Transcript: JD Vance on Joe Rogan Experience

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Joe Rogan: What is it like running for Vice President of the United States? How crazy is this experience?
JD Vance: It's pretty weird. It's pretty weird. You know, I was just telling you this earlier, but the first time that I've been in a public spot without Secret Service in the room is right now. So I'm like looking around for these guys.
Joe Rogan: How long has it been? It's three months, right?
JD Vance: So he asked me the Monday of the RNC convention, which I think was June 15th. And I really didn't know that morning. I thought that he was probably gonna pick me, but I didn't know for sure. Probably 60-40, basically. And so I had no idea. I get the call around 1 o'clock at Milwaukee time at the RNC convention. I'm hanging out with my kid. Another one of my kids is in the other room asleep because, you know, our kids are young, so they nap still. And he makes this call and he's like, hey, do you want to be my vice president? I was like, oh.
Joe Rogan: Literally just like that?
JD Vance: Well, actually, what happened is I got a text message from a staff member on his team that says, you just missed a very important phone call. And I don't know, you know, because there's so much inbound traffic that I think it just went straight to voicemail. So I call him back and I'm like, hey, sir, what's going on? He said, JD, you just missed a very important phone call. I'm going to have to pick somebody else now. You know, so I'm about to shit a brick here. And then he says, no, no, I'm just kidding. Obviously, I want you to be my vice president.
And the funny thing is, you know, my seven-year-old is in the background and he has no idea what's going on. And I love that, right? It's one of the good things about this. He has no clue what's going on. He's like, dad, who are you talking to? He's talking about Pokemon cards, right? And I, you know, Trump hears my son in the background and he says, well, who's that? And I said, that's my seven-year-old son, you. And he's like, put him on the phone.
And I'm just anxious for him to get this statement out, because in my mind, it's not final until the statement is actually out. And he talks to my son and he reads the statement that he is going to put out on Truth Social announcing that I'm the VP nominee of the Republican Party. And he's like, what do you think about that, Ewan? And my son is like, oh, that's pretty good. That's pretty good.
And of course, I remember this story because in particular, and the Madison Square Garden rally of a few days ago was the first time that my son actually met Donald Trump. So we'd spoken to him on the phone, but hadn't actually met him until the rally at MSG. And my seven year old really wanted to tell him a joke. And he remembers this phone conversation. And so he tells him this joke and Trump kind of chuckles, but also is probably judging me because it was a somewhat inappropriate joke for a seven-year-old to tell, but here we are.
Joe Rogan: Well, that's the only ones seven-year-olds remember.
JD Vance: That's right. Well, it's like, you know, I have a terrible language and it's one of my many flaws, but I was raised by my very working class grandmother and she was actually very, interestingly, she was a very devout Christian, but she also had, you know, a language that would make a sailor blush. And so I talk like that because I was raised by this woman.
Joe Rogan: Those are fun ladies.
JD Vance: Those are fun ladies. She was awesome. She was an amazing person, a huge personality. We called her a force of nature because she was such this big personality. But my wife's rule is basically he's only allowed to cuss when he's telling this one joke.
Joe Rogan: Oh, that's hilarious.
JD Vance: So he tells that joke all the time.
Joe Rogan: Exactly. He says it 14 times a day.
JD Vance: Yeah, early on I told my kids, you can swear in front of us, but just don't swear in front of other parents. And don't swear for no reason.
Joe Rogan: Right, well, because they judge you, right? The other parents judge you.
JD Vance: How old are your kids?
Joe Rogan: Well, the youngest ones are 14 and 16, and I have a 28-year-old. But when my 14-year-old was two, we were on a skiing trip, and we were about to leave. We packed up all our stuff, but her helmet, we forgot to put her helmet away. I go, oh, we forgot to put the helmet away. And she just looks down at the helmet, and she goes... Shit. My wife is just like, oh my God, it was so funny. There's just something adorable about a two year old that doesn't know that you're not supposed to say shit.
JD Vance: No, absolutely.
Joe Rogan: And that cute little face.
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 I'm a senator. So we spent 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 wanted like a Delta flight or 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. 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. But it's, you know, but you're right. It's so cute. It's adorable.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, it's so funny. But yeah, I got to do a little bit better about that because they're going to start judging me.
JD Vance: People need to relax. Little bad words every now and then. It's good for you.
Joe Rogan: I think it's good for you. I think it gets a little steam out.
JD Vance: I agree. It's good.
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.
JD Vance: Everyone but Trump.
Joe Rogan: That's right. It's kind of amazing, yeah. 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 and he looks exactly the same.
JD Vance: I can't wait to do it again. Let's go. We gotta win big.
Joe Rogan: 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.
You know, yeah, I mean, look, I definitely thought, OK, obviously, this is a big it's a big thing. Right. Am I talked about it with my wife a lot because she's like she was a working corporate litigator. She's got a very big career. She's much smarter than I am. And we definitely it was a marital conversation, some ways a tough one, because, you know, even though, yeah, I'm a senator, we're still pretty anonymous. Right. Like we can go on vacation or we were till this happened. We go on vacation.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, you'd have people stop and ask to take a photo or say something, you know, 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.
JD Vance: What's that shift feel like? Like, you're 40 years old, right? So yeah, I mean, like, right, like this, just off a cliff, complete different life.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, that's right. That's right. I mean, it's, it's, it's been, I mean, look, in some ways it's really nice because people come up and say really nice things to you. They tell you they're, they're, they're praying for your kids. They're praying for your family.
JD Vance: It depends on where you go though, doesn't it? Like if you go through Brooklyn.
Joe Rogan: Oh, no, sure. Yeah. No, of course. Yeah.
JD Vance: Um, uh, well, yeah.
Joe Rogan: Go through like the super woke blue haired parts of Brooklyn.
JD Vance: You know, it's interesting when 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, they like us even in New York City. But it's definitely weird to just not be anonymous at all anymore, right? And that's taken some getting used to.
I think part of it is also, let me just give you an example. So Sunday morning, we want to go for, this is the event in Madison Square Garden. We had the morning where I didn't really have anything going on. I had a couple of phone calls. So we want to go for a walk with the kids in Central Park. And normally you would 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 that'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 asked 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, you know, 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.
Joe Rogan: Is the adjustment, is it like, is it difficult? Was it pretty easy to just accept it like this is how life is now?
JD Vance: Well, it's, you just, you have to accept it, but 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 before as 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 that they don't know.
Joe Rogan: Right. Yeah. Or, you know, like one of the first things that happened, we're back at our house in Cincinnati 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 yeah, 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 it by and large honestly like I love our Secret Service detail and Our kids are really into them. They sort of see them as their police protectors. Our seven-year-old, it's funny, you know, he's in second grade, and one of his buddies, their parents came to us and said, do you know that the kids are playing this game in school called Boss Man, where basically one second grader will walk down the hallway or down the playground flanked by two separate second graders?
Joe Rogan: Like they're playing Secret Service now?
JD Vance: 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. Did you have presidential aspirations before all this? Is this something that you had considered about the future? 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 middle 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 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.
JD Vance: Trick questions. Yeah, exactly. 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 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 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? We just had a conversation about it.
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.
Joe Rogan: Come on, man. Look, 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 JD thinks game.
JD Vance: Yeah, I think so. And, you know, he told me that he was talking to the Gardner 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 Gardner 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 his staff members who's in the room. He's 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.
Joe Rogan: Whoa.
JD Vance: 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, ah, no, 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.
Joe Rogan: Oh, boy.
JD Vance: He gets shot. 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, I was so pissed. But then I go into like fight or flight mode with my kids. I'm like, you know, our kids, you know, we write up. We were at a mini golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grabbed my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns and basically stand like a sentry at our 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 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?
JD Vance: You know what? Crooks or Cooks or whatever the guy's name is in Pennsylvania. I mean, I've read a fair amount about it and it's pretty bizarre.
Joe Rogan: It's very bizarre. It's bizarre they haven't been able to get into his phone.
JD Vance: Well, they got into his phone. Didn't they?
Joe Rogan: Have they? I thought they've... I thought they said they did.
JD Vance: Maybe you know better than me.
Joe Rogan: 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.
JD Vance: I maybe haven't read it as closely as you have, so don't take that as gospel truth.
Joe Rogan: You have access to more information, but maybe you can't talk about it.
JD Vance: No, 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 where he lived was professionally scrubbed. So he got there, there was no silverware. There's no silverware. The place is scrubbed. Yeah, there's nothing. There's no DNA, no hard drives, no nothing. And how do you get that close? I mean, do you shoot guns?
JD Vance: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: Okay, so I'm a pretty good shot. I served in the Marine Corps for four years. An AR-15 from 140 yards away
JD Vance: Chip shot.
Joe Rogan: Even without a scope.
JD Vance: He didn't have a scope, right?
Joe Rogan: I don't believe he had a scope. But even without a scope.
JD Vance: Without a scope. I've shot an M16 many times and an AR-15 without a scope. There is no... It is shocking that he's alive.
Joe Rogan: Yeah.
JD Vance: I mean, you know, I'm a person of faith, but I think it's a genuine miracle that that guy didn't kill him.
Joe Rogan: But how did he get so close? There's a lot of really big questions.
JD Vance: 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. You know, there was that 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 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 him like, hey, he's yelling at police officers saying, hey, this guy's on the roof. Go and get him. And nobody responded to it. And it's 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. Not 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.
Joe Rogan: That's ridiculous. That's ridiculous. And the miracle is Trump turns his head at the last second.
JD Vance: That's right.
Joe Rogan: The very last second he turns his head to look at the chart and the bullet just grazes his ear.
JD Vance: That's right. 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.
Joe Rogan: That's right. It's the luckiest of luckiest shots ever for him. Unfortunately, not for the people that are behind him.
JD Vance: It's the craziest thing.
Joe Rogan: 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.
JD Vance: Absolutely not.
Joe Rogan: 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, that it would've went right through his brain. And there was another one that went to the left side of him, right? That barely missed him.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, that barely missed him. 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. 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. You know, obviously he's motivated because he hates Donald Trump, but you don't know anything about the secondary motive.
JD Vance: Man, it is weird. The only time we don't get a manifesto is when they're trans.
Joe Rogan: When they're trans, they hide those manifestos.
JD Vance: That's true. The Nashville shooter, man. That was crazy. Have you ever read any of it?
Joe Rogan: I've read some of it. It's pretty wild. It's pretty wild. And they decide that's bad for the cause.
JD Vance: That's right. And they decide to suppress it. But no, the Nashville shooter, 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.
Joe Rogan: Yes.
JD Vance: 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. It was some sort of radical religion, people would be like 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 these signs that are in super woke neighborhoods I'm sure there's plenty of them in Austin like in this house we believe
Joe Rogan: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
JD Vance: 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 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 RITES. 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 kind of a gay Reagan Democrat. 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?
JD Vance: Well, I mean, he's basically like now what you'd 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 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 codifying 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, because they think that there's people think there's something wrong with being gay, so what you really are is a girl.
JD Vance: Yes.
Joe Rogan: 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, right? And it's profitable, which is terrifying. It's terrifying once Corporations, once pharmaceutical corporations have, they have a pattern and a history of profiting off of things. They want to keep profiting off it. They don't want to just stop. And so right now this has become a profitable venture that's scaled. If you can look back from like 2007 to 2024, there's way more of these air quotes, gender affirming care centers and they're profitable.
Joe Rogan: 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, OK, sometimes the profit motive can be a good thing. Like we're going to develop lifesaving 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.
JD Vance: Yeah. And that conversation has totally disappeared. Like I got into the big argument and You know, this person you can read about 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 I the thing that I never understood because she's like 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.
Joe Rogan: But we should be concerned when because it's not just like the lobbying and the influence. I mean, there's something called the Diagnostic Statistical Manual.
JD Vance: 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.
JD Vance: 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.
Joe Rogan: Absolutely. We've always known that.
JD Vance: And then all of a sudden, because of gender, that's abandoned.
Joe Rogan: That's right. 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.
JD Vance: And it all falls apart if you just keep asking questions.
Joe Rogan: That's right. 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.
JD Vance: Correct. 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? 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.
Joe Rogan: And so they decided not to publish that, right?
JD Vance: Which shows you the corruption of science is that we're actually not publishing studies that suggest the gender transition craziness has reached the boiling boiling point.
Joe Rogan: I mean, you know, you have you've had you've kids. I have a four-year-old and two-year-old every single day. My four-year-old or two-year-old will come to me and say something that is batshit insane because they're four and two. Yeah, like my four-year-old will come and say daddy. I'm a dinosaur. Right? I'm going to take them to like the dinosaur transition clinic and put scales on them.
JD Vance: Well, the other thing is like if you were encouraging them, and some parents, 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. Like, how many celebrities have trans kids? It's new. It's not a thing that was going on. It was rare in the past. It becomes a social signifier for a lot of parents. And we have to be honest about that fact. And if you look at, you know, look at where the gender craziness is the most common, it's most common among upper middle class to lower middle class white progressives. Now, you could believe, OK, that there's just like 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. And unfortunately, I mean, here's one thing that I really worry about is, OK.
JD Vance: Think about the incentives. People are very good at rationalizing things. If you are a, you know, middle class or upper middle class white parent, and the only thing that you care about is whether your child goes into Harvard or Yale, like 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...
Joe Rogan: Trans.
JD Vance: And is there a dynamic that's going on where if you become trans, that is the way to reject your white privilege, right? 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. You just say, I'm not, I could say I'm non-binary and like, you don't have to do anything, but all of a sudden you're a part of the group.
JD Vance: Yeah, well, that's right. And again, I think it's important to sort of, you know, 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 mind to the mainstream. Right. And people are very good at rationalizing these things. And so what I think 20, 30 years ago, even among very well-to-do white progressives, like an 11 year old says, I think 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, you know, ha ha ha. And come back to me in a couple of days. Now, I think there is this massive incentive to try to say, oh, my God.
JD Vance: Does that mean that my kid is trans? And 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. Like, I don't know a single person who went from the ages of 10 to 15 who didn't say, oh, like, sometimes I had some, you know, weird ideas or I dressed weird for a couple of years or something, right? It's a confusing, the 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.
Joe Rogan: Not only very rich, but then the child is sterilized.
JD Vance: Yes. 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. You know, I had my testicles removed. Like the whole thing is crazy.
Joe Rogan: 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. That's crazy.
JD Vance: And I'd actually never heard that. I mean, this is 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 gonna 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 healthcare do not say that, right? Because look, I mean, you have sexual dysfunction, you have, to your point, you know, hair in weird places that won't go away, you have voice changes that won't go away. We're 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 are the only ones saying, ah, maybe this is a little crazy. Maybe we should stop.
Joe Rogan: Well, it just shows you how a lot of this, you know, if you can call it a mind virus or whatever it is, it does make people behave religiously.
JD Vance: Yes.
Joe Rogan: 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. 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. And of course, that causes injury to the young girls.
Joe Rogan: Of course. 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. We have to stop this.
JD Vance: Not only that, it like 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, like what are you talking about?
Joe Rogan: There was a recent pool tournament in England, it's a woman's pool tournament, and in the semi-finals two guys are playing each other.
JD Vance: Yeah. Well, it looks when you see them in the actual, you know, 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 Nine 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 a 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.
Joe Rogan: Not only that, but they get to change with him 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: He was changing. He was in a swim meet with teenage girls. And he's changing in the same locker room as them. It's crazy. The problem with that is people there's 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 in the...
JD Vance: Yeah, 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. And it reminds me of, so 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, you know, aviation interests and... 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 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 she said, 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, she says, 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: He 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?
Joe Rogan: What are you talking about? 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. What bothers me is if I have to see your balls. To flash people in broad daylight in New York City? 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 the world's, or America's biggest city.
JD Vance: And it reminds me, you know, 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.
Joe Rogan: Well, have you ever heard Marc Andreessen break down why woke is like a cult?
JD Vance: He's a brilliant guy. He's a very good friend, yeah.
Joe Rogan: I've heard this, yeah. It's brilliant. And he talks about how you can be excommunicated from the cult if you don't follow the doctrine. You have to follow 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.
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 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. Most world religions have but the woke stuff doesn't have is forgiveness and redemption.
Joe Rogan: Yes, right.
JD Vance: 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 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 ever wrong, they can only ever wrong you. 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.
JD Vance: Yes.
Joe Rogan: It's a religion that hasn't been thought out by wise people.
JD Vance: That's right.
Joe Rogan: Where they haven't come up with these different, like the Ten Commandments or different pathways to...
JD Vance: Correct.
Joe Rogan: To forgiveness there's there's nothing so it's a 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...
JD Vance: Yes.
Joe Rogan: That you kind of need like if if if you're gonna do this whole woke thing and like go guns a blazing you're gonna have to get drugs involved like you're gonna have to they're gonna 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 your true self like your true self is you you add hormones that aren't supposed to be in your body that's your true self like how do you know right and it's irreversible are we sure this is...
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, you know, I think all of us, that's sort of part of the human journey for truth. We're all asking who is, you know, 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... See, 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 people on the left that are trying to dismiss a lot of the things that he says about additives in food, about atrazine, fluoride in the wall, all these different things, because now they're connecting not having toxins in your food with a right-wing idea. It's crazy. It's mind-blowing. It's so bananas. Like even being healthy. Fitness.
JD Vance: Fitness.
Joe Rogan: They're connecting fitness with a right-wing idea.
JD Vance: Yeah. Well, it raises one of my...
Joe Rogan: What do you think about that? What's your take on this?
JD Vance: 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. 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 this terrible train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, got a lot of headlines 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.
Joe Rogan: The carbon footprint, I think, 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 gonna go.
JD Vance: Yeah, just control.
Joe Rogan: It's just controlling people.
JD Vance: It's 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 gonna limit so many things about their life they're gonna become accustomed to being...
Joe Rogan: 50 million dollars to Kamala Harris, by the way. All those bullshit fake food, that fake meat, which is not good for anybody. That creeps me out, man. Read about fake meat, folks. Read about how they're making this. And I'm not talking about 3D printed meat, which is a very different thing, which seems to be at least more consumable. But like the plant-based meat stuff, that's garbage. That stuff is garbage, highly processed garbage. If you want to eat vegetables and beat vegetarian, eat Indian food, okay?
JD Vance: That's right. They make really delicious vegetarian food. I'm married to an Indian American. They make very good vegetarian food.
Joe Rogan: They make the best vegetarian food.
JD Vance: Yeah. But it tastes good, and it's actually vegetables. It's not this crazy fake cheeseburger thing that you have.
Joe Rogan: No, that's right.
JD Vance: 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 it in the oven for 45 minutes. That was disgusting. And that was my vegetarian pizza that I made her.
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.
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.
JD Vance: It's a real problem, this Philanthro-capitalism thing. It's very weird, man. We have to look at the financial incentives of this. 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. Which is 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, writ large. I'm very anti-nuclear war.
Joe Rogan: That sounds reasonable.
JD Vance: Thank you. I appreciate that.
Joe Rogan: How did they get the Germans to close down their nuclear factories? They closed a bunch of them?
JD Vance: Mine did? Okay. Joe's did? Holy shit. The Russians are monitoring this fucking conversation. Oh, I hear me now. I hear me. Got it? Huh. We'll be right back. Oh, I'm back. Yeah, but I don't even know if I'm going to stay back. How will I know if it keeps working? I'm listening, but I don't know what happened.
Joe Rogan: Okay. Should we shift? Or should we just, let's try this and then we can... Just let me know if it goes again and I'll put my headphones on if it goes again.
JD Vance: Had a slight technical problem, ladies and gentlemen. So where were we talking about? It must be... I don't know where it is, but... Your foot's not touching it.
Joe Rogan: No. It's back. It's back, Jamie. Jamie, you gotta replace this. I keep saying that, but now you really do. We good? I hear it.
JD Vance: OK, I'm not going to move. I'm not touching anything.
Joe Rogan: What were we just talking about?
JD Vance: Well, we're talking about how you asked, why do the Germans shut down the nuclear facilities? And I know, you know, it's 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 by the balls. So again, how did they convince them to shut down their nuclear power plants? 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.
Joe Rogan: Well, that's true. He's trying to, but the problem is you look at him and you go, Hey, how are you a health expert? Look at you!
JD Vance: 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.
Joe Rogan: That wild boy. Elon is funny as shit, man. He's funny as shit. Getting dunked on by that guy has got to suck. Because you can't even say he's a dumbass. You can say many things. You can't say he's a dumbass. You get dunked on by one of the smartest guys alive.
JD Vance: But the point is, Bill doesn't look good. He looks terrible. He's aging way harder than Trump. Like, whatever you're doing, don't eat like that anymore. Like, 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.
Joe Rogan: That's right.
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 this massive euro complex. Kamala Harris is there. I went 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 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 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.
JD Vance: That's right. And you make a lot of money with global health.
Joe Rogan: That's right. And who doesn't want global health? What a nice guy.
JD Vance: Yeah. Oh, he's like very philanthropic. He's spending all this money trying to help poor people.
Joe Rogan: Right. And then you find out like, wait a minute, how much money did you make doing that?
JD Vance: Exactly. 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.
Joe Rogan: That's right.
JD Vance: He's donated like 350 million dollars to all these different companies.
Joe Rogan: 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.
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... Do you think that you would have enough support to do something like that?
Joe Rogan: 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.
JD Vance: 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 the representatives. The problem with representatives is special interest groups.
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. But I mean, 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.
Joe Rogan: 100% and that's why it's dangerous because it's not like these are completely innocent companies and then 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, this story and this is okay. This is purely secondary. So if, you know, 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. This is a long time ago, and I just kind of ran into him. And, you know, 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 he was talking about quitting and I was like, why? He's like, man, we just did something that's 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 sell 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 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 like 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. 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 you know we were just the trigonometry guys were on here yesterday and we were talking about it that corporations behave like psychopaths like that's there's a book about it it's like they did 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 it must be the cable sorry. Oh, this is it, dude. You got it. This was loose. Try it now. Tell me now. I mean, I heard that click. I bet that's what it was. 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. Anyway, yeah. It's very scary stuff. 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 like instinctively always pro-corporate. We're now sometimes willing to ask, well, is this corporation's interest in the American interest?
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 America's interest? 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 is a very good trend for us.
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. Like, the people... Like, definitionally.
JD Vance: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: The people were... They put nets around the building because so many of them were jumping to their deaths.
JD Vance: Instead of fixing the work conditions, they just go, put up some nets.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, put up some nets so that people can't commit suicide.
JD Vance: But the crazy thing is...
Joe Rogan: You still like all these like progressive people are using these devices to talk about like important social issues.
JD Vance: Oh, yeah. Well, and talking about distractions, right? The distraction, 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. It's bizarre.
Joe Rogan: Now, why can't Apple, here it is, change bedfellows, Native American tribes, Big Pharma, and the legitimacy of their alliance. Wow. So it's true. 2019. Oh my God. This is about exact, you said it's 2019. I was going to say, I think I saw that guy in like 2018. It's so gross. It's so gross. It's crazy, man. It's so sick.
JD Vance: 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. What's the best way to make more money? Not get sued. What's the best way to not get sued? Sir, I found a loophole.
Joe Rogan: You get some fucking Adderall-related psychopath who's been working 16 hours like, I got a plan to get us out of here. And it works. It's legal. Who, I'm sorry, like, look, I get the imperative to make money, but the guy who thought that up is a grade A sociopath. I mean, that person is, I don't want them anywhere near my kids. You gotta 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.
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 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 is 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. Injury from the Vax was crazy. 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 have been in the last 15 years by far was when I took the vaccine. And I, you know, 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 or a lot of people I know, they talk about the second shot that they got of the vaccine was really that made them really, really sick.
Joe Rogan: Well, that's a side effect and not a side effect that we even talk about enough in this country.
JD Vance: No, 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.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, and who do you think those big pharma companies donate to politically in 2024? I'll give you a big fat guess.
JD Vance: Probably Kamala Harris.
Joe Rogan: By a significant margin well particularly with a RFK jr. Being attached to Trump sure with RFK jr. Comes a lot of yeah, you know like There's a lot. There's a lot that you're gonna 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?
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.
Joe Rogan: Here's an interesting thought experiment. If there was one thing that we could do to rein in the pharmaceutical companies, 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.
JD Vance: That would be great, but the vaccine thing is important too because... I will look into it. 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 thing that everybody speaks about in hushed tones. People know people that have been vaccine injured. And 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. They're scared of being labeled an anti-vaxxer. 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: I'm pretty pro-pharma too.
JD Vance: Great drugs that help people with all sorts of conditions and diabetes medication and insulin. 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 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. But that stuff is amazing. But I actually think that in some ways what we should be encouraging these companies to do is that we want them to develop the lifesaving drugs. We don't want them to get rich by shielding themselves from liability or 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 lifesaving therapeutics and that's the only way they could get rich, then they'd probably do more of that.
Joe Rogan: 100%. 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. 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.
JD Vance: Absolutely.
Joe Rogan: Well, that means you're making stuff that too many people are getting sick from, so they're fucking suing you. That's socialized costs, right? It's one of the biggest problems with corporate America is socialized costs, but privatized profits. And what you really want is that you want major American companies, and 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. 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 health care 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? Because it was millions of gallons, right? What was the number of gallons?
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, right? 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. 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.
Joe Rogan: Right.
JD Vance: I pray every day that hopefully not. But you can only study that in the moment.
Joe Rogan: Right.
JD Vance: 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, 10 years later, you try to figure out what the toxins were in people's blood five years, 10 years down the road. And then you'd ask yourself, what weird diseases, if any, are people starting to develop after 5, 10, 15 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 cost? Between $5 and $20 million 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. All these people who 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 going to 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 the spills?
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.
Joe Rogan: There's a lot of that.
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 of 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. Look, 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 fish 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, 25,800 gallons of TILX, 25,800, what's that?
JD Vance: That's the car. That's the car ID.
Joe Rogan: The capacity and the context is 100,000 gallons of that.
JD Vance: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: Oh, each car has, oh, I see what you're saying. Each car had different stuff.
JD Vance: Yeah, each car had different stuff.
Joe Rogan: So what's the total of all of it?
JD Vance: Somewhere like it's 100,000, that's another, it's millions, right?
Joe Rogan: 350,000 gallons or so.
JD Vance: Millions of liters. Yeah. But look, I mean... And all that stuff just leaks into the groundwater, it goes through the soil...
Joe Rogan: Yeah, and a lot of people, it's a rural area, so a lot of people are in well water, you know, a lot of people are just, you know, breathing in the air, I mean...
JD Vance: And we don't even know what the health consequences are for those folks for years. 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, we'll 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. But 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 gonna take the infrastructure of that study and right away we're gonna 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? How would you, do you have to test the groundwater to make sure that it doesn't?
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 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.
JD Vance: You'd have to remove the ground.
Joe Rogan: You'd have to remove the ground and clean.
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 was 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 that 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.
JD Vance: And we're never going to know the answer to that question.
Joe Rogan: Oh.
JD Vance: Yeah, people are terrified of this idea of someone sabotaging things like that that have trains that 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. We're very vulnerable. What can be done to sort of shore that up? It seems like cyber attacks are possible, physical attacks are possible.
JD Vance: Yeah.
Joe Rogan: And if the grid goes down, we have a real problem, right?
JD Vance: We do have a real problem. I mean, look, there's New York Times or somebody else reported recently that my phone was allegedly hacked by Chinese hackers.
Joe Rogan: Oh, no. What'd they get?
JD Vance: Yeah. I don't think anything.
Joe Rogan: Nothing?
JD Vance: Come on, man.
Joe Rogan: Got anything in there?
JD Vance: We'll find out, man. We'll find out.
Joe Rogan: 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. I mean, you know, luckily I'm a pretty boring guy, so I don't think that they got really anything.
Joe Rogan: That's nice.
JD Vance: We'll find out.
Joe Rogan: It's nice to be boring if your phone gets hacked.
JD Vance: Yeah, that's right. That's right. Well, it also, I mean, it's apparently they couldn't get the encrypted messages that were sent. So I'm pretty careful about, like, making sure I use Signal and iMessage and all that stuff.
Joe Rogan: That's great.
JD Vance: 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 badass name, right? If they have anything on me, I can't be too pissed off at them. At least they named themselves Salt Typhoon. But 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 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. 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 to buy enough power transformers to have a backup for every transformer in the country. We should do that.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, 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 that think the 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-
Joe Rogan: They're ugly. They're gross. They're ugly.
JD Vance: Yeah. 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. And we took a road trip-
Joe Rogan: Good old days.
JD Vance: The 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. And it's like, this is beautiful American countryside that 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. And nuclear power plants are actually more efficient, safer, and you don't have the problem. 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.
Joe Rogan: No, they haven't. Not at all. 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 like...
JD Vance: Gross. They kill the birds. They apparently kill the whale.
Joe Rogan: They kill a lot of birds. If you look underneath them, it's like bird graveyards. It's crazy.
JD Vance: Yeah, it really is. And it's clean. It's green. It's like we're brainwashed to think that these things somehow or another are beneficial because they're attached to this idea of being environmentally conscious. And I got the thought behind them, right? I understand why we 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. It's not very efficient.
Joe Rogan: Right. 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.
JD Vance: Well, they do those roofs now, like Tesla does a solar roof, which is fantastic. I think that's a great way, right? That's just empty space. But wind, I think we just should say this was 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.
Joe Rogan: But I just hope people recognize that the trade-off is not worth it. Like, 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 gotta get rid of them, you gotta put them in a landfill. Like, the whole thing's bananas.
JD Vance: It's totally bananas. And again, we focus on the carbon footprint thing, and we don't talk about the fact that there are these massive environmental hazards that goes back to the distracted politics versus the real stuff. And we should be talking about the real environmental consequences of wind power. There's also no... 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.
Joe Rogan: 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 100 years. So let's deal with the most pressing problem. They're all like, no, 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.
Joe Rogan: Also, when you have a movement and your spokesperson is Greta Thurnberg 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 that 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 100 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: That's true. Well, carbon is what trees feed off of.
JD Vance: I knew carbon is what trees feed off of. I didn't know there was more greenery than there was 100 years ago. That's interesting.
Joe Rogan: Not only that, you got Bill Gates that's saying planting trees is not a solution to the carbon problem. Wait a second. This is so not true. This is what seems so crazy. It's so not true and it's also historically, like 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.
JD Vance: That's crazy.
Joe Rogan: 10% of the population of Earth.
JD Vance: I didn't realize that. That is crazy.
Joe Rogan: 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 re-consumed by nature. And it lowered the carbon footprint of Earth.
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.
Joe Rogan: They're saying we have to reduce population. This is one. And when they say it with vaccines, you're like, slow down.
JD Vance: That's right. Did you just say that out loud?
Joe Rogan: 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.
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 recall is not 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 were experimenting.
JD Vance: That is dark. Again, that's... That's like the Native American Oxycontin thing. This is dark shit.
Joe Rogan: But that's this global health shit. Like there's a lot of experimenting going on.
JD Vance: That's right. We pulled up an AP article. I had Alex Jones tell me this. I was like, what? It's like, they gave him polio. They tried the vaccine, they gave him polio. I'm like, what?
Joe Rogan: That's a good Alex Jones impersonation. It's an AP article that shows that they had to stop giving these kids in Africa this polio vaccine because it was actually giving them polio.
JD Vance: That's crazy.
Joe Rogan: 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 in and they experiment on them. And it's so dark.
JD Vance: That is so dark, man.
Joe Rogan: And then it's all done through this idea of philanthropy.
JD Vance: Yeah. Yeah.
Joe Rogan: And 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: Well, 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?
Joe Rogan: Yes.
JD Vance: 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, you know, prevent you from getting some disease. And then you become like permanently disabled or you even die because of it. Like think about what effect that has on how those Africans perceive our civilization. And are we going to have, you know, are they going to like 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. I mean, this is one of my big things with the Russia Ukraine conflict is people don't realize how much of Africa's food supply comes from the Ukraine, like 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-
JD Vance: Yeah, justifiably so.
Joe Rogan: Justifiably so, I'd hate these people, right? You give my kid polio under the pretense of helping them? It's crazy.
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.
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?
Joe Rogan: Yeah, and that... That's the kind of guardrails I want. The common sense ones.
JD Vance: Very logical.
Joe Rogan: Yeah, very logical. But logic is, you know, dangerous today. Like, logic... Oh, man. Logic is... It's a problem when you have ideology. Some people like strictly adhere.
JD Vance: Logic is a colonial idea, man. Yo

Event Date: October 31, 2024

Timelines Involved

• - Presidential Election 2024