t you sick of politicians talking about fake bullsh instead of the fact that you can’t afford a home and that you won’t be able to raise a family because you won’t be able to afford their health care costs and their housing costs? Let’s talk about real stuff. Say what you will about Donald Trump. Say what you will about me —

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: He talks about real things that affect real people.

The Ukraine War and Young Americans

TIM DILLON: Is the happy medium them owning a home in Ukraine? You know what I mean? Because you’re making a lot of points that are going to be tough to do.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, look — perhaps if Kamala Harris is president, here’s the win-win again. She’s always looking for that. If they own a home in Ukraine, they can then be conscripted into her endless war in Ukraine. So if you’re a young American and you’d like to own a very sweet mansion in Ukraine while also fighting a war for a country that’s 6,000 miles away, then yeah, Kamala Harris is your candidate. If you’d like to own a nice home in the United States of America and raise a family, I think Donald Trump is more your flavor. But different strokes for different folks, man. I don’t want to judge anybody’s preferences.

TIM DILLON: No, for sure.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I give the honest —

TIM DILLON: I have a lot of friends that —

SENATOR JD VANCE: — were very much voting for Kamala Harris.

TIM DILLON: They’re very excited about it. Many of them live in Beverly Hills, and they got the flags and everything, and they got into it, and it’s fun. It’s actually fun to have something to be into.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, I actually — okay. So I saw a couple years ago, a buddy sent me a photo. They had the Black Lives Matter thing in the yard —

TIM DILLON: Sure.

SENATOR JD VANCE: — they had the Trans Lives Matter sign in the yard, and then they had the Ukrainian flag —

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: — hanging up on their porch. And he sent me this photo, and he said, “I’ve just seen it. The liberal holy trinity. It used to be the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit. Now it’s those three.”

TIM DILLON: You have it all. Well, we’re not allowed to ask why the Ukraine war happened or what we did to potentially create conditions where — I mean, we’re not allowed to ask that.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Did American diplomacy actually create conflict instead of diffusing conflict? In my view, it did.

TIM DILLON: And maybe that could — maybe that was the goal. We don’t know. I mean, I don’t want to sound like a nut. Well, there are people that —

SENATOR JD VANCE: — yeah, it’s this psychological post-war thing of everyone is either Adolf Hitler or Winston Churchill.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s how these people think about it.

TIM DILLON: Do you think Vladimir Putin is on a march through Europe, that he’s going to knock over Poland, that he’s going to knock over — it doesn’t seem —

SENATOR JD VANCE: Of all the absurd arguments I’ve heard —

TIM DILLON: — that doesn’t seem like it.

SENATOR JD VANCE: He can’t take half of Ukraine, which was his goal. He can’t take half of Ukraine, but somehow he’s going to march all the way to Berlin. And by the way, if he marches all the way to Berlin, what the hell does that say about Germany?

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Maybe they should build their own security capacities to prevent it. Maybe they should listen to Rammstein and actually — that’s worthwhile, though. I will say Rammstein —

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: — has this crazy song —

TIM DILLON: Sure.

SENATOR JD VANCE: — from 2004. I think you know what I’m talking about.

TIM DILLON: I think I do.

SENATOR JD VANCE: “We’re all living in America.”

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: That is actually a really interesting criticism of globalization. So to the Rammstein fans out there, I apologize.

Redefining NATO and America’s Role in the World

TIM DILLON: And NATO — do you think that we redefine our relationship with NATO?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, yeah. I mean, what President Trump has said about NATO is, look, we’re not going to pull out of NATO, but NATO needs to be a true alliance, a true partner, and not basically just another welfare client of the United States of America.

I mean, okay — guess how many mechanized brigades Germany could field right now? Germany’s the fourth largest economy in the world. They could field between 0 and 1 mechanized brigades.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: If that is your country’s military, you’re not a partner of the United States in any security sense. You’re a welfare client of the United States. And I would like Germany — I love Germany, by the way. I think it’s a great country, great people, good beer — they should be doing more to look after their own security.

TIM DILLON: Well, ironically, they rely on cheap Russian gas and oil and the United States military. So asking NATO countries to fund more of their own defense is the direction that you want to go into.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, I think they have to fund more of their own defense. They have to take more ownership over their own security. And I just don’t want America to be the policeman of the world. We can’t be the policeman of Europe, the policeman of the Middle East. I want more of these allies to behave like allies, to take more ownership over their own security and to make their own decisions.

I mean, look, if I was a European country, in some ways I would feel kind of pathetic. They always called Tony Blair, the Prime Minister of the UK, “Bush’s poodle.”

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It was probably being too nice to Tony Blair to call him Bush’s poodle.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Because these guys, they don’t even have their own countries anymore. They just do whatever the United States tells them to do.

Foreign Billionaires and the Hollowing Out of Great Cities

TIM DILLON: Well, London has also just become a vertical money laundering scheme.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, that’s it.

TIM DILLON: Everyone from all over the world — and New York — this is happening to all these great cities: people that live there are being driven out.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Exactly.

TIM DILLON: And you have billionaires and centimillionaires going in and buying up all this real estate, not contributing to the culture of the city at all. And in London’s case, they have Russian oligarchs throwing people out of windows.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yes.

TIM DILLON: Which — that is good. I think it’s fine. No, they’re not — it’s not random, JD. It’s not like —

SENATOR JD VANCE: Are we talking first floor windows or like 10-story windows? Okay, well — it’s people involved.

TIM DILLON: They knew the risk. They knew the risk. But so to me, it’s like — I look at these great cities and I say, listen, obviously you want people from all over the world to come and appreciate a city. At what point does the purchasing of real estate from foreign nationals become a major problem for not only the cost of living of Americans, but the culture of a city?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Huge.

TIM DILLON: You know what I mean? It seems insane that nobody — Ron DeSantis came out and proposed doing something about it, but very few politicians have come out and said anything about that issue.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It’s very important. I mean, look, London is effectively the world’s only socialist tax haven.

TIM DILLON: Right?

SENATOR JD VANCE: It’s just crazy. It’s a socialist country, socialist government at this point, but they let billionaires from all over shelter their assets in their country. It’s a totally bizarre and screwed up way of thinking about your economy. This is sort of what globalization does. This is what I really worry about — London doesn’t feel fully English to me anymore.

TIM DILLON: No.

Cultural Identity, Manufacturing, and the 2024 Election

SENATOR JD VANCE: Right. New York, of course, is the classic American city. Over time, I think New York will start to feel less American. Everything becomes flattened and becomes the same. Real diversity actually is — I’d kind of like to go to a different place and have it be different.

TIM DILLON: You want Paris to be Paris?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Exactly. Not have it all just feel the same. That is, I think, a diversity that I can get behind.

TIM DILLON: People see financial migration as an opportunity to go into a country, not respect the laws, the culture, set up a profitable business and then send that money back to another country. It doesn’t seem like a sustainable model.

SENATOR JD VANCE: No. And you have no investment in that country. We want people who have investments in a place to care about it. Well, if the workers get really pissed, then maybe I’ll have to pay higher taxes. So then we’re going to focus on making the workers not pissed. Or if people get really miserable, then they start doing crazy things. They start rioting. Let’s make it harder for people to riot. If you don’t have that investment in the local community, then I think that’s what this leads to. And to your point, I think we should basically ban foreign asset purchases of American land.

Hillbilly Elegy and Appalachian Roots

TIM DILLON: You grew up in an area of Virginia, or it might not have been Virginia.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Well, so, yeah, I’m Appalachian, born and raised in Ohio. But my family’s sort of all from the Appalachian part of eastern Kentucky.

TIM DILLON: Okay. I think of that all as Virginia, but I know that that’s not the case.

SENATOR JD VANCE: That’s a very LA way of thinking. I didn’t think of Ohio.

TIM DILLON: I thought Ohio was like Graeter’s ice cream and heroin, but fun at music festivals. I didn’t think of it. I thought it was like, you know —

SENATOR JD VANCE: — white rapper vibes. In your mind, it’s like California.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: New York and then just everything else.

TIM DILLON: And then it’s all now Chicago and then fence. But that’s what it’s becoming. We got to stop it from becoming that right now. What were the lessons that you learned? Because your book, Hillbilly Elegy, is a hit, was a bestseller. It’s a movie as well. What were your takeaways? Because I know people that loved the book that disagreed with some of your takeaways. These people probably know better than you because they live in Santa Monica. And they go, “I don’t think he’s right about that.”

SENATOR JD VANCE: The real Appalachians in Santa Monica.

TIM DILLON: Well, by the way, it is — if I’ll take you there, and it doesn’t look that — they’ve had this. Newsom’s turned it into that. What were your takeaways? Because, I mean, the fact that you were able to go to Yale Law School, mount a successful Senate campaign — you’re sitting here running for vice president. You come out of an area where circumstances for a lot of people are dire.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yeah.

TIM DILLON: And it’s a deindustrialized area. There are drug problems. What are the takeaways in your book when you look at the things that plague that area and then how to restore it?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Sure. I’d say separating categories. There’s the personal takeaway and then there’s the policy takeaway. Because at some level, if you’re just a person growing up in a community that’s been deindustrialized, left behind, you kind of have to deal with the hand that you were dealt. And that’s really what the book was about — what do you do now that this thing has already happened?

For me, the biggest thing that I took away from my youth is, one, have a sense of gratitude. Even though we didn’t have a whole lot, I tried to be grateful for my grandparents for sacrificing for me, because that prevented me from being resentful and seeing myself as a victim. When I graduated from high school, I was a pretty resentful kid. I definitely saw myself as, “Oh, everybody else has more than I do.” And seeing yourself as a victim, I think, is a really, really destructive thing for a person.

But then there’s the policy takeaway from it, which is: why are we dealing so many sh*y hands to people to begin with? My job as a vice president is different from my job as an 18-year-old kid who just wanted to live a good life.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: My job as vice president is to make sure that as many kids in our country as possible have a pretty good starting hand as opposed to a really crappy one. And I think the only way to do that — if you look historically, if you look at just our own country — the only way to build a sustainable middle class is to have a viable manufacturing economy.

Think about this. If you’re a lawyer, you’re litigating, you’re doing corporate deals. Well, who are you litigating about and who are you doing corporate deals with if there isn’t a foundation of the economy? If you’re a banker and you’re doing trading or doing capital investment, what are you investing in if not the underlying foundation of the economy? The economy’s foundation has to be the real stuff. It’s agriculture, it’s manufacturing, it’s making things, it’s doing things, and then all the other services are built up around the real economy.

I think the conceit of American leaders, I should say, in 2024, is the idea that you can have everybody working in tech and finance and advertising. Well, you can’t. What products are you advertising? What technologies are you developing if the underlying real economy isn’t strong? What are the bankers investing in if there isn’t anything there?

And I think that’s actually where, while yes, things have gotten really bad under Kamala Harris’s leadership, if we go down this pathway another 10 years and our share of manufacturing GDP goes from 18% to 10%, then the lawyers and the bankers are going to realize they don’t have good jobs either. And that’s when they’re actually going to realize that Donald Trump was right all along.

Breaking Up Big Tech and Preventing Censorship

TIM DILLON: Two more questions. I really appreciate doing this. How do you prevent tech censorship? We’ve talked about it.

SENATOR JD VANCE: It’s a huge problem.

TIM DILLON: I know it’s a tough thing to have an exact answer for, but what are some thoughts?

SENATOR JD VANCE: Very simply — and this is not a traditional Republican answer — the Google antitrust lawsuit that’s moving through the courts right now was actually started under Donald Trump’s administration.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I think you have to break these companies up. I think they’re too big. They become monopolists, they become too powerful, and frankly, they became too powerful thanks to government privileges. These aren’t like natural monopolies that just came up out of the free market. They were handed special favors by the government. They used that power to become monopolists, and now they tell Americans what they can or can’t say. I don’t think there’s actually a way to solve it otherwise. If Google is so big, it’s extremely hard to ensure that Google doesn’t engage in censorship. I just think these companies have to be separated.

TIM DILLON: So break up the companies.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Yes.

Tim Walz, the VP Debate, and Closing Remarks

TIM DILLON: The last question is the toughest one. For the last five years, I have done Christian missionary work in Africa with Governor Walz, and literally, we have not seen —

SENATOR JD VANCE: I thought you were serious. For the first couple of seconds, I was like, “Where the hell is this going?”

TIM DILLON: Me and Governor Tim Walz have been in Africa converting people, feeding them, and the fact that we’ve never seen you there — we’ve both been there, and he’ll tell you as well. He seems like a fun guy. Was he fun at the debate? He seems fun. I like making things up.

SENATOR JD VANCE: I mean, fun is one way to say it. Honestly, at the debate, I felt bad, man.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Because — all right, so my wife — one of her great character attributes, but also one of her flaws, is that she cannot be dishonest with me. If I screwed something up, she won’t be like, “Oh, yeah, you did great.” She’ll say it. So I come off the debate stage and her face is lit up. She’s so happy.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And then I look over at Tim Walz, and Tim Walz looked like she just showed up to a funeral.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: And I was like, “Oh, sh. This went really well for me, and this went really poorly for him.”

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Look, my honest assessment is that he’s probably a pretty nice guy. I don’t know him well. He’s probably a pretty nice guy. Do I think that he should be vice president? No. It’s Minnesota.

TIM DILLON: It’s a tundra.

SENATOR JD VANCE: But aside from policy differences, I just don’t think the guy has the depth to be president. I hate to sound like — President Trump always says this — you want your leaders to be smart.

TIM DILLON: Right.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You want them to actually care about the stuff that they’re doing in government. When I hear Tim Walz — but especially, oh Lord, when I hear Kamala Harris talk — I think to myself, she has no idea what the hell she thinks. And that is scarier than me disagreeing with her on any policy issue.

But look, I’m thrilled to hear that Tim Walz did missionary work in Africa. You guys are both great humanitarians, I think. Did you serve with them in Iraq?

TIM DILLON: Well, actually, in Ukraine. As soon as that happened, we went over and fought valiantly for a year —

SENATOR JD VANCE: — and then he went and marched in Tiananmen Square.

TIM DILLON: Yeah.

SENATOR JD VANCE: You know that. That’s the thing about Tim Walz. He’s the Forrest Gump of politics. Every time something big has happened in world history, Tim Walz has been there to observe it and just see it up close.

TIM DILLON: And by the way, whatever — and your attacks on — your baseless attack on Kamala Harris — if she doesn’t know something, I feel good as an American knowing that Dick Cheney will tell her. J.D. Vance, thank you very much.

SENATOR JD VANCE: Thanks, man. Good to see you.

TIM DILLON: Appreciate it. Thank you.

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