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

I, James 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've got to take care of business this November, then we'll worry about what comes next.

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 because they had been in the big house, which it appeared to me you meant prison. But I thought you were talking about the Michigan football team's stadium, where they played. So, a 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 discussion. This is your, I think, third or fourth time on the program, and it's a great time to be on the program because you're approximately halfway through your term and the midterms are coming up.

1. Assessing the Trump Admin so far: Border control, re-industrialization, inflation, Iran, government debt, anti-fraud

Maybe you could assess what's gone really well and what you're proud of with these 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, that we actually got control of the southern border and 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 postwar 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, that I've been obsessively focused on this for a long time: the idea of reindustrializing and recapitalizing the manufacturing base of the United States of America. This was a bipartisan consensus that leaned into globalization and bought into the idea that you could have a prosperous economy built entirely around services, tech, and finance. The reality, of course, is that to have a truly prosperous economy, you still have to make stuff.

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, and 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.

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. I think it's the thing that he will be remembered for even more than the border. He will be remembered for ending the 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. It's still 3% or 4% this year, and it's not looking good.

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. What I would say, first of all, is that 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. 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.

Despite the fact that we did accomplish 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. 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.

What I would say to anybody who's frustrated right now is that the alternative here—the United States effectively saying to the Middle East, “You're on your own”—would necessarily mean a worldwide energy crisis so long as the Iranians keep shooting at shipping, which we know is exactly what they would do. 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.

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 under the Biden administration, we had inflation, I think, at 9% to 12% 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 going to keep making progress.

I guess my pitch to the American people and to your listeners would certainly be: Do you want to reelect the people who have made substantial progress, accepting that there's still a lot of work to be done, or do you want to 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 that 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 be becoming more apparent to markets that this is potentially a risk to the U.S. dollar over time. The 30-year, I think, is around 5.2% now.

What's your view? 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, and your view, on what we can 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 think that, fundamentally, in 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. 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 we have to continue tackling the basic fraud and waste that's endemic to our government. Of course, we are going to 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 are going to be serious about the deficit.

Fundamentally, I think the problem here, and what the markets are responding to at this moment, is the perception that neither congressional Republicans nor 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, whom I'm going to meet with in a couple of hours, has talked about, it's this: Let's be realistic. 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 cut smartly, but also grow and get the economy in a position where that fiscal deficit is closer to 3% of GDP.

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. Then, of course, you get it to a sustainable level and you can continue to make progress from there.

It is certainly a very serious problem, something that we're very focused on. I guess what I would say to markets is that 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.

2. AI approach: Dealing with Doomerism, "Frankenstein," and AI negativity

Let's maybe double-click on that, Mr. Vice President. 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 seems like there are forces, many inside the United States, that try to slow us down, whether it's data centers.

You may have heard yesterday, but the president called in and tried to help debunk it with Jensen. Meta was here debunking it, 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 fear-monger to try to take power.

This is something I think we could spend an hour talking about. I know we don't have that much time, Chimath, but fundamentally, when I see the backlash to data centers, what I see is the necessary, inevitable consequence of the United States not building enough power for a generation.

We've talked about this before, but when I talk to people—and I'm out there campaigning a lot, so I'm talking to people a lot—there's definitely some basic nimiism in the anti-data-center thing. But there's also this: You talk to a guy whose power bill was $290 a month a year ago and is now $580 a month.

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. 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.

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. They started to generate just a little bit more power than we did in 2005, and since then, we have effectively flatlined.

The PRC now generates 3 times as much electricity as the United States of America does. I think 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 think we have to have this vision in the United States of electricity that is too cheap to meter. That's the way that you push back against some of this ridiculous anti-building-power sentiment that comes from the failure to generate the electricity that we need. I just 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 got to build more power. That's how we solve this problem fundamentally.

And then, obviously, some of this gets into the broader AI stuff, Chamath. The president 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, “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 is, if you're building Frankenstein, stop. Or maybe build—if the cat is out of the bag—build the defensive mechanism against Frankenstein.

I don't know Daario well. I've read everything that he's 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. 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.

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 1, you should stop. And number 2, when the companies come to you and say, “We need the tools to fight back against Frankenstein,” give them those tools.

Right. 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. At a personal level, how is it working with somebody who is willing to take the risk? 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 explain some of those.

I would put Trump Accounts and the Main Street agenda in that category. Just talk to us a little bit at a personal level about working with him—how hard it is to keep up with his energy, his enthusiasm, and 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 Bessent 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 talk about what's on your mind.” He's working at all hours of the day.

Your point, David, is very well taken. He is certainly willing to take risks. You ask what it's like working for a guy like that. One, it's never boring. But two, he's constantly probing: Are we taking the easy path, or are we taking the right path?

Maybe this thing is going to cause some political backlash, or maybe the payoff is not going to be obvious until 2 years from now, 5 years from now, or 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 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 going to reverse America's long-term decline: to be willing to take those risks. Thank God, for the past 18 months, we've had a president willing to do just that.

3. H-1B abuse and the massive $1T+ of fraud in federal spending

Mr. Vice President, Jake forgot to ask his normal gotcha question on H-1Bs. So—

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

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: What can you give us as an update on where those efforts stand? What's happening with the H-1Bs?

This is the Venn-diagram overlap of Jason Calcconis and Steven Miller. It's a very small area.

But look, man, we looked at the fraud in the system and said, one, Congress is not going to 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 going to try to get an H-1B visa, it's an actual genius? It's a person who is going to significantly enrich the tech ecosystem or the American economy.

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. 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. 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, “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 side of 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. That's exactly what we're trying to make sure it does.

Mr. Vice President, can I ask? I think you're the fraud czar now. 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 citizen journalists going out and trying to find the fraud in the system themselves.

And every week there's a new story being uncovered that's just mind-blowing: tens of billions of dollars over and over again. How much fraud do you think there is?

And, you know, with this California high-speed rail, there was a guy who got paid half a billion dollars for not working—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 makes your head start to spin.

How much of our $7 trillion in federal spending do you think is tied up in fraud, in this kind of system of waste and corruption? What's your sense of the scale of the problem?

Two 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're looking at Medicare fraud in California: people who are illegal, people who aren't even human beings. They're just a completely made-up shell of a person. 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 health care to those people. So the basic fraud that exists is in 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 works. This is the food stamp program that ensures that low-income Americans have access to the food 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 of the way it works. California bills us once a month for the cost of its SNAP program. It's $7 billion, $8 billion, 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.

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, or whether they're a legal resident of the United States of America. When we go to the big blue states and say, "Why don't you help us just confirm basic eligibility?" we get total 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.

4. Relationship with Israel, rational foreign policy

JD, before we wrap here, I want to ask you another hard question. This one is about our relationship with the state of Israel and the president's relationship with Bibi Netanyahu.

Many people in the Republican Party and MAGA are now moving to a new party: America First, America Only. There's a rise in anti-Semitism and a persistent belief among 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 as it stands right now, and the administration's position on collaborating with Israel on a lot of these military activities?

What the president has said, Jason, is that obviously Israel has been an important partner when it comes to military technology and intelligence sharing, but also that sometimes the United States doesn't agree with Israel.

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. I find it a little ironic, Jason, that you have Democrats criticizing Donald Trump for his relationship with BB 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 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."

I just think that rooting this relationship, like all relationships, in America's interest is the way to actually have a rational conversation here. When you're talking about whether a given policy is in America's interest 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 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, means that maybe we have to do something different now. I think 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, there are a lot of important relationships and 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. 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.

I literally—what time is it right now? It's 2:25. I have a call with Marco in 5 minutes. So Chimat's got to ask his question first. I have 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.

5. JD Vance's midterms message

Maybe as we wrap, there's a very consequential midterm coming up. I think one poll on one day will say that the Republicans are going to keep everything as is; the poll on another day will say it's going to 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?

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 for middle-American workers, not just for the elites in Washington and New York City.

We've had amazing success with the border and 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.

The second argument I'd make is that 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 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 a 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 going to do a very bad job if we give them power.

All right, ladies and gentlemen, Vice President J. Thank you all. Good to see you guys.