FULL TRANSCRIPT: JD Vance on Joe Rogan Experience Podcast

And that cute little face, “Shit.”

Public Profanity Faux Pas

JD VANCE: Well, I mean, my four-year-old, he was three at the time. We were going because, you know, we live in Cincinnati, but then I’m a senator. So we spend a lot of time in Washington. And I was taking my four-year-old solo. He was three at the time on this trip. And we’re on like a Delta flight. We’re in the back. I’m kind of wondering because, you know, I’ve got bedhead. And I’m thinking to myself, “Do any of these people know that I’m a senator?

Because I look like shit right now.” And my sort of get away with it. I don’t think that anybody knows this is who I am. And we’re sitting there. And my son drops one of those Biscoff cookies in between the seat. And he looks at me and he says, “Dad, well, fuck.” And like 12 people instantly turn around and look at me. And it’s like, “Oh, Senator Vance, your son has such colorful language.” And I’m like, “Oh, my God, I’m such a terrible father.” And these people are all judging me.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JD VANCE: But it’s, you know, you’re right. It’s so cute.

JOE ROGAN: It’s adorable.

JD VANCE: Yeah, it’s so funny. But, yeah, I’ve got to do a little bit better about that because they’re going to start judging me.

JOE ROGAN: People need to relax. That’s a little bad word every now and then. It’s good for you. I think it’s good for you. It gets a little steam out.

JD VANCE: I agree. It’s good.

The Big Decision

JOE ROGAN: Was there any part of you that was like, do I really want this job? Because it comes with so much. It comes with not having the Secret Service in the room. It comes with this enormous change of your life, this insane responsibility. Everybody’s watched presidents, especially, age radically, dramatically. Everyone but Trump. It’s kind of amazing.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: This dude just didn’t age. It’s so strange. It’s like it barely affected him. Everybody else is like they’re getting radiation sickness. And he gets out of there and looks exactly the same. “I can’t wait to do it again. Let’s go. We’re going to win big.”

JD VANCE: It really is amazing. I mean, one of the first times that I sort of spent like a large amount of time with Trump was in 2021. And I was thinking about running for the Senate. So I was down in Mar-a-Lago talking to him. And my initial reaction on seeing him was like, “Oh, my God, you look really good. You actually look healthier now than you did six years ago.” Normally, presidents age very, very badly.

Yeah. I mean, look, I definitely thought, OK, obviously, this is a big thing. I talked about it with my wife a lot because she was a working corporate litigator. She had a very big career. She’s much smarter than I am. It was a marital conversation. It’s always a tough one because, you know, even though I’m a senator, we’re still pretty anonymous.

Life Before and After VP Nomination

JD VANCE: Right. Like we can go on vacation or we were till this happened. We’d go on vacation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JD VANCE: You’d have people stop and ask to take a photo or say something nice. But most people, if you went somewhere, didn’t know who you were right now. It’s literally impossible for us to go anywhere.

JOE ROGAN: What’s that shift feel like? Like you’re 40 years old. Right.

JD VANCE: So, yeah, I mean, like right like this, just off a cliff, complete different life. Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. I mean, it’s it’s it’s been I mean, look, it’s always it’s really nice because people come up and say really nice things to you. They tell you they’re they’re praying for your kids. They’re praying for your family.

JOE ROGAN: It depends on where you go, though, doesn’t it? Like if you go.

JD VANCE: Oh, no. Sure. Yeah. No, of course. Yeah. Like the super woke, blue haired parts of Brooklyn. It’s interesting. We were in New York for the MSG rally. A few people saw me and flashed the universal New York sign for we’re number one. Right. So, you know, they like it. But it’s it’s definitely weird to just not be anonymous at all anymore. Right. And that’s taken some getting used to.

Secret Service Logistics

JD VANCE: I think part of it is also — let me just give you examples of Sunday morning. We want to go for it. This is the this is the event Madison Square Garden with a morning where I didn’t really have anything going on. A couple of phone calls. So we want to go for a walk with the kids in Central Park. And normally you’d walk out of your hotel and walk into Central Park and hang out with your family.

Now it requires we have to notify Secret Service. And so then they have to scope out an area where they can make sure that it’s going to be properly safe. And so instead of walking out our hotel room and taking a walk in Central Park, we hop in a car and show up in some random part of Central Park. It’s 20 blocks away. And then, of course, as soon as we get out, everybody’s like, “Well, who the hell is this?” Because there are 14 car motorcade there. So the lack of anonymity is definitely an annoyance that comes along with it. But I mean, I’m the kind of person where you just take the good with the bad. There are a lot of benefits to it. There are some downsides to it. It’s what I ask for. I try not to think too much about it or complain too much about it. I just try to accept it.

I think obviously if we win, which six days from now I think we are going to win, I think we’ll have to sort of get into more of a routine with it. My attitude thus far has been, well, it’s only for a few months, so you can do anything for a few months.

Adjusting to the New Normal

JOE ROGAN: Is the adjustment, is it difficult? Was it pretty easy to just accept it like this is how life is now?

JD VANCE: Well, you have to accept it. It’s not easy, right? I mean, in particular for our kids, right? Like, okay, I really like to drive. And 99% of the time if we’re in the car as a family, I’m driving. My wife’s in the passenger seat just because I like to drive. And I think for our kids getting used to, “Oh, we’re not going into our car. We’re going into this black SUV and daddy’s not driving.” Right. There’s some other person there.

Or, you know, like one of the first things that happened, we’re back at our house in the weekend after the RNC convention. And we’re sitting there watching like some stupid show, Emily in Paris on Netflix or something, which, sorry, I don’t mean to call it a stupid show. I actually think Emily in Paris is a masterpiece, but set that to the side, bracket that one for now. But we’re watching some show on Netflix and, you know, you just, you see one guy walk past your window and you see another guy walk past your window and it’s just a secret service agent patrolling, just little things like that.

So, you know, it just, you recognize that your zone of privacy is very narrow and that takes some adjusting and getting used to. And, you know, there are all of these, these small little adjustments, but by and large, honestly, like I love our secret service detail. Our kids are really into them. They sort of see them as their, their police protectors.

Kids Adjusting to Secret Service

JD VANCE: Our seven year old, it’s funny, you know, he’s in second grade and one of his buddies, their, their parents came to us and said, “Do you know that the kids are playing this game in school called, uh, called boss man, where basically one second grader will walk down the hallway or down the playground flanked by two separate second graders. Like they’re playing secret service now?” Like they’re playing secret service now in their school.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, how bizarre.

JD VANCE: So like on the one hand, that’s really bizarre and I hope that it doesn’t permanently screw up the psychological development of my kid. On the other hand, it’s kind of funny and you just go with the flow and you try to work with it.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I guess they’re just making fun with it.

Presidential Aspirations?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Is like, did you have presidential aspirations before all this? Is this something that you had considered about the future? Was it like, how did, how did you approach this?

JD VANCE: Yeah. I mean, it’s one of these things when you’re elected to the Senate and, you know, I’m a pretty young guy. I think I’m the second youngest United States Senator right now. You certainly think like, is this something I might do in the future? What does this look like? What would you need to do in terms of getting your family in the right mental space and just making it happen? But it’s all very abstract, right? It’s not all that different from, you know, 10 years ago thinking about starting a business that I never started, right? It’s just things you think about, but you never really think that hard about, right? And that’s kind of, that was kind of my attitude towards it.

I started to realize that Trump was thinking pretty seriously about making me his VP nominee probably earlier this year because he would ask me a lot about who I thought the VP nominee should be.

JOE ROGAN: Oh boy.

The VP Shortlist

JD VANCE: And I, you know, yeah, exactly. And I’d give him, and I’d give him names of people that I thought would be pretty good at it. And a lot of the names that I gave him, he would, he would criticize. And I almost felt like he was inviting me to throw myself out there. But I mean, it’s funny, the morning that he was shot in a Butler PA was the first time that he and I ever talked about it.

So that was a Saturday, just thinking about, I guess it was probably June 13th because I think the convention started June 15th. I go down to Mar-a-Lago that morning, Saturday morning, and I’m talking to him for the first time because the media had always asked me, I was like one of the rumored shortlist candidates. I kept on getting these questions from reporters. Have you ever been, have you ever had this conversation with Trump? And the honest answer was no.

Well, Saturday morning, that changed because I go down there and he’s like, “What do you think? Why should I choose you? Why should I not choose these other guys?” Like we just had a conversation.

JOE ROGAN: Who else was in the running?

JD VANCE: You know, I don’t really know actually.

JOE ROGAN: Don’t lie.

JD VANCE: I really don’t know. I think that there were a couple of senators that were being considered, a couple of governors, a couple of former cabinet secretaries. But you don’t really know because when Donald Trump sat me down, I mean, he talked about 10 different people that he was thinking about naming. And this was two days before he made this election.

JOE ROGAN: So he’s playing like a little, like, let’s see how J.D. thinks game.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I think so. And, you know, he told me that he was talking to the gardener at Mar-a-Lago about who the vice presidential nominee should be. And that’s one of, I think, Trump’s sort of political geniuses is he talks to everybody about everything. And I was like, “Well, what did the gardener at Mar-a-Lago have to say about this conversation? Because this really directly impacts my life.” And, you know, he basically said, “Well, I think I’m probably going to pick you, but I don’t know. And I’m not ready to make a decision.” And then he looks at one of the staff members who’s in the room, like, “Actually, wouldn’t it really set the world ablaze if we just made the decision today? And so why don’t you come up with me and we’ll just do the announcement in Butler, Pennsylvania?”

Well, and I said, and of course, not knowing at the time what was going to happen. I was like, “Absolutely, let’s get this over with because I’m sick of not knowing. Let’s just get this thing over with.” And then he’s like, “I know I’m not going to — I’m not going to do it up there. We need to prepare for it better. So, look, I’m not saying it’s going to be you, but I’m thinking very seriously about it. Have fun. We’ll see after Butler, PA.” And then, of course, I go back home to Ohio. He gets shot.

The Assassination Attempt

JD VANCE: You know, the initial reaction is I actually thought they had killed him, because when you first see the video, he grabs his ear and then he goes down. And I’m like, “Oh, my God, they just killed him.” And I was so I mean, first, I was so pissed. But then I go into, like, fight or flight mode with my kids. I’m like, you know, all right, kids, you know, we were at a — we were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns and basically stand like a century front door.

And that was my — that was sort of my reaction to it. Anyway, I really didn’t know it was going to happen until Monday morning. I didn’t know who else was being selected. I think it was all the names that people sort of see out there. Right. All good guys like nobody. I have any any personal animosity towards. But obviously, you know, here we are.

JOE ROGAN: How much did you study the story of the assassin, the attempted assassin? How much have you paid attention to it? Crooks or cooks or whatever his name is in Pennsylvania.

JD VANCE: I mean, I’ve read a fair amount about it and it’s pretty bizarre. Very bizarre. It’s bizarre. They haven’t been able to get into his phone.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they got they got into his phone. Didn’t they?

JD VANCE: Have they? I thought they’ve.

JOE ROGAN: I thought they said they did. Maybe you know better than me.

JD VANCE: Well, maybe they got into his phone, but they couldn’t access his encrypted messages or something. I thought there was some deal where they haven’t really gotten his communication yet. Maybe I haven’t read it as closely as you have. So don’t take that as gospel.

JOE ROGAN: You’re probably — you have access to more information, but maybe you can’t.

JD VANCE: I don’t know. Trust me. There’s nothing about this that I have access to information I can’t talk about.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there was a lot of weird stuff to it. One of them is that his where he lived was professionally scrubbed. So he got there. There was no silverware. There’s no silverware. That place is scrubbed. Yeah. There’s nothing. There’s no. No DNA. No hard drives. No nothing.

JD VANCE: And how do you get that close? I mean, yeah. Do you shoot guns?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JD VANCE: Okay. So I’m a pretty good shot. I served in the Marine Corps four years. An AR-15 from 140 yards away is a chip shot.

JOE ROGAN: Even without a scope. He didn’t have a scope, right? Yeah.

JD VANCE: I don’t believe he had a scope. Without a scope. Yeah. I’ve shot an M-16 many times and an AR-15 without a scope. There is no. It is shocking that he’s alive. It really is. I mean, I’m a person of faith, but I think it’s a genuine miracle that that guy didn’t kill him. But how did he get so close? There’s a lot of really big questions.

JOE ROGAN: Well, he was walking around the area with a range finder before the event. And people were yelling and saying, “This guy’s got a gun, he’s on the roof. He’s on the roof.”

Unanswered Questions

JD VANCE: You know, there was a crazy, I think it was a BBC reporter, somebody with an English accent who did the report on the ground with the guy. You know, he’s got a MAGA hat on and a Bud Light. He’s probably not a Bud Light. He’s got some beer and he’s talking to this guy who saw Crooks get on the roof and he’s yelling at him. It’s an amazing clip. He’s yelling at police officers saying, “Hey, this guy’s on the roof. Go and get him.” And nobody responded to it. And the whole thing is very fishy to me. And I hope that we win and then get to the bottom of it because I think somebody clearly screwed up.

JOE ROGAN: It doesn’t seem like just screwed up. Like the excuse that the lady from the Secret Service had that they couldn’t put snipers on the roof because the roof was sloped. Like all of it is bananas.

JD VANCE: That’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous. That’s ridiculous.

JOE ROGAN: And the miracle is Trump turns his head at the last second. The very last second he turns his head to look at the chart and the bullet just grazes his ear. That’s right. He’s got a… People keep… There’s this stupid conspiracy out there. He’s got a mark on his ear. I saw it. He has a mark on his ear. And people are like, “Why isn’t there a hole in his ear?” Because it’s just the edge of the skin got hit. That’s all it was.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: It’s the luckiest of luckiest shots ever for him. Unfortunately, not for the people that are behind him. Because a couple of people got shot. And for anybody who thinks that that was staged, you don’t understand shooting. There’s no way you can graze someone’s ear from 120 yards. Absolutely not. You can hit them center mass. It’s crazy. You’re not going to be able to graze their ear. You could kill them easily accidentally if you were faking something like that.

JD VANCE: Well, we’ve all seen the graphics, right, of him turning his head. And if he hadn’t turned his head, it would have went right through his brain.

JOE ROGAN: And there was another one that went to the left side of him, right?

JD VANCE: That barely missed him.

JOE ROGAN: And then instantly that guy’s dead. And then they take a hold of his body. He’s cremated 10 days later. There’s no press conference. There’s no toxicology report. No one talks about it on the news.

JD VANCE: Right. And when there’s a school shooter, we usually have the person’s manifesto out there a day or two later. We know nothing about the motive here, which I think is the craziest thing. Obviously, he’s motivated because he hates Donald Trump, but you don’t know anything about the secondary motive. Man, it is weird.

Radical Trans Ideology

JOE ROGAN: The only time we don’t get a manifesto is when they’re trans. When they’re trans, they hide those manifestos.

JD VANCE: That’s true. The Nashville shooter, man, that was crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Have you ever read any of it?

JD VANCE: I’ve read some of it. It’s pretty wild. It’s pretty wild. And they decide that’s bad for the cause.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. And they decide to suppress it.

JD VANCE: But no, the Nashville shooter, I mean, just while we’re on the topic, went in and murdered a bunch of children at a Christian school because he or she, whatever, was motivated by some very radical trans ideology. And that is something we should talk more about as a country.

JOE ROGAN: 100%. And they didn’t want – if there’s any other ideology that led someone to mass murder, you would examine that ideology very carefully. Some sort of radical religion, people would be very concerned about that radical religion.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: And it is. It’s a radical religion of woke. It’s exactly what it is. It’s this weird idea that you are so virtuous and so correct, you’re allowed to commit violence against these other people because they’re the oppressors, even though they’re children.

JD VANCE: Well, you know these signs that are in super woke neighborhoods? I’m sure there’s plenty of them in Austin. Like, “In this house, we believe science is real.”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

JD VANCE: You know what I’m talking about? Yeah.

The Creed of Wokeness

JD VANCE: Okay, so I don’t know your religious background, but I’m a convert to Catholicism. I was raised Christian, became an atheist, came back to Christianity, got baptized Catholic like five or six years ago. And what is so interesting about this, “In this house we believe,” is it’s so similar to the creed that you declare every day at a Catholic mass, right? We believe in one Lord Jesus Christ, the only begotten Son of God. And there’s almost a similar cadence between the Christian creed and what these guys are doing with this hyper woke stuff. And then there’s the rallies. And then there’s, of course, the various rituals. And it absolutely is a religious faith.

There was this really interesting post that was, you know, I forget exactly who wrote it, but the title was “Gay Rights as,” what was it? It was like “Gay Rights as Religious Rights,” but the second rights was R-I-T-E-S. And it was a guy who was like a pro gay rights guy, but sort of made the observation that when you get into the really radical trans stuff, you actually start to notice the similarities between a practiced religious faith and what these guys are doing. And it’s very interesting.

I actually met earlier with a friend who lives in Austin, who’s like a, you know, kind of a gay Reagan Democrat. And he’s a very interesting guy. He’s a fascinating guy. He’s one of the smartest political philosophers, I think.

JOE ROGAN: How do you be a gay Reagan Democrat?

JD VANCE: You know, I don’t know. It’s just kind of easy.

JOE ROGAN: What’s a Reagan Democrat?

Gay Reagan Democrats

JD VANCE: Well, I mean, he’s basically like now what you would call a Trump Republican, but he’s a political philosopher. And he writes about economics, right? That’s sort of how I got connected to him. I had no idea he was gay when I first met him. But, you know, I’ll never forget. He sent me something like six or so years ago, and it was Elizabeth Warren when she was running for president. And she was like, “We stand for all non-binary two-spirit and all of the like LGBTI plus.” She was talking about all the plus, and she was kind of playing it.

And he sent me this text message with this Elizabeth Warren tweet. And he’s like, “I don’t know what the hell two-spirit is. We just wanted to be left the hell alone.” And I think that, frankly, I wouldn’t be surprised if me and Trump won just the normal gay guy vote. Because, again, they just wanted to be left the hell alone. And now you have all this crazy stuff on top of it that they’re like, “We didn’t want to give pharmaceutical products to nine-year-olds who are transitioning their genders. We just wanted to be left the hell alone.”

JOE ROGAN: Well, a lot of gay guys feel like the whole movement is homophobic, which is ironic. They think that — people think there’s something wrong with being gay, so what you really are is a girl. And they think that a lot of this is being given, these thoughts are being given to gay kids. These kids would just grow up to be gay men, and instead you’re getting them to convert their gender.

JD VANCE: It’s pharmaceutical conversion therapy.

JOE ROGAN: And it’s profitable, which is terrifying. It’s terrifying once corporations, once pharmaceutical corporations have a pattern and a history of profiting off of things. They want to keep profiting off of it. They don’t want to just stop. And so right now, this has become a profitable venture that’s scaled. If you look back from 2007 to 2024, there’s way more of these, air quotes, “gender-affirming care centers”. And they’re profitable.

Profit Motive in Healthcare

JD VANCE: Well, and this used to be something that the old left, right, the criticism that was made of American health care, which I always thought made some sense as a conservative guy, is that when you have the profit motive influencing government policy around health care, then yeah, okay, sometimes the profit motive can be a good thing. Like we’re going to develop life-saving cancer drugs. We want that to happen, right? And I’m fine with people making a big profit for that.

But then sometimes they’ll try to manipulate government policy to make their own drugs more profitable, not because it’s good for health, but because these people just naturally, like most people, want to make some money. And that conversation has totally disappeared. Like I got into a big argument, and this person you can read about in the New York Times later disavowed our friendship and leaked our text messages to the New York Times. But the breaking point was I came out against this gender transition for minors when I was running for the Senate a few years ago.

And she’s a transgender individual, and she kind of flipped out on me. And the thing that I never understood, because she’s very much an old-school leftist, is are you not at all a little bit worried about how rich people are getting by prescribing experimental therapeutics to 9, 10, 12-year-old kids? Like this used to be something that the American left would have gone crazy about. And now the only people who are raising concerns about it are conservative Republicans.

Conflicts of Interest

JD VANCE: But we should be concerned because it’s not just like the lobbying and the influence. I mean, there’s something called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual. It’s sort of the manual of psychiatric disorders. And I think that we’re on the DSM-5, as it’s called, which is the fifth edition of this manual. You have drug companies that are making money that are lobbying to have, you know, child dysphoria put into our psychiatric manuals because then psychiatrists will treat that condition, and then those pharmaceutical companies will get rich from it. Somebody should be interrogating whether the political incentives of our country actually align with the financial incentives of the pharmaceutical industry. Because oftentimes the answer is going to be no, but nobody’s asking that question.

Children and Life-Changing Decisions

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’ve always known that children are very easily influenced and that children shouldn’t be allowed to make life-changing decisions when they’re very young. That’s why they can’t get tattooed.

JD VANCE: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: We’ve always known that. And then all of a sudden, because of gender, that’s abandoned. We’ve completely changed the way we think that children – oh, they just know. I’ve had mind-numbing conversations with people who believe that. And it all falls apart if you just keep asking questions. Just ask them to define how could you know this? What about the development of the frontal lobe? What about this understanding that children have never been able to make life-changing decisions? You don’t allow them to drink alcohol. You don’t allow them to get tattooed. They can’t join the military when they’re 10. There’s a lot of shit you can’t do when you’re a little kid. Why are you letting them just change their gender? What does this even mean?

Suppressed Research

JOE ROGAN: And then the New York Times thing that comes out where it shows that they had a whole study about these puberty blockers that showed that they do not help the children’s mental health and that they probably have a lot of horrific side effects.

JD VANCE: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And so they decided not to release the study. And they decided not to publish that.

JD VANCE: Which is crazy. Which shows you the corruption of science is that we’re actually not publishing studies that suggest that gender transition craziness has reached the boiling point.

Kids and Their Imaginations

You have kids. I have a 4-year-old and a 2-year-old. Every single day, my 4-year-old or 2-year-old will come to me and say something that is batshit insane because they’re 4 and 2. My 4-year-old will come and say, “Daddy, I’m a dinosaur.” I’m going to take them to the dinosaur transition clinic and put scales on them.

JOE ROGAN: The other thing is if you were encouraging them. I’m just going to say it even though it sounds gross. They want their kid to be a part of the LGBTQ thing because it looks like a flag of virtue that they can post in their front lawn. “Oh, look, we have a queer child. Oh, you’re amazing.” There’s a weird thing about it with some of these nutty parents where you could imagine them. There has to be some reason why this enormous percentage of Hollywood kids are trans.

How many celebrities have trans kids? It’s new. It’s not a thing that was going on. It was rare in the past.

JD VANCE: It becomes a social signifier for a lot of parents. We have to be honest about that fact. If you look at where the gender craziness is the most common, it’s most common among upper-middle class to lower-middle class white progressives. You could believe that there’s just something genetic going on in the mind of a wealthy white progressive, or you could believe that this is a cultural trend that we should be questioning a lot more than we are right now.

Incentives and Rationalization

Unfortunately, here’s one thing that I really worry about. Think about the incentives. People are very good at rationalizing things. If you are a middle class or upper-middle class white parent and the only thing you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, obviously that pathway has become a lot harder for a lot of upper-middle class kids, but the one way that those people can participate in the DEI bureaucracy in this country is to be trans. Is there a dynamic that’s going on where if you become trans that is the way to reject your white privilege?

That’s the social signifier. The only one that’s available in the hyper-woke mindset is if you become gender non-binary.

JOE ROGAN: Non-binary is the best one because you don’t even have to do anything. I could say I’m non-binary and you don’t have to do anything, but all of a sudden you’re a part of the group.

JD VANCE: That’s right. Again, I think it’s important that most people are not saying, “Oh, I’m white privileged, how do I become part of the privileged set,” but it’s these weird ways in which these ideas creep into the mainstream. People are very good at rationalizing these things. I think 20 or 30 years ago, even among very well-to-do white progressives, like an 11-year-old boy says, “I think that I’m a girl,” most of the time we would have said, “Oh, that’s ridiculous and crazy and ha, ha, ha, and come back to me in a couple of days.” Now I think there’s this massive incentive to try to say, “Oh, my God, does that mean that my kid is trans?”

Normal Adolescent Confusion

JD VANCE: I also think it’s, to your point, very warping on the minds of young kids because what they’re now doing is taking normal adolescent curiosity and normal adolescent discomfort. I don’t know a single person who went from the ages of 10 to 15 who didn’t say, “Oh, sometimes I had some weird ideas or I dressed weird for a couple of years or something.” It’s a confusing phase for most Americans. We take that normal adolescent confusion and then we try to medicalize it, and nobody’s saying, “Oh, when we do medicalize it, by the way, a lot of pharmaceutical companies get very rich off of it.”

Irreversible Effects

JOE ROGAN: Not only very rich, but then the child is sterilized.

JD VANCE: Yes.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, this is for a lot of these kids. They’ll never be able to have children ever again. If they change their mind, if they one day decide, “Oh, I was just going through a confusing time in my life,” but now I’ve ruined my voice with hormones. My ovaries are destroyed. I had my testicles removed. The whole thing is crazy.

JD VANCE: So this is where I had the real breaking point with a friend that I mentioned earlier is she made this argument that puberty blockers are fully reversible.

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy.

JD VANCE: And I’d actually never heard that. I mean, this was a few years ago. I’d never heard that argument before. And so I actually went and looked at it and looked at the data on this. The idea that if you give puberty-delaying puberty blockers, whatever you’re going to call them, to kids who are 11, 12, 13, that that’s fully reversible, that is completely and preposterously insane.

Now even the most radical advocates of trans health care do not say that, right? Because, look, I mean, you have sexual dysfunction. You have, to your point, hair in weird places that won’t go away. You have voice changes that won’t go away. We are experimenting on tens of thousands of American children. We’re making them miserable. It’s not having any long-term health benefit. It’s making a lot of pharmaceutical companies rich. And it’s conservative Republicans that are the only ones saying, maybe this is a little crazy and maybe we should stop.

Trans Athletes

JOE ROGAN: Well, it just shows you how a lot of this, if you can call it a mind virus or whatever it is, it does make people behave religiously. So it’s like they’re ignoring all of these signs because it doesn’t line up with this ideology that they subscribe to.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Like you have to support trans kids. Like, okay, what are you even saying? How is this a new thing? So pervasive. How is it everywhere? And how are you letting them compete with girls in school? That one drives me bananas. When you have biological males, all they have to do is they don’t even have requirements in some schools. You don’t have to be taking hormones. You can just identify and you can compete as a girl.

JD VANCE: And, of course, that causes injury to the young girls.

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

JD VANCE: And, again, this gives me faith in the wisdom of the American people because if you see how radically the Democrats leaned into this stuff four years ago and how much Kamala Harris is running away from it today, most Americans, they don’t really care who you sleep with. They’re pretty open-minded about most lifestyle choices. But when you talk about having a biological male compete with their teenage girl in competitive sports, Americans are saying, “No, no, no, no. This is crazy. You’re causing injury to my kids.”

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, it ruins chances of getting scholarships. If you were the number one player and then all of a sudden some guy comes along who wears lipstick, now he’s the number one girl on the team. What are you talking about? Yeah. There was a recent pool tournament in England. It was a woman’s pool tournament. And in the semifinals, two guys were playing each other.

JD VANCE: Yeah. When you see them in the actual swimming pool competing, it looks like the biological males are running at 1.5x speed and everybody else is running at normal speed, right? This is just clearly different. And to your point about it destroys opportunities for scholarships, I mean, go back to the original reason why we wanted girls’ sports, why we have Title IX in the United States of America to begin with. Like we recognize that competitive sports, like what does it teach, right?

It teaches you how to participate on the team. It teaches you to recognize your own weaknesses and the strengths of your teammates and vice versa, right? Like I’m the father of a two-year-old daughter. I want my daughter to learn these important life skills. I don’t want her going into athletic competitions where I’m terrified she’s going to get bludgeoned to death because we’re allowing a six-foot-one male to compete with her in sports where you should not have biological males competing with biological females.

Locker Room Risks

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, but they get to change with them in the locker rooms. There was one in Canada where a 50-year-old man identified as a teenage girl. He was a professor. Do you know about this guy?

JD VANCE: I haven’t heard about this, no.

JOE ROGAN: And he was changing. He was in a swim meet with teenage girls. And he’s changing in the same locker room as them.

JD VANCE: That’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: The problem with that is there’s a psychological condition called autogynephilia. And autogynephilia is where men are sexually aroused by the idea of dressing and behaving like a woman. But they’re heterosexual. Now, all of a sudden, these people with this known psychiatric disorder are allowed to just identify as a woman, and you’re a bigot if you don’t let them change the woman.

Conservative Paris vs Liberal NYC

JD VANCE: And you’re expected to empower them at the expense of young women who are very often much more vulnerable for obvious reasons than young men. It reminds me of — the very first congressional delegation trip that I ever took was to Paris. I think it was to Paris. And it’s part of the Paris Air Show, and Ohio has all these aviation interests.

Anyway, long story short, I was talking to a very conservative woman at the Paris Air Show who was from Mississippi. And she was probably 65, 70. And it was really interesting because I was just like, you know, “How do you find the city?” She had never been to Paris before. And I’m just interested in people, so I was asking her. And you know what’s really interesting is I just feel like Paris, I would think of as very liberal, but I actually think Paris is more conservative than some of the big cities in the United States.

And I said, “Oh, tell me more about this.” And this woman doesn’t know me very well, and she’s clearly kind of embarrassed to tell me. But she walks through. She says, “Well, I just don’t see any people. Like when you’re in Paris, the girls are girls and the boys are boys. And that’s true in Paris, and that’s not necessarily true in some of our big cities.”

And then she says, “Senator Vance, I’m embarrassed to tell you this, but when I was in New York City recently, I saw a grown man who was walking around in a miniskirt.” And then she gets very quiet, and she said, “Senator Vance, I could see his balls.”

JOE ROGAN: She probably wanted you to see his balls.

JD VANCE: And you realize, “Oh, my God, this is not empowerment. This is not respecting lifestyle choices. We’re letting a grown man walk around in a miniskirt in broad daylight? Like what are you talking about?”

Perversion vs Self-Expression

JOE ROGAN: I feel like you should be allowed to wear a miniskirt. If a girl can wear a miniskirt, you can wear a miniskirt. That’s not what bothers me. But what bothers me is if I have to see your balls.

JD VANCE: To flash people in broad daylight in New York City? You’re a pervert. You’re a pervert. You’re just a pervert. If that’s what you’re doing, you’re a pervert. And I want all of us to say, whatever your political persuasion, just say, “No, that’s weird. You’re not allowed to walk down the street and flash children in the middle of America’s biggest city.”

And it reminds me, Emmanuel Macron, who’s the leader of France, made this observation about, somebody asked him, “Why hasn’t all the transgender stuff made its way into France?” And Emmanuel Macron says, “Well, in France, we have two genders, and that’s plenty.”

I kind of wish that was the attitude that we had in the United States of America.

Wokeness as a Cult

JOE ROGAN: Well, have you ever heard Marc Andreessen break down why woke is like a cult? He does it. He’s a brilliant guy.

JD VANCE: He’s a very good friend. Yeah, I’ve heard this.

JOE ROGAN: It’s brilliant. And he talks about how you can be excommunicated from the cult. You don’t follow the doctrine. You have to follow it religiously to the letter. That’s where all this stuff, like if you’re allowing guys to just have their balls hanging out, walking down the street because it’s empowering, and because you’re being inclusive. No, you’re empowering perverts.

Lack of Redemption

JD VANCE: Yeah, it’s a cult, and it’s a religion, but with one big difference. And I think this is, you know, actually this observation is probably one of the things that led me back to my own faith. But I sort of just a fundamental background belief I have about humanity is, you know, we’re the hardware, right? We’re biological organisms. We’re the hardware. And the software is the ideas that we have in our head. And certain software promotes human flourishing, and certain software destroys human flourishing. And I think that the good kind of ideas tend to promote human flourishing.

What is, you know, most world religions have, but the woke stuff doesn’t have, is forgiveness and redemption.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JD VANCE: Right? It has the excommunication part, but it doesn’t have the forgiveness and redemption part. Most people recognize that even if you violate some fundamental moral value that I have, if you apologize and try to be a good person, we’re going to be forgiving. We want people to be able to live together.

There is this weird thing with the woke stuff where when, and you see this, and I feel bad when like comedians in particular do it. I’m sure you’ve seen this. But when anybody does this, where they’ll go and say, “Well, I’m really sorry.” They’ll sort of prostrate themselves when they make an offensive joke or they do something they’re not supposed to do, and they expect redemption. But no, no, no. They don’t get forgiveness. What they get is you need to do even more of what you’ve already done. It becomes this self-defeating, self-flagellating cycle. And I think that’s what’s most destructive about this is you can’t be friends with people if you think they’re only, you know, they’re only ever wrong. They can only ever wrong you.

The Importance of Forgiveness

And if they apologize, your response is not to say, “Oh, okay, I accept your apology.” If your response is to say, “No, I want you to apologize even more and even harder,” that destroys human civilization.

JOE ROGAN: It’s an interesting observation, right? Because it really does behave like a religion, but it’s a religion without like a good doctrine. It’s a religion that hasn’t been thought out by wise people where they haven’t come up with these different – like the Ten Commandments or different pathways to forgiveness. There’s nothing. So it’s this thing that behaves like a religion, but it’s not really well thought out, and it’s very illogical.

And it also combines pharmaceutical drug companies and all. There’s a lot of other weird shit that’s attached to this religion that you kind of need. Like if you’re going to do this whole woke thing and like go guns a-blazin’, you’re going to have to get drugs involved. Like you’re going to have to – they’re going to have to do hormone blockers. It’s like it doesn’t just happen on its own.

And that somehow or another is natural to them. Like this is how you be your true self. Like your true self is you add hormones that aren’t supposed to be in your body. That’s your true self? Like how do you know? And it’s irreversible? Are we fucking sure this is –

Skepticism of Foreign Substances

JD VANCE: Yeah. And oh, by the way, instead of your true self being maybe I should be skeptical of some of the crap that I’m putting into my body, I should lean into the idea that I should put more foreign things into the human body. That’s what to me is so fascinating about it is the true self. Like I think all of us, that’s sort of part of the human journey for truth. We’re all asking who is – who are we? What is our true self?

And maybe we should be asking ourselves – this is sort of more of a Bobby Kennedy point. But why are we putting all this weird crap into our food, into our water? Maybe we should be a little bit more skeptical. Like my body is a temple rather than I’m going to welcome even more pharmaceutical intervention into the human body. It’s very interesting how some religions view the body as a temple and some religions almost invite the pollution. I think the woke thing is inviting the pollution.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they’re also inviting – so one of the weirdest things is if you are on the wrong side of their ideology, like if you’re aligned with Trump like RFK Jr. is, now all of a sudden I’ve seen like people on the left that are trying to dismiss a lot of the things that he says about additives in food, about atrazine, fluoride, all these different things. Because now they’re connecting not having toxins in your food with a right-wing idea.

It’s so bananas. Even being healthy, fitness, fitness, they’re connecting fitness with a right-wing idea.

Political Distractions

JD VANCE: Yeah. Well, and it raises – one of my sort of core political beliefs is that our politics is focused on fake shit and distractions to distract us from the real stuff, right? And so if I’m looking at the environmental movement in the United States of America, and I don’t even have like strong views on what the carbon footprint ultimately does. I’m sort of skeptical of the experts here, but I’m also skeptical of the other side. I just don’t really know what I think about this. I think it’s insane to try to eliminate fossil fuels. That’s kind of a belief that I have.

But it’s interesting that the environmental movement in America, the only thing that it talks about is the carbon footprint. And it never talks about like, “Oh, why do we have the highest rates of obesity in the world right now, right? Why is it that American kids spend less time outdoors in nature than they ever have in the history of our 250-year civilization?” There’s this weird way in which we get distracted by the fake stuff instead of focusing on the real stuff.

East Palestine Train Derailment

JD VANCE: And I think there is a really very important environmental conversation to be had. It was interesting when – one of the first things that happened when I was a senator is you have this terrible train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio. And it was a mistake at the time that wasn’t obvious. They basically set off a few of the chemical cars, which – I mean, if you see the images, it looks like a nuclear bomb went off in East Palestine, Ohio. But it’s putting vinyl chloride and all these other pollutants into the water, into the air, into the soil.

And it was amazing. The environmental movement almost could not have cared less about a chemical explosion in rural Ohio that is potentially poisoning thousands of people. But they were really, really concerned about the carbon footprint of those same people. I’m sick of the distraction. I think we should focus on the real stuff. And unfortunately, it’s true of the environmental policy, but it’s true of a lot of other stuff. We just don’t talk about the real thing.

Concerns About Carbon Footprint Monitoring

JOE ROGAN: The carbon footprint thing is very concerning to me because I’m seeing this concept being pushed out of having an app that monitors your carbon footprint and limiting the amount of travel you can do and limiting the amount of things. I know where that’s going to go.

JD VANCE: Yeah, just control. It’s just controlling people.

JOE ROGAN: Absolutely about control. And if you can do that, then you can get away with a lot of things. You can get away with a lot of policy. You can get away with a lot of decisions that are made that people wouldn’t agree with because you’re going to limit so many things about their life. They’re going to become accustomed to being governed in that way.

Profits in the Green Movement

JOE ROGAN: It’s disturbing to me that there’s also profit that’s being made off the green movement. There’s a lot of people, like Bill Gates, who are making a lot of money off of these environmentally conscious things.

JD VANCE: $50 million to Kamala Harris, by the way.

JOE ROGAN: This is bullshit fake food, that fake meat, which is not good for anybody.

JD VANCE: Creep me out, man.

JOE ROGAN: Read about fake meat, folks. Read about how they’re making this. And I’m not talking about 3-D printed meat, which is a very different thing, which seems to be at least more consumable. But the plant-based meat stuff, that’s garbage. That stuff is garbage, highly processed garbage. If you want to eat vegetables and be vegetarian, eat Indian food, okay? They make really delicious vegetarian food.

JD VANCE: I’m married to an Indian-American. They make very good vegetarian food.

JOE ROGAN: They make the best vegetarian food, but it tastes good, and it’s actually vegetable. It’s not this crazy fake cheeseburger thing that you have.

J.D. Vance’s Disastrous Vegetarian Meal

JD VANCE: No, that’s right. Stop eating that. When I first started dating my wife, I just had no idea what vegetarians ate. I’m like a meat and potatoes guy from Ohio, and I wanted to make her dinner, and I wanted to really impress her because I was madly in love with her.

JOE ROGAN: Did you cook beef?

JD VANCE: No. The meal that I made her, I’m not proud of this, but I’ll tell you, was, you know what crescent rolls are? There’s like Pillsbury yeast rolls. So I rolled out a flat thing of crescent rolls. I put raw broccoli on top of it. I sprinkled ranch dressing, and I stuck them in the oven for 45 minutes.

JOE ROGAN: And that was it?

JD VANCE: Disgusting. And that was my vegetarian pizza that I made. Wow.

JOE ROGAN: Did you even follow a recipe?

JD VANCE: No. It’s like cream. I know she ate dairy. It’s broccoli, and it’s bread, right? That’s what vegetarians eat. So yeah, I think that, to your point, vegetarian food can actually be quite good. I’m kind of one of these people where if I don’t have a piece of meat, it’s not a complete meal. But if you’re any vegetarian, eat paneer and rice and delicious chickpeas. Do not eat this disgusting fake meat.

Philanthrocapitalism and Conflicts of Interest

JOE ROGAN: I’m just very skeptical when someone is promoting things for either global health or for the environment. And then I find out that they have a ton of money invested in companies that could fit those needs. It’s a real problem. This philanthro-capitalism thing.

JD VANCE: It’s very weird, man. We’ve got to look at this.

JOE ROGAN: Sneaky.

JD VANCE: We have to look at the financial incentives of this. So one of the big things that me and President Trump confront all the time is the accusation that we’re somehow in bed with Russia. It’s the dumbest thing in the world to me. I don’t really care about Russia. I just don’t think we should have a nuclear war. Like, writ large, I’m very anti-nuclear war.

JOE ROGAN: That sounds reasonable.

JD VANCE: Thank you. I appreciate that.

Russian Funding of Green Energy

JD VANCE: And one of the things they never interrogate is who’s the biggest funder of the green energy movement in Europe? It’s the Russians. And why are the Russians funding it? It’s not because they care about climate change. It’s because they want the Germans and everybody else to buy Russian natural gas. And they realize that if the Germans and French close down all their coal and nuclear factories, Russia is going to have them by the balls.

Technical Issues

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, yeah. Okay. I’m not going to move. I’m not touching anything. All right. We’re back. What were we just talking about?

Germany’s Shift to Green Energy

JD VANCE: Well, we were talking about how… You asked why do the Germans shut down the nuclear facilities.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JD VANCE: And I know, you know, they’re shutting down coal. They’re shutting down any of their base power and leaning really into solar and wind. But, again, the green energy movement in Europe is heavily funded by the Russians because the Russians want to have, because they produce so much natural gas, they want to have Europe buy the balls. So, again…

JOE ROGAN: How did they convince them to shut down their nuclear power plants?

JD VANCE: Well, in the same way that Bill Gates is convincing us to eat fake meat is they fund all this stuff and they make it about the environment.

Bill Gates’ Health Advice

JOE ROGAN: Well, that’s true. He’s trying. But he’s not successful. But, Emily, the problem is you look at him and you go, “Hey, how are you a health expert? This is… Look at you.” The funniest thing ever was when Elon showed a photo of Bill Gates next to a photo of a pregnant man emoji and he said, “If you want to lose a boner real quick.” That’s a wild boy.

JD VANCE: Imagine… Elon is funny as shit, man. He’s actually…

JOE ROGAN: He’s funny as shit. He really is. Getting dunked on by that guy has got to suck because you can’t even say he’s a dumbass.

JD VANCE: Right. You can’t say he’s a dumbass.

JOE ROGAN: You get dunked on by one of the smartest guys alive. But the point is, like, Bill doesn’t look good. He looks terrible. He’s aging way harder than Trump. Whatever you’re doing, don’t eat like that anymore. Go to an actual doctor. I don’t know what you’re doing. Who’s telling you to eat your fake meat? You look like shit. So you can’t give advice. This is crazy. You can’t give advice about health. You’re not a healthy person.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

J.D. Vance at the Munich Security Conference

JD VANCE: So there’s this thing called the Munich Security Conference in Germany. Obviously it’s in Munich. It’s kind of like Davos but for national security. And I went there and it was like a big deal for me because I went in there as the one skeptic in the entire massive Euro complex. Kamala Harris is there. I went in as the person skeptical of continued escalation in Ukraine because I think that what we’re doing in Ukraine is insane and that we should have a policy effectively of promoting peace in the region.

And we walk in and one of the people that I’m on this panel with is the leader of the German Green Party. And, you know, she’s like 30 years old and she really, really cares about Russia, Ukraine. She’s like the youngest person in the German government. And you realize you are like the exact, like you guys are literally Russian influence. Like you’re accusing me of wanting to do Russia’s bidding. You’re encouraging your own country from the perch of government to shut down all baseload power and you’re not even self-aware about how much of your own propaganda is funded by the country that’s benefiting from this.

The Influence of Big Pharma

The lack of ability to interrogate, I mean, Bill Gates, you know, like maybe he’s a good guy. I’m highly skeptical. I don’t know him very well, but he’s getting rich off of all of this stuff that he’s supporting in the name of health or in the name of climate. Our inability to just ask ourselves who’s getting rich from this stuff. Maybe we should be skeptical of the people getting rich from this stuff is one of our big failures as a political society.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a sheep costume. You put on a sheep costume when you’re a wolf. And you make a lot of money with global health. You know, and who doesn’t want global health? What a nice guy. Oh, he’s like very philanthropic. He’s spending all this money trying to help poor people.

JD VANCE: Right.

JOE ROGAN: And then you find out like, wait a minute, how much money did you make doing that? You paid off $500 million doing that? That’s crazy. It’s a very sneaky move, but he’s a smart guy. He’s in a lot of very sneaky moves, like the donating all the money to the media companies, which is why they never criticize him. He’s donated like $350 million to all these different companies.

JD VANCE: That’s right. Or, you know, this is, I think one of the reasons why we don’t have more people asking questions about big pharma is the entire national media. Think about how many pharmaceutical advertisements you watch when you watch a football game.

Pharmaceutical Advertising

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, let’s get into this because this is an interesting one. So one of the things that happened that separated us from the rest of the world other than New Zealand is in the 1990s they allowed pharmaceutical drug companies to advertise.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Is that something that has to stay that way? Is that something that can be changed with policy, or is the financial incentives of that too big to move?

JD VANCE: Oh, you could change it with policy. I don’t know that you…

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that you would have enough support to do something like that?

JD VANCE: It’s an interesting question. So I’ve been critical of pharmaceutical advertising for a long time. My assumption is that there are not enough people who would like to do it to actually get it done. But, you know, I’ve never actually talked to my colleagues about it. So maybe it’s possible.

JOE ROGAN: I bet if you ask the American people, you know, I bet that’s one of those things if you put it to a national vote instead of representatives. The problem with representatives is special interest groups.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Special interest groups and lobbyists and the amount of money.

JD VANCE: Yeah, the whole conduit of money into politics is fundamentally broken. I think we have to fix that. Okay, here’s the thing. And I say this as a critic of pharmaceutical advertising. Whenever I see a pharma ad, and I pretty much only see them when I’m watching football, I’m always shocked that they actually influence anybody. Right? Because it’s like, “Oh, take this drug for rheumatoid arthritis. And you can have all these positive experiences.”

And it’s like, “Oh, the side effects are, you know, erectile dysfunction, rashes on your face, suicidal ideation, tumors in your brain, and you’ll hate yourself and be depressed. So you’ll need this other drug.” And I always wonder, like, you get so many of these weird side effects in the advertisements. How do they actually work?

So I actually think that the real corruption is not really that they, like, persuade Americans. I mean, if you’re going to take a drug, you’re probably going to take a drug based on conversations with your doctor more than a pharma advertisement. But they do corrupt the media ecosystem. Because if you’re getting all that money from the pharma companies, then you’re not going to launch investigations into some of the things you should be launching investigations into.

Native American Tribes and Big Pharma

JOE ROGAN: 100%. And that’s why it’s dangerous. Because it’s not like these are completely innocent companies and have never done anything wrong. So if you all of a sudden have them removed from your list of people that you’re investigating just because they advertise, they’ve essentially bribed you.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: They’ve bribed you. And you’re supposed to be the people that distribute the actual news to the American people. And you’re compromised.

JD VANCE: So, okay. So let me tell you this story. And this is, okay, this is purely secondary. Somebody tries to fact check it. I heard this from a friend. But I heard it from a friend I trusted. So he was a guy I knew. And he worked at the largest industry lobbying organization for the pharmaceutical companies. And I was in D.C. just a long time ago. And I just kind of ran into him.

And I care a lot about the opioid problem. My mom struggled with opioids for a very long time. She’s been clean and sober for a while. But I’m very proud of her. I love you, Mom. I know you’re watching this. But I ran into this guy in the street in D.C. And he had just quit his job for this pharmaceutical lobbying organization. And he was talking about quitting. And I was like, “Why?” He’s like, “Man, we just did something. This is very dark.” And basically what they had figured out is because American Indian tribes, Native Americans, have tribal sovereignty.

And so they figured out, I guess, that if they gave some Native American tribe some fraction of a fraction of a penny of the royalties from the sale of opioids, that they could actually insulate themselves from litigation around the prescription opioid epidemic. And I guess this guy was just like, thought it was so dirty that he was like, “I can’t work for this organization anymore.” And I was like, “Holy shit, that is some pretty dark stuff. So you guys are giving some Native American tribe pennies so that you can insulate yourself from pharmaceutical litigation.” I’d be very curious. I should follow up on this to see if that actually happened. But again, just to be clear, if the media tries to fact check me, this is what I heard from a friend.

JOE ROGAN: Well, let’s let Jamie fact check it right now.

JD VANCE: Yeah, Jamie, I’m very curious if this actually happened. Look into it. But I think it did happen because I saw the look on this guy’s face. And he was like, “Man, this is some pretty dark stuff.”

JOE ROGAN: That’s crazy. But that’s how corporations behave. The TRIGGERnometry guys were on here yesterday, and we were talking about it. Corporations behave like psychopaths. There’s a book about it. It’s like they describe how this endless pursuit of… You know what it is, Jamie? Whenever I move the mic, tell me when it’s back. You just hit it and it made a noise.

JD VANCE: It must be the cable. Sorry. Oh, this is it, dude. I got it. Try it now. Tell me now. I mean, I heard that click. I forget what it was.

JOE ROGAN: Is that it? We’re good? Okay. What was that thing you wanted me to check real quick? Sorry.

JD VANCE: Pharmaceutical companies giving royalty streams to Native American tribes to insulate themselves from lawsuits.

The Republican Party and Corporations

JD VANCE: Anyway, yeah.

JOE ROGAN: It’s very scary stuff.

JD VANCE: Well, yeah. And this is one of the things that I think is genuinely different about… And I don’t want to get too partisan political here, but about Donald Trump’s Republican Party. Obviously, there are corporations that we’re more pro certain businesses and we tend to be more anti certain businesses. Like, for example, big tech. I hate big tech. We can get into that later.

But fundamentally, I think President Trump has changed the mindset of the Republican Party to where it was instinctively always pro-corporate. We’re now sometimes willing to ask, “Well, is this corporation’s interest in the American interest?” Like, there was this famous quote, I believe, from the leadership of GM back in the 1950s that General Motors’ interest is America’s interest. And I’m probably butchering the quote, but sort of paraphrased.

Can anybody really in 2024 say that Google’s interest is America’s interest? Or Apple, which employs thousands of slaves in Shenzhen, is Apple’s interest is America’s interest? Like, I just don’t. That’s ridiculous. And the fact that we’re at least somewhat skeptical of corporate power in the Republican Party, I think it’s a very good trend for us.

Woke Companies and Slave Labor

JOE ROGAN: It is kind of weird that one of the wokest companies, if you thought about like woke companies and like super progressive and like on the right side of everything, Apple. Apple’s like one of the best ones. And they have phones that are made by slaves.

JD VANCE: Yeah. Like definitionally.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. They have nets around the building. Well, there’s so many of them are jumping to their deaths. Instead of fixing the work conditions, they just go, “Put up some nets.”

JD VANCE: Yeah, put up some nets so that people can’t commit suicide.

JOE ROGAN: But the crazy thing is, you still like all these progressive people are using these devices to talk about like important social issues.

JD VANCE: Oh, yeah. Well, and talking about distractions, right? The distractions, like distraction politics versus real politics. If Apple says hashtag BLM and gives a few million dollars to a trans rights organization, then the entire political left ignores that they’re profiting off of slave labor.

JOE ROGAN: It’s bizarre. Now, why can’t Apple? Oh, here it is. Strange Bedfellows, Native American tribes, Big Pharma. So this is like a legitimacy of their alliance. Wow. So it’s true. Yeah. 2019.

JD VANCE: This is about exactly, you said it’s 2019. I was going to say, I think I saw that guy in like 2018.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so gross. It’s so gross.

JD VANCE: It’s crazy, man. It’s so sick.

JOE ROGAN: But it’s what we were talking about. If you allow these corporations, look, they have an obligation to their shareholders. They have to make more money.

JD VANCE: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: What’s the best way to make more money? Not get sued. What’s the best way to not get sued? Of course. “Sir, I found a loophole.” You got some fucking Adderall-related psychopaths working 16 hours like, “I got a plan to get us out of here.” And it works. It’s legal. I’m sorry.

JD VANCE: I’m sorry. Like, look, I get the imperative to make money, but the guy who thought that up is a grade A sociopath.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JD VANCE: I mean, that person is, I don’t want them anywhere near my kids.

JOE ROGAN: You got to put guardrails up, like, you have to have laws. That’s why you can’t have insider trading, right? Like, you have to have guardrails up, and if you don’t, people go ham.

Corporations and Social Policy

JD VANCE: This is why, look, corporations want to go make money, they should make money, fine. But my job is public and social policy. And what really pisses me off, and frankly, what should piss off more Republicans, because again, historically, the Republican Party has been the more pro-corporate party, we should be saying, the more that these corporations are engaged in social policy, in particular, left-wing social policy, the more that we should be saying, I don’t know that I want to give you everything that you want, which is, of course, what the historical party did, but I think it’s much different in the last few years.

JOE ROGAN: I’m just scared that the tentacles of the pharmaceutical industry are so deeply entrenched in politics and in media that you can’t just shake them off. You can’t just say, “Hey, you can’t advertise on TV anymore,” or “Hey, you no longer have exemption from responsibility from the side effects of certain drugs.” Because that whole thing they pulled off with exemption of pharmaceutical companies being responsible for injuries from vaccines was crazy.

It’s crazy because you just empower these people that have lied forever.

JD VANCE: Yeah, it does still exist. And it still exists. And that is totally insane. And I mean, you know, so I took the vax and, you know, I haven’t been boosted or anything, but the moment where I really started to get red-pilled on the whole vax thing was the sickest that I’ve been in the last 15 years, by far, was when I took the vaccine.

Vaccine Side Effects and Censorship

I’ve had COVID at this point five times. I was in bed for two days. My heart was racing. I was like, the fact that we’re not even allowed to talk about that, even, you know, no like serious injury, but even the fact that we’re not even allowed to talk about the fact that I was as sick as I’ve ever been for two days, and the worst COVID experience I had was like a sinus infection, I’m not really willing to trade that. And you don’t even, you know, everybody that I know, a lot of people I know, they talk about the second shot that they got of the vaccine was really, made them really, really sick.

Well, that’s a side effect, and not a side effect that we even talk about enough in this country.

JOE ROGAN: No, it’s, and it’s also, again, we’re talking about companies that have a long history of lying and being forced to pay criminal fines, and then we’re giving them this exemption from being responsible for any of the side effects.

Big Pharma and Political Donations

JD VANCE: Yeah, and who do you think those big pharma companies donate to politically in 2024? I’ll give you a big fat guess.

JOE ROGAN: Probably Kamala Harris.

JD VANCE: By a significant margin.

JOE ROGAN: Well, particularly with a RFK Jr. being attached to Trump.

JD VANCE: Sure.

JOE ROGAN: With RFK Jr. comes a lot of, you know, like, there’s a lot, there’s a lot that you’re going to have to handle there. But that’s, the question is, like, is, are they so entrenched that it’s impossible to, these things that disturb us, the fact that they have exemption from any responsibility because of the vaccine, the fact that they have the ability to advertise on television, can those things be removed? Is that a possible thing?

Reining in the Pharmaceutical Companies

JD VANCE: I think it’s a possible thing, but because I haven’t actually done the work to figure out how many of my colleagues would sign on to this, I can’t say whether it’s like a certain thing or a likely thing or just something that we should be working on. What I, I mean, here’s an interesting thought experiment. If there was one thing that we could do to rein in the pharmaceutical companies, like, what would it be? Would it be liability on the vax stuff? Would it be advertising?

My intuition is actually it might be the advertising on the healthcare stuff, because that’s the way in which they engulf the media into this whole scam.

JOE ROGAN: That would be great, but the vaccine thing is important, too, because…

JD VANCE: I will look into it. That’s, that’s what I’ll, that’s what I’ll say here, because I would need to talk to people to see if this is even possible.

JOE ROGAN: It’s a weird one where you’re not even allowed to question it. You’re not allowed to discuss it. And that becomes very religious, just like all these other things that we talked about, where you have this, this thing that everybody speaks about in hushed tones.

Vaccine Side Effects

JOE ROGAN: People know people that have been vaccine injured, particularly people on the left. They’re very reluctant to discuss it, even publicly. I know people who are public people who have had serious vaccine side effects who do not want anyone to talk about it.

JD VANCE: Absolutely.

JOE ROGAN: They’re scared of being labeled an anti-vaxxer.

JD VANCE: I have a Senate colleague who doesn’t want to talk about it, but worries that it’s like permanently affected his sort of sense of balance and dizziness and vertigo. And yeah, it happens. I’ve talked to a number of people who think that they got vaccine injured. Some of them are public about it, and some of them are not. But here’s the thing, like, I’m not even… You’re probably more anti-pharma than I am. Like there are certain things…

JOE ROGAN: Well, I’m pretty pro-pharma, too. I think they make great drugs that help people with all sorts of conditions and diabetes medication and insulin.

JD VANCE: And like the sickle cell stuff that’s coming out now, we maybe have cured sickle cell disease in black Americans because of a gene therapy. The first…

Encouraging Pharmaceutical Innovation

JD VANCE: I read about it a couple of weeks ago, actually, that the first experimental therapy, and it was hard for the kid who took it, but you had like an 11 or 12 year old black American just walk out of the hospital and he’s probably cured of sickle cell disease. That stuff is amazing. But I actually think that in some ways, what we should be encouraging these companies to do is that, right? We want them to develop the life-saving drugs. We don’t want them to get rich by shielding themselves from liability or working with Native American tribes so that they don’t get sued.

And I actually think there maybe even is a harmony between those viewpoints because if they had to get rich by developing life-saving therapeutics, and that’s the only way they could get rich, then they’d probably do more of that, right?

JOE ROGAN: 100%.

JD VANCE: But again, that’s where public policy comes in, and that’s where like my job is to make sure that when the pharmaceutical companies get rich, they get rich by curing diseases, not by doing like weird psychotic things with Native American tribes.

JOE ROGAN: And you can’t have this argument that we need exemption from responsibility because otherwise we’re not going to be able to profit off of these things. Well, that means you’re making stuff that too many people are getting sick from, so they’re fucking suing you.

JD VANCE: Well, that’s socialized costs, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JD VANCE: It’s one of the biggest problems with corporate America is socialized costs but privatized profits. So what you really want is that you want major American companies, and I’m like I’m a believer in the market economy, you want them to absorb the benefits but also the costs, and that’s often what doesn’t happen.

East Palestine Train Disaster

JD VANCE: Like for example, so I talked about this train disaster in East Palestine, and the railroad companies hate me because I kind of went on a crusade against them afterwards. And what I realized is think of all the costs of that disaster. Think of the healthcare costs, the welfare costs from people who lost their jobs, the declining home values in that community, just all of the costs absorbed by that community, and the railroads are paying slap on the hand fines.

And it sort of occurred to me that the reason they’re not more serious about these train disasters is because they’re privatizing the rewards, but when a major train disaster happens, who picks up the tab? It’s the local residents and it’s the American taxpayer and that’s something that fundamentally has to change.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, that has to change and when you’re talking about the cost from a place like East Palestine, how much can they clean that up? Like, how long does that stay toxic? There was millions of gallons, right? What was the number of gallons of stuff?

JD VANCE: I don’t know the number of gallons but it was a lot and I hate to say the answer to your question, how much can they clean up, the answer is I don’t know. And I actually, this is one of my biggest frustrations, probably my single biggest frustration over my time in the Senate is, when this happened, a bunch of the residents came to me, it’s actually very sweet and even kind of patriotic, but certainly self-sacrificing, where they said, look, no one knows what the effect of this shit is going to be 15 years down the road. Because we weren’t worried about, okay, a guy drinks the water in East Palestine and drops dead. The water levels did not have toxins at that level.

Studying Long-Term Health Effects

JD VANCE: But the question was, what happens when you’re imbibing the stuff, breathing it in, drinking it at low, at trace levels for 10-15 years? Like, do you have weird diseases down the road? Hopefully not, right? I pray every day that hopefully not, but you can only study that in the moment. And so we actually, working with a public health epidemiologist in North Carolina and some in Ohio, we actually came up with a plan. Like, here’s what you would need to do. You’d collect samples in the first six months to a year after the disaster.

I’m talking about, like, fingernail clippings, things like that. You’d establish a baseline of toxins in people’s blood, and then five years later, ten years later, you’d try to figure out what the toxins were in people’s blood five years, ten years down the road. And then you’d ask yourself, what weird diseases, if any, are people starting to develop after five, ten, fifteen years, right? The long-term health effects of this stuff. And it was, in some ways, a really interesting thing to study, because we had never had a chemical disaster where we tried to study the effects years down the road.

And of course, how much would this have cost? Between five and twenty million dollars over the whole lifetime of the study. We couldn’t get Biden-Harris, we couldn’t even get some of my colleagues in the United States Senate to give a shit, and it’s really frustrating to me, because the time has now passed, right? All these people were saying, we are volunteering to be a guinea pig to understand the long-term health consequences. The time has passed, and we’re never gonna know, because we didn’t get the money to do the very small amount of money to do that study then. So you ask that question, the answer is, I don’t know, I tried like hell to find out.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think that there’s someone influencing them to not fund these studies, because they don’t want responsibility for this bill?

JD VANCE: Yeah, I thought a lot about that. I think in this particular case, it was just bureaucratic bullshit, and too many people being distracted.

Inability to Study Long-Term Health Effects

JOE ROGAN: There’s a lot of that, right?

JD VANCE: There’s a lot of that, right? And look, sometimes, to be clear, there is outright malevolence, there’s lobbyists who are in their ear. I think in this case, it was just, you know, a bunch of people in rural Ohio that nobody, except for, you know, a few of us, I care about them obviously, but no person in the Harris administration cared about, and so when we went to the White House and just said, you could move money, like even just give us a couple million dollars to collect the samples and get the study started, and then we’ll privately fund it down the road, we couldn’t get anything from them, and I think it was just they were like, “Eh, we’ve got bigger fists to fry.”

JOE ROGAN: So do you know what efforts have been made to clean that area up, or what actually can be done?

JD VANCE: Oh yeah, no, I mean, look, we’ve definitely… Does it show what it is to you?

JOE ROGAN: So, yeah, 25,800 gallons of TILX, 25,800, what’s that? That’s the car. That’s the car ID, the capacity, and the context is… 100,000 gallons of that. Yeah. Oh, each car has… Oh, I see what you’re saying.

JD VANCE: Yeah, each car had different stuff.

JOE ROGAN: So what’s the total of all of it? Somewhere like that’s 100,000, that’s another… It’s millions, right? 350,000 gallons or so. Millions of liters, but look, I mean…

Challenges of Cleaning Up Contamination

JOE ROGAN: And all that stuff just leaks into the groundwater, it goes into the soil…

JD VANCE: Yeah, and a lot of people in rural areas, a lot of people are in well water, you know, a lot of people are just, you know, breathing in the air, I mean…

JOE ROGAN: And we don’t even know what the health consequences are for those folks for years.

JD VANCE: We won’t know, and we may never really know, because we didn’t collect the samples at the time, because you’ve got to establish the baseline. That was what my epidemiologist guy that I talked to in North Carolina said, you’ve got to establish the baseline, because here’s what’s going to happen, right? Fast forward 10 years, people get weird cancers, sometimes because of chemical spills, sometimes just because that’s human biology. Somebody will sue the train company, which is Norfolk, I think Norfolk Southern, will sue the train company, and they’ll say, “I’ve got this weird cancer because of you.” And what Norfolk Southern will say is, “No you don’t, you don’t have this weird cancer because of me, you have it because of just, you know, you sort of lost the game of Russian roulette that is human biology.” And what we could have said conclusively was yes or no, and unfortunately we’re not going to be able to say that.

This is one of the things, like when we’re in office, the first, not the first, but the first disaster that we have, hopefully there aren’t any, but there always are, first chemical disaster that we are, we’re going to take the infrastructure of that study and right away we’re going to try to establish a baseline.

JOE ROGAN: Is it possible to, I mean, when you have a spill of that magnitude, can you actually get everything out of the ground? Do you have to just remove all the ground, like how would you, do you have to test the groundwater to make sure that it doesn’t…

EPA Response to East Palestine Disaster

JD VANCE: To their credit, and you’re not going to hear me praising these guys that much, but the local EPA folks I actually think did a pretty good job there on the water side, because what they basically did is they just ran the water in the creeks through, you know, a filtration system, cleaned it, oxidized it, and then got the chemicals out of it and then put it back into the system. Now the problem is the stuff that’s just in the ground, you can’t really get that out.

JOE ROGAN: Right. You’d have to remove the ground.

JD VANCE: You’d have to remove the ground and clean, I don’t even know how you would clean it. I don’t know if we have the capacity to clean it. What you can do is try to, you know, as we did, we passed out bottled water and tried to make sure that people weren’t drinking the water until the levels of toxins hit a certain level. And again, but the issue is never like the levels of toxins are going to kill you. The issue is always are they going to cause long-term problems? That is, when we got so focused, I think the media got so focused on is the water safe to drink? And it’s like the question is not is the water safe to drink? The question is, is the water safe to drink for the next 15 years?

JOE ROGAN: Right. And we’re never going to know the answer to that question.

Fears of Infrastructure Sabotage

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, people are terrified of this idea of someone sabotaging things like that that have trained to contain toxic chemicals. People are terrified about the sabotaging of the grid in particular. That’s one that a lot of people have talked about, that we’re very vulnerable. Like what can be done to sort of shore that up? It seems like cyber attacks are possible, physical attacks are possible.

JD VANCE: Yeah. And if the grid goes down, we have a real problem, right?

JOE ROGAN: We do have a real problem. You know, there’s New York Times or somebody else reported recently that my phone was allegedly hacked by Chinese hackers.

JD VANCE: Oh no, what’d they get?

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think anything.

JD VANCE: Nothing? Come on, man. Got anything in there?

JOE ROGAN: We’ll find out, man. We’ll find out. Got any memes you probably shouldn’t have shared with your friends?

JD VANCE: Some offensive memes and, you know, me telling my wife to get an extra gallon of milk at the grocery store. Luckily, I’m a pretty boring guy, so I don’t think that they got really anything. We’ll find out. It’s nice to be boring if your phone gets hacked.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right.

Hacking Through Patriot Act Backdoors

JD VANCE: Well, it also, I mean, apparently they couldn’t get the encrypted messages that were sent, so I’m pretty careful about making sure I use Signal and iMessage and all that stuff. Anyway, so, I mean, look, maybe they got some stuff. We’ll find out. Eventually, I try not to worry too much about shit I can’t control, but one thing that came up, by the way, in that, and I’ll go back to your question, is about the grid. One thing that came up in that is the way that they hacked, and it was also President Trump’s phone, apparently, too. The way that they hacked our phones is they used the backdoor telecom infrastructure that had been developed in the wake of the Patriot Act. And this is something that I think should be a much bigger part of the controversy over the Patriot Act, is when the Patriot Act was passed, like AT&T, Verizon, they had to build all of these systems so that if somebody got a FISA warrant and could hack into a particular phone, the infrastructure actually existed. What I’ve been told is that that infrastructure was used by this Chinese hacker organization called Salt Typhoon, and that’s how they got into the Verizon network, and that’s how they got into the AT&T network.

JOE ROGAN: What a great name, by the way. Salt Typhoon.

JD VANCE: It’s a pretty bad-ass name, right? If they have anything on me, I can’t be too pissed off at them. At least they named themselves Salt Typhoon.

JD VANCE: But the answer to the question about the grid is, this is actually one of these things where, if we had a functional government, it’s pretty easy to to develop the systems. Because if you do like an EMP attack, right, Ron Johnson, who’s a senator from Wisconsin, is really preoccupied with this.

Protecting the Power Grid from EMP Attacks

JD VANCE: You know, it doesn’t take down the whole grid. What it really screws with is the power transformer system. So what we should have is basically a backup power transformer for every major system in the United States of America, just sitting in a warehouse that’s turned off. And because it’s turned off, it won’t be affected by an EMP pulse. And then if there is an EMP attack, you just get those transformers to swap out the ones that were destroyed, and then the grid is back up and running. It’s actually a scandal, I think, that the federal government has not, just at one point, with all the money that we spend on defense and everything else, just said, “We’re going to spend 15 billion dollars to buy enough power transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country.”

Wind Turbines and Environmental Impacts

JOE ROGAN: We should do that. You know, one of the things that Trump talked about that a lot of people probably weren’t aware of was the damage that these wind turbines are doing to whales. I wasn’t totally aware of it. I had no idea until I watched your podcast with him.

JD VANCE: I knew a little bit about it, but I didn’t read about it until after I talked to him. It’s a real problem. It’s a very real problem. And what a conundrum for people that are so-called environmentalists to think that wind is like the cleanest option, when it’s not. The turbines don’t last. You can’t recycle them. It doesn’t work in saltwater, in particular, which is what most of the world’s water is. I think wind is the biggest scam out there. It’s total bullshit. It’s also pollution. When I see those gigantic wind tunnels…

JOE ROGAN: They’re gross. They’re ugly. I mean, I thought this… Where were me and my wife? We used to be on road trips before we had a Secret Service detail.

JD VANCE: Good old days.

JOE ROGAN: Good old days, man. We took a road trip through Kansas or Nebraska or maybe it was Iowa. It was one of the… I mean, we went through all three of those states, but I can’t remember where… You just go for miles and miles, and you see nothing but wind turbines. It’s like this is beautiful American countryside. It used to be green, rolling hills, and now you have these disgusting, dystopian wind turbines. I’m sorry, they are ugly. I will die on this hill. They’re ugly. I don’t want them in American society.

Advantages of Nuclear Power

JOE ROGAN: And nuclear power plants are actually more efficient, safer, and you don’t have the problem… Like, we think about the problems of nuclear waste. They’ve kind of sorted a lot of those out. They haven’t sorted out the problems of getting rid of these turbines.

JD VANCE: No, they haven’t. Not at all.

JOE ROGAN: I have a buddy of mine who lives in South Texas, and I went to visit him, and you drive down there, and it’s like an hour of turbines. They’re everywhere. There’s so many of them. I can’t stand that. You just see them as like the sky is turning dark. You see these things just spinning. It’s just gross.

JD VANCE: They kill the birds. They apparently kill the whales.

JOE ROGAN: They kill a lot of birds. If you look underneath them, it’s like bird graveyards. It’s crazy. And it’s clean. It’s green. It’s like we’re brainwashed to think that these things somehow or another are beneficial because we’re attached to this idea of being environmentally conscious.

Rethinking Wind Power

JD VANCE: I got the thought behind them, right? I understand why you were trying to turn. That’s obviously a source of energy because you have wind blowing through. That’s energy that we should capture, but we’re just not that good at it with this. It’s not very efficient.

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JD VANCE: Just accept that it was a mistake. It’s not that efficient. The political or the environmental costs are pretty significant. Solar, I think, is actually a little bit more reasonable because you can get a lot more of the power. They last a little bit longer. They’re not nearly as ugly, and you can put them in places where people don’t, frankly, want to live that much anyway, like in deserts and things like that.

JOE ROGAN: Well, they do those roofs now. Tesla does the solar roofs.

JD VANCE: Yeah, the solar roofs. I think that’s a great way, right? That’s just empty space. But wind, I think we should say, “This is a failed experiment. We’re going to stop subsidizing this, and if people want to have a wind turbine, great, but we’re not going to build miles and miles of wind turbines anymore, at least not with taxpayer subsidy.” But I just hope people recognize that the trade-off is not worth it. Like, when you’re getting a little bit of electricity, you’re really ruining the landscape. You’re ruining the view. You’re killing birds. You’re messing up whales. And those things don’t last that long, and then when you’ve got to get rid of them, you’ve got to put them in a landfill. Like, the whole thing’s bananas.

JOE ROGAN: It’s totally bananas.

JD VANCE: And again, we focus on the carbon footprint thing, and we don’t talk about the fact that there are these massive environmental hazards. It goes back to the distracted politics versus the real stuff, and we should be talking about the real environmental consequences of wind power.

Questioning Climate Change Orthodoxy

JOE ROGAN: It’s one of those things that, again, is much like a religion, where you must stay with the doctrine. You must follow it by the word, because if you step out of line and say, “Actually, when you look at these studies, it doesn’t really show that the world is warming. It shows that over the last X amount of thousands of years, we’re in a gradual cooling period, and that what’s really terrifying is global cooling.”

You know, Randall Carlson, who’s an expert in asteroid collisions and the Younger Dryas impact theories. Fascinating guy. But he says that the periods in history where we came very close to extinction are like when there’s an ice age. Those are the most terrifying. When there’s global warming, you just move to where it’s not so warm, and that’s what people have done forever.

JD VANCE: Well, and you deal with it technologically, right? This is the thing that the solution to global warming, for however long this warming trend lasts, is to deal with it technologically, right? I mean, if you look at the number of people who die from disasters in the United States, it’s going down, because we’ve gotten better at predicting stuff and helping people deal with things. And, of course, you still have terrible things like Hurricane Helene, but they are luckily part of a downward trend and people losing their lives from terrible storms.

And, you know, if you really think, like, if you really think that carbon, this is another reason why I’m somewhat skeptical of, like, the carbon obsessives, is if you think that carbon is the most significant thing, the sole focus of American civilization should be to reduce the carbon footprint of the world, then you would be investing in nuclear in a big way. And then when you say that, the environmentalists say, “Well, you’ve got all these poison rocks to deal with afterwards.” Well, the poison rocks problem is a less significant problem than the carbon problem, if you think that we’re all going to go extinct in a hundred years, so let’s deal with the most pressing problem. They’re all like, “No, no, no, no.”

And their solution is to buy solar panels that are disproportionately made in China, which has the worst carbon footprint and growing of any country in the entire world. They obviously don’t believe their own bullshit, which is why I’m somewhat skeptical of what they say.

Greta Thunberg and Dissenting Scientists

JOE ROGAN: Also, when you have a movement and your spokesperson is Greta Thunberg and not some insanely intelligent scientist who’s done years of research on this stuff, and there’s also not a consensus among scientists. There’s a lot of scientists that are heretics, that are stepping outside the lines, that are saying this is not an issue, and then they’re also pointing out the fact that carbon is what trees consume, and there’s more greenery in the world today than there was a hundred years ago, which is a very inconvenient thing for people.

JD VANCE: See, I didn’t even realize that. I had no idea.

JOE ROGAN: Well, carbon is what trees feed off of.

JD VANCE: So I knew carbon is what trees feed off of. I didn’t know there was more greenery than there was a hundred years ago. That’s interesting.

The Mongols and Carbon Reduction

JOE ROGAN: Not only that, you’ve got Bill Gates that’s saying planting trees is not a solution to the carbon problem. This is so not true. It’s so not true, and it’s also historically… One of the craziest moments in history, in my opinion, is the Mongols and what the Mongols did in the 1200s. They lowered the carbon footprint of earth because they killed so many people. They killed 10% of the population of earth, and because of that, because they devastated these places and killed so many people, trees grew. More trees grew, and it lowered the carbon footprint. These places that had been overcome by agriculture were then reconsumed by nature, and it lowered the carbon footprint of earth.

The Anti-Human Element of Environmentalism

JD VANCE: Well, there is a fundamentally, it raises the point, there’s a fundamentally anti-human element of the radical environmental movement in the United States of America. They’re saying we have to reduce population.

JOE ROGAN: This is one, and when they say it with vaccines, you’re like, “Slow down.”

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Did you just say that out loud? And then when you read Robert F. Kennedy Jr., and I encourage everyone to read Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s book, The Real Anthony Fauci, because it’s not just about this crisis that we went through with COVID-19. It’s about a host of different things that were done, and one of them was a vaccine that was supposed to be a DPT vaccine that they were giving to girls in Africa that was just birth control. It was just sterilizing them.

JD VANCE: Wow. I didn’t even realize that.

Unethical Experiments in Africa

JOE ROGAN: They were giving them HCG, and they were giving them this enhanced schedule. I don’t want to screw this up because my recalls aren’t the best, but the reality is there was experiments done on unwitting, unknowing African women where they gave them this thing that was supposed to be a vaccine against a disease, but it was really sterilizing them, and they’re experimenting.

JD VANCE: That’s dark. Again, that’s like the Native American Oxycontin thing.

JOE ROGAN: That’s this global health shit. There’s a lot of experimenting going on.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: We pulled up an AP article. I had Alex Jones tell me this. I was like, “What?” He’s like, “They gave them polio. They tried the vaccine. They gave them polio.” I’m like, “What?” AP article that shows that they had to stop giving these kids in Africa this polio vaccine because it was actually giving them polio.

Because they experiment, because this is how they find out if stuff works. So you get people with no internet connection. They live in dirt floors. “We’re going to help you,” and then they come and they experiment on them, and it’s so dark, and then it’s all done to this idea of philanthropy. It’s crazy, and they profit off of it. The whole thing is madness, and because they have so much influence and so much power and so much money is being generated, they’re allowed to get away with these things.

JD VANCE: Just think about that from the perspective of these poor people. I assume the polio vaccine thing happened in Africa or did it happen somewhere else?

Okay, so you’re in Africa. Some white dude shows up, says that he cares about you, gives you a shot that’s going to prevent you from getting some disease, and then you become permanently disabled or even die because of it. Think about what effect that has on how those Africans perceive our civilization. We’re going to have a conflict in 30, 40 years because people are so pissed off about us coming in and giving them health care that isn’t actually health care. I really worry about that stuff.

Food Supply and Geopolitical Consequences

JD VANCE: This is one of my big things with the Russia-Ukraine conflict. People don’t realize how much of Africa’s food supply comes from the Ukraine. I guess an astonishing amount. So if you have this war that goes on forever and there’s not enough food going to Africa, are you going to have a bunch of starving, desperate people who are like pissed off because they’re starving who hate European civilization because they don’t have, you know, they’re not getting the food that they were expecting to get? Like, we never think about the knock-on effects of this stuff, right? Like, yeah, it’s really dark and really evil that we’re giving them polio. I also wonder, the people who live in the village that got polio, what the hell are they going to be doing in 30 years? They’re probably going to hate us.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, I would be really upset if you gave my kid polio. You came over here. Justifiably so.

JD VANCE: Justifiably so, I’d hate these people, right? You give my kid polio under the pretense of helping them? It’s crazy.

Balancing Pharmaceutical Benefits and Guardrails

JOE ROGAN: But, you know, then there’s also pharmaceutical drugs that are really beneficial. And this is the thing, like they have to have guardrails. You have to have some rules and regulations to keep these people from just never-ending profits.

Because they always gravitate towards that. They always gravitate towards making the most amount of money.

Need for Meaningful Pharmaceutical Guardrails

JD VANCE: And again, this is where I go back to some of the arguments of the old left. Like, what kind of guardrails do you want these companies to have? Do you want the guardrails to be that if you donate to the trans pride and BLM organizations, you get to do whatever the hell you want? Or do you want the guardrails, like, we’re going to protect health and public safety and make sure that you’re not, like, killing people under the auspice of helping them? And that’s the kind of guardrails I want. The common sense ones.

JOE ROGAN: Very logical. Yeah. Very logical. But logic is, you know, dangerous today. Logic is a problem when you have ideology. Some people are strictly adhering.

JD VANCE: Logic is a colonial idea, man. You’ve got to get away from the logic. And math is racist.

JOE ROGAN: That’s right. I don’t know about that. That’s a new one.

Influence of Boyz n the Hood

JD VANCE: Well, okay. So, that’s interesting. There’s this movie. It’s probably, like, extremely influential to my entire political worldview. And I didn’t realize until last night, because I got into Austin late. Usually, my wife travels with me. She wasn’t with me last night. She’s taking care of the kids today. So, I get in the hotel room in Austin, and it’s very late, and I watch this movie, Boyz n the Hood. Have you ever seen Boyz n the Hood?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. Sure. Okay.

JD VANCE: I watched that movie a ton when I was, like, eight, nine years old. And I didn’t realize how much that movie has had an influence on me until I watched it last night. Okay. So, all right. Furious Styles, a lot of his stuff about not letting financial institutions buy up all the stuff in your communities. Obviously, he’s talking about black people in L.A. and not, you know, white people in, you know, rural, small-town America. But I was like, “Oh, like, that’s maybe the first place that I ever heard this idea, where he talks about, like, the importance of fatherhood, the importance of especially young boys having a father in the home.” It’s like, I got that from Boyz n the Hood. And obviously, it spoke to me when I was a kid, because I grew up at the time. I didn’t have much of a relationship with my dad.

And it’s interesting, man. He makes this observation, math being racist. He’s criticizing the SAT for being culturally biased. But then he says the only part that isn’t culturally biased is the math. And it’s like, “Oh, this is like a black nationalist in the mid-80s.” Because that’s kind of the philosophy of this movie, is what you might call, like, old-school black leftism. This movie in the 1980s is saying something that I wish a lot of white liberals would hear today, which is, actually, math is not racist. It’s one of the things that’s, like, definitively not racist is math and numbers. You guys are losing your damn minds.

Hunter Biden Scandal

JOE ROGAN: Well, math is racist is one of those ones where you, it’s like, if you heard that in a cocktail party, you’d be like, “What?” Like, if someone behind you was saying math is racist, you’d be like, “What the? We got to get out of here, honey.”

JD VANCE: I’d say, “I want to go, I want one of what they’re having, I want to hang out with those guys.” Okay, by the way, this is my, you know, an act of bipartisanship. The one thing that Republicans, man, that we’re really, I think we got really wrong in the last few years, is the anti-Hunter Biden stuff. I want to go hang out with Hunter Biden. I mean, I may be the only Republican. That dude, that dude, he was like Hunter Thompson without the writing talent. That guy went hard. You got to give it to him. I would bet, I would bet a hundred dollars that Hunter Biden is voting for Donald Trump for president.

JOE ROGAN: Well, it doesn’t seem like he likes his dad. It seems like he wanted… Well, I think his dad, I might, I might bet $20 on his dad voting for Donald Trump for president, especially last night after the garbage comment.

JD VANCE: Oh yeah. You know, that guy is trying to help Donald Trump. We’re going to win, I think we’re going to win, but after we win, I’m going to be convinced that Joe Biden was trying to help us the whole time.

JOE ROGAN: Well, here’s one thing. He put on the MAGA hat. The MAGA hat was crazy.

JD VANCE: That was crazy. When he put on the MAGA hat in front of those guys, and they all cheered, and he insisted on keeping the hat, and he took it with him, I think he’s very, very resentful that he got ousted in what was essentially a coup.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And I’d love to know what happened there, by the way.

JD VANCE: Oh, I would love to know what happened.

JOE ROGAN: I have to use the restroom, but we’ll come back.

JD VANCE: Okay, we’ll take a break. Because this is important.

JOE ROGAN: I just have to pee. We’ll be right back.

Suppression of Hunter Biden Laptop Story

JOE ROGAN: So, the wildest thing about the laptop was that they were able to suppress it from social media.

JD VANCE: Really wild. And when I discussed that with Zuckerberg, and he openly admitted it, that the FBI contacted him and told him that it was Russian disinformation, and that was one of those things, while he was saying it, I was like, “Yo, this guy’s just saying this?”

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. I remember when that episode came out, because it reverberated across American politics like crazy.

JD VANCE: Yeah. Holy shit, he just said the thing that we all suspected for a very long time. And if it wasn’t for Elon purchasing Twitter, and then finding out how much of an influence they were having on this, and that they were, in fact, silencing something that they knew to be correct under a lie, under a lie, and 51 former intelligence agents signed off on this.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It was like, how did you, how did they pull that off? Like, just pulling that off is really wild, and the fact that there was no outrage from the left, that the left was like, “It’s fine because it’s our side, and Trump is evil, and he’s Hitler, we got to get rid of them, so let’s just lie about this laptop.” And no consequences. Nothing.

JD VANCE: Right. The same people that pushed it are still… And by the way, they still all have security clearances, I believe, which is going to change when we win. But, I mean, also, this is, this is where I always get pissed about the media conversation around what happened in 2020, is, what they’ll do is, they’ll sort of find the craziest conspiracy theory about what happened in 2020. They’ll debunk it and say, “Oh, look, this thing, this shows that nothing bad happened in 2020.” There’s a non-partisan organization that actually looked at what would have happened to Americans’ votes if they had just known the truth about the fact that Joe Biden fundamentally had traded his political influence for money. Like, that’s what it was. It’s an old-fashioned American corruption story. I will give you access to powerful people in exchange for money.

Right. That was the true scandal of the Hunter Biden laptop. Again, it wasn’t Hunter Biden doing cocaine with a stripper.

JOE ROGAN: That was the fun part.

JD VANCE: You can say that. I have an election to win. So, that was the real… It was the corruption. It was the corruption. And evidence of the corruption. And direct evidence of the corruption. And the non-partisan organization said, that knowledge, which was suppressed by the entire American media and big tech scene, that would have changed millions upon millions of votes. And we know that the number in four swing states was 88,000 votes that were the difference between Donald Trump and Joe Biden winning the 2020 election.

So, set to the side all of the other arguments about fraud and all the other rule changes that happened in the midst of COVID, we know that big tech colluded with our own sort of, I would say, colluded. The one thing I’ll say about Zuckerberg is, and I don’t know him super well, I’ve never had a problem with him, but I do wonder if it’s a convenient excuse. I don’t doubt that the FBI said, “Hey, this is Russian disinformation.” But these companies still have to take some agency over this too, right? So, I think it was both the corruption of the FBI and the intelligence services, but also the big technology companies themselves. Both of them are at blame.

And I think, fundamentally, if they had not done what they did, Donald Trump would have won another term as President of the United States. You’re never going to be able to convince me that if millions upon millions of swing voters knew the evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption and it was staring them in the face, that we would not have been able to pull that one out.

Mark Zuckerberg’s Political Leanings

JOE ROGAN: Well, Zuckerberg has gotten really into mixed martial arts. He’s gotten really into jiu-jitsu and really into training. And there’s very few things that will turn you into a conservative more than martial arts training. There’s no way to get ahead other than hard work.

JD VANCE: Well, have you seen all these studies that basically connect testosterone levels in young men with conservative politics?

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah.

JD VANCE: So, maybe that’s what’s going on. Maybe the Democrats want us all to be, you know, poor health and overweight is because that means that we’re going to be more liberal, right? If you make people less healthy, they apparently become more politically liberal. That’s an interesting observation.

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think there’s like socially liberal, like live and let live, do whatever you want as long as you’re not hurting anybody, which is really what I am. And then the reality…

JD VANCE: Yeah, these labels get all confused, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. And this is where it gets sort of conflated, like the reality of hard work being a virtue.

JD VANCE: Yes. And this has always been a conservative idea, is that you’re really supposed to like make your mark in this world and get up in the morning and work hard and you should be proud of that.

JOE ROGAN: Yes. The only way to get good at jujitsu is hard work. Yes. So, everybody who really trains hard and gets good has a certain level of just a true understanding of the real relationship, that the actual, the mathematical equation of focus, time, energy, and discipline versus positive results.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: And there’s only one way to excel. There’s no other way to excel at martial arts other than training hard. So, it’s kind of normal that he’s becoming, like, leaning more libertarian and wearing hoodies now.

JD VANCE: Yeah. No, my secret theory is that Zuck is now a Trump supporter, but he can’t say that publicly, of course, but hopefully he is.

The Challenges of Dissent

JOE ROGAN: It’s really difficult to say that now. That’s why guys like Bill Ackman and Chamath and all these people that stand out… It’s taking real courage. It really has.

JD VANCE: Yeah, and I like both of those guys. Because they really do get excommunicated.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Cocktail parties are a mess after that in Marin County. They think you’re a Nazi.

JD VANCE: That’s putting it mildly. But yeah, I mean, you know, one of my closest friends in the tech world is David Sachs. And Dave and I have talked about this, because we were both, like, it’s funny, we were both sort of critical of Trump in 2016, but we came, you know, that criticism from a right-of-center perspective. And both of us, by 2020, were like, “This crazy bullshit has to end. Trump is our guy. And maybe, not only is he our guy, but maybe he was, like, the only one who could have turned the tide against this insanity.” And David, I mean, he has become so far out there. And I admire it in a lot of ways. And sometimes I see what David says, and I’m like, “Dude, are you going to be, like, welcome in your neighborhood?”

Well, I mean, have you ever interviewed David Sachs?

JOE ROGAN: No.

Freedom of Expression

JD VANCE: Well, I mean, he’s just, look, he’s very anti-woke. He’s very, very into foreign, what I would call foreign policy realism. Like, “Why are we starting these stupid wars all over the world? We should be, our foreign policy should be more pro-peace.” And it’s just crazy to me, because he’s so inflammatory about it that I’m, and by the way, I love it, right? You know, I agree with a lot of what David says. And even when I disagree, I know he’s a smart guy.

But he is just saying, “Look, I don’t give a shit. If you’re going to come after me, come after me. But I’m going to say what’s on my mind.” And I think, you know, a lot of people are going in that direction, which is fundamentally a good thing, is people are sick of being told what to think. And like the First Amendment, obviously, it’s a legal document that talks about the role of government and censorship and sort of prohibits government censorship.

JD VANCE: But it’s also a sort of ethic and an attitude that is endemic, or I hope is, to American society, which is, we’re going to think what we want, we’re going to say what we want to. That’s an important First Amendment value, even though it has nothing to do with the First Amendment as a legal document itself. And a lot of people are sick of being told what to think.

Hate Speech and Misinformation

JOE ROGAN: I was very upset when Tim Walz was saying that the First Amendment doesn’t apply to hate speech and misinformation. Like, especially those two terms, hate speech and misinformation, because hate speech…

JD VANCE: They’re in the eye of the beholder.

JOE ROGAN: Right. It’s so subjective, and it’s the marks are moving as to what’s called hate speech now. It’s moving further and further away from normal.

JD VANCE: If you say that an 11-year-old should not get gender transition drugs, that is hate speech, according to a significant subset of the left.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, if you call Caitlyn Jenner Bruce Jenner, that’s hate speech. And you used to get banned for life from Twitter for deadnaming someone.

Which is just bananas. Which is totally bananas. You can call him a cunt, but you can’t call him Bruce. The whole thing is so crazy. It’s just…

JD VANCE: I think that this is… And look, I try not to be too partisan, because I know a lot of people watch your show, but this is, to me, the biggest and most fundamental difference between Kamala and President Trump and the campaign is, you know, whether it’s Biden calling people garbage, or Tim Walz calling people fascist, and Kamala calling people Nazis, or endorsing explicit censorship, we’re not trying to censor our fellow Americans, right? We’ll attack Kamala and her policies and her ideas, but we’re not trying to say you should be silenced because you disagree with us. That is anathema to everything that I believe in.

Troubling Trend in the Democratic Party

JD VANCE: And that is what’s happened in the modern Democratic Party, at least at the leadership level, is they’ve gotten really comfortable with the idea of silencing people who disagree with them, such to the point where, like, it’s not that Tim Walz thinks that hate speech should be censored, it’s that the governor of a state could utter that phrase without recognizing how fundamentally subjective it is, right? Or Hillary Clinton saying that we want to censor misinformation. She has come out and explicitly said that we have to censor disinformation and misinformation. Or we lose total control.

JOE ROGAN: Like, hey, you’re not supposed to have total control over discourse.

JD VANCE: That’s the whole point. We don’t want people to have total control, and they can utter it without the American media going completely bananas, just suggest there’s something broken about the political culture of the left. I mean, there are people on CNN and, you know, CBS and all these other sort of mainstream networks. I would call them corporate networks. All these corporate networks that will say, you know, when Donald J. Trump says that if you riot after the election, you’re the enemy of the people, or you’re an enemy within, like, that is a major threat to democracy.

But Hillary Clinton’s saying that we should censor disinformation, they’re just, “Eh, no big deal.” And the fact that they can get so fired up about what I think is a pretty common-sense observation that if you riot, law enforcement should have a response to it, but they think that it’s the end of the… they don’t care at all. They don’t care at all when Hillary Clinton and Tim Walz endorse explicit censorship. That should scare the hell out of us.

Dangers of Censorship

JOE ROGAN: It should scare the hell out of you whenever any politician is encouraging censorship, especially when it’s about things, like we said, about hate speech and misinformation. Like, misinformation according to who? Because we’ve already shown that there’s a bunch of different factors that have control over what is presented as fact, and they’re not always honest or accurate. And these things get put out, and it harms people, and then there’s some sort of a correction that comes along. Well, the only way to find that out, especially like during the COVID times, these things that they called misinformation, how many of them turned out to be true?

Almost all of them. It’s crazy. The Wuhan lab, it was racist. Racist to assume that the… when Jon Stewart did that bit on Colbert, did you see that?

JD VANCE: I’ve never seen it, though.

The Wuhan Lab Leak Theory

JOE ROGAN: It’s amazing, because you see Colbert scrambling, and he’s trying to, like, Jon’s like, “Do you think maybe the lab that was the Wuhan coronavirus lab, like, maybe it came from there.”

JD VANCE: It was so obvious. I mean, the whole argument for the start of COVID that wasn’t from the Wuhan lab was basically, as I understood it, that a bat had gotten a weird coronavirus and had, like, fallen into a guy’s soup at a wet, you know, at a wet market.

JOE ROGAN: Or a pangolin was involved.

JD VANCE: Yeah. There’s so much stupidity involved. And that, like, that was more believable than there’s the Wuhan coronavirus lab. And yeah, I remember when Tom Cotton was the first major American politician to talk about this. You know, Tom’s, like, a good friend. And he was immediately pilloried as this terrible racist. And, you know, it’s just… it’s bizarre that we’re not allowed to talk about things in the United States of America.

Shifting Attitudes Towards Free Speech

JD VANCE: I will say, I think it’s gotten better. This is one of my more optimistic views is, you know, when we’re all locked in our houses in the summer of 2020, I think that did weird things psychologically to everybody.

JOE ROGAN: Agree.

JD VANCE: And I think that a lot of people rebelled against it. And we’re probably in a better position now in 2024. Like, Chamath would not have come out. I love Chamath. Would not have come out for Donald Trump in 2020.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Right.

JD VANCE: Now he’s hosting fundraisers and giving hundreds of thousands of dollars to to our campaign. So I think the fact that you have so many old-school liberals and old-school leftists say “We’re done with this bullshit” is actually a pretty good sign. Yeah, there’s still social consequences to it, but not nearly as high as they were four years ago.

The Impact of Elon Musk’s Twitter Acquisition

JOE ROGAN: Well, I think when Elon purchased Twitter, it changed the entire game. Because now you have this Wild West, uncensored version of social media that’s run by this super genius madman who has all the money in the world. It’s crazy. I mean, it’s really, without him, we’re in a lot of trouble. Because let’s say Twitter never gets purchased. They run the same way they’ve run it in the past, where they’re being influenced by whatever companies and whatever agencies decide to remove posts or remove people and ban Donald Trump and ban a bunch of different conservatives and ban a bunch of people that were outcasts.

And they just decided they were controlling the discourse. Well, then you have no outlets other than Parler. And we discussed this yesterday. Those outlets 100% got infested by bots, where they’re putting Nazi stuff up and like, “Oh, this is a Nazi site.” No, you’re the Nazi. You put it up there. You poisoned it. Instead of it being just a place where conservatives can go and talk about things and not be censored like they were on Twitter, then they get infiltrated with all this hate shit, and then it becomes a hateful place, and they don’t even want to go. So now they’re homeless.

Well, now all of a sudden, Twitter comes along. Elon comes along and has this complete shift in how he’s viewing this attack on free speech. Then you have Schellenberger and Matt Taibbi. They go into the Twitter files. They find like, “Oh my god, this is unconstitutional.

JD VANCE: This is industrial scale censorship,” is what it was.

JOE ROGAN: And they weren’t right. They did all this stuff, and it turned out that all the things they were saying were either lies or were incorrect, and there’s no repercussions. And so you’re seeing all this in real time, and no one on the left has any problem with it, which to me is insanity. And the people that do have a problem with it, their solution seems to be to just go to the right. They don’t even feel like you can reform the left. People are just like, Tulsi Gabbard becomes a Republican. People are just abandoning this. Like, “I can’t talk to you people.”

The Shift of Dissenting Liberals

JD VANCE: That’s right. I’m doing an event with Tulsi Gabbard tonight in Pennsylvania. I love her. I love her. She’s awesome. I think she basically decided that the left cannot be reformed in this country anymore. That’s what happened with Bobby Kennedy. That’s what’s happened with a lot of old school liberals, is they say, “Yeah, you know, we don’t care what you do in your bedroom, but we believe in the fundamental right of people to speak their mind,” and the Democrats just don’t believe in that anymore.

And I thought a lot about what is going on there and what’s driving it psychologically. And I think that what’s going on is the entire modern Democratic Party grew up in an era where there was consensus, right? Walter Cronkite could say something about the Vietnam War, and it turned out he’s probably right about that, actually, and it collapsed public support for the Vietnam War, where they grew up in America where social trust was just so much higher. And I think that a lot of them are trying to reimpose that social trust from the top, not recognizing that that high level of social trust came organically from the way that American society worked.

And if you have people trying to reimpose it from the top, it actually degrades the very thing that you’re trying to create. Because I’ve seen, I mean, family members of mine who got really radicalized because they were like, “Wait a second, should we be masking three-year-olds in our schools? Like, does that do something to their language development?” And then they would get kicked off of Facebook because a person with 900 Facebook friends who has no public profile dared to, like, question the prevailing narrative. And again, they ended up being right about it. I actually think that what the left is doing is degrading social trust by trying to create it from on high. And I kind of get the psychological impulse because, you know, like a lot of great things that we do come from high levels of social trust, but you’ve got to re-establish it organically. You can’t try to force it on people.

Jeff Bezos’s Op-Ed on Media Bias

JOE ROGAN: And there’s been some course correcting. Like, did you read Bezos’s article? Was it yesterday that came out in the Washington Post?

JD VANCE: Yeah, I did see that.

JOE ROGAN: What did you think of that?

JD VANCE: I mean, I go back and forth. Like, again, I don’t know Jeff super well. I’ve always liked him, my interactions with him. But the problem with the Washington Post is not that their editorial page has been insufficiently conservative. It’s that their entire journalism department is fundamentally engaged in democratic political activism.

I mean, the two, we talk about this a lot, and, you know, my political guys are, you know, a lot of them are outside, and certainly a lot of them will watch. But we talk a lot about which of the newspapers that have really gone crazy. And the New York Times is kind of an exception. Yeah, it’s very left-wing, but it hasn’t totally gone insane. The Washington Post might as well be a propaganda outlet of the Democratic Party. If you look from the Hunter Biden laptop to any number of stories where they just tow the left-wing line almost instinctively, the problem was with the journalism at the Washington Post. It’s not with the editorials.

I don’t care, frankly, whether the editorial page endorses Donald Trump or Kamala Harris. I care about whether the journalists are lying about Donald Trump or lying about Kamala Harris. And, frankly, they’re lying a lot in the negative direction about my running mate, and they’re lying a lot in the positive direction about Kamala Harris.

So what I would like to see from Jeff Bezos is a commitment to the Washington Post not just being a Democrat super PAC. I don’t give a shit if he hires a few more conservative columnists. It doesn’t matter. What matters is, do they hold their journalism to anything like a high standard? And if they don’t do that, then, to me, it’s just window dressing.

JOE ROGAN: But it seems like that’s at least a step in the right direction.

JD VANCE: Fair.

JOE ROGAN: Like, one thing would be great, you have an argument against Donald Trump on the front page next to an argument for Donald Trump, and let two different intelligent people state their cases, one from a conservative perspective, one from a liberal perspective, and let’s see what resonates with you.

JD VANCE: It’s a step in the right direction. I just think that unless you change the underlying, you know, journalism to make it more fair, it’s going to be only a step in the right direction rather than fixing the problem.

Challenges of Reforming Media Bias

JOE ROGAN: What else can he do? I mean, he’s probably pretty busy on his yacht hanging out with his girlfriend with his tight shirts on. How does he have the time? You know, I mean, he can’t go into the office and, like, read everybody’s work.

JD VANCE: Okay, so let me give you an example. There is a journalist by the name of Matt Boyle who writes at Breitbart. Do you know Matt Boyle? Have you ever heard of Matt?

Okay, so Matt is, even though he writes for Breitbart, and I know that most people assume that Breitbart is just this, like, right-wing rag, Matt is, he has one of the best contacts of journalists in Washington. Like, he knows what’s going to happen in the country before most left-wing journalists because he talks to the liberals, he talks to the conservatives, he has allies on Capitol Hill.

I’d love to see the Washington Post hire a guy like Matt Boyle and say, “Matt, go and do what you’re going to do, and obviously it’s not going to be able to have a political bias to it, but go and investigate. If you want to go and investigate Kamala Harris’s campaign, go and do it.” But that is what it would look like, is empowering conservative and independent journalism in the same way that Jeff Bezos has empowered left-wing journalism. If I see that happening, then I’ll be a little bit more optimistic about his stewardship.

Biased Media Coverage

JOE ROGAN: Well, could you imagine if there’s the same sort of scrutiny on Kamala’s speeches and appearances in these media outlets as there is on Trump’s? Like, one of the things that we talked about was how they edited that one answer that she was asked, like, what, you know, about foreign policy.

They edited it completely, and I wasn’t aware that they put an answer for a completely different question there.

JD VANCE: Well, okay, so I think that what happened there, having done some, try to understand a little bit better, is they basically just edited her answer down a lot so that she didn’t sound like a total insane person. Because what aired, I think, on the smaller, you know, what aired on the channels online that had a smaller pickup was the rambling.

JOE ROGAN: The word salad.

JD VANCE: But what actually aired on the news programs was, I mean, it still doesn’t sound very good, but it sounded a hell of a lot better. Let me give you a very good example of this.

JOE ROGAN: It’s really not the answer. It’s like they changed the answer.

JD VANCE: Let me see, let me see what, yeah, no, you’re right. They changed the answer, but I just want to find the statistic from my team, because I asked them this last night. So they did change the answer, and they changed it in a way to protect her. And then, importantly, they refused to release a transcript, right? So my attitude would be, just release the transcript, let people see what she actually said, so that you at least have some integrity as a journalistic outlet.

Biased Coverage of Trump Rally Controversy

JD VANCE: But, okay, so here’s, you, of course, I’m sure paid attention to the kerfuffle over a comedian at the Trump rally at MSG. I think you even know this guy, right?

JOE ROGAN: He’s a good friend of mine, Tony Hicks.

JD VANCE: So he tells a joke about, you know, Puerto Rico. The number of mentions on CNN about this joke in the last 48 hours, this was as of last night, 143; on MSNBC 101, on ABC 53, on NBC 32, and on CBS 31. In two days, they talked about that joke effectively non-stop. You know what it means to have 31 mentions on NBC News about this particular thing? That is a crazy, that is saturation.

Last night, Joe Biden called the half of America that’s going to vote for Donald Trump garbage. Do you think that the word garbage is going to appear on CNN 141 times over the next two days?

JOE ROGAN: No. I would bet no.

JD VANCE: Now, what’s the difference? Well, one difference is that it was a comedian telling a joke, and it’s the president of the United States telling what he actually thinks. Another difference is, again, it’s a comedian with, at best, a tenuous connection to the Trump campaign, and on the other hand, you have the actual sitting president at a vice presidential campaign event telling the vice president — sorry, telling the entire country at an event sanctioned by the Kamala Harris campaign that half of Americans are garbage, and I guarantee the media is not going to cover this in the same way.

I mean, here, let me, I don’t know if Jamie can bring this up, but I tweeted about this last night, that Politico, when they initially tried to write the story about what had been said by Joe Biden, they said that Biden had called racism against Puerto Ricans garbage. Well, who disagrees with that? I think that racism against Puerto Ricans is garbage, but that’s not what he said. He said that Trump supporters are garbage. He said it’s on the video, so Politico tried to, like, retcon this. It turned out there was a video, so we could actually see for ourselves what was actually said, but the amount of dishonesty in the American media really is off the charts.

Concerns About Joe Biden’s Mental Capacity

JOE ROGAN: It is, but also with Joe Biden, I think at this point in time, he’s literally that crazy guy on the porch yelling at the neighbors. I mean, he’s, no one thinks he’s there, which is also one of the fascinating things when they asked her, “When did you know that he was mentally impaired, and why didn’t you talk about it earlier?” And there’s this, “Joe Biden has always done the amazing work that Joe Biden does.” It’s just like, where are you going? You want to get the, like, the lights that they use in the air traffic controller, like, “Come this way,” help her out. Do you think she wears an earpiece?

JD VANCE: Oh, I wouldn’t be surprised, I have no idea.

JOE ROGAN: The earpiece one was amazing, the little bluetooth thing, the earring.

JD VANCE: It’s astonishing, she talks, the only way I can describe it is she talks in circles, right?

JOE ROGAN: It’s like, Tim Dillon says it’s like she does gypsy curses, because she speaks in gypsy curses.

Kamala Harris’s Speaking Style

JD VANCE: That’s very good, “We need to build an opportunity economy, because if Americans don’t have opportunity, then they’re not going to have the opportunity to be Americans,” and it’s like, what the hell did you just say?

JOE ROGAN: And generational wealth, like, wait a minute, do you know how few people generate generational wealth? That means you have so much money, you’re going to give it to other generations.

JD VANCE: There’s actually, okay, I mean, I give a lot of speeches, so there’s actually a skill to this. I think that she is the Michael Jordan of using as many words as possible to say as little as possible. There’s actually a certain gift that she has, because you listen to her talk, and you’re a hundred, two hundred words into it, you’re 500 words into it, and you’re like, “What the hell did she just say? She didn’t say anything.”

JOE ROGAN: Right.

JD VANCE: And that actually, I mean, okay, so yeah, there’s a certain political skill in saying a lot without actually saying anything, but it actually worries me about her being president. Like, okay, there are all these substantive policy disagreements, and we could talk about, okay, I don’t like her border policies, I don’t like this, I don’t like that, but what does she do when she’s in a meeting with a world leader? And she has to, like, know the details of public policy to negotiate with Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping.

Like, one of the major things that you do as a president is you participate in economic negotiations, like, what tariffs are we going to apply on your goods unless you lower the tariffs on ours or vice versa, right? You have to be able to know a little bit about your job to be the president of the United States, and I don’t know that she has an ounce of curiosity about public policy in this country. That’s what scares the hell out of me.

Kamala Harris as the Presumptive Nominee

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just strange that everyone’s accepting that this person who is the least popular vice president ever is now the solution to the problem, and that the media machine in just a few days did this 180 and just sold her as the solution. And as long as they keep her from having these conversations where she’s allowed to talk, they’re able to pull this off. And the fact that it’s happening with no primary should be really concerning to people because it’s never happened before. They could have had a primary.

JD VANCE: Well, it’s also part of the process where you identify people’s flaws, you figure out what they’re good at, what they’re bad at. Like, the primary is actually a grueling process.

JOE ROGAN: How you handle pressure.

JD VANCE: How you handle pressure, right? And we don’t really know how she’s handled pressure because she’s only done it for a little while. And if you just look at Donald Trump’s public schedule, J. D. Vance’s public schedule versus Kamala Harris, dude, it is striking how little she does. There was an interview that she did. I think it’s the only really tough interview she’s done with Brett Baier of Fox News. I believe that she had a clear calendar for two days before she did this interview.

JOE ROGAN: Just prepping her?

JD VANCE: Just prepping her. But, you know, how can you actually, you know, that’s not pressure. If you could just take two days off for one single interview, that’s not pressure.

Allegations Against Kamala Harris’s Husband

JD VANCE: And also just little things. I mean, look, there’s this story out there. To be clear, I have no idea if it’s true, but there’s a woman who has gone on the record and said that Doug Emhoff, Kamala Harris’s husband, smacked her in the face in France. Okay, that’s been reported on the media. I’m sure you guys can find it if you want to. Okay, again, maybe it’s not true, maybe it is true, but these things take time to actually figure out and investigate.

And here’s the thing, you know, you know this, I know this, most people know this. If you are a domestic abuser, that usually doesn’t stop with one person. Like most domestic abusers are serial domestic abusers. Is it in the public interest to do some investigation about whether the White House, the president, could be sharing the White House with the person who is engaged in domestic abuse? That is in the public interest to know. Not only is the American media not that interested in it, but most importantly, you don’t have the time to really investigate some of these accusations.

Meanwhile, every time somebody says anything about Donald Trump without an ounce of evidence, the American media picks it up and runs with and makes an entire news cycle, totally incurious about what’s going on with Kamala Harris.

JOE ROGAN: But I think over time, what’s interesting is most people are becoming aware of this extreme bias, the difference in the scrutiny that’s applied to Trump.

Need for Real Investigative Journalism

JD VANCE: So that’s right, but you go back to this question you asked me about Jeff Bezos. This is why you need good reporters who have the investigatory skills, who are empowered by their employers to go out and do the investigations. Like, you know, your platform, you’re having more honest and open conversations than anything that’s happening in the corporate media. It’s like one of the reasons why I listen to your show, one of the reasons why I’m happy to be here.

But you don’t have like a person working for you who’s going to go to like France and talk to this woman and investigate whether this is true. This is why, you know, I’ve told Elon this, but like the most useful piece of philanthropy, if you’re a right-of-center American, would be to set up a non-profit organization where you pay a really good reporter for five years, you give them complete job security, and you just tell them, go off and investigate what’s going on in the world and bring it back and report on the truth.

Because if you don’t have that, then that is where the media still has a fundamental advantage over us, is they’ve got an army of people investigating me and Donald Trump. There’s no one really investigating Kamala Harris.

The Imbalance in Media Bias

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s also the amount of left-wing media versus right-wing media is pretty disturbing.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like, what is the percentage of networks that lean left? CNN, clearly, MSNBC, ABC, NBC, CBS, and then you have Fox. And then you have a couple of online things, like NewsNation, whatever. And it reaches much less. It reaches much, much less.

JD VANCE: And if you just look at, I mean, you’re only, you know, you and a few others are the only people who can compare with the actual platform size of an NBC, a CBS. I mean, yeah, fewer people watch them now than they did 20 years ago. But if you look, man, like, you’re still getting five to eight million viewers every single night for each of the major networks on the nightly news. That’s incredible reach, right? There’s still a lot of power there.

And, you know, to your point about, like, the comparison, you know, Fox News, number one, if you look at Fox News’s viewership compared to NBC’s, it’s just dwarfs, NBC dwarfs it. But more importantly, in some ways, is Fox News, which I do think is very important, but yeah, they have a right-of-center bias, certainly, I will admit that. But if you look at how much Fox News is covering the left fairly versus the right, it’s much more balanced than, like, an NBC, right? Like, NBC would never have an interview with Donald J. Trump where the journalist is asking tough questions but is, like, sitting down and broadcasting Donald Trump for an hour. Fox News would do that for Kamala Harris, and they did do that for Kamala Harris, and there’s a real difference there.

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s also, like, the way Brett Breyer interviewed Bayer — the way he interviewed Kamala Harris is very similar to the way he interviewed Donald Trump.

JD VANCE: Exactly. Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And nobody accused him of doing anything sneaky then. Or no one was even angry at him then.

JD VANCE: Well, because the expectation is that you’re going to interrupt, and you’re going to fact-check, and you’re going to try to actually do the job of an interviewer, but the expectation is that if you touch Kamala with anything other than kid gloves, you know, you’re not allowed to do that.

JOE ROGAN: But I think, again, I think most people are upset. It’s one of the reasons why the movement is so, the movement towards Trump, they’re so enthusiastic, they’re so energetic, because they do realize that there’s this imbalance, and they don’t like it, and they think that the only way this is going to get fixed is someone who’s a complete outsider.

You can’t be more outsider than a guy who they’re literally turning the judicial system against. That’s right. They’re literally trying to prosecute him like a banana republic, and they’re doing it over and over and over again, and they’re doing it, they’re speaking about it openly, “We’re going to put him in jail, we’re going to lock him up, and that way we’re going to keep him from being in the office.”

Toddler-Like Dishonesty from Kamala Harris

JD VANCE: You know, I use this analogy a couple times publicly, but so what’s interesting to me about toddlers, and, you know, I’ve talked with Tucker Carlson about this, toddlers lie in a way that’s very different from how everybody else lies, right? So, like, if you’re telling a lie, normally, you know, “Hey, did you do that thing?” You would say, “No, no, no, somebody else did it,” or they kind of qualified a little bit.

Let me give you an example. My four-year-old, I’m a big baker, probably surprised by that, but I’m a big baker, and my four-year-old and I are making an Oreo cake a few weeks ago, and my four-year-old is helping me, he likes to help me out a lot when I bake, and I go to the bathroom, and the Oreos that we’re supposed to put in the Oreo cake, like, crumble them up and put them in the cake, like, half of them are gone when I get back, and I’m like, “Buddy, what happened to the Oreos?” And he looks at me, and without a hint of irony or shame, he says, “I didn’t eat the Oreos, you did.” Right?

So that’s the way that Kamala Harris lies, is “I didn’t eat the Oreos, you did.” Not only does she actively brag, and has her administration actively bragged about trying to arrest her political opponents, she will go out and say that if Donald Trump is the president, he’s going to arrest his political opponents, even though he already was president, and he didn’t do that.

JOE ROGAN: Did you see she went on Shannon Sharp and said that he’s going to take away your Second Amendment rights?

JD VANCE: It’s crazy. The person who wants to, who literally wants to confiscate firearms, Kamala Harris, is saying that Donald Trump wants to take away your Second Amendment rights. Dude, the thing that, okay, do you know who Steve Bannon is?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

Steve Bannon’s Imprisonment

JD VANCE: Okay, fascinating guy.

JOE ROGAN: Did he just get out?

JD VANCE: He got out of prison yesterday. They have the audacity to say Donald Trump wants to jail his political opponents. Steve Bannon just got out of prison after a four-year prison sentence yesterday. And by the way, do you know what he was put in jail for? Do you know the actual charge?

JOE ROGAN: No.

JD VANCE: Contempt of Congress. Eric Holder, who was Obama’s Attorney General, was found in contempt of Congress, or at least was, you know, there was, Congress found him in contempt. It was never litigated. He was never tried to put in jail. There was no court case around it. The contempt of Congress that Steve Bannon engaged in is that the J6 committee, or one of these, you know, banana republic committees from the Congressional Democrats, they issued him a subpoena. He, under the advice of his lawyers, felt that he couldn’t actually respond to the subpoena because executive privilege applied. They held him in contempt of Congress and they threw him in prison for it. A charge that has been levied against multiple Democrats. Republicans never tried to throw anybody in prison over it. Steve Bannon just got out of prison.

Kamala Harris is literally using the power of government, has already used the power of government, to jail her political opponents, and she’s saying that Donald Trump is going to do the thing that he didn’t do, and she did when they were in respective positions of power.

JOE ROGAN: Do you think it’s because they’re worried that if he gets into power and he gets back in the office that he’s going to start investigating a lot of this stuff and the 51 former intelligence agents?

JD VANCE: That’s exactly what they’re afraid of. They’re afraid of consequences. They’re afraid of, and look, do I think the 51 intelligence agents who signed that letter should go to prison? No, but should they be stripped of their security clearance? Absolutely, I do. Right? They lied. They used their position of authority and lied to the American people about something that was in the national interest. If there are no consequences for that, then what are we doing?

JOE ROGAN: And they’re probably very concerned with a trial that’s going to reveal what the elements of that particular story really were.

JD VANCE: There’s, yeah, there’s a lot of corruption there. There are, I’m sure, higher-ups. There are people who said one thing in public but said something else in private. There probably is, at some level of that whole thing, people who maybe perjured themselves or at least unethically lied.

Look, there’s a lot going on there, but, you know, Donald Trump is not going out there and has never said, “I want to arrest you because you’re a Democrat.” He’s never said, “I want to arrest you because you disagree with me.” He’s never said, “I want to censor you, even, because you engage in disinformation.” What he has said is that we should investigate some of the obvious sources of corruption in the United States government. That’s not going after your political opponents. That’s what Kamala Harris does, actually.

Trump’s Restraint with Prosecuting Hillary Clinton

JOE ROGAN: Well, one of the things that he’s talked about pretty openly is that he could have gone after Hillary Clinton and he didn’t because he thought it would look bad for the country.

JD VANCE: Yes. And it’s true. I mean, he really could have. She did commit crimes. The FBI, a Democrat who’s supporting Kamala Harris, said that she committed, I think, not just crimes but maybe felonies. She committed felonies in what Donald Trump did and said, you know what, it’s bad for the country. A lot of my voters would love me to prosecute Hillary Clinton, but it’s bad for the country, so I’m not going to do it. That is the exact opposite, of course, of what Kamala Harris and Joe Biden have done. And again, the media, it’s a total upside down universe where they accuse us of doing the very thing that they’ve done themselves.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it’s really wild to watch. The gaslighting is off the charts.

Key Issues for Voters: Economy and Abortion

JOE ROGAN: So there’s a bunch of things that people are deeply concerned with in this country. And it seems like for men, it’s the economy that seems like the primary thing that people are concerned with. And it seems like for a lot of women, it’s abortion. Abortion and Roe v. Wade is a big concern. Now, if I’m correct, your position, and this is what they wanted when they overturned Roe v. Wade, they wanted to leave it in control of the states. Is this your position?

JD VANCE: Yeah, so what President Trump has said and what I’ve said is abortion is now a matter for state legislatures, state voters to determine. And there’s, I mean, one, that’s always what the argument was, right? If Roe v. Wade goes away, then the state legislatures, the state populations are going to make each individual abortion decision the same way that like, you know, California has different laws on a whole host of subjects than Alabama does. The idea is that, yeah, California would make its own abortion policy. Alabama would make its own abortion policy.

And so there’s a basic sort of principle of federalism at work there. But I also think that, you know, knowing Donald Trump well, I think he’s motivated also by a desire for us to just stop having a culture war over this particular issue and to let the voters in these states make these decisions while the national government focuses on things like lowering the cost of groceries and lowering the cost of housing and securing the southern border. And I think there’s actually some great wisdom in that because, you know, think about this.

Abortion has not really been a political issue for 50 years. Now, we say that it is, and obviously we disagreed about it and people thought about it. It was always something the Supreme Court said, “This is the way it is. There’s no political decision making.” Every European nation has made abortion policy democratically. And that’s what Donald Trump is saying. Do what every European nation has done. Let the voters decide what their abortion policy is going to be. And we’re going to focus the national government on different things.

And I say this as somebody who, you know, like I genuinely, you know, want people to choose life. And I’m, you know, a big believer in families. And I think, you know, having children has been like a revelatory experience for me. And I want our country to be more pro-family, more pro-child. I think there are all these things that we can do at the federal level to make our country more pro-family and more pro-child, you know, make child care easier, you know, stop. I’ve actually sponsored legislation to stop the surprise medical bills that happen when people, you know, I’ve seen this with my own wife, you go to the hospital, you come home, you’ve got a beautiful baby.

But you’ve also got a $20,000 unexpected bill because you choose the wrong, you know, the wrong out-of-network health care provider when you’re at the moment of delivering a baby. Like there are all these things we can do to make it easier for young women, young families to choose life. But Donald Trump, I think, wants abortion policy, and he said this explicitly, to be decided at the state level.

Concerns About Abortion Limits and Prosecution

JOE ROGAN: I’m not, it’s not possible for me to get pregnant. So when I think about these things, according to some people, it depends on who you ask, but I think when you talk…

JD VANCE: When you get with the 21st century, man, it’s possible for men to get pregnant now.

JOE ROGAN: For most people, I think one of the issues is, for a lot of people, one of the issues is that men are making decisions for what women can and can’t do. And one of the more concerning aspects of this is, like, say if you live in a state like Texas, where there’s a limit to when you can get an abortion. I think it’s like six weeks, which a lot of people think at that point in time you can’t even tell whether or not you’re pregnant, and this puts a lot of women in, like, very vulnerable positions. And then there’s this thought that they could go to another state where it is legal and have an abortion, but they could be possibly prosecuted for that in their state.

That’s concerning to me. That we can make… If there’s a place in the country where it’s legal to have a medical procedure, and you live in a state where it’s not legal, that your state can decide what you can and can’t do with your body, which is essentially based on a religious idea. And a lot of the… And I’m not criticizing it one way or another, but I’m saying that a lot of what this choose life thing is about, that life is precious and life is sacred and life begins at the moment of conception. And some people agree with this, but other people disagree with this.

And it seems to be a lot of it is based in religion. My concern is using that to dictate whether or not a person can legally travel to another state. I don’t think the government should be monitoring where you travel or what you do when you travel, as long as that thing is legal. And I’m concerned with this idea that you could be prosecuted for it in your state, for doing something that’s legal somewhere else.

JD VANCE: I don’t like the idea, to be clear. I’ve not heard of this, maybe as a possibility, but not as something that actually exists in the law. But I’ve not heard of somebody being arrested, and I don’t like the idea of arresting people for freely moving around the country.

JOE ROGAN: I haven’t heard of them doing it either. I’ve heard of the discussion. I’ve heard it as a threat.

Balancing Autonomy and Life

JD VANCE: I don’t like the idea, to be clear, of people getting arrested for freely moving around the country. So to your point about it being a religious idea, I mean, I would say I know a number of non-religious people who are very pro-life. And I think the honest answer is that what we’re doing is we’re trying to figure out what is the right balance between autonomy and life. And I say this as somebody who, when Ohio made this decision, I campaigned very aggressively for the more pro-life position in the state of Ohio. And my side lost. In fact, we got our asses kicked. We lost 60-40. And I took some learning from that.

I think one of the things that I took as a learning, as a guy who cares about this issue, is Republicans, we’ve got to earn the people’s trust. Because they don’t trust the idea that when we say that we’re pro-family, we don’t just mean pro-birth. A lot of people say you’re pro-birth, but you’re not actually pro-family. And I think there’s a lot that we can do as, you know, Republicans to try to earn back the trust of the American people.

But if I’m trying to represent as fairly as I can the pro-choice and the pro-life position, here’s what I think is really going on, is you have something. Now some people would say, maybe religiously motivated, maybe not, that it’s a human life. I would say that it’s a human life, but it at least has the potential to be human life. And then on the other hand, you have again, I freely recognize this, you have a woman who wants to make a choice about what she wants to do with her own body. Those are two very profound values, both of which I think are valuable, right?

I mean, I think autonomy is really important, I also think life is really important. And what we’re trying to talk about fundamentally, I think again, I’m trying to be fair to both sides here, is to balance the interest in life against the interest in autonomy. And I think that the way to do that, at least my view, is to let the American people debate and talk about and argue about this issue and come to this decision on a state-by-state basis.

Striking a Balance on Abortion at the State Level

JD VANCE: And again, California, Florida, Ohio, Alabama, we have different solutions to this particular problem, but that’s what we’re trying to do, right? People like me are trying to say, look, I think life really matters, and other people are trying to say, I think autonomy really matters. And the truth is that 95% of Americans would probably say there’s some way to strike the balance in the middle. You know, where most of Europe has ended up here, and it’s actually striking because you think of Europe again as a more socially liberal place in America.

Almost every place in Europe has ended up effectively where late-term abortion outside of cases of medical necessity is banned outright. And then, you know, early-stage abortion is allowed. That’s how most societies that democratically settle on this, that’s how they strike the balance. I think my attitude is, I’m running for vice president, I’m not trying to tell you how to strike the right balance, but we want to preserve the right of states to make these decisions.

JOE ROGAN: I think what people are afraid of is men telling women what they can and can’t do with their bodies.

JD VANCE: That’s the autonomy value. I get it, man. Look, I get it. And I think that there is a very real and valid argument here that autonomy should take precedence here. But I also think, if we’re being honest, there is an argument that life matters too, and that’s the balance that people are trying to strike.

The Complexity of the Abortion Debate

JOE ROGAN: It’s very complex, and people don’t want to look at it that way. I always discuss, when I talk about abortion, I say it’s one of these very human issues, where it’s very strange. Where most people think, like, at the moment of conception, if you could just remove those cells and keep them from multiplying, that’s less bad than if you wait six months. Like, almost everybody would agree to that. So what are we doing then? Like, Bill Burr has a great bit about it.

JD VANCE: Yeah, it’s a very good bit. Fantastic. There is a moral intuition there, that obviously, like, something that looks and feels like a baby is more valuable than, you know, something that just looks like a clump of, you know, something that has a heartbeat, sure. But, you know, I think it’s just hard, right? Because it’s not clear to me, philosophically, where you draw the line here. It’s a very, like, hard question to figure out, and I think that’s why people debate it and disagree about it so vociferously.

Late-Term Abortions and European Consensus

JD VANCE: But it’s interesting, man. The thing that I find, again, as a person who leans more in the pro-life side of this debate, is, okay, so you will sometimes hear people on the left say, “Well, late-term abortion doesn’t happen.” Well, there’s an organization called the Guttmacher Institute. It’s a pro-choice organization. It’s a pro, you know, abortion rights organization. And they found that there are approximately, I think it’s 12,000 abortions that happen in the second half of pregnancy.

So this is past 20 weeks. Maybe it’s even past 22 weeks. About 12,000 abortions past 22 weeks, okay? They also found that of those, 8,000 of them are purely elective. There’s no medical necessity. There’s no, like, you know, the baby has some genetic abnormality. It’s just pure, elective, late-term abortion. I don’t know how we can’t get consensus that that is not good.

JOE ROGAN: Right. Right? Right. But come on.

JD VANCE: And, in fact—

JOE ROGAN: Especially when it’s not a medical necessity.

JD VANCE: Exactly. Every European nation has gotten to that point where you say, “Okay, like, 8,000 late-term abortions, like, come on.” But, again, it’s not my decision as the vice president, and that’s not President Trump’s view. He’s very against the national abortion ban because he wants this debate to happen organically and democratically. And I think that’s kind of our attitude to this. Now, you’re right. Again, there is a balance to strike here. But usually in American society, we recognize the way to strike that balance is to debate it as citizens and not to have, like, lawyers and judges make these determinations for us.

The “Safe, Legal, and Rare” Perspective

JOE ROGAN: Believe it or not, Joe Biden had one of the most logical takes on it a long time ago. A long time ago, back when he could talk regularly.

JD VANCE: Back when his brain wasn’t bright.

JOE ROGAN: And he said abortion should be safe, legal, and rare.

JD VANCE: Well, that was my grandmother’s view. Right? That was the Bill Clinton view. And I do think that there’s something that is really weird about this whole debate where, you know, thank God, to be clear, this is not true of the gross majority of our pro-choice citizens. But you do sometimes see people, like, they’ll go on TikTok, and they’ll celebrate having an abortion.

Many, many women, usually when I was younger, who chose to have abortions because they felt like they didn’t have any other options. And, you know, I don’t judge them. I think that a lot of them just felt like they were completely trapped, and they made the decision that was ultimately right for them. Again, my argument is we need to try to gain those women’s trust back because clearly the Republican Party on this issue has lost a lot of trust. But none of them were, like, baking birthday cakes and posting about it afterwards.

They recognize that this is a medical procedure, and this is, you know, something that they felt they had to do. But celebrating something like that is just bizarre to me. And I’m much more comfortable with the people who say “safe, legal, rare” than I am with the people who say “let’s shatter abortion from the rooftops.”

Extreme Voices on Social Media

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s just this rebellion thing, you know.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: Like the concept in the zeitgeist is that abortion had always been, you know, Roe v. Wade had always been the law of the land. And then all of a sudden that was taken away. And you have these religious men who are trying to dictate what women can and can’t do with their bodies.

JD VANCE: Yeah. Yeah. No, look, I mean, again, I understand that. I understand the pushback against that. But I think you can go, like with so many other issues, you can go way too far about it. And it becomes trying to celebrate something that, at the very best, if you grant, I think, every argument of the pro-choice side, it is a neutral thing, not something to be celebrated.

JOE ROGAN: I think there’s very few people that are celebrating, though.

JD VANCE: I agree.

JOE ROGAN: It’s just the extreme weirdos, the TikTok people.

JD VANCE: Well, but it’s like everything, right? And I try, you know, this is something that is dangerous about social media, is the danger of social media with me is not to me that I live in my own echo chamber and just have views reinforced. The danger is that I’m only exposed to the crazy people on the other side who make it easier for me to adopt my own worldview because I’m saying, “Oh, it’s just people celebrating.” When in reality, you know, like you said, most American women, even those who are pro-choice, are not celebrating this thing.

JOE ROGAN: I think that’s one of the insidious things about the social media algorithm is that it highlights things that people engage with, which is more outrageous, more things that they find reprehensible. They see more of it. I see so many guys with makeup telling me they’re going to take your kids, indoctrinate your kids. Like, why am I seeing that? Well, it’s because they’re highlighting it. And when you have an app that’s owned by China, that is the number one app. Is that a coincidence?

Finding Reasonableness Amid Polarization

JD VANCE: Yeah. Facilitating the worst of our fellow citizens because it allows us to silo more. But I mean, the way that I deal with that is I just try as hard as I can to remember that most Americans. This is what really bothered me about what Biden said, like most Americans who vote for Kamala Harris are fundamentally good people. Like, I believe that. And you’ve got to try to find the people who are reasonable and talk to them. And that’s why I talk about the importance of regaining trust. I’ve had enough conversations with people who don’t like the Republican Party’s, even their perception of the Republican Party’s views here, that if you talk to reasonable people, you gain a different perspective than if you talk to the unreasonable people.

JOE ROGAN: And I think a lot of people are only informed by headlines and by real quick things that they see on television. And so they form these narratives in their head, and this is what they’re operating off of.

JD VANCE: That’s absolutely right.

JOE ROGAN: And this is why they have this weird perception of both Republicans and of Trump. And then they start throwing these terms around like fascism and white supremacy. And, well, of course you don’t like fascism. Of course you don’t like white supremacy. You can’t be a Republican. And the next thing you know, you’re on the other side. And you’re like, “How did you get me? You railroaded me, you fucks. You’re censoring my Facebook. What’s going on here?” There’s not a reasonable – and that’s the one thing that I think the Republican Party has done poorly is be a little bit more balanced in some of these controversial social issues.

Concerns About Same-Sex Marriage

JOE ROGAN: One thing that people are worried about right after Roe v. Wade was gay marriage, gay marriage laws. And people are thinking, well, it’s religion that overturned Roe v. Wade, and religion is probably going to overturn these gay marriage laws. And people are very terrified about that too.

JD VANCE: Which obviously that’s not something we’re trying to do. But it’s interesting to me how much people focus on the religious element of it because if you go back to the Roe v. Wade debate, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, who was a feminist icon and was very pro-choice, she thought Roe v. Wade was terrible law.

JOE ROGAN: Why did she think that?

JD VANCE: Because – I mean basically because of the argument that often sort of Republicans will use about making it a state issue. She said, look, you can be pro-choice as Ruth Bader Ginsburg was, but the avenue to make abortion policy should be legislatures, not judges. So it was a procedural argument about how the constitution functioned where it’s funny. Like Ruth Bader Ginsburg actually agreed with Donald Trump that even – like that this should be a state’s issue, that the state should make these decisions among their citizens. And it’s telling that that perspective is not illustrated or highlighted.

Balancing Faith and Pluralism

JD VANCE: But look, I understand like people who aren’t – obviously a person of faith. They don’t want people of faith to force their values down on people who don’t agree with them. But I’m sort of comfortable with every one of us kind of having our zone, and within that zone, I don’t want people to come in and tell me what to do. Like in my home, I’d like to be able to raise my kids with my religious values, and I’d like to be able to teach my kids what I think, and you should be able to teach your kids what you think.

And then we recognize that the more public the zone, the less that I can get to control what you do. And that’s part of living in a pluralistic society, and I’m very comfortable with that. I think unfortunately the modern left seems to be less and less comfortable even with people of faith having their own private zone. This is the trans thing where it’s like, “Oh, we’re going to take your kids away if you don’t consent to gender reassignment.” Or “We’re going to tell you that you can’t send your kids to a religious school.” You hear people say these things.

Again, I think it’s the crazies. It’s not the majority of our fellow citizens, but part of living in a pluralistic society is accepting that every man’s castle or every woman’s castle is his or her own. You’ve got to have respect for people within those castles, and then we should hopefully just have some common sense things that everybody can agree on when we’re talking about public spaces.

Concerns About Religious Influence on Governance

JOE ROGAN: I think for a lot of people, worst case scenario when they start thinking about religious influence on the way they’re allowed to behave and the way their state is governed, worst case scenario is a state adopts Sharia law. This is worst case scenario. I think all these people that would cry against the concept of Islamophobia really need to understand what that means and what you’re talking about. To say that that’s an outrageous and ridiculous idea that’s never going to take place, it’s kind of already worked its way into some societies.

JD VANCE: It has. It has.

JOE ROGAN: Is it Minnesota that has called to prayer? Is it Minneapolis?

JD VANCE: I don’t know. I know there is a place in Minnesota, I believe, where they have prayer calls as a matter of local government.

Discussion on Immigration and Religious Extremism

JD VANCE: I do think that’s happening.

JOE ROGAN: That starts getting real weird. Stuff like that starts getting real weird, and when you have people that are openly saying, our goal is, and they’ve talked about this in Toronto. Activists have said, “Our goal is to outbreed everyone who is not Muslim and vote it out and put Sharia law in place.”

JD VANCE: That’s very scary. That’s what to me is so crazy about some of the hyper left-wing reaction. The idea that somehow I want to force every man, woman, and child to go to my church is ridiculous. I just don’t want to do that. I’ve never had any interest in doing that. But where you see actual real religious tyranny is increasingly in Western societies where you’ve had a large influx of immigrants who don’t necessarily assimilate into Western values, but try to create, I think, a religious tyranny at the local level. And if you think that won’t happen at a national level, you’re crazy.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever read Douglas Murray’s book, “The Strange Death of Europe?”

JD VANCE: I haven’t read the whole thing, but I’ve read it in bits and pieces.

JOE ROGAN: He’s a smart guy. He got attacked so hard for that because he was really like an early founder. He’s the Paul Revere of this shit.

Nuclear Weapons and Religious Extremism

JD VANCE: Well, no. One of the most controversial things I’ve ever said is, what is the first Islamist? It’s important to separate. There are Muslims who are not Islamists. Islamists are like theocrats. What is the first Islamist country that is going to have a nuclear weapon? And I sort of joked. I said, “Maybe it’s going to be the United Kingdom because they’re so bad at assimilating sort of newer immigrants into their society.”

You have definitely communities in the UK where local leaders are running explicitly on Sharia law and winning elections in cities that are in the United Kingdom. This is England. This is like where America came from. There’s a bunch of English pilgrims who came to the United States. That, to me, is really crazy and really scary. And then, of course, everybody said, “Well, Pakistan already has nuclear weapons.” And my response is, well, Pakistan isn’t necessarily an Islamist country. It’s an Islamic country.

Religious Doctrines and Society

JD VANCE: They certainly have an Islamic government, and that’s the majority religion of the people. But Pakistan isn’t going and saying, “We need to conquer the infidels.” At least their government isn’t. We need to conquer the infidels and force them to obey our laws. You see that more among some of the activists in the United Kingdom maybe than you do in certain Arab countries. And that’s crazy.

JOE ROGAN: It is crazy. But it goes along with this thing that we’ve been talking about. I think essentially people have sort of a built-in mode, a program in their mind that accepts religious doctrines. And these religious doctrines could be woke. It could be hardcore right-wing conservative Christian fundamentalism. Or it could be Islamic doctrine.

Immigration and Assimilation

JD VANCE: Yeah. But this is why assimilation is so important, right, is that, look, I’m married to the daughter of immigrants. I do think that immigration can enrich this country. I do think that immigrants, many of them, are bringing a lot to the table. But we have to be honest with ourselves that permitting 500,000 immigrants in a society like ours is much different than permitting 5 million or 50 million immigrants. And importantly, where are the immigrants coming from? What are their values? What are their economic skills?

JOE ROGAN: What’s their criminal record?

JD VANCE: What’s their criminal record? There’s something very, in sort of the modern, again, this is a new thing because this is not Bill Clinton liberalism. This is something that we’re seeing today where they don’t even want to talk about the quality and the backgrounds and the skills of people coming to our country. Somehow it’s fundamentally racist to say, “Well, we don’t want certain people of certain backgrounds to be in the United States of America.” No, it’s just common sense. I mean, let me sort of give you a very specific example.

OK, so, you know, ask yourself, should America accept 100,000 immigrants from Mexico? OK, just in the abstract. Well, Mexico is a gigantic country with millions upon millions of people. Who are we talking about? Are we talking about people who speak English as a second language and don’t have criminal backgrounds? Or are we talking about people who don’t even read and write in Spanish and do have criminal backgrounds? Because those same groups of people, even though they come from the country we call Mexico, are going to assimilate and contribute to America’s society much differently. There’s something in the modern liberal mind that doesn’t even allow you to ask the question, who does America benefit from bringing into this country?

And if the answer is we don’t benefit, then why would we bring them into the country?

Border Security and Crime

JOE ROGAN: Well, it’s also the concept of being anti-open border. Somehow or another became attached, instead of safety, it became attached to xenophobia. It became attached to racism. And when you confront people and say, “Do you know that Venezuela is literally opening their prisons and instructing people to just cross into America?” Like, no. One of the wildest ones, I think it was you, were having a conversation with a woman. We were discussing the gangs in Aurora, Colorado.

JD VANCE: That was me.

JOE ROGAN: And she was like, “It’s only a couple buildings.”

JD VANCE: Imagine if that’s your community. It’s only a couple of apartment complexes with hundreds of people that have been taken over by Venezuelan gangs. I think, Joe, the right number of apartment complexes taken over by Venezuelan gangs is zero.

JOE ROGAN: It’s in San Antonio, too.

JD VANCE: It’s happening in San Antonio. It’s happening everywhere.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy that people don’t want to admit to this, because if they do, it’s empowering the right. And they think it’s going to help Donald Trump get elected. So they’re turning a blind eye to dangerous criminals crossing the border with no recourse, no tracking. You can’t do anything about it.

Impact on Local Communities

JD VANCE: Well, you see this in some communities where, because they’re small towns and because rapid migrant influx can happen very quickly, where the town population has been doubled. So you don’t even have to assume people are criminals. What does it do to the local public school when all of a sudden a thousand newcomers show up that don’t even speak English? What does it do to the hospital system when you now have thousands of people in a small healthcare system that are showing up to get emergency services because they don’t have access otherwise to a doctor?

And now the American citizens have to wait in line for seven hours to get to see a doctor because we’ve overwhelmed the local hospital system. What does it do to housing prices? You see this in a number of communities, including those that I represent in Ohio. When you bring in thousands upon thousands of people, you cannot build enough houses quickly enough to accommodate that.

So the cost of housing becomes unaffordable for American citizens. It is the craziest thing that we’ve seen in this country that you don’t even allow people to talk about the effects of mass migration anymore. And that’s why I think it’s one of the reasons why Donald Trump is going to be elected president, or at least should be elected president. Because he’s one of the few guys who’s saying, “You know what, no, no, no, we’re going to talk about this problem.” Yes, some immigrants are good. Some immigrants are not good. And that is an obvious insight to anybody who knows human nature.

The Border Bill Controversy

JOE ROGAN: What do you think is the goal behind allowing this to take place? Now, first of all, one of the things that Kamala Harris has said was that there was a bill that could have fixed the border problem, but that Donald Trump did not want it to take place because he wanted to keep this as a political talking point. What was the bill?

JD VANCE: Okay, here was the bill. What happened is, okay, let me talk about what the bill does, first of all.

Number one is it sets a maximum cap on the number of illegal immigrants that we could have before the border shuts down. That maximum cap is 2 million illegal aliens per year. It’s like 1.85 million, to be more precise. That’s number one of it.

Number two, it codified what’s called catch and release, where a person comes into our country, they’re an illegal immigrant, but they say, “No, no, no, I’m not an illegal immigrant. I’m an asylum seeker.” And so their claim for asylum gets adjudicated, but because there’s a backlog, because we have so many, their claim isn’t going to be adjudicated for 15 years. So rather than having that person wait in Mexico, we give them a work permit, and we give them legal status, and we let them come into the United States of America. That’s called catch and release. Donald Trump’s policy was you have to wait in Mexico. We’re not going to catch you and then release you into the country for 15 years. It codified that.

In other words, even if Donald Trump became president, and this is why he really hated it, is that he would not be able to undo catch and release if he won the election. It would be codified into American law. Third thing it did, nothing on the border wall, nothing on an immigration system called parole, which is supposed to be a case by case. You grant parole to people who are fleeing tyranny, but Harris has used parole to the tune of millions upon millions. Mass parole, whole categories of country have been paroled in the United States. It didn’t do anything to solve that problem. So it wasn’t a border security bill. It was an amnesty bill.

Now, in addition to what I just said, it also gave some table scraps to Border Patrol. And that is what allows them to hinge onto that one thing and to say it’s a border security bill. No, no, no, no, no. It was a mass amnesty bill would have made the border problem 10 times worse. And that’s why they ultimately pushed it. And that’s why Republicans fought against it. By the way, like six Democrats voted against that piece of legislation because they thought it was kind of a disaster. So it was not a bipartisan border bill.

In fact, it was much more bipartisan, the opposition to the legislation. But it has allowed Kamala Harris to go around and dishonestly claim that she cares about the southern border, even though when she came into office, they bragged about undoing all of Donald Trump’s successful border policies. They did exactly that. And then we had the massive migrant invasion that we’ve seen in the last three years.

Corporate Influence and Immigration

JOE ROGAN: And I think it was good on you in the debate with Tim Walz when they fact checked you. They tried to fact check you and say that this has always been in place. And you stepped up and said, no, no, no. This app is new. And this app was specifically used for shipping. And now they’re using it to schedule people to illegally come into the country. Here’s the question. Why? Why is this happening? What do you think? I mean, obviously speculation a little bit. But what do you think the motivation of allowing this to take place and the disproportionate number of people that have moved to swing states, which is also a little suspicious?

JD VANCE: So it depends on how many tinfoil hats you have in this room.

JOE ROGAN: I got a lot. I got a wardrobe.

JD VANCE: We can get real serious about this real quick or pretty crazy very quickly. Look, I think what is obvious is and I’ve seen this in the halls of Congress. I’ve seen it very explicitly. You talk about lobbying and we obviously talked about in the context of other industries. There is a massive corporate lobby for cheap labor in the United States of America. And that is, I think, the main thing that’s going on. Think about this. If you’ve got millions of illegal aliens.

Okay, let me tell you a story. In 2017, 2018, when I was in the private sector, I was at a business conference dinner. And I was seated next to the CEO of one of the largest hotel chains in America. This is, I think, probably 2018. And the guy is going on and on about how much he hates Donald Trump. And I’m like, “Oh, that’s interesting. Like, why do you hate Donald Trump so much?” Because again, I was sort of a Trump skeptic in 2015. And at this point, I was kind of starting to really get on the Trump train.

And he said, “Well, the reason I hate Donald Trump,” he says, “is because Donald Trump’s border policies have cut down the number of illegal immigrants. And because I can’t pay illegal immigrants under the table anymore, I have to pay American workers and they want much higher wages.” And I was like, this guy just admitted it.

I was like, “Holy shit, this guy just admitted it.” That’s a crime. That is straight up Monopoly man evil shit that this guy admitted to. And I was like, you know, my wife, who’s very apolitical, she was actually at the dinner with me. And she’s like, “Come again? You just said you don’t want Americans to get decent wages?” Like, that is the best argument for Donald Trump’s immigration policy is that American workers are getting higher wages. And this is why this corporate CEO hates it.

Political Power and Immigration

JD VANCE: So whatever the industry is, you’ve got a lot of people who want cheap labor and they don’t want to pay American workers higher wages. That’s a big part of it. I do think there’s also a power dynamic to it. In particular, I think Kamala Harris and the Democrats, they want to give these millions upon millions of illegal aliens the right to vote. They want to legalize them. They want to make it easier for them to participate in our elections. And that means fundamentally the end of American democracy. Because you’re talking about 25 million people here.

If Kamala Harris gives 10 million of those people legal status and allows them to vote in American elections, then, you know, say 70-30, they go Democrat. Republicans will never win a national election in this country in my lifetime.

JOE ROGAN: And the only way to get them on your side would be the Republicans offer the same services and maybe even be more generous in letting illegals in.

JD VANCE: Exactly.

JOE ROGAN: I mean, you would have to literally beat them at their own game. Like, I’m going to give you a free house.

JD VANCE: Yeah, no. I mean, yeah. Lifetime’s probably overstating it, but you’d have to – it would take 30 years for the Republicans to get to a point where we could even compete with these newcomers. But, again, it will have degraded the voting power of the people who have the legal right to be here.

JOE ROGAN: And it will essentially turn these states blue forever. The same way they’ve done California.

Reagan’s Legacy and California

JD VANCE: Exactly. And we saw this. Look, I’m like a Reagan guy. I’m a conservative Republican. But Reagan screwed up a lot. He screwed up mental health in this country. People don’t talk nearly enough about that. The amnesty thing he really screwed up. And people always say, “Well, you know, Ronald Reagan” – critics of Donald Trump will say, “Well, look at how Reagan talked about immigration.” Because of what Ronald Reagan did at the 1986 amnesty, California is now effectively permanently blue state.

JOE ROGAN: Except when Arnold won.

JD VANCE: But Arnold ran as a super moderate Republican. He was a major celebrity, right? He was at the height of his celebrity power, and he still won barely, even though California had been mismanaged. California is a one-party state because of Ronald Reagan’s amnesty.

JOE ROGAN: And that’s the fear, is that the entire country could become one party.

JD VANCE: The entire country becomes that. Now, it also – you may not appreciate this, but even if you don’t give people the right to vote, it really distorts congressional apportionment and in the electoral college. You know how this works?

Congressional Representation and Immigration

JOE ROGAN: Yes, I do. But explain it to people, please.

JD VANCE: Okay. So how many – you know, we have 435 congressional seats. Who – the way that you draw those congressional districts is that you try to draw them evenly based on population so that everybody has equal representation, right? One person, one vote, fundamental principle of American law. But you don’t just count the American citizens. You also count the illegal aliens.

And so, for example, the state of Ohio lost a congressional seat in the last census, and states that have high illegal immigrant populations picked up congressional seats. So you’re actually taking away congressional representation from American citizens and giving it to illegal aliens. Even if you don’t give them the right to vote, you’re still destroying the voting power of American citizens.

JOE ROGAN: Because it’s based on population.

JD VANCE: Because it’s based on population, including illegal immigrants.

JOE ROGAN: Is there a way to change it so that it’s only based on legal American citizens?

JD VANCE: Well, Donald Trump tried a proposal that Democrats went nuts over and litigated – was litigated in the courts. So we would have to try again that would ask citizenship status during the U.S. census. The idea being that if you ask more people their citizenship status, you get fewer people who are answering that question. I think that we should make it.

And I do think this would require an act of Congress, but I think that it would be constitutional. Is we should just say that illegal aliens are not counted for purposes of congressional representation.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah.

JD VANCE: Democrats would call that racist, but it’s just common sense policy.

Voter ID and Election Integrity

JOE ROGAN: Well, especially if it’s been shown that you’re manipulating it by moving more people to these places. And even if they’re not legal citizens and they can’t vote, it still counts as congressional seats. That’s kind of crazy.

It doesn’t – the one that drives me the most crazy is this idea that somehow or another it’s discriminatory to require ID to vote. That could only mean – I’ve tried to look at this from the most charitable position outside of it. Only makes sense if you’re trying to cheat.

JD VANCE: That’s exactly right.

JOE ROGAN: You need an ID for everything. Yeah. You need an ID to rent a car.

JD VANCE: Well, you know it’s basically illegal now in California to ask for voter ID.

JOE ROGAN: Which is crazy.

JD VANCE: Which is totally insane. But my view, and I’m sure you’ve got many, many listeners in the great state of California. The next time you’re pulled over by a police officer, just tell them that you’re on your way to vote.

JOE ROGAN: I’ve seen that meme.

JD VANCE: Think about this. But you can’t – if you can’t require people to show voter ID, then I think you’re inviting fraud into your system. And there’s also something implicitly very racist about this.

Because what they say is voter ID means that black people aren’t going to vote. Well, number one, if you look at polls, the same level of support for voter ID exists in the black community as in the white community. It’s about 75, 80% of blacks, 75, 80% of whites support voter ID. But they’re basically saying that black people can’t get identification.

When they say that voter ID is racist, they’re implicitly saying black people can’t get identification. I think that’s an actual racist concept. I actually assume that my fellow – or that black citizens are my fellow Americans, and they can do the same thing that every other citizen can do, which is get identification.

Voter Fraud and Legal Challenges

JOE ROGAN: It’s fundamentally just gaslighting. That’s all it is. It’s just you’re trying hard to make your point because you want people to be able to vote that maybe shouldn’t be voting. And then there’s all these lawsuits where they’re counting votes that they know to be illegitimate.

Well, they’re saying that there’s a certain amount of people that are in the system that they’re going to – they want to keep in there, which is crazy. So you’re saying you want people that shouldn’t be allowed to vote to vote.

JD VANCE: They say that they don’t want illegal aliens or illegal voters to vote. The Harris administration right now is litigating a lawsuit against the governor of Virginia because the governor of Virginia, using a state law, kicked about 1,500 people – or maybe it was 6,500. But it was some number of people off the Virginia voter rolls because they checked a box that said they were noncitizen.

Well, if you’re noncitizen, you can’t be on the voter rolls. So he kicked all of the noncitizens off the voter rolls. Harris is suing Glenn Youngkin. The Department of Justice under Kamala Harris is suing him to ensure that those voters go back on the voter rolls.

JOE ROGAN: There’s no argument that makes any sense.

JD VANCE: There’s no argument for this other than you want to facilitate cheating.

JOE ROGAN: But the fact that the left has no problem with this because they just want to win is insane.

JD VANCE: But who’s going to hold their feet to the fire? Who’s going to tell the honest truth? The American media has barely even covered the fact that in the middle of a very consequential presidential election, Kamala Harris’ Department of Justice is suing to keep illegal voters on the voter rolls. It’s crazy. It’s wild.

JOE ROGAN: So it’s like for Trump to win, he has to win by an enormous margin. He has to overcome a lot of this shenanigans.

JD VANCE: Well, as President Trump says, we want to make it too big to rig. Look, I encourage all of your listeners, whether you agree with us on all the issues or not, if you agree with censorship, then vote Kamala Harris. And if you think Americans should be able to say what they want to say, then get out there and vote. Vote early, vote by mail. That’s obviously part of the reason why I’m here is I want to get people out there to vote because I do think that we need to overwhelm the system with so many voters that we ensure that we get the representative government that we actually deserve as a country. And that’s not going to happen unless people get out there and vote.

Psychedelic Therapy and Veterans

JOE ROGAN: One of the things that I think is an important issue that kind of gets put aside is I know a lot of veterans in particular and a lot of people with some severe trauma that have had psychedelic therapy and they’ve had to go to other countries to do it. They’ve done some of it illegally in America. But I know far too many guys who have had PTSD, who have had an incredible experience and been alleviated of all these. And this helped them. It helped them tremendously.

JD VANCE: Is it like MDMA or is it?

JOE ROGAN: MDMA was what MAPS was using. They were running these studies and they got close to FDA approval, but now they’re being sent back to say they have to do more studies. So the problem is like you can’t really do double-blind placebo-controlled studies on MDMA. Either you’re on it or you’re not on it. It’s pretty obvious.

JD VANCE: Yeah, sugar pills don’t have the same effect.

JOE ROGAN: Yeah, it just doesn’t. But the therapy for people that are suffering from severe PTSD has been incredibly beneficial. They’ve shown that with the MAPS studies, but they’ve also shown it with like anecdotally. I know a bunch of different guys that have gone down to Mexico and had psilocybin journeys and all these different things where they’ve encountered these experiences that have made them sort of rethink who they are, alleviated them of a lot of the stress and a lot of the trauma that they’ve experienced and given them peace.

Drug Scheduling and Medical Benefits

JOE ROGAN: And the concept of Schedule 1 is that there’s no medical benefit. And if these people are experiencing, first of all, cessation of smoking, people that have had issues with addiction, Ibogaine treatments, another one that they’ve found, which is not something that anyone would ever abuse recreationally. I’ve never done it, but apparently it’s an excruciating experience. But the rate of curing addiction is tremendous from it.

And these things have been denied. People have had denied access to it because of this scheduling issue. Like we discussed it yesterday on the podcast, like the LD50 rate was like lethal dose at 50% is impossible to achieve with psilocybin. And yet it’s still illegal. And that there’s all these people that have reported.

JD VANCE: Psilocybin is mushrooms, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yes. OK. But you can synthesize it. It doesn’t have to be.

JD VANCE: I see.

History of Marijuana Prohibition

JOE ROGAN: But the scheduling of these things, in particular, like marijuana, like marijuana is legal on a state level with, I think, almost half the country now, if not more.

JD VANCE: Yeah.

JOE ROGAN: But yet federally illegal. And if you go to the history of why it was federally illegal in the first place, it coincides with what happened with prohibition of alcohol. Right after prohibition of alcohol, they turned their eyes to marijuana. And there was a lot of political influence by Harry Anslinger and William Randolph Hearst. And there’s a lot of maneuvering. And that’s where the Reefer Madness films came up and all this propaganda stuff. It was to make it illegal essentially to make the textile, the hemp illegal.

JD VANCE: Interesting.

JOE ROGAN: There’s a long history to it. It’s basically more about the commodity of hemp than it was really about the drug itself. In fact, the term marijuana was never used for cannabis, which has been used for thousands and thousands of years. The term marijuana was created by William Randolph Hearst and put in Hearst newspapers. It was originally marijuana was a Mexican slang word for a wild tobacco.

JD VANCE: Really?

JOE ROGAN: So they started writing these stories about blacks and Mexicans smoking this new drug marijuana and raping white women.

JD VANCE: I had no idea this history.

JOE ROGAN: It’s so crazy. The story is so nuts. But it all came about because of an invention called the decorticator. And the decorticator is – it’s an invention that allows them to economically and effectively process hemp fiber without slave labor. So when the cotton gin came along, people stopped using hemp as much because it’s much more difficult to work with. And they started using cotton for clothing. But before that, they’d use hemp.

And this is non-psychoactive hemp. It makes a superior paper. It does – there’s a bunch of uses for it completely outside of the psychoactive aspect of it. William Randolph – there was the cover of – was it Popular Science magazine? Popular Mechanics magazine. Hemp, the new billion-dollar crop. And it was all about this invention. So then the propaganda machine goes into full scale, and then they start –

This was in the 1930s. So they start – here it is. “The new billion-dollar crop, 1938.” And this is because of this invention, the decorticator. So it solves a problem. You can see it there. It solves a problem. More than 6,000 years old. “Hemp, a crop that will not compete with other American products. Instead, it will displace imports of raw material and manufactured products produced by underpaid coolie and peasant labor. It will provide thousands of jobs for American workers throughout the land.”

So everybody was really high on hemp as a commodity because of this new machine that you could process hemp fiber with, where you can make much more superior paper, superior clothing. It’s like canvas, literally. The Mona Lisa was painted on hemp. The first draft, the Declaration of Independence, was written on hemp. They used to use it for paper back then. So then William Randolph Hearst, who owns Hearst Publications, also owns all these paper mills and forests filled with trees.

JD VANCE: So they, to combat this industry, exactly.

JOE ROGAN: And so we’re still trapped under this propaganda that was distributed in the 1930s by incredibly powerful people. And this is why it’s illegal on the federal level. And even though you have medical marijuana that’s been showed to help people with chemotherapy and wasting disease, help people that have appetite problems and people in chronic pain, it’s still listed as a Schedule I drug federally, which, to me, is unconscionable. It doesn’t make any sense.

JD VANCE: Okay. So, like, first of all, we’re not trying to be clear, because I’m speaking as a vice presidential candidate. We’re not trying to throw people in jail for smoking weed.

Drug Policy and Public Spaces

JD VANCE: That’s, like, very much something that we’re not interested in doing. What is, I mean, the one thing that I have, like, my attitude on this stuff is kind of live and let live. Like, keep it in your home. I don’t like smelling it when I take my kids to the park, right?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. That’s not good. Daddy, what’s that scarf doing here?

JD VANCE: Yeah, exactly. But, like, you know, keep it at home. I don’t want to throw people in prison. That’s not what we’re trying to do.

JOE ROGAN: I don’t think you should be drunk at the park either, right?

JD VANCE: Exactly. Exactly. Same exact principle. The thing that I wonder about is if you, you know, I do – there’s a part of me that worries a little bit about kids doing a lot of this stuff.

JOE ROGAN: Yes.

JD VANCE: It’s your point about consent and the brains development and all these things. I really worry about do you have an increase in usage among minors? And so what I’d like to get is some sort of legal regime that, you know, again, it’s not like criminally prosecuting or prosecuting at all people for smoking a joint, but also where we can actually ensure that it’s kept out of public spaces. That’s kind of my attitude towards it. And I think that’s the right approach. On the psychedelic thing, what is – like what would need to be done?

Veterans and Psychedelic Therapy

JD VANCE: Because I know, to be clear, I know absolutely nothing about this, so this is me, you know, asking a question, not committing to some public policy. You have to be careful with this stuff, especially six days from an election. But I had never heard about, you know, because I’m a veteran too. I served [four] years in the United States Marine Corps, went to Iraq, went to Haiti once. Is there any like – like what is the pathway, I guess, and what do you think should happen for veterans accessing psychedelics?

JOE ROGAN: Well, there’s so many anecdotal stories about veterans experiencing relief that I think it should be available to them, especially veterans. I think that we put our veterans through –

JD VANCE: But is it like an FDA thing is making it possible for them to get therapy?

JOE ROGAN: Yes, and it’s also the way it’s scheduled.

JD VANCE: Because it’s Schedule I, isn’t it? Like if it had a medical use, presumably you would get it off of Schedule I. Yes. So why aren’t we – I’m just fascinated by this. This is the first time I’ve heard about this. Why aren’t we testing whether there is – yeah, fair point. You can’t do a double-blind placebo-controlled study, but you can definitely still study whether this helps people or not. Why aren’t we doing that or are we doing that? I’m just not aware of it.

JOE ROGAN: Well, we’re definitely not doing it. I mean, there’s been some research. John Hopkins did some research on psychedelics, and they found similar benefits. There’s also dangers, like anything that has profound effects on the human mind. There are certain people that are very vulnerable, and those people should not be taking these things. There are people that have a hard time with regular reality.

Veterans and Mental Health

JOE ROGAN: They’re barely hanging on regularly. But I think the people that are not should have access to that because I believe in freedom. And I believe in the freedom to explore things that have great benefits. And I keep going back to veterans because I think we require an insane thing of them.

We take regular people who live in civilized society. We send them over to Afghanistan and Iraq and have them engaged in the absolutely most brutal thing that people do, which is war. They see their friends blown apart. They get shot. They see people die. They have to kill people. And then they come back here, and then they’re supposed to just acclimate. And there’s no guidelines. There’s no way to do it. No one can coach you through it. And a lot of these guys wind up killing themselves, and it’s a very high amount. And, you know, Sean Ryan, have you done his show?

JD VANCE: Yeah, love Sean Ryan.

JOE ROGAN: Love Sean Ryan. Sean Ryan was talking about the experience that he had with him. Completely changed his life. He stopped drinking. He became a much more compassionate, sensitive person.

JD VANCE: We talked about foreign policy and veteran stuff, but we didn’t talk about this.

JOE ROGAN: The guy’s a Navy SEAL. He’s seen a lot of shit.

JD VANCE: He’s seen a lot of shit. That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: Yes, he has. That’s the job. And you come back over here, and you’re supposed to just be normal, and there’s no help, at least for those people.

JD VANCE: Look, my attitude is we should help veterans get the mental health treatment they need and be less screwed up by all this stuff. We should be doing whatever we can. I just don’t understand why aren’t we? Like, is this a pharma lobbying thing? I’m sure there’s some aspect to that. Because I’m always wondering, like, why are we not actually solving problems?

And this is a problem I know nothing about. Sorry. I know a lot about veteran suicides and veteran mental health. This proposed solution, like, literally the first time I’ve heard about this.

Pharmaceutical Industry and Mental Health

JOE ROGAN: Well, you could get real cynical as to what’s the resistance. You could say the companies that make psychotropic drugs, SSRIs and the like, and companies that have a vested interest in continuing to sell these things would not want something that causes people to have a profound psychological change that doesn’t require them to be on these things anymore. There could be an impact in that. But I think it’s also a lot of ignorance.

JD VANCE: Yeah. Have you read this book, “Bad Therapy?”

JOE ROGAN: No.

JD VANCE: Okay. It’s good. So the mental health thing in the United States is really, really worrisome. Because, you know, when I talk about – obviously we have a big gun violence problem in the United States of America. And I talk about mental health because obviously that’s a part of what’s going on here. It’s – what they say is, well, every other country has mental health, meaning advocates of strict gun laws say every other country has mental health problems, but they don’t have the same gun violence problem that we do.

It’s actually not totally true. When you look at, like, SSRI prescriptions, selective serotonin, reuptake inhibitors, it’s like Prozac, that category of mental health therapeutics. We take something like six times as much as our peer countries economically.

Mental Health and Mass Shootings

JOE ROGAN: There’s also a direct correlation between school shooters, mass shooters and SSRIs.

JD VANCE: Really?

JOE ROGAN: Yeah. Oh, yeah. Most of the people that have committed mass shootings – and I’m not talking about gang shootings – but a bunch of them are on psychotropic drugs. And everybody wants to blame drugs.

JD VANCE: I have no idea.

JOE ROGAN: Oh, yeah. That’s crazy. Google it because you can find out what the numbers are. I know that Columbine kids were on psychotropic drugs. I know there’s been a ton of school shooters.

JD VANCE: You mean, like, prescribed? You’re talking about, like, weed.

JOE ROGAN: No, no, no. Prescribed psychotropic drugs. Prescribed psychiatric drugs. And that if you bring that up, you are taking away from this argument they want to say where they want to blame everything on the guns. It’s all about gun control, and we need more gun control. Like, a gun is a tool. There’s more guns in this country than there are human beings, okay?

Gun Control and Statistics

JD VANCE: I made this argument out of the debate. The idea that you can gun regulate your way out of this problem is ridiculous. It’s ridiculous. We have so many firearms in the United States of America that even if I bought into the gun control argument, you’re never going to be able to get sufficient guns off the streets. So it’s ridiculous. We have to actually go after some of the root causes here.

It also ignores, like, Finland, for example, has a lot of guns, does not have nearly the same problem with these mass shooters that we do. I’d be interested to see what their mental health drug usage rate is, too.

JOE ROGAN: Did you ever see Ted Nugent debate Pierce Morgan on gun violence?

JD VANCE: No, I never did.

JOE ROGAN: It’s pretty good. It’s really good. He’s a smart guy. He’s a very smart guy. But Ted actually knows the statistics. So when Pierce is bringing up all the mass shootings and all the gun violence shootings, Ted said, “Do you know what they really are? Do you know how many of them are suicide? Do you know how many of them are gang violence?” “Do you know how many of them are cops shooting bad guys? Do you know how many of them are actually mass shooters?”

JD VANCE: Yeah. I did know that, actually.

Gang Violence and Gun Control

JD VANCE: When we talk about gun violence problem, what we’re really talking about primarily is gang violence. That’s where a lot of the gun violence, I think a majority of the gun violence is coming from, which is not to say it’s not a problem. But it’s not the same problem that obviously gathers most of the headlines.

JOE ROGAN: Right. And this idea that just getting guns out of people’s hands. You got a bail? We’re good if you are.

The idea that you’re going to take guns away from everyone, you’re going to solve the problem. It’s like you’re still going to have people that are out of their mind, and they want to commit violence, and they’re going to find another way to do it. Like we’ve had other ways that people have killed a lot of people because they were sick. Because they’re out of their mind.

JD VANCE: That’s right.

JOE ROGAN: And the fact that no one wants to look at this connection between psychiatric drugs and mass shootings is kind of insane. Have you found anything that shows the data on –

JD VANCE: That’s pretty wild. I’m finding actual people saying that. There’s no proof. There’s a paper that says –

JOE ROGAN: Of course.

JD VANCE: I don’t know where I’m going from day to day. But yeah, she obviously cares a lot about veterans issues. And the most important veterans issue is, yeah, the mental health thing really matters. But it’s that we shouldn’t be sending them to stupid wars.

JOE ROGAN: Well, that was one of the most insane things that Hillary Clinton did when she tried to say that she was a Russian agent. That was so much bullshit, man. That is so crazy. This woman served overseas twice. She was a congresswoman for eight years. So crazy. And she just decided to call her a Russian agent.

JD VANCE: Hillary Clinton, by the way, has not served in the military at all. At least her husband and her daughter haven’t served in the military at all. So her immediate family hasn’t. Like give me a break on this.

JOE ROGAN: She was deployed in medical unions. I mean that’s literally where she got that streak of gray in her hair.

JD VANCE: Tulsi is a legitimate servant to the United States of America. And the accusation that she’s not comes from people who want to send Americans to wars that have no connection to our national interest. I mean this is the biggest difference, I think, between Kamala Harris and Donald Trump is actually foreign policy.

Foreign Policy and Political Establishment

JD VANCE: And there are three issues, man. I’ve learned this in my own brief political career. There are three issues where you are not allowed to challenge the establishment. One is trade. You have to be pro-free trade. Everything is good. Let as many Chinese slave labor-made products into your country as possible, even if it destroys native industries. That is, number one, the most important issue to our establishment.

Number two most important issue is immigration. And the number three most important issue is foreign policy. And maybe actually foreign policy is the biggest. Because if you criticize the wars and you criticize American foreign entanglements, that is where people get really fired up.

JOE ROGAN: And what is the root of that, you think?

JD VANCE: I think some of it is financial. Liz Cheney wants her board seat at Raytheon and everywhere else. That’s part of what’s driving it. Of course her dad was a major owner, or I believe that he owned a pretty significant stake in Halliburton. But I actually think, I don’t want to overstate that, because I actually don’t think that’s most of what’s going on. And this is maybe a background view that I have that I should interrogate a little bit more. But I tend to think that people aren’t expressly financially motivated.

Post-World War II American Consensus

JD VANCE: I think they’re much better at rationalizing their financial motivation as somehow good. So I don’t think Liz Cheney, to be fair, even though I can’t stand her, wakes up and says, “Oh, I want to get rich, so I’m going to support the Ukraine war so that Raytheon can continue making all these missiles.”

I think what’s going on is they have convinced themselves that the post-World War II American consensus, this entire idea that we’re going to remake the entire world in America’s image, they think that that is the most important and most valuable project. And they don’t care. They’re going to do it as much as they can, even though I think it’s run its course. I think we should have learned that Iraq, we can’t turn everybody into the United States of America, nor should we want to. But these guys can’t quite give up on it. It’s just a powerful psychological motivation.

You go back to when the Soviet Union fell, when the Berlin Wall fell in the late 80s, early 90s, there was this sense among American leaders, Bill Clinton takes over in 1992, that we had reached what was called at the time the end of history, that Western liberal democracy was going to triumph. Everybody was going to be like us. There was going to be no more ethnic conflict, no more religious conflict, no more regional conflict.

The Iraq War Legacy

JD VANCE: And I think these guys bought the idea so profoundly that they can’t really wake up and recognize that for the past 40 years, we’ve tried their theories and their theories haven’t worked.

JOE ROGAN: There’s also the craziest thing that happened to me during this campaign was when Dick Cheney endorsed Kamala Harris and the left went crazy. Yay, Dick Cheney’s on our side. A guy, look at what they said about Dick Cheney. How much do you hate Donald Trump? How much do you hate Donald Trump that you’re willing to choose Dick Cheney over him? Man. And that Dick Cheney is all of a sudden a good guy? The engineer behind the Iraq War is responsible for how many people dead?

JD VANCE: You know, hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of Arabs, certainly thousands of Americans. The biggest world historical catastrophe, I think, in the history of the United States of America was the Iraq War. Because unlike other mistakes that we’ve made, it was truly unforced. There was no reason in hindsight to do it. There was nothing that we got out of it.

We lost, I mean, so many innocent people. We spent trillions of dollars. We, I think, destroyed the social cohesion that we had gotten after 9-11. Because remember, like, after 9-11, everybody was an American. We were all on the same team, Democrat or Republican. We destroyed that and we created in Iraq, effectively, a proxy of Iran. Which it’s telling now that 20 years later, the biggest foreign policy threat that we face in the Middle East is Iran. And we created a massive ally of the Iranians and the Iraqis. And none of the people who actually presided over that disaster are saying, “Maybe we really, really screwed up and maybe we should reevaluate some of our assumptions.”

Election Outlook

JOE ROGAN: There’s only a few days left. How much of a chance do you think Trump has to win this? Are you confident or is it close?

JD VANCE: I’m confident. It is close, but I am confident. Because it’s close, but it’s close in a way that favors us, right? The undecided voters tend to be voters who are more aligned with us. I think the early voting data looks really good.

I think that, you know, people just fundamentally don’t want to do more of the same. And Kamala Harris is more of the same. I think some of our arguments that Kamala Harris is the candidate of censorship is starting to really break through. But, you know, to your listeners, if you agree with what I’ve said here, get out there and vote.

Because, like, there is something to be said for me and Donald Trump actually sat and had a conversation. And, you know, hopefully I didn’t make a complete fool of myself. But they just don’t do that, right? Like, why would we make a person who’s terrified of talking about what she wants to do and what she believes, why would we make her president of the United States?

The only way to make that not happen is to vote for me and Trump on or before November the 5th. So it’s very important. I feel good about it, but I don’t feel great about it. Because there are a lot of ways in which Democrats are going to try to motivate their base down the stretch. There are a lot of ways in which, yeah, I mean, I wouldn’t put it past them. Maybe they do try to cheat. I don’t know exactly what it looks like in five or six days. But I know that the best thing that we can do to prevent that from happening is to get out there and make our voices heard.

JOE ROGAN: All right. Thank you very much. Thanks for being here. Appreciate it.

JD VANCE: Good to see you, too.

JOE ROGAN: All right. Bye, everybody.

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