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

Episode Date: June 30, 2026

I sit down with Vice President JD Vance to discuss the conflict with Iran, the growing controversy surrounding AI data centers, and his conversion to Catholicism detailed in his new book Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith. Ep. 2005 - - - Today's Sponsors: PureTalk - Make the switch in as little as 10 minutes and start saving today! Visit https://PureTalk.com/KNOWLES Angel Studios - Go to https://Angel.com/knowles. Join the Angel Guild today. Take advantage of our special offer and become a premium member for the lowest price of the season and get two free tickets to see 'Young Washington' in theaters this Independence Day. Leaf Filter - Schedule your free inspection and get up to 35% off at https://leaffilter.com/KNOWLES - - - DailyWire+: Click here to join the member-exclusive portion of my show: https://dailywire.com/subscribe Becoming a Daily Wire member allows you to see all of our content ad-free. 📲 Download the free Daily Wire app today on iPhone, Android, Roku, Apple TV, Samsung, and more. 📘 My book "Speechless: Controlling Words, Controlling Minds" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/Speechless 📗 My book "Reasons to Vote for Democrats: A Comprehensive Guide" is available here: https://dwplus.shop/ReasonsToVoteForDemocrats 🕯️ Get your Michael Knowles candles: https://thecandleclub.com/collections/michael-knowles 👕 Don’t dress like a squish. Shop my merch here: https://dwplus.shop/MichaelKnowlesMerch - - - Socials: YouTube — https://youtube.com/@MichaelKnowles Facebook — https://www.facebook.com/michaelknowlesshow Instagram — https://www.instagram.com/michaeljknowles TikTok — https://www.tiktok.com/@notmichaelknowles X — https://twitter.com/michaeljknowles - - - Privacy Policy: https://www.dailywire.com/privacy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Please play responsibly. I love a good conversion story. I don't usually do interviews on my daily show. I rarely plug politicians' books. But when I heard there was a new book out on a religious conversion, specifically a conversion to Catholicism, I could not resist sitting down with the author who just happens to be the vice president of the United States, with war brewing around the world, political breakdown at home, especially on the right, and AI Advantage, 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. I'm Michael Knowles. It's the Michael Knowles show.

Mr. Vice President, thank you for being here. It's good to see you. Thanks for having me. I'm really sorry that we're not in my usual. studio. We're in your town. If we were in my studio, we would be in nice, big, comfortable chairs, maybe with a cigar. This is a little bit more formal, but I really appreciate the opportunity. Of course. Because I've read a lot of political books. I have a lot of friends who are politicians, and most of the books are horrible, and I don't even actually read them. This book, I really, really enjoyed. It's not flattery at all. Everyone needs to go out and get Communion by J.D. Vance.

Thank you. Because this touches on something that I care about more than Iran and AI and 2028. We'll get to all of it, which I have to ask about. Of course. But this touches on something I care about a lot more, which is a religious conversion, specifically to Catholicism. 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. Yes. Yeah. So I have to ask, one, why did you do it? And two, you're not the only one. You are in many ways the kind of voice of the millennials and the Zuma, older Zuma generation here. There's been a big surge in religious reversion and especially to Catholicism. Why?

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a wireless network that values what you value. Okay, back to the vice president. Okay, so before, first of all, thank you for doing this. It's good to see you. Thanks for coming to, D.C. I know we had planned to schedule this last week, I believe, and I had to go to Switzerland, so thank you for being. I will never forgive the Iranians for doing that to me.

But we're here now. We're the Swiss. But, okay, before you get into the Y Catholicism, I think you have to get into the Y Christianity, then not Christianity, then back to Christianity, and then get there. So let me give like the 90-second summary of my faith journey from when I was a kid until I was 24, 25.

So basically, raised an evangelical household, raised by my grandmother, but with like a lot of Pentecostal flavor from my biological father. basically unchurched. I would go to church with my dad, my stepmom sometimes, but mainly it was with my grandma. We would watch TBN.

We'd watch Paul and Jane Crouch. We'd watch Billy Graham revivals. And I realized after my grandmother died, this is when I was 21 years old, maybe 20. But right before I left for Iraq in 2005, Mammal died. And I realized that was my connection to Christianity. So there was no institutional connection.

And that's sort of one of the subtext of the book. book is trying to raise my own kids in a more institutional faith and the hope that it takes in a way that I didn't. Because two years after my grandmother was dead, I called myself an atheist. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. So I'm an atheist. I become, and maybe I always was a striver. I'm obsessed with achievement for achievement's sake. And I guess, Mr. Vice President? Shock to hear it. Yeah. And I get to law school and I'm at Yale. And I realize that I've like won all these competitions, the meritocratic competitions that life had told me to win, but I found them

deeply unfulfilling. And frankly, I found that I was becoming a shitty person in the process or a bad person, excuse me, if you have to edit that out. I don't know. What are the rules on? We never go blue on that show. We make exceptions for top government officials. Okay, I have terrible language as I talk about in the book. It's one of my many non-Christian or one of my many traits I have to work on as a Christian. Okay. So I am at law school. I'm doing very well in sort of all the worldly things. I'm doing not so well in the non-worldly things. I fall in love.

That woman is now the second lady and soon to be mother of four Vance children, currently the mother of three Vance children. And I sort of realize like everything I've geared my life towards of the last few years is hollow. But this person that I'm in love with, she really wants me to be a good husband, eventually, a good father. She wants me to care about virtue of being a good human being and like the deepest sense of the word.

and I kept on returning this idea that the elites who fashioned themselves hyper-rational, they didn't believe in superstitious things like Jesus Christ as the Son of God, they were the ones who seemed to be the less focused on what mattered, the least focused on what mattered. And meanwhile, it was all these sort of bumpkins that I dismissed as sub-rational, superstitious, who seemed to have things figured out in a much deeper way. So that leads me down the pathway back to Christianity, and I think that was almost 90 seconds, maybe a little bit long. But, okay, then it's like, how do you become a Christian in this world?

And there are all of these things that attracted me to Catholicism. So, number one, I really liked the sense that it was institutionally stable. Okay. And again, going back to my unchurched upbringing, when things were going well in my religious life, it was very much attached to like a single individual, whether it was my grandmother or a pastor, and sometimes the pastors would come and go. I was really attracted to the idea that like in this church, the mass was more or less the same, whether you were on vacation in some faraway country or whether you were in suburban Cincinnati. But I also like doctrinally that,

you know, like things didn't change based on who the person giving the homily was. And that sense of stability, the idea that Christian doctrine was fundamentally founded on Jesus Christ and the church beyond that, that if it really is founded on Jesus Christ, it shouldn't change. Now, of course, it's going to have to apply itself to new circumstances when Jesus Christ died and rose from the dead. We didn't have automobiles. We didn't have modern narcotics. We didn't have a lot of the things that they were dealing with at the time. But the principle is fundamentally immovable. And then there's an open question about how you apply the principle to new things. And then the final thing I'd say is, and then we can, I'm sure, go into the details. I'm trying to summarize this very

quickly because I know we only have an hour. But there is something about the connection between the past, the present, and the future that I really liked about the Catholic Church. This idea that you had your role to play, whether it was a big role or a small role in the life of the church. You were inheriting that from thousands of years of history, and you would eventually die and hopefully be rejoined with the Lord, and you would pass on that legacy to some other person who would then carry it on after you. That continuity across the generations I found very, very attractive. And one of the things I write about in the book is that sort of one of these existential fears that animate me, I've never been particularly afraid of dying.

You know, it's funny when we had this sort of situation at the Willard Hotel, or no, we're in the Willard Hotel right now. Currently. Where was the White House Correspondents Association dinner? Anyway, there was the assassination. It was. It was at the Hilton, maybe? Yeah. Wherever it was.

And it was obviously focused on the president, but, you know, you hear loud noises and then the guys with the machine guns run in and you're kind of like, oh, something kind of crazy is going on. I just, I don't, the idea of dying doesn't really scare me. It has never scared me, whether as an atheist or as a Christian. And I talk about that a little bit in the book, Communion, you should buy it, that I've always been somewhat troubled by that because, you know, if you think potentially hell is waiting you on the other end, shouldn't you be really afraid of it, but I've just never been afraid of dying. What I have been afraid of, and there's this existential dread that kind of animates me, we haven't gotten into this in any of the interviews that I've done, but I guess we can get into it here, is this idea that the continuity across generation. is going to stop with us. Yeah. That we inherited something and instead of building upon it and passing it on,

it's just going to die with us. You see it decay. Yeah. Of decay and of stasis rather than dynamism and growth. And that, like I felt like the Catholicism's continuity was in some ways an antidote to that. Because it's, you know, yeah, there are certainly things you can look at our world. I think there are things you can look at and be very hopeful about.

There are things you can look at in our modern world and be very despairing about. But if you look at the long history of the Christian faith, it's very hard not to say that many, many other people and many, many generations past had it far worse than we did. Yes. And that gives me a certain sense of, okay, like, maybe we should stop whining and try to build something rather than just complain about how bad things are for us right now. Right.

It is the church is the only institution from antiquity that has survived in the West. all the time. So I totally get it, and I feel that anxiety. It bothers me, whether we're talking about a restaurant or we're talking about a monument in Washington, D.C., it bothers me to see it get dirtier and fall apart and be neglected even in the minds. Absolutely. Yeah, I feel that same anxiety. And even your story of, you come from modest means, you end up at Yale, you become much more conservative and Christian, I guess, as a result of that, lose a maternal figure, come to the faith, in a large way through intellectual figures, it resonates. I get what you're talking about. In the book, you talk about a few of those figures in particular, Augustine, Aquinas,

René Girard, the 20th century Catholic writer about magnetic desire. Yes, preach. I love it. This then leads me to wonder, after you were brought back to the faith, in no small part, through the intellect, thinking of the decline of civilization, thinking about these great writers, thinking about the doctrines and parsing differences between them. Yep. Did you have any religious experience, what C.S. Lewis would call the numinous experience? Did you ever see a ghost kind of thing? You know, never quite saw ghosts, but definitely.

And, you know, one of the things I talk about in the book, and this is something I'm still very much working on, is when I return to the faith, one of the things that had just degraded during my many years of not being religious at all was my ability to pray. And so I remember distinctively 14, 15, 16, like talking to God and being able to talk to God in this very natural way. And then I start returning to the faith

and I go to pray and I'm not exactly sure what to say. And there's this interesting way in which just that prayer muscle had kind of atrophied. It's come back. I don't know they just come back all the way. But one of the things, again, I really liked about the sort of the aim ancient Christian canon was all of these prayers that were just, you say the prayer.

Of course, the most important is the Lord's Prayer. There's the Glory be, glory be to the Father to the Son and to the Holy Spirit. And you sort of go through these prayers. 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. And so, yeah, like Augustine, you know, Augustine was fascinating. Aquinas is fascinating. Gerard was particularly fascinating to me,

but the faith can't just be something that you think about. It has to be something that you practice, and it has to be something that you feel. And that was very much, again, something that was part of my own faith journey I write about in the book. But the interesting thing... There's this quote from Pulp Fiction

I keep returning to, which is, I'm going to butcher a little bit, but it's right after, you know, Samuel Jackson and John Travolta, these gangsters just murder a few people. But they miss one guy, and that guy's like hiding in the bathroom. So he pops out and he shoots at point-blank range, Samuel Jackson is totally fine, right? Despite the fact that multiple bullets should have hit him.

And he kind of looks around, he kills the guy who tried to shoot him, and then he has this religious sort of epiphany, and that's really the entire movie from his perspective is this ongoing religious journey. Now, what's fascinating about it is he talks about miracles. And there's this debate between him and John Travolta about whether this counts as a miracle. And he says, look, what matters is not whether this is an according to Hoyle miracle. What matters is that I felt the touch of God.

Yeah. Okay. And just two things sitting here right now when I think about like feeling the touch of God. Okay. One of which I didn't even write about in the book. It just occurred to me now, but I'm going to tell it to you. The first one, and I guess he's out of himself now, this is Ross Dauphin and I. We're having a conversation. This is in 2019, probably. And he at the time was one of the foremost conservative critics of Pope Francis. In my view of the papacy is, you know, you don't treat it like you're a congressional representative. It's not a political office.

Obviously, you can have pragmatic disagreements. But, like, you should have a little respect for it as a practicing Catholic. Yes. Okay. And so Ross and I were going back and forth about whether he was properly differential. even to this person who was, you know, clearly not aligned with American conservatives on a whole host of issues. Very diplomatic way to put it, yeah. Yeah, yeah.

So we're at a conference, we're having this argument, we're in like the basement of this hotel. There's kind of an open bar that's been set out for us. And we're drinking too much and talking about Catholicism and talking about the Pope. And I make this kind of really strident argument about the papacy. And, you know, even talking about it, it sounds insane. but there's like a wine glass back behind the bar, and it's not like we're in southeast in Ohio, it's not like there was an earthquake,

just kind of one glass kind of jumps off and shatters on the ground in the middle of this conversation, and both Ross and I have this sort of moment. We're like, oh, that was really weird. Yeah. And again, is it an according to Hoyle miracle? Maybe, maybe not, but I felt the touch of God. Maybe.

If a guy can arise from the dead, a glass can fall off a shelf. Absolutely, absolutely. So that felt like a very powerful moment. I'll give you another just very stupid moment, but not stupid. It's disrespectful to God. Providential. But, okay, so there's a church in Cincinnati that does really early confessions on either Saturday or Sunday. Okay, it's in the Oakley neighborhood of Cincinnati, St. Cecilia's Church.

okay. And they would always do really early confessions, I think on Sunday. So like, you know, if I hadn't gone to confession a couple months, I always wake up really early, but you had to be there by like 7 a.m. or something, okay. So I'd get in my minivan and I'd go to confession before the kids were even awake on a Sunday morning. Okay. I remember one time distinctively being like, you know, if you weren't in line by 715 or sort of you kind of missed your window, I remember distinctively like I woke up at 702 later than I normally wake up. And I'm like, there's no way I can make it to St. Cecilia's Church. But I just felt this little voice, like, go and try to make it. Maybe the line will be extra long. Maybe you'll get it at the very end. And the ride from my house to St. Cecilius is probably a 15-minute drive.

I got there in like eight minutes because every single red light was green. Yeah. And like, again, maybe every red light was green. Maybe it was just a coincidence of the universe, but I felt the touch of God. I got in line in time. and just little things like that.

You know, my attitude on this is, I've talked with buddies about this, some of whom are still very, very atheist and very non-religious, is like, I really do think that there are these moments where God speaks to all of us. You just have to be trying to listen a little bit.

Yeah. And, yeah, you know, every few months I'll have a little moment like that where it's like, huh, that was kind of weird. Like, what are the odds that the 25 traffic lights from my house to St. Cecilia, maybe it's only a dozen, but there are a lot of them, that all of them would be green

in such a way that made it possible for me to get there very quickly. Right, right. Anyway, we will get to much, much more with the vice president. First, though, you need to get to angel.com slash knolls. The story of George Washington did not begin at Valley Forger, Yorktown. It began decades earlier, with a 20-year-old facing failure, surviving near death and being shaped by Providence into the man who would found the greatest nation in human history. Young Washington tells that story, directed by John Irwin, starring Andy Circus, Ben Kingsley, and The Great, the greatest, Kelsey Grammer. No revisionism, no rewriting, just the truth of who Washington was and what God had planned for him.

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250th birthday. I've noticed this. You mentioned confession about the state of grace. Yeah. And something about the state of grace that's really nice is the priest cuts all the demons off you, and so your life is better. But the other thing, just about your perception, it seems to me that all those little signs, you know, the Christian view of the world is a deeply semiotic view. Nothing is merely what it seems. You know, everything means something. St. Thomas Aquinas begins the Summa Theologiate with that observation. And in the state of grace, you kind of see it a little bit more, I think. But on the flip side, when you're in a real state of sin, you know, Dante and trying to walk up the mountain, sometimes then God, he doesn't just whisper at you,

sometimes he shakes you and says, hey, idiot, you know, pay attention, why aren't you? And so I think, yes, if you go into a room, even of these liberal elites that you assail in the book, that rightly assail, you go into a room and you say, do you believe in God, no, do you believe in miracles, no, do you believe in this, that, no? But if you ask them, something as silly as have you ever seen a ghost, a lot of them will say yes. We all kind of know that there's meaning in the world. We all kind of know that there's meaning in the world. So then on this point, of all, you go to these very liberal institutions. Okay. Can I make an observation just about that? Please. Okay. One of the really interesting things about just the secular, hyper-progressive, hyper-liberal age that we live in

is you realize how many of the rituals and institutions and practices of Catholicism show up in the modern world completely divorced from the God part and the grace part of it. Okay, so we're thankfully, thanks to Donald Trump, I would say. We're past the point where most people, at least that I see, hang out those hideous signs in their yard that say, in this house, we believe, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, you know, love is love. Waterish people, whatever. No person is illegal. Okay.

So that sign is like such a disgusting butchering of the Nicene Creed. And when you realize, you're like, oh my God, people still have this desire to profess to do it very publicly. And even to do it in this kind of cadence that you see in the Nicene Creed. And of course, they do it in this very politically motivated way. Confession is another thing. It's, like, I find, as a, you know, Protestant, I find confession deeply uncomfortable. I still do. Ditto, and I'm a cradle cat.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. But it's just like the craziest ritual. You're going to go in this, you know, the tiny booth and sit there with a total stranger and tell about every terrible thing you've done over the last couple of months. It's nuts. Yeah. But what, if you think about it, it is so similar to the ritual of modern therapy. Of course.

And but minus the guilt and forgiveness. Like the thing that's, you know, I talk about the liberation of guilt. Yes. Because there's actually, you know, I've always heard this phrase Christian guilt or Catholic guilt as if it's terrible to feel guilty when you do something bad. But sometimes if I'm impatient with my kid, for example, it's kind of a good thing to feel guilty. Yes. To feel like there's an inner voice telling you to be a better human being, a better father, a better husband. So then you go and talk to somebody about it, but not in this like, oh, you know, maybe I yelled at my kid because, you know, my mom.

I hate my dad when I was nine years old and I never dealt with the unresolved trauma of it. It's, you know, maybe that there's certainly an element. I do believe that everybody's, the demons of everyone's past continue to follow them around. I write about this concept in the book. But maybe the reason that, you know, you weren't super patient with your kid is just that you're a flawed human being and you screwed up. And there's nothing wrong with saying, I screwed up, I should feel bad about it, and I should make amends. And I think that sort of, that seems to me is a much healthier, but also much truer to human nature way to think about misconduct and right and wrong. Yeah, of course.

I have a buddy, actually, who put a sign in his yard with the same font and says, in this house, we believe in God, the Father Almighty neighbor. That's great. That's brilliant. Yeah, you see all of it. I mean, the transgender transition, which is, you know, they refer to the past as a dead name. I mean, that is a kind of a secular baptism. That's right. You see all of these echoes.

So, look, I guess that gets to the first point, which is why are these young people converting, especially to more liturgical, traditional, especially Catholic religion? Well, because it has the real version of the things that they're seeking in the world. Okay, I get that. Yeah. In harder politics and policy, you're at all of these liberal institutions, Yale Law School especially, but elsewhere, traipsing around rich businesses and all the rest. Sure.

And the one thing that everyone agrees on is meritocracy. Now, you have two, probably my two favorite chapters of the book. One is pulling from Pope Leo the 13th encyclical, Ray Rum Navarum, you call it of New Things. Yep. The other one is borrowing from Thomas Carlyle's mockery of economics is the dismal science. Yes. And these are my two favorite chapters of the book. I was arguing with a colleague of mine.

He's a friend and a colleague. I won't say his name. Okay. He speaks very quickly. doesn't eat shellfish. I'm not going to say, you're a very famous podcaster, but we were arguing about this because I love this perspective of the Catholic social teaching,

the critique of meritocracy, the mockery of economics, which Edmund Burke starts modern conservatism with mocking the economists, sophisters, and calculators who have destroyed Western civilization. But what you write is total heresy and blasphemy compared to the last 30 to 60 years of American conservatism.

Sure. The one thing, no matter what we all disagree on, everyone agreed, meritocracy is good, and that's what the left gets wrong, and we need to double down a meritocracy. You say it stinks. Why? Well, I think a couple things. I mean, first of all, I think that, you know, I think Aristotle once said that virtue lies in the mean. And like any sort of, there's like the vice and the virtue version of anything, I don't think ambition is bad. In fact, I think that if you're ambitious because you want to build, you know, a rocket that goes to the moon, right?

We couldn't have gotten the moon. We're not for that kind of ambition. Or if your ambition is to, you know, build a building that a lot of people live in, that provides comfort and so forth, I think that's good. But I think what we've allowed in our modern society, what meritocracy has done is warped it into ambition for ambition's sake. Ambition not to build something beautiful, but to get ahead of other people. Ambition, not to make an amazing product, but ambition to make a lot of money for money's sake.

And I think that we've allowed that basic human desire to achieve great and beautiful things to be warped into a vice of just being better than other people. And I think that is sort of what Christian teaching is counseling us against. It's okay. You know, I think God makes us, you know, all creatures big and small. Some of us he makes to be ambitious. I'm certainly, you know, an ambitious person. I'm the vice president of the United States.

I think he makes some people who just want more normal things out of life. they want a nice job and they want to provide their kids with nice things, and that's good, too. I think that when it becomes warping and disorienting is when it becomes ambition for ambition's sake. And what the meritocracy, I think the modern meritocracy in 21st century America has done is taught people to want to be better than everyone else. And I think it has two really, really big problems. First of all, if you're orienting yourself not to some objective truth, but to how other people are performing and behaving, you're not your own person, and you're certainly not God's person. You're fundamentally

following the crowd. This is like an insight from René Gerard. So at some level, meritocracy is fundamentally derivative of other people. Yes. That's a bad thing. The second thing is that I actually think that it, I don't know how to put this, but I think that meritocracy can steal from us a sense of what really, really matters. And you saw the, you saw the, you know, at Yale Law School, you see it in any elite institution. You don't see people bragging about their kids in the same way they brag about their jobs. You don't see people bragging about their relationships as you do the same way they brag about their credentials. And so one of the core lessons of my life is that the most valuable thing I got out of law school was friendships,

particularly the relationship with the woman who's now my wife. Those things matter fundamentally way more. Nobody is on their deathbed and looks back and says, this is like the most trite cliche in the world because it's true, nobody looks back and says, I wish that I had spent less time with my son so that my net worth was $1,000 higher. No one thinks that. And yet meritocracy trains people to think exactly that

when they're in the point of their life when those decisions are made. It's also like the definition of cynicism, which knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. And you're telling of these conversations at Yale Law School is, you know, you don't just hear it at Yale law school. You hear it throughout our culture, and they just tell you that all that matters is slaving away doing spreadsheets

for Mr. McGillicuddy at the widget factory to drive up GDP. And so then... And there's a liberation in it. I mean, the craziest conversation that I had, conversations that I had at Yale Law School was people who counted themselves

as feminists, which, you know, to take like the positive spin on feminism, it would be that women should have their same rights as men. And yet they define success and achievement as spending as much time in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs. I mean, it's enough to make somebody a Marxist. And say, you have like totally internalized

a set of ideas that is completely opposed to your well-being as human being. Like if you think that it is liberating for you to sit in a cubicle at Goldman Sachs, you have been had. And we all got to, just admit that before we can make any progress as a civilization. No, I mean, this is really, on the point about Catholic social teaching,

this is the point of Rayram Navarum and Pope Leo the 13th was he said, hold on, communism, totally awful, terrible, you can't be Catholic and communist. Every Pope's census basically said that. But also, we're not ideological laissez-faire capitalists who think we need to send our kids to the coal mines. We have to put these things in their proper order. So then my question for you is, there's been a massive restructuring of what conservatism means. President Trump led a lot of that. So looking ahead, you are the heir apparent now, whether you like it or not, you are.

So looking ahead to 2028 and beyond, if there's this thing going on even beyond you, this restructuring of what it means to be a conservative, then if it's not creative destruction, tax cuts for wealthy people exclusively, and, you're a restructuring of what it means to be a conservative, then if it's not creative destruction, tax cuts for wealthy people exclusively, and, I don't know, just like GDP ticking up. Yeah. What is... Well, first of all, I think that people need to appreciate how fully they lost the argument. So to the point that they've really moved the goalposts. I mean, if you remember when Donald Trump ran for president the first time, the idea of tariffs on imported goods was a heresy in the GOP. Yeah.

It is now the baseline position that virtually every Republican politician adopts is like, Of course, we shouldn't let foreign countries like prey on American workers and prey on American industries. Immigration restriction. Again, there is, obviously, there's a cultural and crime and law and order element to it, but there's also a very powerful economic argument that we don't want to let the wages of immigrants undercut the wages of Native American workers. Again, that is just boilerplate at this point in the GOP. And I mean, even things like when the president said a few weeks ago that, you know, yeah, he absolutely wanted to like seize, seize the equity of the AI companies. And, you know,

you're not supposed to say that. And it's like, guys, he's the president and he sets the agenda and he just said it. And by the way, nobody really even protested. Yeah. So, like, the president has already, and obviously I'm biased I'm as vice president, but the president has already, like,

completely reordered the conversation towards what you might call an American developmentalist approach. Like American economic policy on the right, right, is now much more Alexander Hamilton than it is Milton Friedman. Yeah. I think that's obviously a good thing. You might disagree, but that's just a normative statement.

Notice, though, what you've just said, because for the people who say that betraying some nostalgic retconning of a caricature of the 1980s, that to change that in any way would be abandoning American history and the tradition, you said, hold on, I just went from Milton Friedman to Hamilton. And to some degree, George Washington. Right. 200 years backwards in history, actually. That's very much a foundation of American developmental economics and economic policy. And I do think, you know, I don't want to say you can go back to the future or, you know, forward to the past. But I do think fundamentally that Hamiltonian tradition is going to be what we see on the American right

and will dominate American conservative economic thinking for the future. Yeah. Which is not laissez-faire. It's actually much more about building the kind of tools, building the kind of infrastructure that allow human beings to flourish, that allow national and native industries to flourish at the expense of a hyper-globalized economy. And I think those are the basic principles

that are going to carry us into the future. But to me, it's fundamentally about the dignity of the human person. The economy is a tool to service the dignity of the human person. if a set of economic policies make it easier for a person to raise a family, to earn a living wage, to give back to their community, to maybe go to church on Sunday, or to actually spend some leisure time building the kind of life that matters, like that is the sort of thing that we want to be supportive of. Now, obviously, to do those things, you do need economic development. But if you turn economic development into a sort of idol, then you end up sacrificing a lot of the things that matter. most. And I do think that, you know, for our friends who are sort of on the more laissez-faire side of the American right, in hindsight, part of why Milton Friedman's ideas made more sense in the 1980s is because they were being advocated in a country that still had a very rich and powerful institutional Christianity. And so, like, being laissez-faire in a world where there are

Christian guardrails on everything is a much different proposition than being laissez-faire in a world where globalized liberalism has become the sort of status quo of American elites. Of course, because so much of that liberalism, classical variety or a more modern variety, it is resting upon a foundation that it did not create, you know, and a foundation that in many ways weakens. So obviously really... I think that's exactly right. I think you could say this, 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. He's, you know, on the older side of things. 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. He said, you know, Margaret Thatcher, an amazing human being, like a true giant in the history of Western politics. But, you know, he said, you know, Margaret Thatcher, an amazing human being, But fundamentally, Margaret Thatcher was trying to preserve the shop and the community around the shop that her father had when she was a little girl. And yet, if you look at modern Britain and the result of Margaret Thatcher's policies, you would say that her policies actually got Britain further away from that ideal and not closer to that ideal. That's not, by the way, criticizing her. I think she was trying out something in a very new era in a situation where things were quite broken. But we have to be honest, like what worked and what didn't work.

And I think, unfortunately, I would say Thatcher's politics and a lot of 20th century conservative politics was, it sort of bought the premises of modern liberalism and was not infused enough with the basic Christian underpinning of the West. Yeah, Ayn Rand is not going to save your culture. It's not going to happen. So then we're throwing around all these names, all of our good dead friends. Yep. five figures off the top of your head. Thinkers, intellectuals, or statesman perhaps. Okay.

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Start protecting your home today with Leaf Filter at America's number one gutter protection system. Schedule your free inspection at Leaffilter.com slash Knowles up to 35% off at L-EA-Filter.com slash Noles. Minimum purchase required restrictions supply, see representative for warranty and promotion details. I'm not going to say Jesus because that's too easy, but that's obviously the one and none. I think that's a gimmick. That's the center box on bingo. But so the three who I think have got to be part of this conversation for me are Aquinas, Augustine and René Girard. I talk about the three of them and all of them in different ways, but very, very influential to my own thinking on these topics. If I

So I probably honestly would put Alexander Hamilton in there Or maybe the French economist, I always forget his name Who basically provided a lot of like the developmental influences To Alexander Hamilton in some ways Hamilton was just applying this guy's ideas I will get you the name and you can tell your audience later And then if I had to pick a fifth name it's see this is what's

this is what's very hard about this question but I might actually say um again not Frank Meyer but the Catholic who was pushing back against Frank Meyer well Meyer converted in the end

he did convert in the end I'm talking about his his interlocutor I can't remember his name but he had such Brent Pozole Brent Bozell Brent Bozell Yeah, yeah. Great answer. But like, who ghost wrote conscience of a conservative, I believe? Exactly. Which is why that book was so good. Yeah, that's exactly right. That is a great answer.

That's a guy. Yep. I, too, one of the unsung heroes of 20th century conservatism. He's moderately sung, I should say, moderately sung hero. Yeah, but I also think was way ahead of his time. Yeah. Was very thoughtful about what was actually going on in the conservative movement at the time. Yeah. And if you were to look at somebody, you know, what are my mentors in the investment business? once told me, like, the most valuable thing you can do as an investor as a thinker is to try to identify people who have made discrete predictions about the future and, like, lean on the people who have been more right than wrong. predicting the future is inherently, as you know, a very, very difficult business. But if you get somebody who's willing to actually say what they think is going to happen and is more right than wrong, that's like a very, very important thinker. And I don't

think there's a single person in 1950s America who was more correct about the future of either the American right or the country than Bozell. Great observation. It also reminds me, the only credit I can take on one of these recently is I called the Pope's name, but it was wishcasting. I wasn't predicting it. I just really wanted it to be Leo. I hope that turns out. Speaking of, in the time I have left with you, speaking of international affairs, I understand there's some conflict going on, somewhere in the Middle East, the reason that we couldn't do this interview a couple weeks ago. You're obviously in this 27 hours a day. Correct.

By my understanding, tell me if I have this wrong. By my understanding, the president said on Monday, what we might get peace talks Tuesday, Iran immediately comes out, says we have not scheduled peace talks Tuesday. Then we're in a ceasefire, but we keep shooting at each other. Then the Iranians say, we can't get a deal because Israel keeps firing on Hezbo and southern Lebanon. So then Israel and Lebanon get a deal, a peace deal. But Hezbollah, which works for Iran, says we're not going to abide by the deal. And then the straight-of-ormuzes is open, but some people say it's closed.

And it's not told, but then the Iranians say there are tolls, along with Oman, which we didn't even bring up Oman yet. 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. So now, as we're looking at Schrodinger, straight and Hormuz, or the whole conflict generally, what structurally needs to change to bring about peace? Is there any timeline you foresee on that happening, like a lasting piece? And, and, crucially, how significant will that be for not just the midterms, but 2028? Well, first of all, I do think that things are much different than they were even a few months ago. I'm not saying they're going to, you know, I can't predict, of course, the future. But so one, there are talks. There were scheduled talks, really technical talks building on the negotiation that we've already had. Those are definitely happening tomorrow. One of the things I find just fascinating and frustrating about the Iranians is they'll say, no, no, no, there aren't peace talks ongoing, but there are technical talks between the United States and Iran about the peace deals. 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. One of the things that I is underappreciated about the president's approach to this whole region of the world is he likes to reshuffle the deck and then see where the leverage points are, where the pressure points are, and see where we can make progress.

And that's really where we are right now. Things have changed a lot. The Iranian military is much weaker. The Iranian economy is much weaker. you know, Lebanon and Israel are talking to each other directly in a way that they weren't a few months ago. they both are sort of broadly aligned. And you know, you can even make an argument that if you, if you harmonize the Lebanon-Israel peace deal with the MOU signed between the United States and Iran, what both of those documents fundamentally say is that Lebanon's territorial integrity will be respected.

Okay. So things have definitely changed. I think the question is whether that change is durable. And I don't know when this will air probably tomorrow. Tomorrow. Okay. So, so I think with the press, 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. Number two, we want to see what kind of an arrangement actually exists in the Middle East between not just Iran and the United States, but the GCC, Israel, Lebanon, we're going to play that situation out. And then on the

Strait of Hormuz, I mean, I think you actually said it well, which is that the Strait is open in the sense that to oil traffic, we're seeing more oil come out of the Strait of Hormuz. And some days, actually more oil coming out of the Strait than came out before the war even started. So there's this element of the, you know, where the world oil economy is kind of getting back into year, that's going to take a little bit of time, but you've already seen the prices come way down. Now, what the cynics will say is, well, if you look at the number of ships that are trafficking, that's actually down from the pre-war start. But they're mostly talking about cargo ships and other vessels, at least so far, what we've seen is the oil traffic has reached its pre-war,

its free war height. So I think what the president has told us to do is use this MOU to sort of refill the world's oil economy, to refill some stock. And, you know, to refill some stocks and then to see where the hand is. And, you know, as I've said this repeatedly, if the Iranians are willing to make the commitments that we would like them to make and are willing to back those up with verifiable milestones, then we are going to change our relationship with Iran. And if they don't do that, then nothing has really changed except for what we've already accomplished from the military campaign, which is a lot. So we kind of have two options here. We have the option of pursuing a long-term deal with the Iranians, but that requires a significant

change in their behavior. We have the option of banking our wins, and then, of course, doing things on top of that if the president feels that we have to. And I think both of those options are very much in play, and the president's going to let this play out. But what's happening right now is he's letting those options play out in an environment where there is significantly less pressure on the world energy economy. And this is my biggest frustration with right-wing critics of what we've done over the last few months in Iran is that they don't realize how completely they were losing the political argument because of what was happening to world energy markets. So what the president of the United States has done...

You're talking about the critics who want more bombs dropping on. Yeah. Their attitude is just drop bombs and drop bombs and drop bombs and drop bombs. And they can't. can't really articulate to what end. And what the president is saying, I'm willing to drop bombs. And he's clearly shown that he's willing to drop bombs, but only if it serves an objective. And so what he's doing right now is taking a lot of pressure

off of the world economy, the world energy economy in particular, while not giving up a single one of his gains and while preserving a lot of optionality. I think that's a very good place for us to be in. But there's uncertainty because no one could be certain what the Iranians are going to do. Right. So then the message, if you're an Iranian, the message you're getting from the U.S.

is not, okay, we've settled this. You get to keep the Strait of Hormuz and we'll try to play nice now. The message is, okay, we're going to serve our self-interest by replenishing the oil coffers and get back to us in 60 days. You might have some fire and brimstone coming back down. And if you actually behave, you won't, right? And that's what the president has fundamentally put out there. It is interesting to me because the Iranians have said, we control the strutely. rates and yeah, we're going to let traffic flow for the next 60 days, but then we're going to negotiate over what happens from there. Okay. And what I find just bizarre about that assertion is that nobody from the Gulf Coast, the Gulf Coalition countries, the Arab countries in the

Gulf, and the Omanis, who are sort of the main Iranian theoretically partner, all of them have come out and said, we don't accept this Iranian tolling mechanism. And so, the Iranians keep on asserting something that isn't actually happening right now, and they don't have a credible pathway to make happen in the future. So I do see this as a bit of a side show, because fundamentally, like, their arguments, what I mean is the side show is what they're saying. Yeah.

What will actually happen is going to be determined through a combination of negotiation, diplomatic, economic, and military leverage. What they're saying right now for the consumption of their domestic audience, it really doesn't matter. What matters is what's going to happen. Sure. That's something that we're working on right now. 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 the Hezbollah keeps up to its antics and we can't get a peace deal between these three, four, five, six countries. How significant is that for the Republican chances in 28? I don't mean to only come back to 2028, but I think it helps clarify what it means for the party. 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? Or maybe it is that today. Could this become a major moment in the history of the American Empire and the Republican Party? Well, first of all, I just want to be very clear here. Like, this is not going to end in a place where the Iranians are collecting total. on ships going through the Strait of Hormuz.

There's a lot of uncertainty because we don't know how the Iranians are going to behave. But that is just one thing that every country in the region, including Iran's own allies, say, is unacceptable. That would be intolerable. Unpredictability, yes, because the Iranians are inherently unpredictable. Their government's very unstable. But I don't think that is going to be a situation that exists.

In fact, I feel quite confident that we're not going to have a toll straight of war moves in the future. But, you know, do you write a question about, like, could this be something that affects the chances in 2028. Could this be a very important historical moment? The answer is obviously yes. 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. 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. So I think fundamentally there's a desire here for everyone to say this is over or America, you know, the Democrats and even frankly some Republicans are saying, well, you know, this shows that Trump blinked. And then other people are saying, you know, it's all over. And the Iranians are saying this. And I would be highly skeptical of what everybody says right now. I think Marcos said this the other day. So this is the end of the beginning.

Okay. There is a lot more game to play. And there are a lot more cards that we're going to see to mix metaphors here. And the good thing about it is that we're served by an administration, we're served by a president of United States, who is constantly trying to figure out how to gain an edge for the American people. I ultimately strongly believe we will look back on this moment and say, we got to a good place. it's going to take a lot of work, not just in negotiation arena, but in the arena's too. You know, I have a great deal of sympathy for the administration, actually, on this. I appreciate it. Because, look, I was very skeptical of this intervention before,

before, during, and after. And I favor a restraint foreign policy. But I look at these polls, and I saw a poll a year ago, of Americans, especially on the right. How many of you think that we should stop Iran from getting a nuclear weapon? It's 90 percent, 80, 90 percent. 80, 90 percent. How many of you want to go to war with Iran? Like 10 percent, 20 percent, none. And you say, well, those are in the same polls. Yes. And then even look, to bring it into another issue, it's interesting at this moment that foreign policy, which rarely rises to the top of conservatives' minds, it really does seem to be dominating. You look at China. The Wall Street Journal had this worrisome report out a couple days ago, said that after Anthropic came out with the

mythos AI, they said, this is so good, it's so dangerous, we're not going to release this to the public. Wall Street Journal reports, China just made its own mythos. It's out. It's so much for that. We're clearly in some kind of AI arms race. We appear to be in a cold war. Maybe it gets a little hot even sometimes with China. And Americans are divided on this, even conservatives. On the one hand, we want to win the arms race with China. 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. 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. Well, so in the Trump administration and then looking ahead perhaps to the Vance administration,

what does the American foreign policy look like? Because from what I can tell, we want the privileges of empire, but we don't want the obligations of empire. First of all, I reject the premise of any future Vance administration. I'm very focused on being vice president. No, it was very slick, but I refuse to accept it. This aggression will not stand. But on the Trump administration's policy, I mean, look, we've tried, and I think we've done a good job of balancing the economic benefits with the downsides of artificial intelligence. Okay. And you're right. We don't want to lose the AI race to China. I think there's an interesting question about how much China's own AI policy is fundamentally derivative of us. And I don't just mean them copying American models. That is.

that is part of it. I actually mean, I'm not sure, I don't think many Americans have a good understanding of how the Chinese actually think about AI. I think there's a part of the Chinese policy set, you know, She's inner circle that probably just wants to dominate the AI arms race.

I actually think there is a part of She's inner circle that says we don't want to lose to the United States, but we don't want to win either. That they're, I think they're a little freaked out by it, is what I'm saying. We will get back to the vice president breaking news as it pertains to politics, the world, the entire international order. But first, I have some news to break on Mayflower because our country turns 250 years old this week, the semi-quincennial of a country built by tobacco. It deserves a cigar worthy of the occasion.

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You must be 21 years older, older, to order voidware prohibited conditions and exclusions apply. So where I think that lands for me is, you know, I am very skeptical of AI to the extent that it leads to, like, porn-slop videos. and weird child predation stuff on the internet. And I'm more optimistic about AI when it comes to things like curing diseases and solving, like, very, very big technical challenges for the American people. So, you know, because of that, I think we have to strike a balance.

Like, I'm not super laissez-faire on some of the applications of AI because I do think that some of the AICOs fundamentally want to control the information economy in the United States. they want to sell sometimes very damaging things to our children. They want to get rich in the process, and they want to control the government. I think that some AI leaders want to build things that are genuinely transformative in a good way, and I don't think that we can be completely unbiased. You have to sort of pick a side. And I think in the United States, the side that I pick is pro the people who are building things that are meaningful and valuable, and anti the people who just want to like, you know, produce slot videos

and make it easier for child predators to interact with our kids. The data center thing is interesting. Like, just if you look at the polling, I've talked to some friends of mine who work in the AI world about this. I don't know if I've ever seen, I mean, like, AI data centers are about as popular as herpes. It's unbelievable how bad the polling is. And my view on this is that it's not really about the data centers.

It's about the energy. And that 99% of the backlash to AI data centers is because we're allowing these data centers, especially in blue states where they make it hard to build power to tap into the grid. So an AI data center literally means you're going to be paying more electricity so that somebody in Silicon Valley

can make another billion dollars. Like going back to the point about the dignity of human beings, that is not a good trade. That's not a trade that we accept. We should accept. But I think the most important solution there is just to build more power. And where I think the Chinese are way ahead of us in AI,

it's the only area, is the Chinese are not afraid to build power. We are. And so this is where I think the environmental movement in the United States is going to collide with reality. And it's funny that if the AI people don't figure this out, they're going to be the casualty of this war. Between building power and the environmental movement in the United States, AI data centers are going to be the first casualty.

And, you know, my advice to the AI CEOs would be something like, maybe you should support building more power. And maybe, you know, and we've pursued policies like this in the Trump administration where you try to force people that if they're going to build an AI data center, they can only do it if it's going to raise people's power costs. I can't help but notice that some of the real billionaire obsessives about environmentalism, they've changed their tune. People like Bill Gates. He said, basically that global warming was solved. This happens to coincide with this energy crisis for, who knows? Maybe it's a coincidence, maybe it's Providence, who knows? I know you have to go, because you have very important things to do, like help run the whole country.

I have two brief questions before you go, and they're sort of like pick a name kind of questions. Sure. The leading Democrat for 28. Hmm. I think it's got to be AOC. I know that's probably conventional wisdom, but... Well, no, I think the conventional wisdom right now is new. him. No, no, I don't buy that. I think he heard himself with his comment to an audience

full of Black Americans that I'm low IQ just like you. Sort of bad in a couple of different ways. How do you do? At least two major political gaps produced in a single sentence. The major political gas I've had, it's sort of much less efficient than that. So yeah, look, I think all... AOC, more than Asoff, more than any of these other guys? Yeah, I mean, it's funny. It's the AOC versus Asoff thing, I guess the question would be, who do you think really has the power in the Democratic Party? And if you think the answer is like Wall Street

and the left-of-center business community, then it would be AASF. And if you think it's the universities, it would be AOC. So David Brooks made an observation. I think David Brooks probably hates my guts, but he like occasionally will say something that I think is genuinely brilliant, and this was one of them. He said that the fundamental problem with today's Democratic Party

is that the power center is shifted from unions to universities. And if that's right, AOC will be the nominee. And by the way, I think that's one of the reasons why the Democratic Party of 2026 is so deranged. Because, you know, you walk into a union hall, even where 70% of the guys are still voting dem, fundamentally like a normal place with normal social values. It's not the university like, you know, it's not the university breakroom.

Faculty lounge, that's the word that I'm looking for. So I, and this, by the way, is another reason why I'm just fundamentally pessimistic about the Dems because, you know, it's one thing to be a socially pragmatic left-of-centered Democrat

at on economic issues, but they're just so dominated by the crazy people. Yeah. And they can't, it's like they can't figure out the part where they get the economic populism, which actually is very popular, and I think Republicans should be more worried about that. Yeah. But every time they get the economic populism, it's with somebody like AOC who's like, ah, we, you know, need to tax the rich and give all the money to transgender baseball players who prey on your kids. And it's like, wait a minute. Yeah. Could you, you know, like a very potent political movement would be half of that,

whether you agree with it or not. Yes. Half of that equation is very politically popular. The part where you allow those same billionaires that you're taxing to get rich by selling unlicensed pharmaceutical products to 12-year-old minors to gender transition them, that's the part that makes most Americans go, what the hell are you talking about?

And oh, by the way, are you actually against the rich when your social values and your cultural values happened to align with the CEOs of nearly every major corporation. Yes, yeah. I mean, you saw it just the other day, Scott Wiener, this guy who's running for Pelosi's seat. Like a true deviant. A true.

I mean, there's like something wrong with that guy. His crowning political achievement was encouraging pederasty in the law. That's not an exaggeration. And he was kicked out of the trans march for being two right-wing. You know, so that's basically the state party. Oh, Scott. Sometimes you eat the bar and sometimes the bar eats of you, my friend. Best of luck.

Last question I have for you before I let you go. Last name to name. Who's your confirmation saint? Augustine, St. Augustine. Yep, that's right. So that was an easy choice for me. Confessions was such a big part of my own faith journey. I write about it a little bit in the book.

But the city of God and everything that he wrote. So that's an easy one. We have an Augustinian pope, an Augustinian vice president, maybe soon an Augustinian president. I gave Popely of the 14th when I visited him for his inaugural Mass, we found a very old copy of confessions that we gifted him. That is, now what am I going to get him? I don't know.

I don't know what I'm going to meet him. Mr. Vice President, such a pleasure. Thank you for being very, very generous with your time. Excellent book. Thank you. I really, I'm not even lying, as I would be inclined to do for a friend or someone I admire, but this book is really good. So go get it.

Communion by J.D. Vance. Thank you, sir. Good to see you, then. Thanks.