The Michael Knowles Show - Ep. 2005 - ＂I've Never Said This In An Interview Before＂｜ JD Vance On Faith, Iran & AI

00:00:00.000 Hey there, it's Wayfair here, where delivery and setup are as easy as a few taps on your phone.

00:00:05.540 You're relaxing in an old hammock, scrolling Wayfair's app, when you spot it, a brand new patio set.

00:00:10.580 Next thing you know, Wayfair delivers it right to your patio and sets it up.

00:00:14.520 Oh, you need a new grill too? Alright, Wayfair's got you covered.

00:00:18.120 With Wayfair's room of choice delivery and fast experts set up on qualifying orders,

00:00:22.300 life gets a little easier. Visit Wayfair.com or the Wayfair app.

00:00:26.580 Wayfair, every style, every home.

00:00:28.580 July is National Grilling Month, and there's no better time to stock up on America's best meat from Good Ranchers.

00:00:34.060 They source 100% of their meat from American farms and ranches and deliver it straight to your door, making summer grilling easier than ever.

00:00:39.840 Good Ranchers makes it simple to stock the kitchen with quality American-raised meat, while also supporting the farmers and ranchers keeping American agriculture alive.

00:00:46.960 Visit GoodRanchers.com to get $50 off your order when you use the code DAILYWIRE.

00:00:51.060 That's code DAILYWIRE for $50 off, but you can also get free meat with every order on top of the $50 off if you decide to start a plan today.

00:00:58.580 goodranchers.com. American meat delivered. I love a good conversion story. I don't usually

00:01:04.760 do interviews on my daily show. I rarely plug politicians' books. But when I heard there was

00:01:11.020 a new book out on a religious conversion, specifically a conversion to Catholicism,

00:01:17.180 I could not resist sitting down with the author, who just happens to be the vice president of the

00:01:22.740 United States, with war brewing around the world, political breakdown at home, especially on the

00:01:27.920 right, and AI advancements that threaten to upend all of society and even our view of ourselves,

00:01:34.700 I think we're all feeling a little apocalyptic. So joining me to weigh in on all these matters

00:01:40.380 and more is Vice President J.D. Vance. I'm Michael Knowles. This is The Michael Knowles Show.

00:01:57.920 Mr. Vice President, thank you for being here.

00:02:06.340 It's good to see you. Thanks for having me.

00:02:07.540 I'm really sorry that we're not in my usual studio.

00:02:10.480 We're in your town.

00:02:12.020 That's right.

00:02:12.420 If we were in my studio, we would be in nice, big, comfortable chairs, maybe with a cigar.

00:02:17.300 This is a little bit more formal, but I really appreciate the opportunity.

00:02:21.500 Of course.

00:02:21.880 Because I've read a lot of political books.

00:02:24.840 I have a lot of friends who are politicians.

00:02:26.240 and most of the books are horrible

00:02:28.680 and I don't even actually read them.

00:02:32.080 This book, I really, really enjoyed.

00:02:34.200 It's not flattery at all.

00:02:35.160 Everyone needs to go out and get Communion by J.D. Vance.

00:02:37.660 Thank you.

00:02:38.480 Because this touches on something that I care about

00:02:40.720 more than Iran and AI and 2028.

00:02:45.380 We'll get to all of it, which I have to ask about.

00:02:47.840 But this touches on something I care about a lot more,

00:02:49.920 which is a religious conversion,

00:02:51.720 specifically to Catholicism.

00:02:53.620 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.

00:03:05.060 Yes, yeah.

00:03:05.780 So I have to ask, one, why did you do it?

00:03:09.520 And two, you're not the only one.

00:03:12.180 You are in many ways the kind of voice of the millennials and the Zoomer, older Zoomer generation here.

00:03:18.440 There's been a big surge in religious reversion and especially to Catholicism.

00:03:23.500 Why?

00:03:24.680 We will get to much more with our vice president friend,

00:03:27.900 but first, you need to go to puretalk.com slash Knowles,

00:03:31.300 K-N-O-W-L-E-S.

00:03:33.420 Our spending habits say something about our values.

00:03:36.560 I want a company that is not just the smart financial choice,

00:03:39.680 but also aligns with what I believe.

00:03:41.500 Now, I know you're like me,

00:03:42.560 and that is why you should switch to veteran-led Pure Talk.

00:03:46.800 This is a wireless company that champions American work ethic

00:03:49.560 and favors community over corporations.

00:03:51.440 Pure Talk has great values and is a notch above the big wireless corporations. From customer

00:03:58.040 support, reception, data, value, Pure Talk has five stars in every category. You're going to

00:04:02.580 get the best service available to you, top-notch 5G network on the very best towers, not just

00:04:07.560 similar, the very best towers for the best price, $34.99 per month from a wonderful company that

00:04:13.980 supports our veterans, supports our country. You even get great customer service because the people

00:04:19.200 on the other line speak English. The average family of four is saving $1,000 a year. That

00:04:23.660 could be a lot of extra money for your 4th of July summer vacation. Head on over right now

00:04:27.720 to puretalk.com slash Knowles. No service contract, no cancellation fees. puretalk.com

00:04:34.140 slash Knowles. Make the switch and start championing your values in every area of your life.

00:04:38.260 puretalk.com slash Knowles to make the switch to Pure Talk, a wireless network that values

00:04:43.640 what you value. Okay, back to the vice president. Okay. So before, first of all, thank you for

00:04:51.640 doing this. It's good to see you. Pleasure. I know we had planned to schedule this last week,

00:04:57.000 I believe, and I had to go to Switzerland. So thank you for being here. I will never forgive

00:05:00.000 the Iranians for doing that to me, but we're here now. We're the Swiss. But okay, before you get 1.00

00:05:06.440 into the why Catholicism, I think you have to get into the why Christianity, then not Christianity,

00:05:12.060 then back to Christianity and then get there.

00:05:14.020 So let me give like the 90 second summary

00:05:16.620 of my faith journey from when I was a kid

00:05:19.260 until I was, you know, 24, 25.

00:05:21.560 So basically raised in an evangelical household,

00:05:24.880 raised by my grandmother,

00:05:26.420 but with like a lot of Pentecostal flavor

00:05:28.300 from my biological father.

00:05:32.260 Basically unchurched.

00:05:33.880 I would go to church with my dad,

00:05:35.060 my stepmom sometimes,

00:05:36.200 but mainly it was with my grandma.

00:05:38.180 We would watch TBN,

00:05:39.280 we'd watch Paul and Jane Crouch,

00:05:40.700 we'd watch Billy Graham revivals.

00:05:42.740 And I realized after my grandmother died, this is when I was 21 years old, maybe 20,

00:05:47.840 but right before I left for Iraq in 2005, Mamaw died.

00:05:52.860 And I realized that was my connection to Christianity.

00:05:56.500 So there was no institutional connection.

00:05:58.220 That's sort of one of the subtexts of the book is trying to raise my own kids in a more

00:06:02.660 institutional faith and the hope that it takes in a way that I didn't.

00:06:06.900 Because two years after my grandmother was dead, I called myself an atheist.

00:06:10.180 Yeah.

00:06:11.060 Yeah.

00:06:11.220 Okay. So I'm an atheist. I become, and maybe I always was a striver. I'm obsessed with

00:06:17.820 achievement for achievement's sake. Really, Mr. Vice President? Shocked to hear it.

00:06:23.600 Yeah. And I get to law school and I'm at Yale. And I realized that I've like won all these

00:06:29.240 competitions, the meritocratic competitions that life had told me to win, but I found them deeply

00:06:34.600 unfulfilling. And frankly, I found that I was becoming a shitty person in the process or a

00:06:38.100 bad person, excuse me, if you have to edit that out. I don't know. What are the rules?

00:06:40.680 We never go blue on this show. We make exceptions for top government officials.

00:06:44.580 Okay. I have terrible language as I talk about in the book. It's one of my many non-Christian

00:06:49.200 or one of my many traits I have to work on as a Christian. Okay. So I am at law school.

00:06:58.520 I'm doing very well in sort of all the worldly things. I'm doing not so well in the non-worldly

00:07:03.640 things. I fall in love. That woman is now the second lady and soon to be mother of four

00:07:09.080 Vance children, currently the mother of three Vance children. And I sort of realized like

00:07:13.460 everything I've geared my life towards over the last few years is hollow. But this person that

00:07:18.300 I'm in love with, she really wants me to be a good husband, eventually a good father. She wants

00:07:23.240 me to care about virtue, being a good human being and like the deepest sense of the word.

00:07:28.040 And I kept on returning to this idea that the elites who fashion themselves hyper-rational,

00:07:34.880 They didn't believe in superstitious things

00:07:36.520 like Jesus Christ is the son of God.

00:07:38.720 They were the ones who seemed to be

00:07:40.380 the less focused on what mattered,

00:07:42.420 the least focused on what mattered. 1.00

00:07:43.760 And meanwhile, it was all these sort of bumpkins 0.98

00:07:45.700 that I dismissed as sub-rational, as superstitious, 0.92

00:07:49.040 who seemed to have things figured out in a much deeper way. 0.51

00:07:51.480 So that leads me down the pathway back to Christianity. 0.64

00:07:55.000 And I think that was almost 90 seconds, 0.85

00:07:56.680 maybe a little bit longer.

00:07:58.380 But okay, then it's like,

00:08:00.500 how do you become a Christian in this world?

00:08:04.420 And there were all of these things that attracted me to Catholicism.

00:08:09.460 So, number one, I really liked the sense that it was institutionally stable, okay?

00:08:15.840 And again, going back to my unchurched upbringing, when things were going well in my religious life,

00:08:25.320 it was very much attached to, like, a single individual, whether it was my grandmother or a pastor,

00:08:30.620 and sometimes the pastors would come and go.

00:08:32.300 I was really attracted to the idea that like in this church, the mass was more or less the same,

00:08:38.020 whether you were on vacation in some faraway country or whether you were in suburban Cincinnati.

00:08:42.720 But I also like doctrinally that, you know, like things didn't change based on who the person

00:08:49.720 giving the homily was. And that sense of stability, the idea that Christian doctrine

00:08:55.340 was fundamentally founded on Jesus Christ

00:08:58.660 and the church beyond that,

00:09:01.300 that if it really is founded on Jesus Christ,

00:09:04.520 it shouldn't change.

00:09:06.220 Now, of course, it's going to have to apply itself

00:09:07.900 to new circumstances.

00:09:08.920 When Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead,

00:09:11.340 we didn't have automobiles.

00:09:12.620 We didn't have modern narcotics.

00:09:15.380 We didn't have a lot of the things

00:09:16.940 that they were dealing with at the time.

00:09:18.740 But the principle is fundamentally immovable.

00:09:22.500 And then there's an open question

00:09:24.080 about how you apply the principle to new things.

00:09:26.880 And then the final thing I'd say is,

00:09:28.740 and then we can, I'm sure, go into the details.

00:09:31.320 I'm trying to summarize this very quickly

00:09:32.900 because I know we only have an hour.

00:09:34.620 But there is something about the connection

00:09:39.760 between the past, the present, and the future

00:09:43.100 that I really liked about the Catholic Church.

00:09:47.200 This idea that you had your role to play,

00:09:50.640 whether it was a big role or a small role

00:09:52.560 in the life of the church,

00:09:53.600 you were inheriting that from thousands of years of history and you would eventually die and

00:09:59.720 hopefully be rejoined with the Lord and you would pass on that legacy to some other person who would

00:10:05.140 then carry it on after you. That continuity across the generations I found very very attractive and

00:10:10.180 one of the things I write about in the book is that sort of one of these existential fears that

00:10:14.740 animate me I've never been particularly afraid of dying you know it's funny when we had this sort

00:10:20.560 of situation at the, what, the Willard Hotel, or no, we're in the Willard Hotel right now.

00:10:25.200 Currently.

00:10:25.740 Where was the White House Correspondents Association dinner? Anyway, there was the

00:10:29.200 assassination.

00:10:29.860 It was at the Hilton, maybe?

00:10:31.320 Yeah, wherever it was. And it was obviously focused on the president, but, you know,

00:10:34.340 you hear loud noises, and then the guys with the machine guns run in, and you're kind of like,

00:10:37.840 oh, something kind of crazy is going on. I just, I don't, the idea of dying doesn't really scare

00:10:44.600 me. It's never scared me, whether as an atheist or as a Christian. And I talk about that a little

00:10:48.680 bit in the book, communion, you should buy it, that I've always been somewhat troubled by that

00:10:55.280 because if you think potentially hell is waiting you on the other end, shouldn't you be really

00:10:59.040 afraid of it? But I've just never been afraid of dying. What I have been afraid of, and there's

00:11:05.120 this existential dread that kind of animates me, we haven't gotten into this in any of the

00:11:08.960 interviews that I've done, but I guess we can get into it here, is this idea that the continuity

00:11:16.440 across generations is going to stop with us.

00:11:19.020 That we inherited something

00:11:20.800 and instead of building upon it and passing it on,

00:11:23.560 it's just going to die with us.

00:11:25.120 You see it decay.

00:11:25.940 That feeling of decay and of stasis

00:11:29.300 rather than dynamism and growth. 0.98

00:11:32.240 And that, I felt like the Catholicism's continuity

00:11:37.960 was in some ways an antidote to that 0.98

00:11:40.420 because it's, you know, yeah,

00:11:42.880 there are certainly things you can look at our world.

00:11:44.860 I think there are things you can look at

00:11:46.260 be very hopeful about. There are things you can look at in our modern world and be very despairing

00:11:49.960 about. But if you look at the long history of the Christian faith, it's very hard not to say

00:11:56.120 that many, many other people in many, many generations past had it far worse than we did. 1.00

00:12:01.460 Yes.

00:12:01.980 And that gives me a certain sense of, okay, like maybe we should stop whining and try to build

00:12:07.540 something rather than just complain about how bad things are for us right now.

00:12:10.840 Right. It is, the church is the only institution from antiquity that has survived in the West

00:12:16.880 all the time. So I totally get it. And I feel that anxiety. It bothers me whether we're talking

00:12:22.600 about a restaurant or we're talking about a monument in Washington, D.C. It bothers me to

00:12:26.460 see it get dirtier and fall apart and be neglected even in the minds of people. Absolutely. Yeah, I

00:12:31.600 feel that same anxiety. And even your story of you come from modest means, you end up at Yale,

00:12:39.500 You become much more conservative and Christian, I guess, as a result of that.

00:12:43.860 Lose a maternal figure and come to the faith in a large way through intellectual figures.

00:12:50.660 It resonates.

00:12:52.000 Sure.

00:12:52.240 I get what you're talking about.

00:12:53.580 Yeah.

00:12:53.860 In the book, you talk about a few of those figures in particular.

00:12:57.300 Augustine, Aquinas, Rene Girard.

00:13:00.340 Yeah.

00:13:00.480 The 20th century Catholic writer.

00:13:02.900 Sure. 0.80

00:13:03.180 About mimetic desire.

00:13:05.780 Yes, preach.

00:13:07.360 I love it.

00:13:08.560 this then leads me to wonder after you were brought back to the faith in no small part

00:13:15.080 through the intellect thinking of the decline of civilization thinking about these great writers

00:13:19.460 thinking about the doctrines and parsing just differences between them yep did you have any

00:13:24.400 religious experience what c.s lewis would call the numinous experience did you ever see a ghost

00:13:29.140 kind of thing um you know never never quite saw a ghost but definitely and you know one of the

00:13:33.980 things I talk about in the book, and this is something I'm still very much working on,

00:13:38.280 is when I returned to the faith, one of the things that had just degraded during my

00:13:44.340 many years of not being religious at all was my ability to pray. And so, I remember distinctively,

00:13:50.460 you know, 14, 15, 16, like talking to God and being able to talk to God in this very natural

00:13:56.560 way. And then I start returning to the faith and I go to pray and I'm not exactly sure what to say.

00:14:02.740 And there's this interesting way in which just that prayer muscle had kind of atrophied.

00:14:07.740 It's come back.

00:14:08.900 I don't know that it's come back all the way.

00:14:10.840 But one of the things, again, I really liked about the sort of the ancient Christian canon

00:14:14.940 was all of these prayers that were just, you say the prayer, right?

00:14:19.360 Of course, the most important is the Lord's Prayer.

00:14:21.600 There's the glory be, glory be to the Father, to the Son, and to the Holy Spirit.

00:14:25.500 And you sort of go through these prayers.

00:14:28.080 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.

00:14:38.100 And so, yeah, Augustine was fascinating.

00:14:42.000 Aquinas was fascinating.

00:14:43.240 Gerard was particularly fascinating to me.

00:14:45.980 But the faith can't just be something that you think about.

00:14:49.340 It has to be something that you practice, and it has to be something that you feel.

00:14:52.540 And that was very much, again, something that was part of my own faith journey I write about in the book.

00:14:58.080 um but the the interesting thing so there's this quote from pulp fiction i keep returning to

00:15:06.900 which is i'm going to butcher a little bit but it's right after you know samuel jackson and

00:15:11.680 john travolta these gangsters just murder a few people and then but they they miss one guy and

00:15:17.020 that guy's like hiding in the bathroom so he pops out and he shoots at point blank range samuel

00:15:22.200 jackson is totally fine right despite the fact that multiple bullets should have hit him and he

00:15:27.240 kind of looks around. He kills the guy who tried to shoot him. And then he has this religious 0.98

00:15:31.200 sort of epiphany. And that's really the entire movie from his perspective is this

00:15:35.060 ongoing religious journey. Now, what's fascinating about it is he talks about miracles. And there's

00:15:42.080 this debate between him and John Travolta about whether this counts as a miracle. And he says,

00:15:45.940 look, what matters is not whether this is an according to Hoyle miracle. What matters is

00:15:50.680 that I felt the touch of God. And just two things sitting here right now, when I think about like

00:15:57.220 feeling the touch of God. Okay. One of which I didn't even write about in the book. It just

00:16:01.840 occurred to me now, but I'm going to tell it to you. The first one, and I guess he's out of himself

00:16:06.760 now. This is Ross Douthat and I. We're having a conversation. This is in 2019, probably. And,

00:16:13.920 you know, he at the time was one of the foremost conservative critics of Pope Francis.

00:16:18.920 And my view of the papacy is, you know, it's, you don't treat it like you're a congressional

00:16:24.920 representative. It's not a political office. Obviously, you can have pragmatic disagreements,

00:16:30.800 but you should have a little respect for it as a practicing Catholic.

00:16:34.460 Yes.

00:16:34.780 Okay. And so, Ross and I were going back and forth about whether he was properly differential,

00:16:39.400 even to this person who was clearly not aligned with American conservatives on a whole host of

00:16:45.340 issues.

00:16:45.500 A very diplomatic way to put it.

00:16:46.740 Yeah, yeah. So, we're at a conference. We're having this argument. We're in the basement

00:16:51.320 of this hotel. There's a kind of an open bar that's been set out for us. And we're drinking

00:16:57.880 too much and talking about Catholicism and talking about the Pope. And I make this kind of really

00:17:02.340 strident argument about the papacy. And even talking about it, it sounds insane, but there's

00:17:10.380 like a wine glass back behind the bar. And it's not like we're in southeastern Ohio. It's not

00:17:15.440 like there was an earthquake. Just kind of one glass kind of jumps off and shatters on the ground

00:17:21.080 in the middle of this conversation,

00:17:23.220 and both Ross and I had this sort of moment

00:17:25.280 where like, oh, that was really weird.

00:17:27.500 Yeah.

00:17:27.800 And again, is it an according to Hoyle miracle?

00:17:31.300 Maybe, maybe not, but I felt the touch of God.

00:17:33.740 Maybe.

00:17:33.980 If a guy can rise from the dead,

00:17:36.160 a glass can fall off a shelf.

00:17:37.860 Absolutely, absolutely.

00:17:38.800 So that felt like a very powerful moment. 0.99

00:17:42.640 I'll give you another just very stupid moment, 1.00

00:17:45.100 but not stupid. 1.00

00:17:46.560 It's disrespectful to God. 1.00

00:17:48.460 Providential.

00:17:49.180 Providential.

00:17:49.640 but okay i i so there's a church in cincinnati that uh does really early confessions on either

00:17:59.420 saturday or sunday okay it's um it's it's it's in the oakley neighborhood of cincinnati saint

00:18:05.660 cecilia's church okay and they would always do really early confessions i think on sunday

00:18:10.320 so like you know if i hadn't gone to confession a couple months i always wake up really early but

00:18:15.140 you had to be there by like 7 a.m. or something, okay?

00:18:17.840 So I'd get in my minivan and I'd go to confession

00:18:20.520 before the kids were even awake on a Sunday morning.

00:18:23.240 Okay, I remember one time distinctively being like,

00:18:26.620 you know, if you weren't in line by 7.15

00:18:28.300 or sort of you kind of missed your window,

00:18:30.500 I remember distinctively like I woke up at 7.02

00:18:33.160 later than I normally wake up.

00:18:35.220 And I'm like, there's no way I can make it

00:18:37.000 to St. Cecilia's Church.

00:18:38.200 But I just felt this little voice like,

00:18:40.180 go and try to make it.

00:18:41.320 Maybe the line will be extra long.

00:18:42.800 Maybe you'll get it at the very end.

00:18:44.000 and the ride from my house to St. Cecilia's

00:18:47.300 is probably a 15-minute drive.

00:18:49.760 I got there in like eight minutes

00:18:51.800 because every single red light was green.

00:18:56.640 And like, again, maybe every red light was green.

00:19:00.080 Maybe it was just a coincidence of the universe,

00:19:02.940 but I felt the touch of God.

00:19:04.640 I got in line in time and just little things like that.

00:19:08.340 You know, my attitude on this is,

00:19:10.940 I've talked to buddies about this,

00:19:12.100 some of whom are still very, very atheist and very non-religious is like, I really do think

00:19:17.940 that there are these moments where God speaks to all of us. You just have to be trying to listen

00:19:22.500 a little bit. And yeah, you know, every few months I'll have a little moment like that where it's

00:19:28.300 like, huh, that was kind of weird. Like what are the odds that the 25 traffic lights from my house

00:19:35.540 to St. Cecilia's, maybe it's only a dozen, but there are a lot of them that all of them would

00:19:40.920 be green in such a way that made it possible for me to get there very quickly. Right. Right. Anyway.

00:19:46.060 We will get to much, much more with the vice president. First though, you need to get to

00:19:51.580 angel.com slash Knowles. The story of George Washington did not begin at Valley Forge or

00:19:56.600 Yorktown. It began decades earlier with a 20 year old facing failure, surviving near death and being

00:20:02.560 shaped by providence into the man who had found the greatest nation in human history. Young

00:20:07.700 Washington tells that story, directed by John Irwin, starring Andy Serkis, Ben Kingsley, and

00:20:12.800 the great, the greatest Kelsey Grammer. No revisionism, no rewriting, just the truth of

00:20:19.300 who Washington was and what God had planned for him. March into theaters July 4th. Help make it

00:20:25.460 the number one movie in America. Here is the smart move. Do not pay 30 bucks at the box office.

00:20:31.200 A premium Angel Guild membership costs just 15 bucks a month, 25% off, locked in for 12 months,

00:20:36.100 two free tickets to Young Washington, every future Angel release. This is really, really

00:20:40.220 good stuff. Join the Angel Guild today. Go to angel.com slash Knowles. Take advantage of our

00:20:45.600 special offer and become a premium member for the lowest price of the season. Two free tickets to

00:20:50.720 see Young Washington in theaters this Independence Day. Be part of making this film the number one

00:20:54.520 movie in America for our nation's 250th birthday. I've noticed this, you mentioned confession about

00:20:59.860 the state of grace. Yeah. And something about the state of grace that's really nice is the priest

00:21:04.180 cuts all the demons off you, and so your life is better. But the other thing, just about your

00:21:08.160 perception, it seems to me that all those little signs, you know, the Christian view of the world 0.75

00:21:13.320 is a deeply semiotic view. Nothing is merely what it seems, you know, everything means something.

00:21:19.200 St. Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiae with that observation. And in the state of grace,

00:21:24.740 you kind of see it a little bit more, I think. But on the flip side, when you're in a real state

00:21:30.620 of sin, you know, Dante trying to walk up the mountain, sometimes then God, he doesn't just

00:21:35.760 whisper at you. Sometimes he shakes you and says, hey, idiot, you know, pay attention. Why aren't you? 1.00

00:21:40.120 And so I think, yes, if you go into a room, even of these liberal elites that you assail in the

00:21:45.540 book, that rightly assail, you go into a room and you say, do you believe in God? No. Do you

00:21:50.300 believe in miracles? No. Do you believe in this, that? No. But if you ask them something as silly

00:21:55.020 is, have you ever seen a ghost? A lot of them will say yes. We all kind of know that there's

00:22:00.880 meaning in the world. So then on this point, of all, you go to these very liberal institutions.

00:22:05.480 Can I make an observation just about that? Okay. One of the really interesting things about

00:22:10.880 just the secular, hyper-progressive, hyper-liberal age that we live in

00:22:16.740 is you realize how many of the rituals and institutions and practices of Catholicism

00:22:24.840 show up in the modern world completely divorced from the God part and the grace part of it.

00:22:31.240 Okay. So we're thankfully, thanks to Donald Trump, I would say, we're past the point where most

00:22:39.140 people, at least that I see, hang out those hideous signs in their yard that say, in this

00:22:45.280 house, we believe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, love is love. Water is people, whatever.

00:22:50.300 No person is illegal.

00:22:52.080 Okay.

00:22:52.760 So that sign is like such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed.

00:23:01.300 And when you realize, you're like, oh my God,

00:23:03.820 people still have this desire to profess, to do it very publicly.

00:23:09.480 And even to do it in this kind of cadence that you see in the Nicene Creed.

00:23:14.240 And of course, they do it in this very politically motivated way.

00:23:19.540 Confession.

00:23:20.300 is another thing, it's, like, I find, as a, you know, Protestant, I find confession deeply

00:23:27.740 uncomfortable. I still do. Ditto, and I'm a cradle cat, you know? But it's just, like,

00:23:34.020 the craziest ritual. You're going to go in this, you know, tiny booth and sit there with a total

00:23:38.380 stranger and tell them about every terrible thing you've done over the last couple of months. It's

00:23:41.340 nuts. But what, if you think about it, it is so similar to the ritual of modern therapy.

00:23:50.420 Of course.

00:23:51.260 And, but minus the guilt and forgiveness. Like the thing that's, that's, that's, you know,

00:23:57.700 I talk about the liberation of guilt.

00:23:59.100 Ah, guilt too. Yes.

00:24:00.480 Because there's, there's actually, you know, I've always heard this phrase,

00:24:03.480 Christian guilt or Catholic guilt, as if it's terrible to feel guilty when you do something

00:24:06.860 bad, but sometimes if I'm impatient with my kid, for example, it's kind of a good thing to feel

00:24:12.680 guilty, to feel like there's an inner voice telling you to be a better human being, a better father,

00:24:17.900 a better husband. So then you go and talk to somebody about it, but not in this like, oh,

00:24:22.540 you know, maybe I yelled at my kid because, you know, my mom yelled at me when I was nine years

00:24:27.780 old and I never dealt with the unresolved trauma of it. No, maybe that there's certainly an element.

00:24:33.660 And I do believe that everybody's,

00:24:35.580 the demons of everyone's past

00:24:36.980 continue to follow them around.

00:24:38.400 I write about this concept in the book.

00:24:40.060 But maybe the reason that, you know,

00:24:43.040 you weren't super patient with your kid

00:24:44.780 is just that you're a flawed human being 1.00

00:24:46.880 and you screwed up. 1.00

00:24:48.120 And there's nothing wrong with saying,

00:24:49.740 I screwed up, I should feel bad about it,

00:24:51.800 and I should make amends.

00:24:53.120 And I think that sort of,

00:24:55.740 that seems to me is a much healthier,

00:24:57.980 but also much truer to human nature way

00:25:00.220 to think about misconduct and right and wrong.

00:25:02.900 Yeah, of course. I have a buddy, actually, who put a sign in his yard with the same font

00:25:07.140 and says, in this house, we believe in God, the Father Almighty.

00:25:10.820 That's great.

00:25:11.620 That's brilliant.

00:25:12.180 Yeah, you see all of it. I mean, the transgender transition, which is, you know,

00:25:16.420 they refer to the past as a dead name. I mean, that is a kind of a secular baptism.

00:25:20.280 That's right.

00:25:20.600 You see all of these echoes. So, look, I guess that gets to the first point, which is,

00:25:24.300 why are these young people converting, especially to more liturgical, traditional,

00:25:27.760 especially Catholic religion? Well, because it has the real version of the things that

00:25:32.120 they're seeking in the world. Okay, I get that. In harder politics and policy, you're at all of

00:25:38.960 these liberal institutions, Yale Law School especially, but elsewhere, traipsing around

00:25:44.780 rich businesses and all the rest. And the one thing that everyone agrees on is meritocracy.

00:25:54.500 Now, you have two, probably my two favorite chapters of the book. One is pulling from

00:25:58.920 Pope Leo XIII's encyclical, Rerum Novarum, you call it of new things. The other one is

00:26:03.640 borrowing from Thomas Carlyle's mockery of economics as the dismal science. And these

00:26:08.780 are my two favorite chapters of the book. I was arguing with a colleague of mine. He's a friend

00:26:13.940 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

00:26:23.700 of the Catholic social teaching, the critique of meritocracy, the mockery of economics,

00:26:29.760 which Edmund Burke starts modern conservatism with, mocking the economists,

00:26:33.940 sophisters, and calculators who have destroyed Western civilization.

00:26:36.940 But what you write is total heresy and blasphemy compared to the last 30 to 60 years of American

00:26:45.040 conservatism.

00:26:45.780 The one thing, no matter what we all disagree on, everyone agreed meritocracy is good,

00:26:50.400 and that's what the left gets wrong

00:26:53.020 and that we need to double down on meritocracy.

00:26:54.940 You say it stinks.

00:26:56.260 Why?

00:26:57.160 Well, I think a couple of things.

00:26:58.200 I mean, first of all,

00:26:59.820 I think that,

00:27:01.660 yeah, I think Aristotle once said

00:27:03.160 that virtue lies in the mean.

00:27:05.100 And like any sort of,

00:27:07.440 there's like the vice

00:27:08.760 and the virtue version of anything.

00:27:10.700 I don't think ambition is bad.

00:27:12.800 In fact, I think that if you're ambitious

00:27:14.300 because you want to build,

00:27:16.200 you know, a rocket that goes to the moon,

00:27:19.460 right?

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,

00:30:23.020 And there's a liberation in it.

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.

00:31:10.220 Yes.

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.

00:31:27.060 Every pope since has basically said that.

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.

00:31:45.280 President Trump led a lot of that.

00:31:47.500 So looking ahead, you are the heir apparent now.

00:31:50.740 Whether you like it or not, you are.

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,

00:32:06.460 and, I don't know, just like GDP ticking up.

00:32:11.960 Yeah.

00:32:13.180 What is it?

00:32:14.480 Well, first of all, I think that people need to appreciate

00:32:17.960 how fully they lost the argument,

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.

00:32:32.420 It is now the baseline position

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

00:32:40.020 like prey on American workers 0.94

00:32:42.100 and prey on American industries. 0.77

00:32:43.480 Immigration restriction? 0.69

00:32:44.600 Immigration restriction.

00:32:45.560 Again, there is, obviously, 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

00:32:53.740 undercut the wages of Native American workers.

00:32:55.740 Again, that is just boilerplate at this point in the GOP.

00:32:59.580 And I mean, even things like

00:33:00.760 when the president said a few weeks ago

00:33:03.340 that, you know, yeah, he absolutely wanted to, like,

00:33:06.680 seize the equity of the AI companies.

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,

00:33:17.360 and he just said it.

00:33:18.280 And by the way, nobody really even protested.

00:33:20.580 So, like, the president has already,

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

00:34:02.460 from Milton Friedman to Hamilton.

00:34:04.280 And to some degree, George Washington.

00:34:05.640 Right, 200 years backwards in history, actually.

00:34:07.820 That's very much a foundation

00:34:08.860 of American developmental economics and economic policy.

00:34:13.100 And I do think, you know,

00:34:16.160 I don't want to say you can go back to the future

00:34:19.220 or, you know, forward to the past,

00:34:22.540 but I do think fundamentally

00:34:24.680 that Hamiltonian tradition

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

00:35:28.220 into a sort of idol,

00:35:30.520 then you end up sacrificing

00:35:31.900 a lot of the things that matter most.

00:35:33.440 And I do think that, you know,

00:35:34.940 for our friends who are sort of

00:35:35.920 on the more laissez-faire side

00:35:37.600 of the American right,

00:35:39.060 in hindsight,

00:35:40.560 part of why Milton Friedman's ideas

00:35:43.420 made more sense in the 1980s

00:35:46.240 is because they were being advocated

00:35:48.800 in a country that still had

00:35:50.320 a very rich and powerful

00:35:53.000 institutional Christianity. 0.88

00:35:55.080 And so, like, being laissez-faire 0.95

00:35:58.100 in a world where there are Christian guardrails on everything 0.97

00:36:02.340 is a much different proposition 0.99

00:36:04.680 than being laissez-faire in a world

00:36:06.920 where globalized liberalism has become

00:36:09.520 the sort of status quo of American elites.

00:36:12.100 Of course, because so much of that liberalism,

00:36:15.300 classical variety or more modern variety,

00:36:18.440 it is resting upon a foundation that it did not create,

00:36:22.980 and a foundation that it in many ways weakens.

00:36:25.480 So obviously we're-

00:36:26.320 I think that's exactly right.

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.

00:36:37.500 He's, you know, on the older side of things.

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 back to the vice president. But first, you need to go to leafilter.com slash Knowles, K-N-O-W-L-E-S.

00:38:12.160 One of the most expensive habits people have is trying to save money. Not all the time,

00:38:16.680 but when it comes to buying cheap versions of things that actually matter, everyone does it.

00:38:20.760 You buy the knockoff phone charger. Sweet little Lisa was talking about this the other day.

00:38:24.500 You buy whatever it is, the bargain power tool, the very suspiciously affordable version of the

00:38:29.700 thing you actually wanted. Then for weeks, you convince yourself you're a financial genius.

00:38:33.240 Then it breaks. Then you buy the big one, the real one, and then you've paid twice. Don't do that.

00:38:37.800 I've learned over the years, some things are worth doing right the first time. That is especially

00:38:40.780 true when it comes to protecting your home. Do not cheap out on your gutter guard, okay? Leaf

00:38:46.820 Filter is not just another gutter guard. It is a trusted name built on more than 20 years of

00:38:52.440 engineering and over 50 patents. There are a lot of companies that want to claim that they're just

00:38:57.120 as good as Leaf Filter. You've heard of Leaf Filter. This is just as good. You can save a

00:39:01.540 little money though. No, you ain't going to save any money. You want to get what is already a

00:39:05.540 terrific deal for the real thing. Start protecting your home today with Leaf Filter, America's number

00:39:10.140 one gutter protection system. Schedule your free inspection at leaffilter.com slash Knowles up to

00:39:15.220 35% off at leaffilter.com slash Knowles. Minimum purchase required restrictions apply. See

00:39:19.940 representative for warranty and promotion details. The grill is shot. The chairs are held together by

00:39:25.560 optimism. And what happened to the rug? Sounds like your outdoor setup is not ready for patio

00:39:30.920 season. Fix it all with Wayfair. Shop Wayfair for grills, rugs, furniture, and more. With 20 million

00:39:37.880 five-star reviews, room of choice delivery, and expert setup on qualifying orders, it's never

00:39:43.280 been easier to do more for less. Get 10% off your first eligible purchase. Hurry to Wayfair.com or

00:39:49.660 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...

00:40:49.500 see this is what's

00:40:56.580 this is what's very hard

00:40:57.620 about this question

00:40:58.440 but

00:40:59.460 I

00:41:00.580 I might actually say

00:41:03.440 again

00:41:06.660 not Frank Meyer

00:41:10.540 but the Catholic 0.71

00:41:11.640 who was pushing back

00:41:13.160 against Frank Meyer

00:41:13.880 well Meyer converted

00:41:14.820 in the end

00:41:15.380 he did convert

00:41:16.160 in the end

00:41:16.660 I'm talking about his

00:41:17.780 his interlocutor

00:41:18.680 I can't remember

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

00:42:30.100 than Bozell.

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.

00:43:09.480 Iran immediately comes out and says,

00:43:10.880 we have not scheduled Peace Talks Tuesday.

00:43:12.960 Then we're in a ceasefire, but we keep shooting at each other.

00:43:16.120 Then the Iranians say, we can't get a deal

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.

00:43:25.060 But Hezbollah, which works for Iran,

00:43:26.940 says we are not going to abide by the deal.

00:43:29.120 And then the Strait of Hormuz is open,

00:43:30.780 but some people say it's closed.

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?

00:44:04.700 And crucially, how significant will that be?

00:44:08.080 for not just the midterms, but 2028?

00:44:11.380 Well, first of all, I do think that things are much different

00:44:15.060 than they were even a few months ago.

00:44:17.800 I'm not saying they're going to, you know,

00:44:19.400 I can't predict, of course, the future.

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

00:44:29.420 that we've already had.

00:44:30.480 Those are definitely happening tomorrow.

00:44:32.940 One of the things I find just fascinating 1.00

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

00:47:55.360 we have the option of banking our wins

00:47:59.640 and then, of course, doing things on top of that

00:48:02.640 if the president feels that we have to.

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.

00:48:09.400 But what's happening right now

00:48:11.240 is he's letting those options play out

00:48:13.340 in an environment where there is significantly less pressure

00:48:16.620 on the world energy economy.

00:48:19.220 And this is my biggest frustration

00:48:21.360 with right-wing critics of what we've done

00:48:23.580 over the last few months in Iran

00:48:25.380 is that they don't realize

00:48:27.780 how completely they were losing

00:48:30.900 the political argument

00:48:32.040 because of what was happening

00:48:33.780 to world energy markets.

00:48:35.220 So what the president

00:48:36.140 of the United States has done...

00:48:37.580 You're talking about the critics

00:48:38.480 who want more bombs dropping on.

00:48:40.220 Their attitude is just drop bombs 0.91

00:48:43.320 and drop bombs and drop bombs

00:48:44.700 and they can't really articulate

00:48:46.300 to what end.

00:48:47.260 What the president is saying,

00:48:49.320 I'm willing to drop bombs

00:48:50.680 and he's clearly shown

00:48:51.580 that he's willing to drop bombs

00:48:52.720 but only if it serves an objective.

00:48:55.800 And so what he's doing right now

00:48:57.860 is taking a lot of pressure

00:48:59.660 off of the world economy,

00:49:01.580 the world energy economy in particular,

00:49:03.700 while not giving up a single one of his gains

00:49:06.180 and while preserving a lot of optionality.

00:49:08.540 I think that's a very good place for us to be in,

00:49:11.480 but there's uncertainty

00:49:12.800 because no one can be certain

00:49:15.020 what the Iranians are going to do. 0.53

00:49:15.980 Right, so then the message, 0.81

00:49:17.180 if you're an Iranian,

00:49:18.100 the message you're getting from the U.S.

00:49:19.220 is not, okay, we've settled this,

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.

00:49:35.660 And if you actually behave, you won't, right?

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,

00:50:37.260 diplomatic, economic, and military leverage.

00:50:39.460 What they're saying right now for the consumption of their domestic audience,

00:50:42.740 It really doesn't matter.

00:50:44.940 What matters is what's going to happen.

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?

00:51:22.220 Or maybe it is that today.

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

00:51:50.180 That would be intolerable. 1.00

00:51:51.620 Unpredictability, yes, because the Iranians are inherently unpredictable. 1.00

00:51:54.880 Their government's very unstable.

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?

00:52:13.740 The answer is obviously yes.

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.

00:53:08.860 I think Marcos said this the other day.

00:53:10.600 He said this is the end of the beginning, okay?

00:53:13.280 There is a lot more game to play.

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.

00:53:46.320 I appreciate it.

00:53:46.860 Because, look, I was very skeptical of this intervention before, during, and after.

00:53:51.980 Sure.

00:53:52.740 And I favor or restrain foreign policy.

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?

00:54:06.140 90%, 80%, 90%.

00:54:07.380 How many of you want to go to war with Iran?

00:54:09.720 Like 10%, 20%, none.

00:54:11.660 And you say, well, those are in conflict.

00:54:13.840 Yes.

00:54:14.140 I've seen the same polls.

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.

00:54:22.680 It really does seem to be dominating.

00:54:24.300 You look at China.

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.

00:54:33.520 It's so dangerous.

00:54:34.820 We're not going to release this to the public.

00:54:36.880 Wall Street Journal reports China just made its own mythos.

00:54:39.600 It's out. 1.00

00:54:40.020 It's so much for that.

00:54:41.120 That we're clearly in some kind of AI arms race.

00:54:45.880 We appear to be in a Cold War. 0.78

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.

00:55:25.820 I'm very focused on being vice president.

00:55:27.800 No, it was very slick, but I refuse to accept it.

00:55:31.960 This aggression will not stand.

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?

00:55:49.440 And you're right.

00:55:50.820 We don't want to lose the AI race to China.

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.

00:56:02.400 That is part of it.

00:56:04.180 I actually mean, I'm not sure,

00:56:07.220 I don't think many Americans have a good understanding

00:56:09.400 of how the Chinese actually think about AI.

00:56:11.640 I think there's a part of the Chinese policy set,

00:56:15.240 you know, Xi's inner circle,

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,

00:56:26.780 but we don't want to win either.

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

00:56:44.360 on Mayflower because our country turns 250 years old this week, the semi-quincentennial of a

00:56:50.300 country built by tobacco. It deserves a cigar worthy of the occasion. I have been teasing this

00:56:54.500 for some months now. It's finally arrived. It is our special 250th anniversary of America,

00:57:00.820 Mayflower Blend, and it is called Mayflower Dawn of America, special reserve edition of our

00:57:07.320 best-selling flagship blend. This is wrapped in a seven-year-aged true USA Connecticut tobacco

00:57:14.520 wrapper. This is grown in the shade of New England. This is the kind of tobacco, it's a

00:57:19.720 more aged, delicious version of the kind of tobacco I grew up smoking. You'll get notes of

00:57:24.280 cream, almond, toasted bread, coffee, presented exclusively in a commemorative box of 10,

00:57:28.780 Each cigar sealed in its own tube.

00:57:30.760 The tubes are beautiful.

00:57:31.660 On the secondary band, you'll find the words from our framers to ourselves and our posterity.

00:57:36.240 It's just killer.

00:57:37.440 It's just a killer cigar.

00:57:38.560 It's in very, very limited quantity.

00:57:40.280 It was hard to get this tobacco in the first place.

00:57:42.240 I'm telling you, this is a limited batch.

00:57:43.860 I don't want to hear it.

00:57:44.440 When they're gone, they're gone.

00:57:45.340 You must be 21 years old or older to order.

00:57:47.820 Voidware prohibited conditions and exclusions apply.

00:57:51.300 Celebrate Canada Day by getting even more for your points.

00:57:55.080 It's the Super Redemption event at Shoppers Drug Mart.

00:57:57.900 Friday, June 26th to Wednesday, July 1st.

00:58:01.320 Valid in-store and online.

00:58:05.980 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

00:58:42.740 the information economy in the United States.

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.

00:59:04.220 There is, you have to sort of pick a side.

00:59:06.780 Yeah.

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.

00:59:20.140 The data center thing is interesting.

00:59:23.160 Like, just if you look at the polling,

00:59:25.120 I've talked to some friends of mine

00:59:26.260 who work in the AI world about this.

00:59:27.900 I don't know if I've ever seen,

00:59:29.160 I mean, like AI data centers

00:59:30.720 are about as popular as herpes.

00:59:33.480 It's unbelievable how bad the polling is.

00:59:36.500 And my view on this is that

00:59:38.680 it's not really about the data centers,

00:59:40.620 it's about the energy.

00:59:42.000 And that 99% of the backlash to AI data centers

00:59:45.180 is because we're allowing these data centers,

00:59:47.780 especially in blue states

00:59:48.860 where they make it hard to build power to tap into the grid.

00:59:51.980 So an AI data center literally means

00:59:53.660 you're going to be paying more electricity

00:59:55.740 so that, you know, somebody in Silicon Valley

00:59:58.460 can make another billion dollars.

01:00:00.640 Like, going back to the point about the dignity of human beings,

01:00:03.560 that is not a good trade.

01:00:04.640 That's not a trade that we accept.

01:00:06.040 We should accept.

01:00:07.260 But I think the most important solution there

01:00:09.600 is just to build more power. 0.96

01:00:12.400 And where I think the Chinese are way ahead of us in AI, 1.00

01:00:15.680 it's the only area, 0.97

01:00:16.780 is the Chinese are not afraid to build power.

01:00:19.880 We are.

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,

01:00:31.440 they're going to be the casualty of this war.

01:00:33.780 Between building power and the environmental movement

01:00:36.660 in the United States,

01:00:37.920 AI data centers are going to be the first casualty.

01:00:40.700 And, you know, my advice to the AI CEOs

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,

01:01:09.620 that global warming was solved.

01:01:11.820 This happens to coincide

01:01:13.680 with this energy crisis for,

01:01:15.640 who knows?

01:01:16.220 Maybe it's a coincidence.

01:01:17.180 Maybe it's Providence.

01:01:17.860 Who knows?

01:01:18.420 I know you have to go.

01:01:19.640 Yeah.

01:01:19.740 But you have very important things to do,

01:01:20.840 like help run the whole country.

01:01:22.120 I have two brief questions

01:01:23.640 before you go.

01:01:24.540 And they're sort of like

01:01:25.260 pick a name kind of questions.

01:01:26.480 Sure.

01:01:27.220 The leading Democrat for 28.

01:01:30.800 Hmm.

01:01:32.300 I think it's got to be AOC.

01:01:34.120 I know that's probably

01:01:34.800 conventional wisdom, but...

01:01:36.320 Well, no, I think the conventional wisdom

01:01:37.500 right now is Newsom.

01:01:38.860 No, no.

01:01:39.620 I don't buy that.

01:01:41.480 I think he hurt himself with his comment

01:01:44.740 to an audience full of black Americans 0.97

01:01:47.040 that I'm low IQ just like you. 0.99

01:01:50.460 Sort of bad in a couple of different ways.

01:01:53.000 How do you do?

01:01:54.640 At least two major political gaffes

01:01:58.380 produced in a single sentence.

01:02:00.060 The major political gaffes I've had,

01:02:01.460 it's sort of much less efficient than that.

01:02:05.580 So yeah, look, I think all-

01:02:07.720 AOC, more than Ossoff,

01:02:08.960 more than any of these other guys?

01:02:11.300 Yeah, I mean, it's funny.

01:02:12.820 It's the AOC versus Ossoff thing.

01:02:14.880 I guess the question would be,

01:02:17.040 who do you think really has the power

01:02:18.620 in the Democratic Party?

01:02:20.940 And if you think the answer is like Wall Street

01:02:24.800 and the left of center business community,

01:02:27.460 then it would be Ossoff.

01:02:28.900 And if you think it's the universities,

01:02:30.080 it would be AOC.

01:02:31.400 So David Brooks made an observation.

01:02:33.360 I think David Brooks probably hates my guts,

01:02:35.800 but he like occasionally will say something

01:02:37.840 that I think is genuinely brilliant,

01:02:39.220 and this was one of them.

01:02:40.660 He said that the fundamental problem

01:02:42.200 with today's Democratic Party

01:02:43.220 is that the power center has shifted

01:02:44.960 from unions to universities.

01:02:48.100 And if that's right, AOC will be the nominee.

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.

01:02:57.620 Because, you know, you walk into a union hall,

01:03:01.140 even where 70% of the guys are still voting Dem,

01:03:04.520 fundamentally like a normal place

01:03:06.760 with normal social values.

01:03:09.200 It's not the university, like, you know,

01:03:13.640 it's not the university break room.

01:03:16.320 Faculty lounge, yeah.

01:03:17.060 Faculty lounge, that's the word that I'm looking for.

01:03:18.820 Right.

01:03:19.380 So, and this, by the way, is another reason

01:03:22.040 why I'm just fundamentally pessimistic about the Dems,

01:03:24.600 because, you know, it's one thing to be

01:03:28.420 a socially pragmatic left-of-center Democrat

01:03:33.240 on economic issues, 0.97

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.

01:04:36.920 Yes, yeah.

01:04:37.720 I mean, you saw it just the other day,

01:04:39.600 this Scott Wiener, this guy who's running for Pelosi's seat.

01:04:43.640 Like a true deviant.

01:04:46.920 I mean, there's like something wrong with that guy.

01:04:49.120 His crowning political achievement

01:04:50.820 was encouraging pederasty in the law. 0.67

01:04:53.020 That's not an exaggeration.

01:04:54.680 And he was kicked out of the trans march

01:04:56.740 for being too right-wing.

01:04:58.500 You know, so that's basically the state of the party.

01:05:01.220 I think, Scott, sometimes you eat the bar

01:05:04.720 and sometimes the bar eats you, my friend.

01:05:06.760 Best of luck.

01:05:07.820 Last question I have for you before I let you go.

01:05:10.380 Last name to name.

01:05:11.980 Who's your confirmation saint?

01:05:14.040 Augustine, St. Augustine.

01:05:15.500 Yep, that's right.

01:05:16.820 So that was an easy choice for me.

01:05:18.560 Confessions was such a big part of my own faith journey.

01:05:21.840 I write about it a little bit in the book,

01:05:23.200 but you know, the city of God and everything that he wrote.

01:05:25.720 So that's an easy one.

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.

01:05:43.880 That is, now what am I going to get him?

01:05:46.060 I don't know.

01:05:46.440 I don't know what I'm going to need him.

01:05:47.380 Mr. Vice President, such a pleasure.

01:05:49.140 Thank you for being very, very generous with your time.

01:05:52.060 Excellent book.

01:05:52.940 Thank you.

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.

01:06:03.080 Good to see you, man. Thanks.

01:06:23.160 payday for life what would you feel free to do maybe take a long weekend every weekend or try

01:06:28.900 a bunch of new hobbies would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free don't worry we get it

01:06:34.000 every twenty dollar ticket could win you three thousand dollars a month for life and supports

01:06:38.700 life-saving cancer research at the princess margaret feel free to buy your payday for life

01:06:43.060 ticket today raffle number 155-2194 please play responsibly

The Michael Knowles Show - June 30, 2026

Ep. 2005 - ＂I've Never Said This In An Interview Before＂｜ JD Vance On Faith, Iran & AI

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

The Michael Knowles Show - June 30, 2026

Ep. 2005 - ＂I've Never Said This In An Interview Before＂ ｜ JD Vance On Faith, Iran & AI

Episode Stats

Summary

Transcript

Ep. 2005 - ＂I've Never Said This In An Interview Before＂｜ JD Vance On Faith, Iran & AI