Ep. 2005 - ＂I've Never Said This In An Interview Before＂ ｜ JD Vance On Faith, Iran & AI
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Length
1 hour and 6 minutes
Harmful content
Misogyny
3
sentences flagged
Toxicity
13
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Hate speech
53
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Summary
With war brewing around the world, political breakdown at home, and AI advancements that threaten to upend all of society and even our view of ourselves, I think we re all feeling a little apocalyptic. So joining me to weigh in on all these matters and more is Vice President J.D. Vance.
Transcript
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goodranchers.com. American meat delivered. I love a good conversion story. I don't usually
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do interviews on my daily show. I rarely plug politicians' books. But when I heard there was
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a new book out on a religious conversion, specifically a conversion to Catholicism,
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I could not resist sitting down with the author, who just happens to be the vice president of the
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United States, with war brewing around the world, political breakdown at home, especially on the
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right, and AI advancements that threaten to upend all of society and even our view of ourselves,
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I think we're all feeling a little apocalyptic. So joining me to weigh in on all these matters
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and more is Vice President J.D. Vance. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.
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I'm really sorry that we're not in my usual studio.
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If we were in my studio, we would be in nice, big, comfortable chairs, maybe with a cigar.
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This is a little bit more formal, but I really appreciate the opportunity.
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Everyone needs to go out and get Communion by J.D. Vance.
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Because this touches on something that I care about
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We'll get to all of it, which I have to ask about.
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But this touches on something I care about a lot more,
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And the way that I know that your conversion is sincere is that no American politician in his right mind would ever convert to Catholicism for self-interested reasons.
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You are in many ways the kind of voice of the millennials and the Zoomer, older Zoomer generation here.
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There's been a big surge in religious reversion and especially to Catholicism.
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We will get to much more with our vice president friend,
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what you value. Okay, back to the vice president. Okay. So before, first of all, thank you for
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doing this. It's good to see you. Pleasure. I know we had planned to schedule this last week,
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I believe, and I had to go to Switzerland. So thank you for being here. I will never forgive
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the Iranians for doing that to me, but we're here now. We're the Swiss. But okay, before you get
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into the why Catholicism, I think you have to get into the why Christianity, then not Christianity,
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So basically raised in an evangelical household,
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And I realized after my grandmother died, this is when I was 21 years old, maybe 20,
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but right before I left for Iraq in 2005, Mamaw died.
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And I realized that was my connection to Christianity.
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That's sort of one of the subtexts of the book is trying to raise my own kids in a more
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institutional faith and the hope that it takes in a way that I didn't.
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Because two years after my grandmother was dead, I called myself an atheist.
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Okay. So I'm an atheist. I become, and maybe I always was a striver. I'm obsessed with
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achievement for achievement's sake. Really, Mr. Vice President? Shocked to hear it.
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Yeah. And I get to law school and I'm at Yale. And I realized that I've like won all these
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competitions, the meritocratic competitions that life had told me to win, but I found them deeply
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unfulfilling. And frankly, I found that I was becoming a shitty person in the process or a
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bad person, excuse me, if you have to edit that out. I don't know. What are the rules?
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We never go blue on this show. We make exceptions for top government officials.
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Okay. I have terrible language as I talk about in the book. It's one of my many non-Christian
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or one of my many traits I have to work on as a Christian. Okay. So I am at law school.
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I'm doing very well in sort of all the worldly things. I'm doing not so well in the non-worldly
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things. I fall in love. That woman is now the second lady and soon to be mother of four
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Vance children, currently the mother of three Vance children. And I sort of realized like
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everything I've geared my life towards over the last few years is hollow. But this person that
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I'm in love with, she really wants me to be a good husband, eventually a good father. She wants
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me to care about virtue, being a good human being and like the deepest sense of the word.
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And I kept on returning to this idea that the elites who fashion themselves hyper-rational,
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And meanwhile, it was all these sort of bumpkins
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that I dismissed as sub-rational, as superstitious,
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who seemed to have things figured out in a much deeper way.
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So that leads me down the pathway back to Christianity.
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And there were all of these things that attracted me to Catholicism.
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So, number one, I really liked the sense that it was institutionally stable, okay?
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And again, going back to my unchurched upbringing, when things were going well in my religious life,
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it was very much attached to, like, a single individual, whether it was my grandmother or a pastor,
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I was really attracted to the idea that like in this church, the mass was more or less the same,
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whether you were on vacation in some faraway country or whether you were in suburban Cincinnati.
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But I also like doctrinally that, you know, like things didn't change based on who the person
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giving the homily was. And that sense of stability, the idea that Christian doctrine
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Now, of course, it's going to have to apply itself
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about how you apply the principle to new things.
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and then we can, I'm sure, go into the details.
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you were inheriting that from thousands of years of history and you would eventually die and
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hopefully be rejoined with the Lord and you would pass on that legacy to some other person who would
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then carry it on after you. That continuity across the generations I found very very attractive and
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one of the things I write about in the book is that sort of one of these existential fears that
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animate me I've never been particularly afraid of dying you know it's funny when we had this sort
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of situation at the, what, the Willard Hotel, or no, we're in the Willard Hotel right now.
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Where was the White House Correspondents Association dinner? Anyway, there was the
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Yeah, wherever it was. And it was obviously focused on the president, but, you know,
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you hear loud noises, and then the guys with the machine guns run in, and you're kind of like,
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oh, something kind of crazy is going on. I just, I don't, the idea of dying doesn't really scare
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me. It's never scared me, whether as an atheist or as a Christian. And I talk about that a little
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bit in the book, communion, you should buy it, that I've always been somewhat troubled by that
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because if you think potentially hell is waiting you on the other end, shouldn't you be really
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afraid of it? But I've just never been afraid of dying. What I have been afraid of, and there's
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this existential dread that kind of animates me, we haven't gotten into this in any of the
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interviews that I've done, but I guess we can get into it here, is this idea that the continuity
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and instead of building upon it and passing it on,
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And that, I felt like the Catholicism's continuity
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there are certainly things you can look at our world.
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be very hopeful about. There are things you can look at in our modern world and be very despairing
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about. But if you look at the long history of the Christian faith, it's very hard not to say
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that many, many other people in many, many generations past had it far worse than we did.
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And that gives me a certain sense of, okay, like maybe we should stop whining and try to build
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something rather than just complain about how bad things are for us right now.
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Right. It is, the church is the only institution from antiquity that has survived in the West
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all the time. So I totally get it. And I feel that anxiety. It bothers me whether we're talking
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about a restaurant or we're talking about a monument in Washington, D.C. It bothers me to
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see it get dirtier and fall apart and be neglected even in the minds of people. Absolutely. Yeah, I
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feel that same anxiety. And even your story of you come from modest means, you end up at Yale,
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You become much more conservative and Christian, I guess, as a result of that.
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Lose a maternal figure and come to the faith in a large way through intellectual figures.
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In the book, you talk about a few of those figures in particular.
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this then leads me to wonder after you were brought back to the faith in no small part
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through the intellect thinking of the decline of civilization thinking about these great writers
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thinking about the doctrines and parsing just differences between them yep did you have any
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religious experience what c.s lewis would call the numinous experience did you ever see a ghost
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kind of thing um you know never never quite saw a ghost but definitely and you know one of the
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things I talk about in the book, and this is something I'm still very much working on,
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is when I returned to the faith, one of the things that had just degraded during my
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many years of not being religious at all was my ability to pray. And so, I remember distinctively,
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you know, 14, 15, 16, like talking to God and being able to talk to God in this very natural
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way. And then I start returning to the faith and I go to pray and I'm not exactly sure what to say.
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And there's this interesting way in which just that prayer muscle had kind of atrophied.
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But one of the things, again, I really liked about the sort of the ancient Christian canon
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was all of these prayers that were just, you say the prayer, right?
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Of course, the most important is the Lord's Prayer.
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There's the glory be, glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.
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And I found that that inner conversation with God was a very good part of just getting me back into the ritual practice of prayer again.
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But the faith can't just be something that you think about.
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It has to be something that you practice, and it has to be something that you feel.
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And that was very much, again, something that was part of my own faith journey I write about in the book.
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um but the the interesting thing so there's this quote from pulp fiction i keep returning to
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which is i'm going to butcher a little bit but it's right after you know samuel jackson and
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john travolta these gangsters just murder a few people and then but they they miss one guy and
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that guy's like hiding in the bathroom so he pops out and he shoots at point blank range samuel
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jackson is totally fine right despite the fact that multiple bullets should have hit him and he
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kind of looks around. He kills the guy who tried to shoot him. And then he has this religious
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sort of epiphany. And that's really the entire movie from his perspective is this
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ongoing religious journey. Now, what's fascinating about it is he talks about miracles. And there's
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this debate between him and John Travolta about whether this counts as a miracle. And he says,
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look, what matters is not whether this is an according to Hoyle miracle. What matters is
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that I felt the touch of God. And just two things sitting here right now, when I think about like
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feeling the touch of God. Okay. One of which I didn't even write about in the book. It just
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occurred to me now, but I'm going to tell it to you. The first one, and I guess he's out of himself
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now. This is Ross Douthat and I. We're having a conversation. This is in 2019, probably. And,
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you know, he at the time was one of the foremost conservative critics of Pope Francis.
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And my view of the papacy is, you know, it's, you don't treat it like you're a congressional
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representative. It's not a political office. Obviously, you can have pragmatic disagreements,
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but you should have a little respect for it as a practicing Catholic.
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Okay. And so, Ross and I were going back and forth about whether he was properly differential,
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even to this person who was clearly not aligned with American conservatives on a whole host of
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Yeah, yeah. So, we're at a conference. We're having this argument. We're in the basement
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of this hotel. There's a kind of an open bar that's been set out for us. And we're drinking
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too much and talking about Catholicism and talking about the Pope. And I make this kind of really
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strident argument about the papacy. And even talking about it, it sounds insane, but there's
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like a wine glass back behind the bar. And it's not like we're in southeastern Ohio. It's not
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like there was an earthquake. Just kind of one glass kind of jumps off and shatters on the ground
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And again, is it an according to Hoyle miracle?
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I'll give you another just very stupid moment,
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but okay i i so there's a church in cincinnati that uh does really early confessions on either
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saturday or sunday okay it's um it's it's it's in the oakley neighborhood of cincinnati saint
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cecilia's church okay and they would always do really early confessions i think on sunday
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so like you know if i hadn't gone to confession a couple months i always wake up really early but
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you had to be there by like 7 a.m. or something, okay?
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So I'd get in my minivan and I'd go to confession
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before the kids were even awake on a Sunday morning.
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Okay, I remember one time distinctively being like,
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I remember distinctively like I woke up at 7.02
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And like, again, maybe every red light was green.
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Maybe it was just a coincidence of the universe,
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I got in line in time and just little things like that.
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some of whom are still very, very atheist and very non-religious is like, I really do think
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that there are these moments where God speaks to all of us. You just have to be trying to listen
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a little bit. And yeah, you know, every few months I'll have a little moment like that where it's
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like, huh, that was kind of weird. Like what are the odds that the 25 traffic lights from my house
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to St. Cecilia's, maybe it's only a dozen, but there are a lot of them that all of them would
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be green in such a way that made it possible for me to get there very quickly. Right. Right. Anyway.
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We will get to much, much more with the vice president. First though, you need to get to
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movie in America for our nation's 250th birthday. I've noticed this, you mentioned confession about
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the state of grace. Yeah. And something about the state of grace that's really nice is the priest
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cuts all the demons off you, and so your life is better. But the other thing, just about your
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perception, it seems to me that all those little signs, you know, the Christian view of the world
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is a deeply semiotic view. Nothing is merely what it seems, you know, everything means something.
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St. Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with that observation. And in the state of grace,
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you kind of see it a little bit more, I think. But on the flip side, when you're in a real state
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of sin, you know, Dante trying to walk up the mountain, sometimes then God, he doesn't just
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whisper at you. Sometimes he shakes you and says, hey, idiot, you know, pay attention. Why aren't you?
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And so I think, yes, if you go into a room, even of these liberal elites that you assail in the
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book, that rightly assail, you go into a room and you say, do you believe in God? No. Do you
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believe in miracles? No. Do you believe in this, that? No. But if you ask them something as silly
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is, have you ever seen a ghost? A lot of them will say yes. We all kind of know that there's
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meaning in the world. So then on this point, of all, you go to these very liberal institutions.
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Can I make an observation just about that? Okay. One of the really interesting things about
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just the secular, hyper-progressive, hyper-liberal age that we live in
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is you realize how many of the rituals and institutions and practices of Catholicism
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show up in the modern world completely divorced from the God part and the grace part of it.
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Okay. So we're thankfully, thanks to Donald Trump, I would say, we're past the point where most
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people, at least that I see, hang out those hideous signs in their yard that say, in this
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house, we believe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, love is love. Water is people, whatever.
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So that sign is like such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.
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people still have this desire to profess, to do it very publicly.
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And even to do it in this kind of cadence that you see in the Nicene Creed.
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And of course, they do it in this very politically motivated way.
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is another thing, it's, like, I find, as a, you know, Protestant, I find confession deeply
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uncomfortable. I still do. Ditto, and I'm a cradle cat, you know? But it's just, like,
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the craziest ritual. You're going to go in this, you know, tiny booth and sit there with a total
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stranger and tell them about every terrible thing you've done over the last couple of months. It's
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nuts. But what, if you think about it, it is so similar to the ritual of modern therapy.
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And, but minus the guilt and forgiveness. Like the thing that's, that's, that's, you know,
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Because there's, there's actually, you know, I've always heard this phrase,
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Christian guilt or Catholic guilt, as if it's terrible to feel guilty when you do something
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bad, but sometimes if I'm impatient with my kid, for example, it's kind of a good thing to feel
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guilty, to feel like there's an inner voice telling you to be a better human being, a better father,
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a better husband. So then you go and talk to somebody about it, but not in this like, oh,
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you know, maybe I yelled at my kid because, you know, my mom yelled at me when I was nine years
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old and I never dealt with the unresolved trauma of it. No, maybe that there's certainly an element.
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Yeah, of course. I have a buddy, actually, who put a sign in his yard with the same font
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and says, in this house, we believe in God, the Father Almighty.
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Yeah, you see all of it. I mean, the transgender transition, which is, you know,
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they refer to the past as a dead name. I mean, that is a kind of a secular baptism.
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You see all of these echoes. So, look, I guess that gets to the first point, which is,
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why are these young people converting, especially to more liturgical, traditional,
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especially Catholic religion? Well, because it has the real version of the things that
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they're seeking in the world. Okay, I get that. In harder politics and policy, you're at all of
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these liberal institutions, Yale Law School especially, but elsewhere, traipsing around
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rich businesses and all the rest. And the one thing that everyone agrees on is meritocracy.
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Now, you have two, probably my two favorite chapters of the book. One is pulling from
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Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, you call it of new things. The other one is
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borrowing from Thomas Carlyle's mockery of economics as the dismal science. And these
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are my two favorite chapters of the book. I was arguing with a colleague of mine. He's a friend
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and a colleague. I won't say his name. He speaks very quickly, doesn't eat shellfish. I'm not going
00:26:18.760
to say a very famous podcaster, but we were arguing about this because I love this perspective
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of the Catholic social teaching, the critique of meritocracy, the mockery of economics,
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which Edmund Burke starts modern conservatism with, mocking the economists,
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sophisters, and calculators who have destroyed Western civilization.
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But what you write is total heresy and blasphemy compared to the last 30 to 60 years of American
00:26:45.780
The one thing, no matter what we all disagree on, everyone agreed meritocracy is good,
00:26:53.020
and that we need to double down on meritocracy.
00:27:19.720
we couldn't have gotten the moon were it not for that kind of ambition. Or if your ambition is to
00:27:24.040
build a building that a lot of people live in, that provides comfort and so forth, I think that's
00:27:28.900
good. But I think what we've allowed in our modern society, what meritocracy has done is warped it
00:27:34.300
into ambition for ambition's sake. Ambition not to build something beautiful, but to get ahead of
00:27:38.780
other people. Ambition not to make an amazing product, but ambition to make a lot of money
00:27:43.120
for money's sake. And I think that we've allowed that basic human desire to achieve great and
00:27:49.960
beautiful things to be warped into a vice of just being better than other people. And I think that
00:27:55.260
is sort of what Christian teaching is counseling us against. It's okay that God makes us all
00:28:02.280
creatures big and small. Some of us he makes to be ambitious. I'm certainly an ambitious person.
00:28:07.720
I'm the vice president of the United States. I think he makes some people who just want more
00:28:11.880
normal things out of life. They want a nice job and they want to provide their kids with nice
00:28:15.860
things. And that's good too. I think that when it becomes warping and disorienting is when it
00:28:22.580
becomes ambition for ambition's sake. And what the meritocracy, I think the modern meritocracy
00:28:27.700
in 21st century America has done is taught people to want to be better than everyone else.
00:28:33.500
And I think it has two really, really big problems. First of all, if you're orienting
1.00
00:28:37.980
yourself not to some objective truth, but to how other people are performing and behaving,
00:28:43.800
you're not your own person and you're certainly not God's person. You're fundamentally following
00:28:48.180
the crowd. This is like an insight from Rene Girard. So at some level, meritocracy is
00:28:52.580
fundamentally derivative of other people. That's a bad thing. The second thing is that I actually
00:29:00.540
think that it, I don't know how to put this, but I think that meritocracy can steal from us
00:29:08.240
a sense of what really, really matters. And you saw this at Yale Law School. You see it in any
00:29:14.900
elite institution. You don't see people bragging about their kids in the same way they brag about
00:29:20.920
their jobs. You don't see people bragging about their relationships as you do the same way they
00:29:25.240
brag about their credentials. And so one of the core lessons of my life is that the most valuable
00:29:31.140
thing I got out of law school was friendships, particularly the relationship with the woman
00:29:35.600
who's now my wife. Those things matter fundamentally way more. Nobody is on their deathbed and looks
00:29:42.100
back and says, this is like the most trite cliche in the world because it's true. Nobody looks back
1.00
00:29:48.180
and says, I wish that I had spent less time with my son so that my net worth was a thousand dollars
00:29:53.620
higher. No one thinks that. And yet meritocracy trains people to think exactly that when they're
00:29:59.420
in the point of their life when those decisions are made. It's also like the definition of cynicism,
00:30:04.480
which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And your telling of these
00:30:09.220
conversations at Yale Law School is, you know, you don't just hear it at Yale Law School. You
00:30:14.160
hear it throughout our culture. And they just tell you that all that matters is slaving away,
00:30:18.260
doing spreadsheets for Mr. McGillicuddy at the widget factory to drive up GDP. And so then,
00:30:25.480
I mean, the craziest conversation that I had, conversations that I had at Yale Law School
00:30:31.540
was people who counted themselves as feminists, which, you know, to take like the positive
00:30:39.620
spin on feminism, it would be that women should have the same rights as men.
1.00
00:30:43.740
And yet they define success and achievement as spending as much time in a cubicle at Goldman
00:30:50.160
Sachs, I mean, it's enough to make somebody a Marxist and say, you have like totally internalized
00:30:56.800
a set of ideas that is completely opposed to your well-being as a human being. Like if you think
00:31:04.380
that it is liberating for you to sit in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs, you have been had.
00:31:10.580
And we all got to just admit that before we can make any progress as a civilization.
00:31:14.240
No, I mean, this is really, on the point about Catholic social teaching, this is the point of Rerum Novarum and Pope Leo XIII.
00:31:22.440
He said, hold on, communism, totally awful, terrible, you can't be Catholic and communist.
00:31:29.420
But also, we're not ideological laissez-faire capitalists who think we need to send our kids to the coal mines.
00:31:35.120
You know, we have to put these things in their proper order.
00:31:37.720
So then my question for you is, there's been a massive restructuring of what conservatism means.
00:31:47.500
So looking ahead, you are the heir apparent now.
00:31:52.420
So looking ahead to 2028 and beyond, if there's this thing going on even beyond you,
00:31:57.360
this restructuring of what it means to be a conservative,
00:32:00.740
then if it's not creative destruction, tax cuts for wealthy people exclusively,
00:32:14.480
Well, first of all, I think that people need to appreciate
00:32:20.420
so to the point that they've really moved the goalposts.
00:32:23.640
I mean, if you remember when Donald Trump ran for president the first time,
00:32:26.580
the idea of tariffs on imported goods was a heresy in the GOP.
00:32:34.440
that virtually every Republican politician adopts
1.00
00:32:37.340
is like, of course, we shouldn't let foreign countries
1.00
00:32:47.040
there's a cultural and crime and law and order element to it,
00:32:49.620
but there's also a very powerful economic argument
1.00
00:32:51.700
that we don't want to let the wages of immigrants
00:32:55.740
Again, that is just boilerplate at this point in the GOP.
00:33:03.340
that, you know, yeah, he absolutely wanted to, like,
00:33:10.940
And, you know, it's like, shh, you're not supposed to say that.
00:33:14.360
And it's like, guys, he's the president, and he sets the agenda,
00:33:23.800
and obviously I'm biased, I'm his vice president,
00:33:25.400
but the president has already, like, completely reoriented the conversation
00:33:29.000
towards what you might call an American developmentalist,
00:33:33.180
approach. Like American economic policy on the right is now much more Alexander Hamilton than
00:33:40.620
it is Milton Friedman. I think that's obviously a good thing. You might disagree, but that's just
00:33:45.140
a normative statement. Notice though what you've just said, because for the people who say that
00:33:49.380
betraying some nostalgic retconning of a caricature of the 1980s, that to change that in
00:33:58.200
any way would be abandoning American history and the tradition. You say, well, hold on. I just went
00:34:05.640
Right, 200 years backwards in history, actually.
00:34:08.860
of American developmental economics and economic policy.
00:34:16.160
I don't want to say you can go back to the future
00:34:27.100
is going to be what we see on the American right
00:34:29.640
and will dominate American conservative economic thinking
00:34:32.220
for the future, which is not laissez-faire. It's actually much more about, you know, building
00:34:38.760
the kind of tools, building the kind of infrastructure that allow human beings to
00:34:43.860
flourish, that allow national and native industries to flourish at the expense of a
00:34:49.020
hyper-globalized economy. And I think those are the basic principles that are going to carry us
00:34:53.480
into the future. But to me, it's fundamentally about the dignity of the human person. The
00:34:59.320
economy is a tool to service the dignity of the human person. If a set of economic policies make
00:35:05.200
it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community,
00:35:12.100
to maybe go to church on Sunday, or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life
00:35:18.260
that matters, like that is the sort of thing that we want to be supportive of. Now, obviously,
00:35:22.940
to do those things, you do need economic development. But if you turn economic development
00:35:58.100
in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything
0.97
00:36:18.440
it is resting upon a foundation that it did not create,
00:36:27.500
I think you could say that about, you know, I have a British friend who has been in British conservative politics for longer than I have, maybe longer than I've been alive.
00:36:39.920
And he was making this observation about Margaret Thatcher to another British conservative who was just scandalized by it, but couldn't push back against it in anything besides an emotional way.
00:36:50.980
said, you know, Margaret Thatcher, an amazing human being, like a true giant in the history
00:36:56.180
of Western politics. But like fundamentally, Margaret Thatcher was trying to preserve
00:37:02.040
the shop and the community around the shop that her father had when she was a little girl.
00:37:08.680
And yet, if you look at modern Britain and the result of Margaret Thatcher's policies,
00:37:13.840
you would say that her policies actually got Britain further away from that ideal and not
00:37:18.340
closer to that ideal. That's not, by the way, criticizing her. I think she was trying out
00:37:22.680
something in a very new era, in a situation where things were quite broken. But we have to be honest,
00:37:29.840
like what worked and what didn't work. And I think, unfortunately, I would say
00:37:33.980
Thatcher's politics and a lot of 20th century conservative politics was, it sort of bought
00:37:41.400
the premises of modern liberalism and was not infused enough with the basic Christian underpinning
00:37:47.400
of the West. Yeah, Ayn Rand is not going to save your culture. It's not going to happen. So then
00:37:51.460
we're throwing around all these names, all of our good dead friends. Five figures off the top of
00:37:57.920
your head. Thinkers, intellectuals, or statesmen, perhaps. Okay. On that cliffhanger, we will get
00:38:05.560
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download the app now. I'm not going to say Jesus because that's too easy, but that's obviously
00:39:56.160
the one and done. I think that's a gimme. That's the center box on bingo. But so the three who I
00:40:03.060
think have got to be part of this conversation for me are Aquinas, Augustine, and René Girard.
00:40:10.740
I talk about the three of them. And all of them in different ways, but very, very influential
00:40:16.860
to my own thinking on these topics. So I probably honestly would put Alexander Hamilton in there,
00:40:28.500
Or maybe the French economist, I always forget his name, who basically provided a lot of like
00:40:34.580
the developmental influences to Alexander Hamilton. In some ways, Hamilton was just
00:40:38.220
applying this guy's ideas. I will get you the name and you can tell your audience later.
00:40:44.000
And then if I had to pick a fifth name, it's...
00:41:19.260
his name but he had such uh brent bozell brent bozell brent bozell yeah great answer but like
00:41:25.120
who ghost wrote conscience of a conservative exactly which is why that book was so good
00:41:28.680
yeah that's exactly that is a great answer that's a guy yeah i to it one of the unsung heroes of
00:41:34.700
20th century conservatism he's moderately sung i should say moderately sung hero yeah but i also
00:41:39.240
think was way ahead of his time yeah was very thoughtful about what was actually going on in
00:41:45.720
conservative movement at the time. And if you were to look at somebody, you know, one of my mentors
00:41:51.740
in the investment business once told me like the most valuable thing you can do as an investor,
00:41:57.440
as a thinker, is to try to identify people who have made discrete predictions about the future
00:42:02.480
and like lean on the people who have been more right than wrong. Predicting the future is
00:42:08.680
inherently, as you know, a very, very difficult business. But if you get somebody who's willing
00:42:14.260
to actually say what they think is going to happen and it's more right than wrong, that's
00:42:19.280
like a very, very important thinker. And I don't think there's a single person in 1950s
00:42:25.260
America who was more correct about the future of either the American right or the country
00:42:31.460
Great observation. It also reminds me, the only credit I can take on one of these recently
00:42:38.420
is I called the Pope's name, but it was wish casting. I wasn't predicting it. I just really
00:42:43.300
wanted it to be Leo. I hope that turns out. Speaking of, in the time I have left with you,
00:42:47.800
speaking of international affairs, I understand there's some conflict going on somewhere in the
00:42:52.900
Middle East. The reason that we couldn't do this interview a couple of weeks ago.
00:42:57.280
You're obviously in this 27 hours a day. Correct. By my understanding, tell me if I have this wrong.
00:43:03.920
By my understanding, the president said on Monday, we might get peace talks Tuesday.
00:43:12.960
Then we're in a ceasefire, but we keep shooting at each other.
00:43:18.520
because Israel keeps firing on Hezbollah in southern Lebanon.
00:43:22.540
So then Israel and Lebanon get a deal, a peace deal.
00:43:32.600
And it's not told, but then the Iranians say there are tolls,
00:43:35.640
along with Oman, which we didn't even bring up Oman yet.
00:43:38.080
And so I guess it seems to me, in my layman's understanding, the structural issues preventing peace are all the same as they've been for about 10,000 years.
00:43:50.360
So now, as we're looking at Schrodinger's Strait of Hormuz or the whole conflict generally, what structurally needs to change to bring about peace?
00:43:59.480
Is there any timeline you foresee on that happening, like a lasting peace?
00:44:11.380
Well, first of all, I do think that things are much different
00:44:21.540
But so one, there are talks, there were scheduled talks,
00:44:25.980
really technical talks building on the negotiation
00:44:35.320
and frustrating about the Iranians is they'll say,
1.00
00:44:37.980
No, no, no, there aren't peace talks ongoing, but there are technical talks between the United States and Iran about the peace deal.
0.90
00:44:43.280
It's like, okay, so it's a Persian negotiating tactic and a Persian rhetorical device that I don't understand, but that is the way that the Iranians have done this.
00:44:54.120
um one of the things that i is underappreciated about the president's approach to this whole
00:44:59.760
region of the world is he likes to reshuffle the deck and then see where the leverage points are
00:45:07.500
where the pressure points are and see where we can make progress and that's really where we are
00:45:11.060
right now things have changed a lot the iranian military is much weaker the iranian economy is
00:45:16.280
much weaker um you know lebanon and israel are talking to each other directly in a way that
00:45:22.380
they weren't a few months ago. They both are sort of broadly aligned. And, you know, you can even
00:45:27.980
make an argument that if you harmonize the Lebanon-Israel peace deal with the MOU signed
00:45:35.240
between the United States and Iran, what both of those documents fundamentally say is that Lebanon's
00:45:40.780
territorial integrity will be respected. Okay. So things have definitely changed. I think the
00:45:46.740
question is whether that change is durable. And I don't know when this will air, probably tomorrow.
00:45:50.620
Okay. So I think what the president has said is, let's let this play out. There are a few things that we want. We want durable commitments that are verifiable and backed up by inspections that Iran will denuclearize their entire country. Okay. We're going to see how we get there.
00:46:09.080
Number two, we want to see what kind of an arrangement actually exists in the Middle East
00:46:18.360
between not just Iran and the United States, but the GCC, Israel, Lebanon. We're going to play that
00:46:24.840
situation out. And then on the Strait of Hormuz, I mean, I think you actually said it well, which
00:46:29.260
is that the Strait is open in the sense that to oil traffic, we're seeing more oil come out of
00:46:36.020
the Strait of Hormuz. And some days, actually, more oil coming out of the Strait than came out
00:46:40.500
before the war even started. So there's this element of the, you know, where the world oil
00:46:48.020
economy is kind of getting back into gear. That's going to take a little bit of time, but you've
00:46:52.200
already seen the prices come way down. Now, what the cynics will say is, well, if you look at the
00:46:56.600
number of ships that are trafficking, that's actually down from the pre-war start. But they're
00:47:01.220
mostly talking about cargo ships and other vessels. At least so far, what we've seen is
00:47:06.080
the oil traffic has reached its pre-war height. So I think what the president has told us to do
00:47:13.780
is use this MOU to sort of refill the world's oil economy, to refill some stocks, and then to see
00:47:21.760
where the hand is. And, you know, as I've said this repeatedly, if the Iranians are willing to
0.98
00:47:30.600
make the commitments that we would like them to make and are willing to back those up with
1.00
00:47:34.500
verifiable milestones, then we are going to change our relationship with Iran. And if they don't do
0.99
00:47:40.280
that, then nothing has really changed except for what we've already accomplished from the military
00:47:45.840
campaign, which is a lot. So we kind of have two options here. We have the option of pursuing a
00:47:51.160
long-term deal with the Iranians, but that requires a significant change in their behavior.
1.00
00:47:59.640
and then, of course, doing things on top of that
00:48:04.260
And I think both of those options are very much in play
00:48:06.520
and the president's going to let this play out.
00:48:13.340
in an environment where there is significantly less pressure
00:49:08.540
I think that's a very good place for us to be in,
00:49:21.320
You get to keep the Strait of Hormuz, and we'll try to play nice now.
00:49:25.020
The message is, okay, we're going to serve our self-interest by replenishing the oil coffers.
00:49:31.380
And get back to us in 60 days, you might have some fire and brimstone coming back down.
00:49:38.180
And that's what the president has fundamentally put out there.
00:49:41.000
Now, it is interesting to me because the Iranians have said, we control the straits.
00:49:46.240
And yeah, we're going to let traffic flow for the next 60 days.
00:49:49.460
but then we're going to negotiate over what happens from there, okay?
00:49:53.420
And what I find just bizarre about that assertion is that nobody from the Gulf Coast,
00:50:00.000
the Gulf Coalition countries, the Arab countries in the Gulf,
00:50:04.380
and the Omanis, who are sort of the main Iranian theoretically partner,
00:50:08.440
all of them have come out and said, we don't accept this Iranian tolling mechanism.
00:50:14.420
And so the Iranians keep on asserting something that isn't actually happening right now,
00:50:19.800
and they don't have a credible pathway to make happen in the future.
0.95
00:50:22.620
So I do see this as a bit of a sideshow, because fundamentally, like, their arguments,
00:50:28.560
what I mean is the sideshow is what they're saying.
00:50:32.220
What will actually happen is going to be determined through a combination of negotiation,
00:50:39.460
What they're saying right now for the consumption of their domestic audience,
00:50:46.720
That's something that we're working on right now.
0.59
00:50:48.240
And so then if you look ahead, not just to the midterms, but even to 2028, if this drags on in this kind of stasis, the Iranians don't behave, and Hezbollah keeps up to its antics, and we can't get a piece of steel between these three, four, five, six countries, how significant is that for the Republican chances in 2028?
00:51:10.140
I don't mean to only come back to 2028, but I think it helps clarify what it means for the party.
00:51:15.500
Is this, as the president has said, you know, just a digression, sort of a side quest that we had to deal with because of the Iranian nuclear threat?
00:51:24.640
Could this become a major moment in the history of the American empire and the Republican Party?
00:51:31.460
Well, first of all, I just want to be very clear here.
0.57
00:51:34.620
Like, this is not going to end in a place where the Iranians are collecting tolls on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz.
0.53
00:51:41.940
There's a lot of uncertainty because we don't know how the Iranians are going to behave.
0.80
00:51:45.420
But that is just one thing that every country in the region, including Iran's own allies, say is unacceptable.
1.00
00:51:51.620
Unpredictability, yes, because the Iranians are inherently unpredictable.
1.00
00:51:56.340
But I don't think that is going to be a situation that exists.
00:52:00.280
In fact, I feel quite confident that we're not going to have a told Strait of War moves in the future.
00:52:05.380
But, you know, you brought a question about, like, could this be something that affects the chances in 2028?
00:52:11.180
Could this be a very important historical moment?
00:52:16.040
But again, how exactly this plays out is very much contingent on the way that the Iranians respond to the leverage the president has put on them.
00:52:26.620
And if they respond well, I think we're going to look back at this and say, we turned over a new leaf. Now, a lot of people are skeptical, including me, that that will ultimately happen. And then if the Iranians perform or behave poorly, then I think that we still have a lot of leverage points to ensure that this ends up in a place that is good for America's objective.
00:52:45.380
So I think fundamentally, there's a desire here for everyone to say this is over or, you know, the Democrats and even, frankly, some Republicans are saying, well, you know, this shows that Trump blinked.
0.93
00:52:59.000
And then other people are saying, you know, it's all over and the Iranians are saying this.
00:53:04.000
And I would be highly skeptical of what everybody says right now.
00:53:10.600
He said this is the end of the beginning, okay?
00:53:17.380
And there are a lot more cards that we're going to see to mix metaphors here.
00:53:21.540
And the good thing about it is that we're served by an administration.
00:53:26.120
We're served by a president of the United States who is constantly trying to figure out how to gain an edge for the American people.
00:53:32.340
I ultimately strongly believe we will look back on this moment and say we got to a good place.
00:53:37.840
It's going to take a lot of work, not just in the negotiation arena, but in the arenas too.
00:53:42.140
You know, I have a great deal of sympathy for the administration, actually, on this.
00:53:46.860
Because, look, I was very skeptical of this intervention before, during, and after.
00:53:55.320
But I look at these polls, and I saw a poll a year ago of Americans, especially on the right.
00:54:01.560
How many of you think that we should stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon?
00:54:14.560
And then even, look, to bring it into another issue, it's interesting at this moment that foreign policy rarely rises to the top of conservatives' minds.
00:54:25.040
The Wall Street Journal had this worrisome report out a couple days ago.
00:54:28.120
It said that after Anthropic came out with the mythos AI, they said, this is so good.
00:54:36.880
Wall Street Journal reports China just made its own mythos.
00:54:41.120
That we're clearly in some kind of AI arms race.
00:54:47.880
Maybe it gets a little hot even sometimes with China.
00:54:51.400
And Americans are divided on this, even conservatives.
0.55
00:54:54.060
On the one hand, we want to win the arms race with China.
00:54:56.500
On the other hand, we don't want AI to take all of our jobs, build huge data centers in our backyard, raise our energy prices, all the rest.
00:55:03.720
So you say, well, no, I don't want to lose the AI arms race, and I don't want the data center in my town.
00:55:08.260
Well, so in the Trump administration and then looking ahead perhaps to the Vance administration, what does the American foreign policy look like?
00:55:17.580
Because from what I can tell, we want the privileges of empire, but we don't want the obligations of empire.
00:55:22.440
First of all, I reject the premise of any future Vance administration.
00:55:27.800
No, it was very slick, but I refuse to accept it.
00:55:33.000
But on the Trump administration's policy, I mean, we have tried and I think we've done a good job of balancing the economic benefits with the downsides of artificial intelligence, okay?
00:55:52.780
I think there's an interesting question about how much China's own AI policy is fundamentally derivative of us.
00:55:59.020
And I don't just mean them copying American models.
00:56:07.220
I don't think many Americans have a good understanding
00:56:11.640
I think there's a part of the Chinese policy set,
00:56:16.580
that probably just wants to dominate the AI arms race.
00:56:20.080
I actually think there is a part of Xi's inner circle
00:56:23.460
that says we don't want to lose to the United States,
00:56:28.520
That they're, I think they're a little freaked out by it
00:56:31.900
is what I'm saying. We will get back to the vice president breaking news as it pertains to
00:56:38.400
politics, the world, the entire international order. But first, I have some news to break
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So where I think that lands for me is, you know,
00:58:11.540
I am very skeptical of AI to the extent that it leads to like porn slop videos
00:58:18.160
and weird child predation stuff on the internet.
00:58:22.240
And I'm more optimistic about AI when it comes to things like curing diseases
00:58:26.780
and solving, like, very, very big technical challenges for the American people.
00:58:32.140
So, you know, because of that, I think we have to strike a balance.
00:58:36.180
Like, I'm not super laissez-faire on some of the applications of AI
00:58:39.300
because I do think that some of the AI CEOs fundamentally want to control
00:58:44.960
They want to sell sometimes very damaging things to our children.
00:58:49.300
They want to get rich in the process, and they want to control the government.
00:58:52.620
I think that some AI leaders want to build things
00:58:56.680
that are genuinely transformative in a good way.
00:58:59.620
And I don't think that we can be, you know, completely unbiased.
00:59:07.200
And I think in the United States, the side that I pick is
00:59:09.480
pro the people who are building things that are meaningful and valuable
00:59:12.260
and anti the people who just want to like, you know, produce slot videos
00:59:16.960
and make it easier for child predators to interact with our kids.
00:59:42.000
And that 99% of the backlash to AI data centers
00:59:48.860
where they make it hard to build power to tap into the grid.
01:00:00.640
Like, going back to the point about the dignity of human beings,
01:00:12.400
And where I think the Chinese are way ahead of us in AI,
1.00
01:00:20.840
And so this is where I think the environmental movement
01:00:23.380
in the United States is going to collide with reality.
01:00:26.380
And it's funny that if the AI people don't figure this out,
01:00:33.780
Between building power and the environmental movement
01:00:37.920
AI data centers are going to be the first casualty.
01:00:43.920
would be something like, maybe you should support building more power. And maybe, you know, and we've
01:00:50.700
pursued policies like this in the Trump administration, where you try to force people
01:00:54.880
that if they're going to build an AI data center, they can only do it if it's going to raise people's
01:00:58.640
power costs. I can't help but notice that some of the real billionaire obsessives about
01:01:04.200
environmentalism, they've changed their tune. People like Bill Gates, he said, basically,
01:02:20.940
And if you think the answer is like Wall Street
01:02:51.120
And by the way, I think that's one of the reasons
01:02:52.500
why the Democratic Party of 2026 is so deranged.
01:03:01.140
even where 70% of the guys are still voting Dem,
01:03:17.060
Faculty lounge, that's the word that I'm looking for.
01:03:22.040
why I'm just fundamentally pessimistic about the Dems,
01:03:34.800
but they're just so dominated by the crazy people and they can't it's like they can't figure out the
01:03:41.840
part where they get the economic populism which actually is very popular and i think republicans
01:03:45.920
should be more worried about that yeah but every time they get the economic populism it's with
0.68
01:03:52.020
somebody like aoc who's like oh we you know need to tax the rich and give all the money to transgender
01:03:58.480
baseball players who prey on your kids and it's like wait a minute yeah could you like a very
0.53
01:04:03.860
potent political movement would be half of that, whether you agree with it or not.
01:04:08.040
Half of that equation is very politically popular. The part where you allow those same
01:04:12.800
billionaires that you're taxing to get rich by selling unlicensed pharmaceutical products
01:04:17.760
to 12-year-old minors to gender transition them, that's the part that makes most Americans go,
01:04:23.480
what the hell are you talking about? And oh, by the way, are you actually against the rich
01:04:29.240
when your social values and your cultural values
01:04:32.260
happen to align with the CEOs of nearly every major corporation.
01:04:39.600
this Scott Wiener, this guy who's running for Pelosi's seat.
01:04:46.920
I mean, there's like something wrong with that guy.
01:04:58.500
You know, so that's basically the state of the party.
01:05:07.820
Last question I have for you before I let you go.
01:05:18.560
Confessions was such a big part of my own faith journey.
01:05:23.200
but you know, the city of God and everything that he wrote.
01:05:27.520
We have an Augustinian pope, an Augustinian vice president, maybe soon an Augustinian president.
01:05:32.320
I gave Pope Leo XIV when I visited him for his inaugural mass.
01:05:37.340
We found a very old copy of Confessions that we gifted him.
01:05:49.140
Thank you for being very, very generous with your time.
01:05:53.160
really, I hardly, I'm not even lying, as I would be inclined to do for a friend or someone I admire,
01:05:59.120
but this book is really good, so go get it. Communion by J.D. Vance. Thank you, sir.
01:06:23.160
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