Transcript of JD Vance on AI, Entitlement Fraud, Iran War, Israel, H-1B Abuse & the Midterms New

I, James David Vance, do solemnly swear that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States, so help me God. Congratulations, Mr. Vice President. We're the senior partner. We're the world's superpower. That's the way that it works. This is not just theft of the American people's money. This is also theft of critical services that the American people rely on. This is a problem that has festered in this country for far too long. You stop socialism by making people's lives better, and that's what we're trying to do every single day.

We gotta take care of business.

Please welcome Vice President J.D. Vance.

All right. Nice to see you, Mr. Vice President.

How are you?

I'm good. I'm good. Jason, I caught the very tail end of that panel discussion, and you were asking somebody about how their life had changed. I couldn't see who it was, but asking how their life had changed as they'd been to the big house, which it appears to me you meant prison, but I thought you were talking about the Michigan football team stadium they play in. Very different understanding of what you were talking about and what was actually going on.

Yeah.

Well, it's great to have you back. We always appreciate that you take the time to join the Besties and have a very candid, honest, This is your, I think, 3rd or 4th time on the program, and it's a great time to be on the program because you're halfway through your term approximately, and the midterms are coming up. Maybe you could assess what's went really well for— and what you're proud of with this first 2 years, and then let's get into some things that maybe your own constituents are not happy with. Let's start with the positive. What do you think you've accomplished in these first 2 years?

Well, look, I think the 2 things that I'm most proud of are, first of all, we actually got control of the southern border, but started to reverse the flow of illegal immigration, which is about 3 million lower today than it was when we came into office. Obviously, there's a lot more to do, but if you look at the history of Western governments in the post-war era, they open the border, they invite border invasions, but they never actually reverse it. At best, they slow it down. I think President Trump was the first president in my lifetime to actually reverse that flow of illegal immigration. I'm extremely proud of that. I'm also proud, as you guys know, I've been obsessively focused on this. I've been obsessively focused on this for a long time, which is the idea of reindustrializing and recapitalizing the manufacturing base of the United States of America. And this was a bipartisan consensus that leaned into globalization, that sort of bought into this idea that you could have a prosperous economy that was built entirely around services, tech, and finance. And the reality, of course, is that to have a truly prosperous economy, you still have to make stuff.

And I think Donald Trump understood that better than anybody else. Obviously, it takes a long time to rebuild the manufacturing base of the country, but if you look at the trillions of dollars of new investment, the new construction, the new manufacturing facilities being built, I do think that you're seeing the obvious signs that over the past 18 months, we've reversed a 40-year trend. Now, Rome wasn't built in a day. It's going to take longer to fully undo the damage wrought by the last 40 years, but the fact that we're actually on the right pathway is a signature achievement of Donald Trump, and I think it's the thing that he will be remembered for, even more than the border. He will be remembered for ending the sort of consensus around globalization and actually enacting policies that get us on the right track again.

I think we all agree with those 2, and just absolute congratulations on that. You guys have crushed it. I think we all concur. Your constituents, the people who voted for you, are extremely frustrated about 2 issues. Let's just tackle them head-on. The first is you promised us you wouldn't start a foreign war. You promised us you wouldn't start a foreign war in the Middle East specifically. And then you promised you would get inflation under control. You haven't been able to get inflation under control. Still 3 or 4% this year. It's not looking good. And Americans, specifically the people who voted for you, Mr. Vice President, are very upset about starting this war. What is your message to them? How do these 2 issues get resolved? Because people are very unhappy about it.

Yeah, so Jason, I understand that, and I certainly hear from people. And what I would say, first of all, is we invite people into the coalition who disagree with us. You don't have to agree with us on every single issue. But on the war specifically, what I would say is, look, the president came in and yes, he wanted to keep the United States out of foreign entanglements. He also said that he was committed to Iran not having a nuclear weapon. And I think that wanting to keep the United States out of foreign entanglements does not mean that you can never use the military in order to accomplish the American people's objectives. Now, all that said, despite the fact that we did accomplish a substantial destruction, not just of their nuclear program, but also of the Iranian conventional military, we've seen the Iranians shooting at commercial shipping even in the midst of peace negotiations. And I think the president has actually done the responsible thing here, which is to try to ensure that world energy markets, despite Iranian terrorism, continue to get that flow of oil and gas. And so what I would say to anybody who's frustrated right now is the alternative here, which is the United States effectively says, Middle East, you're on your own, would mean necessarily a worldwide energy crisis so long as the Iranians keep on shooting at shipping, which we know that's exactly what they would do.

So I think the president is taking the responsible course of action. He's protecting America's assets in the region while also ensuring that world energy markets continue to get a supply of oil and natural gas. And on the inflation, Jason, I think we've made a lot of progress. To my point earlier, Rome was not built in a day. But, you know, under the Biden administration, we had inflation, I think, at 9.5% annualized. That's the highest rate in about 48 years. You're right, 3.5% is still too high, but you've seen substantial progress. And of course, we're gonna keep on making progress. I guess my pitch to the American people and to your listeners certainly would be, do you want to reelect the people who have made substantial progress, accepting there's still a lot of work to be done, or do you wanna go back to the people who caused the problem in the first place? Obviously, I'm biased, but I think that you should elect the people who have actually made substantial progress while recognizing a lot more progress needs to happen.

Mr. Vice President, one of the other things many of us were excited about with this incoming administration was addressing the fiscal deficit. It seems to become more apparent to markets that this is potentially a risk to the, to the US dollar over time. The 30-year, I think, is around 5.2% now. What's your view? And, you know, when the administration came in, there was an effort with Doge, but it's been very hard to get congressional action to take the steps necessary to reduce the deficit. Maybe you can share the administration's view, your view on what can we do to right the fiscal course for the federal government now and over time?

Yeah, look, it's a very important and fair question. I mean, I think that fundamentally, the anti-fraud efforts that I've been focused on, we've saved about $250 billion of the American taxpayers' money that would have otherwise gone to fraudsters. And in the scale of a $7 trillion federal budget, obviously $250 billion isn't the whole thing, but it's a lot. And it's something that we're very proud of. I think that we have to continue to sort of just tackling the basic fraud and waste that's endemic to our government. And of course, we are gonna need some real bipartisan legislative solutions to give markets confidence, not just that we're going to be serious about the deficit, but that hopefully the president who comes after and the Congress that comes after is going to be serious about the deficit. I think fundamentally the problem here, and I think what the markets are responding to at this moment, is the perception that neither congressional Republicans or Democrats are serious about the debt and the deficit. Obviously, I think the administration— I'm biased— I think that we are serious about this issue. If you look at what Scott Bessent, who I'm going to meet with in a couple of hours actually, what Scott Bessent has talked about is You know, let's be realistic.

We have— we inherited a $2 trillion fiscal deficit, and you're not going to get back to a balanced budget by cutting $2 trillion out of a $7 trillion budget overnight. What you can do is you can cut smartly, but also grow and get the economy in a position where that fiscal deficit is closer to 3% of GDP. Now, yes, we've got to make more progress, but if you look at what Scott has done at the Treasury, I think that we are on pace to get to a point where we can get the fiscal deficit to a sustainable level. And then of course you get it to a sustainable level and you continue to make progress from there. But it is certainly a very serious problem, something that we're very focused on. And I guess what I would say to markets is we've got a Secretary of the Treasury, but also a president who are very focused on the problem. But it's going to require a long-term solution, ideally something with some bipartisan consensus, which is something we'll have to see about. Because let's be honest, a lot of people in Congress, not just Democrats, but a lot of people in Congress have not shown a willingness to be serious about spending.

We have to change that.

Let's maybe double-click on that, Mr. Vice President. There's one of the ways that we can get out of this is through growth and productivity growth, but there is this crazy dynamic where it just seems like there are forces, many inside the United States, that try to slow us down, whether it's data centers. And you may have heard yesterday, but the president called in and tried to help debunk it with Jensen. Meta was here debunking Microsoft was here, but it just seems like a whack-a-mole problem of trying to actually get the truth out. Just talk to us about how we've ended up in this situation where there are these forces that are trying to effectively lie or fearmonger to try to take power.

Yeah, so this is something I think we could spend an hour talking about. I know we don't have that much time, Chamath, but fundamentally, when I see the backlash to data centers, what I see is the necessary, the inevitable consequence of the United States not building enough power for a generation. And so we've talked about this before, but when I talk to people, and I obviously sort of, I'm out there campaigning a lot, I'm talking to people a lot, there's definitely some basic NIMBYism in the anti-data center thing. But there's also, you know, you talk to a guy who a year ago his power bill was $290 a month and now it's $580 a month. And the reality is that in blue states, where we've made it impossible to build additional electricity generation, you're seeing a backlash when people start paying additional power costs. Now, my response to that is you can't just stop building because of it. What you've got to do is build the things that you need, specifically power. So, you know, Elon talks about this all the time, but I talk about it too. If you look at the amount of power generated by the PRC, the People's Republic of China, and compare it to the amount of power generated by the United States of America, in 2005, they crossed the line, meaning they started to generate just a little bit more power than we did in 2005.

Since then, we have effectively flatlined, and the PRC now generates 3 times as much electricity as the United States of America does. I think that a lot of our problems are downstream of that fundamental problem, And we just have to build more. We have to build more power. I mean, you know, I think that we have to have this vision in the United States of electricity that is too cheap to meter. And that's, I think, the way that you push back against some of this ridiculous, you know, sort of anti-building power comes from the failure to generate the electricity that we need. And I just, I don't understand how we ever got here as a country. I think the environmental movement obviously has a lot to do with it, but we've just gotta build more power and that's how we solve this problem. problem fundamentally. And then, you know, obviously, some of this gets into the broader AI stuff, Chamath.

Yeah.

And, you know, the president, I think, is very rightly asking the question, why is it that the people who are at the frontier of the AI economy are throwing up their hands and saying, well, we've built Frankenstein, and the solution to Frankenstein apparently is to create a one-world governance structure for artificial intelligence. What I would say to those people, if you're building Frankenstein, stop, or maybe build— if the cat is out of the bag, then build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein. I don't know Dario well. I've read everything that he said over the past couple of weeks. Everybody that I know tells me that he's very earnest, that this is a deeply held belief. It's not cynical. It's not about regulatory capture, that he genuinely cares about this. But at the same time, I talk to tech companies. I'm sure you guys talk to a lot more tech companies than I do. At the same time that you have this sort of cyberhacking tool that's come out of Anthropic's newest models, you have companies that are desperate for the defensive mechanisms to defend against that cyberhacking tool, and they're being denied access to it. So if you're going to create Frankenstein, don't come to the government and say we need regulation.

look inward and accept that if you're building Frankenstein, number one, you should stop. And number two, when the companies come to you and say, we need the tools to fight back against Frankenstein, give them those tools.

Right.

Well, it's incredibly commonsensical. Brad, and then maybe Sachs.

Yep.

Mr. Vice President, great to see you.

You know, the president called in yesterday. He's on top of the AI issue. You're working for somebody who's the most incredibly entrepreneurial and risk-taking president perhaps in the last 50 years. I just had a— at a personal level, how is it working with somebody who is willing to take the risk that some people— Jason criticized some of the things that haven't happened in the first 20 months. But the fact of the matter is, unlike a lot of people who occupy that office who are just looking to stay the course and take the safe path, he's taking a lot of risks, and then you have to help to explain some of those. I would put Trump accounts in that category, the Main Street Agenda. But just talk to us a little bit at a personal level how working with him, how hard it is to keep up with his energy, his enthusiasm, his entrepreneurialism.

Yeah, Brad, you know him well. He sleeps less than any person that I've ever met. I don't sleep that much, but I certainly sleep more than him. Scott Bassin and I always joke that he'll call us at 2:30 in the morning, and he'll say, were you up? And it's like, no, sir, I wasn't, but I am now. So let's, let's talk about what's on your mind. He's working at all hours of the day. But your point, Brad, is very well taken. He is certainly willing to take risks. And I think, you know, you ask what it's like working for a guy like that. Well, one, it's never boring, but two, he's constantly probing, are we taking the easy path or are we taking the right path? And yes, maybe this thing is gonna cause some political backlash, or maybe the payoff is not gonna be obvious until, you know, 2 years from now, 5 years from now. 10 years from now, but I think it's the exact right mindset. One of the frustrations I've had just looking at the economy pretty much my entire life is that there's been this division between true entrepreneurs and managers, between bureaucrats and people who are genuinely innovative and willing to take risks.

I think that we've had way too many caretaker presidents during my lifetime, frankly, way too many caretaker CEOs, and not enough people who are genuinely innovative and willing to take risks. Obviously, he gets criticized for it from time to time. But I'd much rather have a president who's willing to take those risks, who's willing to take on the big projects. It's the only way I think you're gonna reverse America's long-term decline is to be willing to take those risks. Thank God for the past 18 months we've had a president willing to do just that. Uh, Mr. Vice President, uh, Jake Al forgot to ask, uh, his normal gotcha question on H-1Bs.

Well, that's because they took my advice and they raised the price. We were in sync on that one.

You know, it's an issue that the tech community cares about. At the same time, we have learned that the program was riddled with fraud. I'm curious, can you give us an update on, you know, where do those efforts stand? What, you know, what's happening with the H-1Bs? Yeah, no, this is the Venn diagram overlap of Jason Kalkanis and Stephen Miller. It's a very small area.

Yes.

But look, man, we We looked at the fraud in the system and we said, you know, one, Congress is not gonna pass a law changing this. There just isn't the political will to do it. So what are the things that we can do administratively to ensure that if a tech company is gonna try to get an H-1B visa, it's an actual genius, it's a person that is gonna significantly enrich the tech ecosystem or the American economy? You know, you're not just replacing one accountant who makes $60,000 with a lower-wage foreign accountant who makes $45,000 a year. That is not what the program exists for. And so, And so we came up with this idea to impose a $100,000 fee. We're also looking at various ways of preventing companies that use H-1B visas from laying off a bunch of American workers. So, you know, one of the things that I find just shocking about this is you'll have a company that applies for an H-1B and they'll say, oh, we're desperate for workers, we can't find the workers. And then you go and look at their history and they've laid off 5,000 people. Well, that's ridiculous.

If you're laying off American workers, you shouldn't be going to the market searching for foreign workers to replace them. So we're doing a lot. within the confines, of course, of what we're allowed to do legally. We've gotten sued on some of this stuff, but I think fundamentally we're on the right on both the law and the policy. The H-1B should not exist to replace American workers with low-wage foreigners. It should exist to enrich the American economy, and that's exactly what we're trying to make sure it does.

Mr. Vice President, can I, can I ask, um, you're, you're— I think you're, you're titled the Fraud Czar now, and just going Back to the deficit question. Every week we're seeing these videos. We've got Nick Shirley here this afternoon. I think he really started this trend of some of the citizen journalists going out and trying to find the fraud in the system themselves. Every week there's a new story that's being uncovered that's just mind-blowing, tens of billions of dollars over and over again. How much fraud do you think there— this California high-speed rail, there was a guy that got paid half a billion dollars for not working. to some billionaire in Italy who owns a football team. I couldn't believe it. I tracked all this stuff, and I'm like, it just— your head starts to spin. How much of our $7 trillion federal spending do you think is tied up in fraud, in this kind of system of waste, and this corruption? What's your sense of the scale of the problem?

Yeah, so 2 quick things on that. First of all, Elon, during the height of Doge, said that it was 20%. That's $1.4 trillion. Whether it's 10% or 20%, you're talking about something on the scale of hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars. The biggest problem with finding fraud is actually that the states where it's worst are also the states that have the least willingness to cooperate with what we're doing. So when you look at some of the bigger ticket items for fraud, you know, you're looking at Medicare fraud in California, people who are illegal, people who aren't even like human beings, they're just like a completely made up you know, shell of a person. But unfortunately, the state of California is not actually helping us fight back against that particular fraud. Or we know that there are hundreds of thousands, maybe more, illegal aliens in Illinois, New York, and California who are on Medicaid. That obviously is billions and billions of dollars to provide healthcare to those people. So the basic fraud that exists is the big programs in states that have allowed themselves to be overrun by illegal immigration. Another very good example, and this was shocking to me when we came in and started doing this work, is the way the SNAP program, this is the food stamp program that ensures that low-income Americans have access to food that they need.

Obviously, one of the most important things that we do in the federal government is make sure that poor kids can eat. But that program is rife with fraud, in part because the way it works is California California bills us once a month for the cost of their SNAP program. It's $7 or $8 or $9 billion depending on the month that we're talking about. So what happens is the federal government wires $9 billion to California, no questions asked. So it's not an exaggeration to say that we have no ability to know who is even on the SNAP program, whether they're a real human being, whether they're a legal resident of the United States of America. And when we go to the big blue states and say, why don't you help us just confirm basic eligibility, we get totally pushback. We get no cooperation on this basic fact of good governance, confirming eligibility for federal programs. So my guess is that if the number is $700 billion, a few hundred billion of that is in the blue states, and we could deal with it just by checking eligibility criteria. We're working on innovative ways to force that, but it's actually legally much harder than it should be to force the blue states to comply.

with some basic anti-fraud initiatives.

JD, before we wrap here, I want to ask you another hard question, this one about our relationship with the state of Israel and the president's relationship with Bibi Netanyahu. Many people in the Republican Party, MAGA, are now moving to a new party, America First, America Only. There's a rise in antisemitism, and there's a persistent belief amongst a lot of the people on the right that maybe our foreign policy is too influenced by the state of Israel or Bibi Netanyahu. Can you take us into the relationship right now where it stands and the administration's position on collaborating with Israel on a lot of these military activities?

Yeah, you know, what the president has said, Jason, is obviously Israel has been an important partner when it comes to military technology, when it comes to intelligence sharing. But also sometimes the United States doesn't always agree with Israel. And I think that more than frankly any president in the last 40 years, he has shown a willingness to actually part ways with Bibi Netanyahu when he feels like the interests of the American people are different from the interests of the government of Israel. And I find it a little ironic, Jason, that you have Democrats criticizing Donald Trump for his relationship with Bibi when Donald Trump is the one president of the last 40 years who's been willing to say, you know what? Yeah, Bibi's a good partner, but also Bibi and I have a different opinion on this, or Bibi's wrong about this, or maybe Bibi's right about this from the perspective of Israel, but the American people need us to go in a different direction. So I just think that rooting this relationship, like all relationships, in America's interests is the way to actually have a rational conversation here. Because when you're talking about whether a given policy is in America's interests, and you keep yourself laser-focused on that, I think that's how you make sure that the American people know that you're fighting for them.

But I also think that it allows us to actually rationally focus and force ourselves to have a conversation about when something that maybe sounded good or maybe has become a cliché or a slogan for the past 20 or 30 years, well, maybe we have to do something different now. And I think that that's how we have to approach not just this relationship, but all relationships. By the way, You see a similar pushback when the president makes the argument that he's made about NATO, which is yes, obviously a lot of important relationships, a lot of important partnerships in NATO, but that doesn't mean that we're going to completely make our European foreign policy subservient to NATO in the same way that we cannot let our Middle Eastern foreign policy be subservient to the state of Israel. We're going to work with people when we work with them. We're going to disagree when we disagree, and we're going to pursue America's interests. That's the only way. to have a rational foreign policy.

I know Chamath wants to get one last question in here. Just before he does, tell us, how's Marco Rubio doing in his job so far? Can you rate his performance in the first 2 years?

He's doing great, man. I love Marco. Jason, the funniest media narrative is that somehow Marco and I are hypercompetitive, and we sit around thinking about how we're going to run for president against each other in 2028. Like, I literally— what time is it right now? It's 2:25. I have a call with Marco in 5 minutes. So Chamath's got to ask his question first. I got to answer it quickly. And then Marco and I have to go do the business of the American people. He's a great dude. He's a great human being. He's doing a great job too.

So maybe as we wrap, there's a very consequential midterm coming up. I think a poll on one day will say that the Republicans are going to keep you know, everything as is. The poll on the other day say it's gonna be a socialist sweep of America. It's very complicated, but can you just give us some insight into what's actually happening on the ground and what is the message that needs to be delivered so that folks can come to the right conclusion in November?

You know, I guess I have 2 basic messages. There's a lot of good that we've done over the past 18 months. We cut taxes bigly. We cut taxes on overtime, Social Security, and tips. Those are tax cuts cuts for middle American workers, not just for the elites in Washington and New York City. We've had an amazing success with the border, with immigration. We've pursued H-1B reform that prioritizes American workers over foreign nationals. There's a lot of good that's been done, but there's a lot of work left to do. Don't give power to the people who caused the problems that we're fixing. Give us another chance or give us another couple of years to continue to work on the amazing things that we've been doing for the past 2 years. And the second argument I'd make is even if you don't agree with us on every issue, the other party is consumed by craziness. They're consumed by people who want to steal everything, who want to give the country over to illegal aliens and criminals. They actively brag about it. I mean, I've heard a lot of crazy stuff, guys, over the past, you know, few years in politics.

But when I heard somebody running for Congress in New York say that July 4th was about the liberation of Puerto Rico and Palestine, I thought to myself, This person needs to be checked into a mental hospital, not given a seat in Congress. So to the American people, I'd say, send these people packing, put them in the mental hospital. Do not put them in Congress, because even if you don't agree with us on every policy issue, at least we're motivated by common sense and American interests. They're just motivated by left-wing interest groups and radicalism, and they're gonna do a very bad job if we give them power.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Vice President J.D. Vance.

Thank you all. Good to see you guys.