EXCLUSIVE - Vice President JD Vance: They Tricked Me About Donald Trump, But Everything Changed! | The Diary Of A CEO Transcript

Steven Bartlett interviews US Vice President JD Vance on his childhood, political evolution, the Iran deal, AI, and faith

Steven Bartlett interviews Vice President JD Vance for The Diary of a CEO.

Summary

US Vice President JD Vance opens up about his turbulent Appalachian childhood — marked by his mother's addiction, a revolving door of father figures including a legal adoptive father who disappeared from his life by age 12, and the stabilising influence of his grandmother — to his military service in the Marine Corps and disillusionment with the Iraq War, his political evolution from Trump critic to Vice President, and his return to Christian faith. Vance reveals details of the Iran ceasefire agreement signed the day before recording, describing it as a genuine term sheet committing Iran to nuclear disarmament and economic reintegration in exchange for sanctions relief. He reflects candidly on how his early instability shaped his adult psychology, including avoidant attachment patterns in his marriage, and describes his journey from angry atheism back to Christian faith, documented in his new book Communion. He also addresses AI's economic implications, arguing the greater risk is not mass unemployment but extreme wealth concentration, and expresses support for workers having a meaningful stake in AI companies.

Key Takeaways

FULL TRANSCRIPT

JD Vance's Childhood: Appalachia, Addiction, and His Grandmother

Steven Bartlett: Mr. Vice President, I have your book here. It says: "Of all the things that I hated about my childhood, nothing compared to the revolving door of father figures. I hated the disruption. And I hated how often these boyfriends would walk out of my life just as I began to like them." I always think that to understand the people sat in front of me, you have to get a picture of their early context. I had no idea about your earliest context, and it has in some respects informed what I've then seen from you later as an adult. Can you take me back to your context and explain that quote for me?

JD Vance: I was raised in a very working-class town, a very working-class family. This is a photo of me when I was a little kid. And my family, like a lot of other families in similar circumstances, struggled. We struggled to adapt to middle-class life. This is my sister and my grandfather. My grandfather had very low formal education — he graduated from high school. My grandmother actually left school when she was 13. Very religious people, particularly my grandmother, but they struggled pretty much economically for most of their lives. My grandfather died when I was 13. My grandmother died when I was 20. This photo was probably not even a year before she died. I was about to go to Iraq and she was very old and frail. This is one of the last photos of the two of us. She was really the woman who raised me, because of that revolving door of father figures. My mom is an amazing person — she's been clean and sober for 11 years now. But she was in the throes of a pretty bad addiction problem for much of my childhood. So my grandmother was my savior. She was the person who stepped in and made sure I had a stable life, to the extent that I did.

Steven Bartlett: And your grandmother — she got pregnant at 13?

JD Vance: That's right. Think about this: Eastern Kentucky, the hills of an extremely impoverished, very rural part of the United States. She's dating my grandfather, who I think was 16 at the time. She's 13. These are children. She gets pregnant. They move to Ohio for more opportunity, because you just couldn't build a good life in that part of the world. There weren't enough good jobs. She had a miscarriage. So the thing that brought her out of her home hastened them getting married — I don't think they would have gotten married at 13 and 16 were it not for that unplanned pregnancy. They're married. They have a very chaotic marriage, an abusive marriage in a lot of ways. But they have three kids — my mom, my uncle, my aunt. The story of our family is that some of us were able to break the cycle and some of us weren't. Part of what motivated me to write that book was trying to understand why life worked out for some of us and didn't work out for others.

Steven Bartlett: So your biological father — he put you up for adoption?

JD Vance: He did. I was adopted by a man when I was five or six years old by the name of Robert Hamill, and he is still technically listed as my legal father on my birth certificate. He was in the picture from when I was about seven until ten or eleven. Then he and mom got divorced. He stuck around for a little bit after that, but by the time I was 12, he was just gone. Never talked to him again, never saw him again.

Steven Bartlett: Am I right in thinking this is the third man in your life at that point? Because your sister Lindsay comes from a different father.

JD Vance: That's right. Her father was a very good guy. She's five or six years older than me. He was the first of my mother's husbands. Then my biological father was number two. Then my legal father was number three. And then things got a little quicker from that point forward — more turnover in the relationships.

Steven Bartlett: There was also a guy called Matt thereafter, at 13 years old, that your mom had met.

JD Vance: Yeah. Good guy. Very close to him. He's actually very political, so he and I reconnected a little bit over our shared interest in politics. He was only around for maybe a few years, probably less, but he was a significant and positive force.

Steven Bartlett: In your book, page 124, you say living with mom and Matt, when you were 14 years old, was like a front row seat to the end of the world.

JD Vance: Yeah. It was just chaotic. Things that I thought of as normal — that I later realized, talking to my wife or talking to friends, were not normal at all — a level of relationship instability, fighting, people throwing stuff. If the fights got really bad, someone would throw a plate at somebody else. It sounds crazy even talking about it now, but it was pretty normal back then. Sometimes it was worse and sometimes it was better, but there was a sense in which relationships were always just kind of chaotic. As an adult, you can almost imagine — now that you've got so many kids yourself — I can understand the feeling of craziness being normal, and you kind of don't realize it until you see into someone else's world or someone else hears about yours.

Steven Bartlett: Because I can relate to that in many ways. But as an adult, you must look back on that and see the way it shaped you.

JD Vance: It was very unhealthy. It was hard to feel a sense of stability. It was hard to really attach to people because you always assumed they were going to be gone. Years later, I was at a conference giving a speech and this guy came up to me — he was a child psychologist. He said one of the things the literature shows is that people who come from traumatic or chaotic environments and end up doing pretty well always have one person — whether it was a teacher, a social worker, a grandparent, an aunt or an uncle — they always have one person who is their anchor. That seems to be the difference for a lot of these kids. I was lucky enough to have that. I think about my life a lot of the time sitting here as Vice President of the United States. What would my life have turned out to be if you'd had all that chaos as a background but taken out those stabilizing forces? God knows.

Steven Bartlett: Your grandmother — that's right. Because through your story, when I was reading about your childhood, she seemed like the safe place you would retreat to over and over again.

JD Vance: She was, in an unconventional way, both a mother figure and a father figure. She was extraordinarily odd — and I mean that in the most loving way possible — but she was just incredibly tough. I was, I don't know, 12 or 13, hanging out with one of the kids in the neighborhood who was kind of going down a bad path. He would later spend some time in jail. He was getting into drugs, starting to smoke weed, starting to do a little bit more than that. My grandmother found out and told me that if I kept hanging out with this kid, she was going to run him over with her car. I was kind of caught off guard by that. And then she said, "JD, I promise you, and no one will ever find out about it." I was like, "Wow." So for the sake of this kid, I pretty much stopped hanging out with him. But that toughness was like a necessary part. It was through sheer willpower that she kept me on the straight and narrow. I don't know where I'd be without her.

Steven Bartlett: And over the next couple of decades, your mother's addiction seems to get worse and worse — from prescription drugs to heroin and everything in between. It really ravages not just her life but the family's life, nearly making your grandparents bankrupt.

JD Vance: Yes. And mom, by the way, has been clean and sober for 11 years, which is an amazing thing. But when Papa died, I realized that what my grandmother was for me, Papa was for mom. He was her safe place. He was her anchor. I think she already had some addiction problems, but it just really accelerated from there. Things went off the rails. My grandparents were trying various ways to help her before my grandfather died. It got worse and worse, harder and harder drugs, a few bad overdoses. By the grace of God, some miracle — it's amazing how transformed she is. It drives home how for some people drugs just take so much away from a human being. And in the same way that they took so much away from her, sobriety has given her a whole lot back.

The Psychology of a Chaotic Childhood

Steven Bartlett: If I asked your wife how this season of your life — the most formative season — has changed you, what are all the things you would say? I remember interviewing Michael Jordan's coach, and he said to me that people's dark sides and their light sides are fundamentally interconnected.

JD Vance: That makes total sense to me. I think on the dark side, what she would say is I have an extraordinary mistrust of people I don't know particularly well. I sort of assume the worst sometimes about circumstances and things outside of my control, but I maybe assume the best about the people themselves. There's an inherent sense that the world is going to fall apart. Even in our marriage — it would be hard to imagine a marriage that was more successful and more happy than ours. Our kids are doing great. My wife and I love each other very much. She really is my best friend. She's the person I talk to about everything, my closest confidant. And yet there are all kinds of times during our 12-year marriage where I've just had this thought: there's no way this is going to last. She's taking the kids to the grocery store and I start thinking, "Oh my god, a drunk driver is going to have a head-on collision." There's a sense of instability that is very much built in.

That's the dark. I think the light is that because I've seen a lot of people at their very best and their very worst, I sort of assume the best about the human beings themselves. So even though the circumstances are crazy and even though things hit the fan sometimes completely outside of your control, what she would say is that I probably have a higher empathy quotient than any person she knows. And I really try to understand what makes people tick.

There's a lot beyond that. I was a lot of work when I look back at our early relationship. We'd have an argument before we ever married and I'd be like, "Okay, well, fine. Let's just break up." And her response was, "Well, that's crazy. Why would we break up? Let's just have a rational conversation." I don't do rational conversations in that context. That is not something we do. But so long as you're self-aware about that, it's a problem you can solve. She would say compared to 14 years ago when we first started dating, it's just night and day. But very early on it was a chaotic relationship itself.

Steven Bartlett: Clearly an avoidant attachment style, which obviously makes a ton of sense.

JD Vance: I didn't have the vocabulary to describe that, but that's exactly what it was.

Steven Bartlett: Did you have to go to couples therapy? Because it seems almost inconceivable that you could go through that early context, be so avoidant, see everything as ephemeral, yet still have a healthy relationship like the one you have with her.

JD Vance: No, never went to couples therapy. I actually went to therapy a couple of times and I just found it way too uncomfortable to talk to a stranger. The other thing I really didn't like about it — and I don't mean this to criticize therapy, I'm sure it helps a lot of people — but there was something about it that felt almost too self-referential. It almost encouraged me, at least, to blame others, to blame my past, to blame my mom. I really didn't like this feeling that I was giving up agency over my own life. So we've just gotten better at how we relate to each other. But that's primarily me. She grew up in a very stable situation. Her parents are South Asian immigrants to the United States, but she was born and raised in San Diego, California — just a very normal middle-class Southern California life. Because of that, she just had much healthier relationship practices than I did.

On Politics, Immigration, and Division

Steven Bartlett: That point about understanding the person on the other end and having empathy for the human being — it appears to be almost exact in politics. I watch the election campaigns. I watch how yourself and the president went against people like Kamala Harris. So you must, with that logic, think that Kamala Harris is actually a really good person. You must understand Kamala.

JD Vance: I wouldn't say that I understand her. I would say that I just don't have this animosity towards people on the other side.

Steven Bartlett: But is that not sort of implicit in the job itself — that you have to point out their faults?

JD Vance: Yeah, you do. Absolutely. But I think you can be rational about it, cerebral about it. Certainly there are things the other side does that annoy me. But my fundamental bias is that most people are good people. And to the extent that they do something you disagree with, it's either because they screwed up or because they made a mistake. I've always been more charitable about other human beings. Maybe I do that too much. Maybe I'm too charitable. But I'd rather be too charitable than too cynical about human beings, because if you're always cynical about other people's motivations, you're going to be in a very bad spot.

Steven Bartlett: Politics seems to me like the game of painting the other side as malicious.

JD Vance: Fundamentally you're making a pitch to people. It's not about Kamala Harris or Donald Trump or JD Vance or Tim Walz — it's about the American people. And to make that sales pitch, you have to say what's better about this product, what's worse about the other product. That is just inherent. But what I always try to do is talk about: here are the policies that are really bad, here are the reasons why I think this is screwed up, here are the reasons why I think she made mistakes. It is weird — you are in a position where you're trying to point out the faults in other people, even if it's just their conduct as opposed to their character. But I do think you see people in politics who fundamentally just really hate the people on the other side. That's just not me. It's never going to be me.

Even when I'm being very pugilistic, even when you really have to drive home a point — something I think the Biden administration just really screwed up in a profoundly dangerous way was our immigration policy. There are all kinds of reasons why that might have happened. But fundamentally, that was a very, very bad screw-up. I don't hate Kamala Harris because I think she had a bad immigration policy. I just think it's important to point out the flaws.

Steven Bartlett: On the immigration policy — this is another area where you get such division. I remember watching Trump demonizing Mexican people and brown people. I remember this particular quote where he said about the black community, "What have you got to lose?" And I remember thinking, I'm a black man. I feel like I've got things to lose. That kind of narrative, that broad-strokes demonization, would make people's lives harder and feels unnecessary. Even if you agree that immigration is a problem, the skin color or religion framing — Mexicans as rapists and murderers — might galvanize in the near term, but in the long term is probably going to sow division and is probably net negative for society.

JD Vance: One thing I'd say about anything I've ever heard the president say that's then refracted through the lens of social media — very often what he is accused of saying, he didn't say it, or he said it in a totally different way, or there was much greater context. I remember back in 2015 or 2016 being offended at the rapists and murderers line, and then I went and looked at what he actually said. What he said — which is actually true — is that some of these countries are actually encouraging prisoners to come into the United States. Does that mean that every person who comes into America is a rapist or a murderer? No, it doesn't. But he didn't say that. So again, this goes back to the point about being charitable — I do try to understand fundamentally why did a person say that, what are they actually thinking, what are they trying to get across.

Steven Bartlett: You wouldn't have said that.

JD Vance: The president and I certainly have very different styles. Absolutely. But the way that I think about immigration is fundamentally: as a country, you are the people who live in your nation. America is 330 million souls. Most of them, whether they voted for me or not, are really good people who want really good things for their families. There are some bad apples in every group of 330 million people, but most people are fundamentally good and decent. However, you could let people into your country who could be fun, decent, normal human beings who just kind of mess with the equation a little bit. It's like if I have a bunch of people over to my house for dinner — I invite 10 people and one of them brings a stranger, it's probably going to be fun. But if every single one of them brings three strangers, it's going to totally change the character of the conversation, of the room. A country is like that, just on a much more massive scale.

I think the president was very right about immigration in a way that was prescient. And even if the blunt way that he described it offended some people, I think it was a very important contribution not just to our country but to the world.

Steven Bartlett: I think the thing I've always been concerned about when I see the rising narrative across the West — the UK as well — is that in trying to solve that problem, division seems to be the most compelling narrative for politicians. And the downstream consequence of division you see playing out on the streets. Especially in the UK at the moment, you're really seeing certain communities being quite demonized and victimized because of this broad political narrative being used to get people into power. But the downstream consequences for real people on the streets who are brown or black or Muslim — I don't think the people at the top consider that. Is there another way of making the point on immigration without demonizing people?

JD Vance: When I talk about it, to the extent that I demonize anybody in the immigration conversation, I demonize the leadership that is immune to thinking about the consequences of this. On the division thing — division is a very interesting word to me. I like living in a community that's cohesive, where people get along, where we love everybody regardless of what they look like. But let me give you a slightly different perspective. What if division is not the result of politicians demonizing certain groups? What if division is the inevitable consequence of when the population changes too quickly in a given society? And what you see as politicians exploiting division — I actually think what they're trying to do is articulate a feeling that people have. Sometimes people might express that feeling in ways that we don't like or that are offensive, but fundamentally — let's say you're a working-class guy in Britain or in the United States and somebody moves into your neighborhood.

Steven Bartlett: That's right. I did. My family is obviously black. My mom's Nigerian and I came from Botswana and I moved into an all-white neighborhood.

JD Vance: How did people treat you?

Steven Bartlett: We were called the n-word a couple of times.

JD Vance: That's terrible. I don't like that. But I imagine that a lot of people in your community were welcoming.

Steven Bartlett: They were. For sure. But as a kid you only remember the ways you stand out.

JD Vance: Of course. And I certainly think it's important to try to fight back against that stuff. We don't want young kids who come into a community for that to be their memory. But our next-door neighbor was a black family, and my grandmother was not woke. She did not have progressive views about race or gender or pretty much anything else. But she really loved — I'll never forget this — the black man who lived next door to us. She said he has a good heart. And that was her highest compliment of anybody. He was a preacher. The family was a very, very good family. Stable family — mom, dad, a few kids. I was very close to the young son. I just did not experience that division. When people talk about division, I just did not see that family as substantially different from us.

Now, where Mamaw really did resist the changes was when the neighborhood went downhill very quickly — I talk about that a little bit in the book. You had a bunch of people move in with different habits. And at some level, was it wrong for my grandmother to feel offended that her neighborhood had changed so quickly that she didn't feel comfortable there anymore, or that the people who came in had different values, or she couldn't hold a conversation with somebody in the same way?

I got attacked on this during the 2024 campaign when I said it's actually okay, if you're an American and an English native speaker, to want the person who moves in next to you to speak English — not because you're a racist or a xenophobe, but because you want to be able to talk to the person you share a community with. What I often see is that division gets magnified when statesmen don't do the job of actually ensuring that integration is possible. And for integration to be possible, it has to be slow-moving. You have to be careful. A hundred people moving into a community is different from ten people moving into a community. You have to make sure that everybody has economic opportunities. It's one thing to welcome a newcomer when everybody has access to a good job, but you welcome a newcomer when a lot of people are feeling economically distressed, they're going to react to it totally differently. My job as an elected leader is to create the kind of environment where division happens less. It's not to pretend that division doesn't exist. People naturally feel reactive when things change too quickly, and that's okay.

Steven Bartlett: I understand the human instinct of xenophobia. And I think we'd all want to be able to connect with our neighbor. I think the point of nuance is: when they can't speak my language, what do I then do about that? Maybe if my neighbor didn't speak my language, we might not get along because we won't be able to connect. But I wouldn't be angry at them. My concern is when the Western narrative is that it's the brown people that are the reason your life is hard — if I believed that, if I heard that from my political leaders, it's conceivable that I might be angry at my neighbor even though they've done nothing. Just their presence alone might make me resent them. And then what happens when I resent them because I'm being told they're the reason I'm suffering, they're the reason I don't have a job? And then we get into these cultural wars, which is a slippery slope.

JD Vance: I hear you. But what I would say is — I said this on the campaign trail all the time — I'm not mad at the illegal alien who broke our laws and came into the country. Probably some of them didn't even know they were breaking our laws. They came into our country and wanted better opportunity for their families. What I am mad at is the political system that encourages people to break those rules and sows division and then gets mad at the native population for looking around and saying, "Wait a second. I didn't sign up for this. I didn't agree to this."

There's an instinct in every human being to want to share a community with people where you've got something in common. A little bit of spice is good. Too much spice changes the dynamic. Most people are okay with change, but change that happens too fast, too quickly — in an immigration context — is very, very bad for a country. I think you guys have had that. We've had that. A lot of European countries have had that. I don't even feel particularly angry at any country because it's a mistake that all of us made. But now that you see that, I think we have to say: let's try to do things a slightly different way.

Steven Bartlett: I think algorithms also play a big role in that because of the design.

JD Vance: Yeah. Absolutely.

Steven Bartlett: I do think though — if my family were struggling or at all in danger, and there was an area of land over there that offered them a better chance, I personally think for the sake of my family I would try and move them into that area. And I assume you would do the same. If America went to catastrophe and Mexico was doing great, would you not try and get into Mexico even if you didn't have a visa?

JD Vance: I don't think I would. I can understand why some people have to move — you need to eat, you need to provide for your family. But I think this is another thing about immigration that is challenging: you want people to feel a certain rootedness and a certain devotion to their country. One of the things that's very unique about America compared to Europe is there's this poll question that went around when I was a teenager — it asked what percentage of young people in that society would die for their country if they had to. In the United States, it was something like 70%. In all the other Western countries, it was like 20 to 35%.

I love this place in a way that is totally independent of the economic opportunities it provides to my children. There's something much deeper — a connection to the places, to the memories, to the folkways. I drive through Eastern Kentucky and those beautiful rolling hills, even mountains. You go to West Virginia — you should do this. It's the most beautiful area, I think, in the world, because you get the mountains and you get the rivers, but it's also so green and rich with life. I feel an attachment to it that is very, very unique.

Steven Bartlett: But even if your family were at risk, you wouldn't move them into Mexico?

JD Vance: The story of my family is that my grandparents came from Eastern Kentucky and moved to southern Ohio — not exactly that far away — because of economic opportunity. So I certainly empathize with that. If somebody showed up to my home in Cincinnati and pointed a gun at my head and said you have to leave or we're going to kill your children, I'd leave. But I think most migration decisions are not actually that extreme or consequential.

Military Service, Iraq, and Disillusionment with Leadership

Steven Bartlett: This young man here — you ultimately go into the Marine Corps.

JD Vance: I go into the Marine Corps. This photo is taken in boot camp — I believe right after, so 2003, maybe May. And this one I'm pretty sure is taken in Iraq, either in '05 or '06, at a point when the Iraq war was not going well.

Steven Bartlett: Why did you join? What was the decision?

JD Vance: There was this sense — and in hindsight I really resent this. I'm genuinely still angry at George W. Bush over this, even though I try to be charitable and I have friends who worked for him and think he's a great guy. When I was a senior in high school, I'm at a restaurant called Skyline Chili in southwestern Ohio. This guy comes out wearing a World War II veterans hat — we call them Red Hatters in the United States. I remember thinking, this generation is dying away. I went up and shook his hand. I said, "Thank you, sir, for your service." He was genuinely touched. But I remember thinking: this guy answered the call. Now we have to answer the call.

September 11th happened when I was a junior in high school. There was this patriotic sense that this is our World War II. And even some of the historical analogies that got used were the exact same — Saddam Hussein was Adolf Hitler. What if you had had an opportunity to stand up and say no to Adolf Hitler when he annexed the Sudetenland? Wouldn't you have taken that chance? They were so good at tapping into that patriotic reservoir. And by the way, I think that reservoir is a very valuable thing. I think it's important for statesmen to cultivate it, but only to tap into it when it's really necessary and really justified.

I went to the Marine Corps recruiter. I wanted to be a Marine because my older cousins were Marines and people said the Marines were the toughest. I signed on the dotted line. I went in on what's called an open contract — sometimes you sign up and your job is already assigned, but I said, "You can give me whatever job you want. I just want to be a Marine." I did that because I loved my country and I wanted to contribute in the same way that that guy who was still wearing his red hat, still proud of it, knew that he had contributed. That led me to go to Iraq from '05 to '06. I made a lot of friends, gained a ton of appreciation for the Marine Corps as an institution and the people, but became a little jaded about our political leadership.

Steven Bartlett: Why are you annoyed at Bush?

JD Vance: That patriotic reservoir that exists in any country — I think it's maybe most powerful in the United States, where 70-plus percent of young people say they would die for their country. I'm sure a lot of people in Europe look at that and say those are jingoistic idiots. But I actually think that to have a real nation, you have to have the willingness that if, God forbid, something happens, you're willing to put on your uniform and go do what needs to be done. But in order for that to work, in order for that feeling to be justified, leaders have to not take advantage of it. You can't say Saddam Hussein is Adolf Hitler. He wasn't.

I don't think that George W. Bush was careful with it. I think he called the nation to do something that ultimately wasn't in our best interest as a nation, but more fundamentally, he drew on that wellspring of patriotism to direct us to do something that we shouldn't have been doing in the first place.

Steven Bartlett: Because he had bad information, or because of negligence or incompetence?

JD Vance: I know enough people who know him. I think he had bad information. But fundamentally, the war on terrorism was not an existential thing to the United States in the same way that World War II was an existential thing for Britain. We have to be careful about how we describe what we're asking our young people to do. Because if you ask them to do something and they feel like you were being honest with them, that pays dividends into that patriotic reservoir. If you ask somebody to do something and it turns out you were lying to them — whether it was intentional or not — you draw down that patriotic reservoir.

I mentioned that poll, and I don't have the data in front of me, but whatever the number of young Americans who say they would die for their country — I would bet a lot of money that that number in 2026 is much lower than it was in 2003.

Steven Bartlett: So it's really like a social contract built on trust. You violate that trust and it has very, very bad consequences.

The Iran Ceasefire Deal

Steven Bartlett: The US is, I guess, in a war now.

JD Vance: Well, not anymore.

Steven Bartlett: Famous last words.

JD Vance: Fair. We are in a ceasefire that I feel very good about. We announced the ceasefire. We announced the peace agreement with the Iranians yesterday.

Steven Bartlett: I've learned so much about war because of this war, in part because I'm an interviewer at the time of war and I've been having lots of conversations with lots of people about the nature of war. Robert Pape said this to me — he said, "The thing people underestimate about a war is when the bombs start dropping, politics changes both where the bombs are dropping and at home." I think with the Iran war, that's exactly what happened. From my assessment of it, it looked like it was going to be quite straightforward — drop the bombs, take out the leader, the people rise up. But then what happened? It looked like the country fractured into all of these little pockets of militia and military. And then I heard the president and yourself multiple times say, "We don't really know who we're negotiating with," because you'd taken out the first and second row of leadership. And the approval ratings had started to plummet at home. Is this another forever war?

JD Vance: The answer is no. I always said Donald Trump learned the lessons — actually, that's almost unfair to him. He didn't learn the lessons of the Iraq war because back during the Iraq war, he was saying it was stupid, we should get out. He was saying that back then. While there were certainly some objectives we had in this conflict, I just never had any doubt that this would become a multi-year expedition with no end in sight, because I knew that we had leadership that was trying to define the objective very narrowly, accomplish the objective, and then see where we are.

If you go back to the street uprising — certainly there was some thought that it would be possible that the Iranian street would rise up and you would see a new government that was much more pro-American, much more pro-Western. What happened, though, and what we knew we could do, is degrade their military. That was actually the primary objective. Yes, the president talked about the Iranians rising up, but the primary objective was always to degrade their conventional power so that we could be in a better position vis-à-vis Iran, so that whoever was calling the shots, they didn't have a loaded gun to our head anymore. That's what we knew we could accomplish. And then there was always the question: now that we've accomplished that, where do we go from here?

Two months ago, I would have said I have no idea who we're negotiating with. Now I feel very confident that we have an understanding of who we're negotiating with and what it is that they care about. Yes, there are fractures in their system. The Iranian system — this is oversimplifying it a lot — has kind of three poles. There's the political pole: the people most responsive to the leadership — the foreign minister, the president, the speaker of the parliament. There's a clerical pole: the clerics who actually hold ultimate authority in the Iranian system via the supreme leader. And then you have the military, particularly the IRGC. All three of these poles interact with each other in weird ways. Two months ago we were like, "Wait a second — who has the upper hand? What does this group want versus this group versus that group?" But what I feel quite confident about right now — we're taping this interview on June 15th — is that we know who we're dealing with, and the fractures aren't really the issue anymore. The system has kind of coalesced. And what they're telling us now is: we've done one thing vis-à-vis the United States for 47 years and we shouldn't do that thing anymore. We want to change. And if you, the Americans, are willing to actually negotiate with us, to have a conversation — yes, we're willing to make the long-term commitment never to develop nuclear weapons, but we want a totally different economic arrangement than what we have with the West right now.

That's where we're at right now — actually figuring out the details of what that would look like. I feel pretty good about it. I feel good that we could have a better relationship with that country. I feel good that they'll never have a nuclear weapon. And I think there is a general consensus within their system that their relationship with the West would be different than the past.

The underappreciated element — and this is like if I was ever going to write a book about Donald Trump's foreign policy — is that he's so non-conventional in the way that he does everything, but certainly in the way that he does foreign policy, that things that were previously unimaginable are actually on the table. When Donald Trump says to the Iranians, "We want you to be a successful country if you give us what we need on nuclear — we'll take the sanctions off your country and allow you to prosper" — that would have been unthinkable ten years ago in any Democrat or Republican administration. But it's thinkable because Donald Trump is just like, "The way things worked in the past are dumb. We're going to do something new." That's what he's putting on the table. We'll see if they meet us, but right now I feel pretty good about it.

Steven Bartlett: The other term I'd never heard before is the Strait of Hormuz. Did you have any idea that the Iranians would cut off the Strait of Hormuz?

JD Vance: You see these media reports like the Trump team was caught off guard. What would happen in the Strait of Hormuz was a main fixture of the conversation we were having about whether to do this, how to do this. You can never predict with 100% certainty what people are going to do, but the basic assumption we had going into it was that they would try to cut off the strait, they would try to jack up energy prices. They thought — and I think this is true — they thought they could cut off the straits for us but actually keep the straits open for themselves. That ended up not being true when we imposed the blockade. But fundamentally, we knew some version of what would happen. We also went into it saying if they do this, it's fundamentally a short-term thing. Brent crude is sort of the main crude oil index. I think the highest it got was $126 per barrel. Right now sitting here it's around $82 a barrel. It's fallen off a cliff because there's a broad recognition that yeah, it was a short-term shock, but not one that's going to permanently alter the world energy economy.

Steven Bartlett: It's quite a powerful weapon they have in their arsenal — just to shutter the world's economy and anger your people at home at the gas pump.

JD Vance: Geography really matters in warfare. They have great proximity to the Strait of Hormuz. But if you look at the amount of oil we were getting out of the Strait of Hormuz — call it April 1st, it was close to zero. You go to May 30th, early June, it was many, many million barrels of oil a day. Not enough to eliminate the shock, to be clear, but we were seeing significant increases in oil traffic. And I think that's one of the reasons why we're having a good negotiation with the Iranians — they recognized, yes, they have this leverage point, but maybe not forever. It's one of those cards you can play, but you can't necessarily play it week after week after week. It degrades in power. Their geographical leverage point was weakening over time, and it's why we are where we are.

Steven Bartlett: Because if you're them, you go, "Well, all I've got to do is wait two years because the president is going to be at the end of his term. So if they could just wait it out for two years, they can hope that a new political leader comes in who might be more charitable with them."

JD Vance: If Donald Trump has two and a half years left in office, I think the Iranians recognized they did not have two and a half years to wait things out. One is that as we got more and more oil out of the strait, their leverage point decreased. But more importantly — look, you look at Persian culture, you look at the history of Iran. This is one of the proudest and oldest civilizations anywhere in the world. They don't want to be like a Libya-style rump state. They want to have a much brighter future. I think that's actually true. Something has fundamentally changed in the way that regime sees the world.

Steven Bartlett: The deal that you have on the table — excuse me if I'm skeptical, but I said to you before we started recording, I watch everything. I've watched every interview you do, every interview the president does. And as I've watched these interviews, there's been lots of false deals. You flew out to Pakistan and flew right back. The deal wasn't done. I think I saw a report the other day that said the president has said roughly 30 times that there's a deal done or a deal on the table — usually on a Sunday, then it's not. So I don't have any trust anymore for a deal getting done.

JD Vance: Well, this one's real.

Steven Bartlett: Okay, good. So what does that mean? Does it mean that there's a contract that has been sent with terms on it and they've provisionally — like a term sheet — said we agree?

JD Vance: Yes. That's exactly what's happened.

Steven Bartlett: Okay. So they've agreed to a term sheet. And then as is the case in business and investing, that becomes a more formalized contract, and then that's signed?

JD Vance: That's right.

Steven Bartlett: So what is in the term sheet?

JD Vance: A few things. The first is that the Strait of Hormuz opens effectively immediately and the blockade is lifted effectively immediately. Now, "effectively" is doing a little bit of work there, because part of what's going on is there's a different risk tolerance for different shippers in the Gulf. Some of these guys are already shipping a lot of oil through the Strait of Hormuz right now, even though the Iranians are threatening to shoot at them. What this means is that over time we're going to demine the strait. The Iranians are going to stop shooting. We're going to lift our naval blockade and you're going to see a pretty quick resumption of full flow of traffic in the Strait of Hormuz.

There are mines in there. But it's a very big waterway. There's a lot of traffic moving right now. We know where the mines are. They're not everywhere. The biggest obstacle and impediment to ships moving right now is actually not the mines themselves — it's the Iranians who are shooting drones and missiles. And we have seen a precipitous decline in even that happening since we signed this agreement. You're already seeing the fruits of this negotiation.

Number two is it contemplates the Iranians giving up their highly enriched stockpile of material, committing to a long-term inspections regime on their nuclear program, and in exchange having a totally different economic relationship with the United States. There's a stack of sanctions the US has on Iran that is like 60 pages long. That is incredibly destructive to the Iranian economy by design. The deal is: if the Iranians take significant steps to behave like a normal country, they're going to get significant reintegration into the world economy. What the United States gets out of that is the long-term guarantee that they never become a nuclear power.

The Iranian nuclear program has been completely destroyed — it doesn't exist right now. But over time you can try to rebuild it. What we're trying to say is: we don't want you to rebuild this program. If you make real and verifiable commitments that you're not going to, then you're getting a lot of economic benefits on the side.

Steven Bartlett: You dropped those big bunker buster bombs. The nuclear material is now buried pretty deep underground. With this deal, do you get to go and get it? Do they hand it over to you?

JD Vance: The way the deal is structured is that the Iranians, the Americans, and the International Atomic Energy Agency will actually work together to go get the material and destroy it. The agreement contemplates a new era in the relationship. The idea is that we're all going to try to work together, destroy this material. And if that happens, the Iranians are going to have a totally different economic relationship with the West. And if it doesn't happen, then the United States is no worse off.

Steven Bartlett: And do you get to check that they're not just going to a different mountain and building new nuclear weapons?

JD Vance: That's where the verification element comes in. But we have a very good sense — you can probably guess why — of what's going on in the country of Iran. We could probably keep that material just permanently buried, but we don't want to do that. We actually want to solve the problem and we want the Iranians to have a different relationship with us.

Steven Bartlett: The specifics of being able to check that they're not building new nuclear weapons — it sounds to me like the specifics haven't been defined yet, like how those checks take place.

JD Vance: It's like you said — it's a term sheet where we've got broad agreement on principles and how we're going to approach the negotiation, but there are a lot of details that we've got to figure out from here.

Steven Bartlett: So I've got: Strait of Hormuz opens, nuclear inspections, a coalition to remove the nuclear waste, and in return they get the opportunity to participate in the economy and sanctions will be lifted. Is there anything in that term sheet not included there?

JD Vance: There are other little details. Obviously the permanent cessation of hostilities. We're trying to bring in a regional era of peace here. But that's pretty much the main thing.

The US-Israel Relationship

Steven Bartlett: And Israel. There were some interesting words exchanged yesterday. The Fox reporter had called Trump, I think yesterday, because Netanyahu had started firing some bombs. Apparently Trump said he'd phoned Netanyahu and told him he had no judgment. "Why did BB have to do a attack? I'm so pissed off. Half an hour before we were supposed to sign the deal." Trump called Netanyahu a very difficult guy. "He should be very thankful for us for doing this, because if Iran had a nuclear weapon, Israel wouldn't be around for two hours." Lots of frustration at Netanyahu and what he had done. I've heard you actually say that you think Israel and the United States have two different objectives.

JD Vance: What I'd say is that we're different countries with different interests. I think the United States — sometimes people characterize Israel as a good partner to the United States, which is true. But sometimes people mischaracterize it and say that Israel and the United States are fundamentally always aligned. It's just not true. We're different countries. We have different needs. We have different geographies.

Steven Bartlett: Do you trust them?

JD Vance: I don't trust anybody. When it comes to international affairs and diplomacy — do I think they're very capable? Absolutely. Do I think that when we have shared interests, we work together very well? Absolutely. But I don't trust anyone. We just have to continually be laser-focused on what our interests are. What the president said about BB is — sometimes, you know, we are the world's superpower and obviously we're Israel's most important ally anywhere in the world. And sometimes to ensure that we are able to accomplish our objectives, the president has to have a very frank conversation with the prime minister of Israel. Sometimes he does that. Sometimes everything works smoothly, sometimes it doesn't. It's just the nature of any relationship — any relationship is going to have moments where you have to be more direct.

Steven Bartlett: The world's opinion and thoughts about the US-Israel relationship has never been more widely discussed. What, in super simple terms, is the relationship and where did it come from?

JD Vance: They're obviously in some ways the only democracy in the Middle East. A very advanced economy, very high-skilled people, technological ingenuity. It's a country of 9 million people that generates a lot of the world's inventions. Very impressive country economically. They're also probably better at intelligence collection than any country in the world. Because they're an advanced economy, because their people generally speaking want to live in peace and harmony, just want to go to work and raise their kids, there are a lot of shared interests and shared objectives.

Going back to the early 2000s, when one of our biggest problems was the rise of Islamic radical terrorism, there was a broad recognition that there's a lot for us to work on together. But even then, the Israelis were much more worried about Iran than the United States was. We were much more worried about al-Qaeda — a different branch of Islamic terrorism. So even when we've been very aligned, we're just different countries with different objectives.

Having seen the president of the United States operate, I feel quite confident that they are the junior partner. We're the senior partner. We're the world's superpower. That's the way it works.

Steven Bartlett: Do you trust the UK?

JD Vance: Again, I don't really trust anybody. But do I like a lot of Brits? Absolutely. Do I have an incredible fondness for the United Kingdom as a country and a culture? Absolutely. And I really like a lot of the people even in the Labour government, even though they're politically misaligned with me and the rest of the Trump administration. We have disagreements from time to time. We work really well together and sometimes we have misaligned interests and we have to pursue our interests in the best way we can.

Steven Bartlett: What does Netanyahu want? Because I sit here with these experts and they say he wants to overtake the whole of the Middle East, he wants to run the Middle East.

JD Vance: I don't know. I can't get inside somebody's head.

Steven Bartlett: Have you asked him what he wants?

JD Vance: I think that in this particular operation, where interests were aligned is we wanted Iranian conventional military power to be much weaker, to be decimated. The Israelis shared that objective. Do I think there are people within Israeli society who would like to turn Iran into Libya — basically a failed state with 90 million people? Probably. But I don't know that BB wants that. I've actually never had that conversation with him. It would be an interesting conversation to have. Is Iran turning into a Persian Libya good for the United States of America? Absolutely not. And that's one of the reasons why the president has set us on this course of working on our interest, which is the elimination of the nuclear threat and a changed dynamic with the Iranians.

From Trump Critic to Vice President

Steven Bartlett: You run for Senate and you're successful. And this is really where you and Trump first made friends, I should say. Before then you weren't friends. You were quite critical of Donald Trump before then. What I actually didn't know until literally today — I read the piece you wrote in the Atlantic where you criticized him for taking advantage of the struggling working class. Your quote: "What Trump offers is an easy escape from pain. To every complex problem, he promises a simple solution. He can bring jobs back simply by punishing offshore companies into submission. He can cure the addiction epidemic by building a Mexican wall and keeping the cartels out. He will spare the United States from humiliation and military defeat with indiscriminate bombing. But it doesn't matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan. He never offers detail for those plans to work because Trump is cultural heroin. He makes some people feel better, but he cannot fix what ails them, and one day they'll realize it." Very tough words against Trump.

JD Vance: Long time ago. 2016. Ten years ago. What changed?

Steven Bartlett: What changed?

JD Vance: Let me pick up on something first. You always have to be able to acknowledge when you're right and when you're wrong. There was a lot I was right about in 2016. But can you read the line for me again where I talk about no credible military leader?

Steven Bartlett: It says, "It doesn't matter that no credible military leader has endorsed his plan."

JD Vance: I wrote that. I believed it when I wrote it. And reading it now, I'm almost embarrassed that I wrote it because it was so obviously absurd. In fact, the fact that Donald Trump was misaligned with the military experts and the military leadership of 2016 was a good thing, not a bad thing. Think about those military leaders. I have a lot of respect for the troops, the people who serve, the people who put on a uniform. But you can make a very credible argument that from the early '90s until at least 2016, America hadn't won a war in 30 years. There's a reason why Donald Trump mistrusted the military leadership. And he was right. So much of what I think the president represented at the time was a recognition that American institutions had become sclerotic and broken, and he was a weapon to break down those institutions.

Steven Bartlett: Your assessment of him back in 2016 is similar to the Democratic assessment of him. And there was a private message between you and a roommate where you said he was either a cynical asshole or America's Hitler. How do you go from that position to Vice President of the same person? What is that journey?

JD Vance: A crazy journey, man. But again, you have to ask yourself: first of all, I thought Donald Trump would be a failed president if he got elected. He was not. I thought that America's institutions were fundamentally functioning. They were not. I thought that the military leaders who told us this about a war, the scientific experts who told us this other thing about a pandemic, were fundamentally maybe not always right but mostly wise people. I was wrong.

Steven Bartlett: What have you observed behind the scenes that JD didn't see from the outside? When you see him making decisions.

JD Vance: I want to caveat this by saying I didn't know him well — I mean, I voted for him in 2020, and I was very involved in the 2024 campaign well before I was ever his vice presidential nominee. That change happened based purely on what I saw from the outside. It's not like I had insider knowledge about Donald Trump that caused me to change.

Now, what I will say is that having the insider knowledge — one thing that piece in the Atlantic gets wrong is that Donald Trump is much different as a human being than the media makes him out to be. He's very warm. He's a very loving person to his kids, to his grandkids. He's incredibly generous. If you see Donald Trump in the Oval Office, it's like he has to give you a gift — whether it's a water bottle or a MAGA hat or a coin or a pin. He's one of these people who really likes hospitality. He really likes making other people happy. I had no understanding of that from the outside. What I would see was clips of him arguing with a journalist, and that was it. That gives you a very one-dimensional view of a person.

The thing I say about Donald Trump is — I remember back in 2016, and in hindsight it's just so dumb — people would say that he was dumb or that he wasn't very smart. He's super smart. He reads a lot. He understands people at an instinctual level better than anybody I've ever known. From a pure IQ perspective, he's a very smart person. If you gave Donald Trump an IQ test alongside the other 45 or 46 presidents the United States has had, I guarantee he'd be either near the top or at the top. And the entire American media in 2016 had convinced me, at least, that he was not a smart person.

Steven Bartlett: And by 2022, he's endorsed you and you win your race in the US Senate. And then at some point you're going to get introduced to him and he's going to ask you to be the Vice President of the United States. Bring me there — was that a phone call or was it a meeting?

JD Vance: There had been meetings before that. At that point I was involved in his re-election campaign. I was one of the first — maybe the very first — senators to endorse him, in 2023 I believe, very early on, when the conventional wisdom was that he would not even win the Republican nomination, that his political career was over. So I endorsed him very early. He and I became quite close over that period. We talked a lot about issues. He gave me some advice on various bills I was working on in the Senate. We just became pretty close. There was this train derailment in East Palestine, Ohio, and he and I became quite close over that. So we just sort of developed a relationship — we were friendly, then closer, then he was someone I really looked to in politics.

The 2024 campaign really started heating up and there were all these rumors about possibly me being his running mate. He and I didn't ever have that conversation about being his running mate until like a day or two before he picked me. And that was an in-person conversation. It was actually the morning he was shot. He goes to that rally in Pennsylvania, he gets shot. Obviously he's okay, thank God. And then two days later, he asked me to be the nominee.

Steven Bartlett: So where were you when he asked you?

JD Vance: I had just landed in Milwaukee for the RNC convention. There's a deadline to it because the way the convention works is you have to be formally nominated by the delegates on Monday at like 3 or 4 o'clock. It was 11 o'clock. I had just arrived in Milwaukee. I had no idea what was going on. I thought I had a good chance, but I wasn't sure. And he called me. I didn't answer the phone. It was just one of those things where I was getting so many phone calls and the call went straight to voicemail — like it never rang. And so I get a text message from a friend of mine who's now the White House chief of staff saying, "You just missed a very important phone call." I called him back. I said, "What's up, Mr. President?" He said, "JD, you just missed a very important phone call. I'm going to have to pick somebody else." But then he asked me, and the rest is history.

The Personal Cost of the Vice Presidency

Steven Bartlett: Did you know at that time what you were signing up for?

JD Vance: No. No idea.

Steven Bartlett: So why did you want to do it? When I arrived here today, I saw what felt like 50 men with guns. They'd scoped out the whole building. How does the Vice President live with his family when you have this going everywhere with you?

JD Vance: You sign up because you want to make a difference and because I was already a senator, so I'm already in the politics business. I might as well try to serve at the highest level possible. You think you could help. Part of being the VP is you help on the campaign trail. But no — look, I'm not a whiner and I would never complain about this, but if I was a whiner, the one thing I would say is it was very hard on the kids, in particular our oldest son. I just had no idea what I was getting myself into.

The president and I have this brief phone conversation. My kid is talking to me about Pokémon cards at the hotel in Milwaukee. We're still unpacking our suitcase. And it's like, okay, I'm now the VP nominee. I have to get on my suit. I have to get prepared to be nominated like three or four hours later. All these thoughts are swirling through my head. Knock at the door, and it's the Secret Service. "All right, you're under our protection now. We have to move your entire family to the president's hotel so that you're in the same protective bubble." And all of a sudden, I just realized my life is totally different now. It'll never be the same. I was okay with that — you just get used to it. I'm a grown man. But it was very hard on my oldest boy, who's nine years old now.

Steven Bartlett: He made a comment, didn't he?

JD Vance: Oh, yeah. He hated it. He hated the attention. He hated how people treated him differently. He would go to a school and people would treat him like he was special, and he just wanted to be a normal kid. And I felt guilty. I felt really guilty about that. I felt this sense like, oh my god, I've conscripted this kid into this life. I had no idea what I was signing him up for. He didn't sign up for it. I signed him up for it. That was pretty tough.

Steven Bartlett: You wrote in your new book, page 198: "Sometimes I feel like I've ruined his life without even asking him." In reference to your seven-year-old son.

JD Vance: Yeah. That's how I felt. I think I've gained some perspective about it. One of the things we've been quite good at is finding communities where he's more isolated from all the attention and all the pressures of it. We have a very good school community for him, a Christian school that he goes to and loves. There's also a flip side — kids, as you may know, you realize how much nature matters more than nurture. Our oldest boy is an introvert. Our six-year-old is a little bit more like me — he's a bit of an extrovert. He loves it. So you kind of have to balance the way it affects the kids. I don't feel like I've ruined my nine-year-old's life anymore, but I certainly felt extremely guilty about what I had signed him up for at that time.

Steven Bartlett: And in your new book, Communion, you quote him saying, "Dad, I just want everyone to go back to treating us like they used to."

JD Vance: Yes, that's right.

Steven Bartlett: Are these things hard to hear?

JD Vance: Of course, man. Of course. Your kids have an emotional effect on you that is just totally profound. And yeah, when your son tells you that he wants something that you can no longer provide him, that's a very, very tough thing. Now the flip side — and you can say this is a rationalization, but I think it's true — there are a lot of blessings that come along with this life. I've talked to him a lot about this. I write in the book that Charlie Kirk was probably the person who was most influential in helping me think through this conversation — don't try to pretend that it's not a sacrifice to him. You have signed him up for something that has changed his life. But I try to talk to him about the benefits too. You've gotten to see the world. We've gotten to see the country in a way that no kid has ever gotten to see it. We get to live in this cool house — I live in the Naval Observatory here in Washington DC. We would not get to do that if I was not the Vice President.

What I've learned to do with him is not to minimize the negative, but to try to contextualize it, and also to try to emphasize the positive. I asked him probably about a year ago, "Are you still unhappy that I became the Vice President?" This was probably four or five months into it. He said, "Absolutely." I asked him that question recently and he said, actually, it's pretty good. So kids adjust. Lives change. You figure out a routine for the kids. And I think that guilt motivated certain conduct. Would we have built the life that we have around them were it not for this recognition that we had caused this change and this disruption? No. So you take the good with the bad.

Usha Vance and Their Relationship

Steven Bartlett: A lovely photo here of your wife.

JD Vance: I love this photo. I think she looks beautiful. This is actually the day — or at least the weekend — that I met her mom. This is at the High Line in South Manhattan. There's this little observation deck. We're sitting there taking a photo. That first summer we were together — we started dating in March of 2011. I was doing a research assistant thing in New Haven, Connecticut, about an hour and a half train ride. She was in New York City. It was in some ways like a metaphor for our relationship because I found New York just this totally intimidating place. I didn't know how to ride the subway. I didn't even know how to buy a subway card. But because I was in love with her, I went down there every chance I could get. We spent every moment together. When you're newly in love with somebody, it's just like an obsession. We sort of explored New York City together as this young couple that summer. And that was the day that I met her mom, and I passed the test because here I am.

Steven Bartlett: What surprised her most about you becoming the Vice President?

JD Vance: She doesn't get surprised by much, so that's actually a very hard question. I do think the Secret Service protection surprised her too — the way that it changes your life. We went to Rome for the Pope's inaugural mass, the new pope, the American pope. My favorite thing to do in the world — if you said I'll give you two hours, you can do whatever you want — I would go to some place, whether in the country or in a big city, and I would just take a walk with Usha. That is my ultimate way to vacation or to relax. We tried to take a walk in Rome and it was like Seal Team Six had descended upon Rome. They were shutting down every traffic intersection. There's a helicopter flying overhead. I think that's surprising to her — how much the security protocols have changed just the way that we do things like take a walk together.

Steven Bartlett: Can you make that decision yourself? Can you say to all these Secret Service people, "None today"?

JD Vance: There are actually statutory prohibitions — they have legal obligations to protect me. They are, I will say, great people, amazing people. And we found accommodation — we found a way of taking a walk without disrupting everybody. But it's taken a little bit of work and a little bit of practice. The biggest change is just that the basic protocol, the thing that they've gotten used to, is much different and more misaligned with the way that we want to live our lives. So we figured it out. We've gotten things to a good place. But in the first instance, man, it was crazy.

Steven Bartlett: I just couldn't imagine. Getting here today — I was here yesterday, making my way into this building, which is like our studio. I couldn't believe it. I was being patted down, pocket checked. People were handing me stuff. I went downstairs to the toilet in the basement. There was a guy down there with a gun.

JD Vance: You've never been safer than you are right now.

Steven Bartlett: I do feel safe.

Faith, Atheism, and the Book Communion

Steven Bartlett: You've written this new book called Communion, which is — the subtitle is Finding My Way Back to Faith. Back to faith. So for your 30s you became atheist — in your late 20s?

JD Vance: In my 20s, even — in my early 20s. I was raised in an evangelical household. Very conservative, very evangelical Christianity. My grandmother was one of these people who read the Bible five or six times a day, prayed five or six times a day. Mamaw was devoutly religious, but we were what you would call unchurched. I would go to church with my dad, occasionally with my mom, occasionally with my mamaw, but our religion was very much experienced at home. You would watch televangelists on TV, watch Billy Graham revival things on TV, but we didn't go to church that much.

I got to a point in my life where I just felt like my faith wasn't speaking to me anymore. It didn't seem to have particular relevance to my life. There was a certain new atheist element to it where I assumed that I knew more than these bumpkins that had raised me. Her faith is all superstition. I'm rational. I'm a college-educated kid and I know things that other people don't. There's a certain intellectual arrogance that was built into it. But fundamentally, I think the thing about my faith that just never took root is that I never saw why it actually mattered that much. It was just a thing. It was in the background. It was something we believed. I really did believe this stuff when I was a teenager, but it didn't really matter. And so when that boy collided with reality and collided with a lot of things that were going on in the world, I just was not properly prepared to actually integrate my faith into this new world.

Steven Bartlett: When did you realize that it mattered?

JD Vance: So I become an atheist. I'm one of these angry atheists where I'll argue with people who say they're religious and I pretend that I'm smarter than everybody else. Very embarrassing in hindsight. A flaw that I have — and all of us have many flaws and many virtues — is I just wanted to rise above. Where it came from a good place is I wanted stability. I wanted a decent income. I wanted to provide my kids the stability that I didn't have. But where it was a very bad thing is I cared way too much about what credentials I had, where I went to school, how much money I made. This new atheism was like the perfect philosophy for the creed of a kid who just wanted to get ahead. I wanted to make as much money. I wanted to have the most prestigious profession. I was super ambitious for ambition's sake.

I'd won every competition that life had put before me. I'm at this point in my late 20s. I've got a beautiful girlfriend. Things are going pretty well. I'm at Yale Law School — the top law school in the United States, very prestigious. Everybody thought I was very smart because I went to Yale Law School, and I cared about that back then. I don't care about it now. And I sort of realized I'm actually not a happy person. I'm not a good person. I care about where I went to law school way more than whether I'm good to this girl. I was madly in love with her, but was I a particularly good boyfriend? No. I had learned from my youth to be chaotic. I'd threatened to break up with her every other month. If we had an argument, I'd just disappear for a couple of days. I sort of realized: okay, there's something missing here. All of this obsession with achievement and being smarter than everybody else and being rational — it has not actually made me a good person.

I looked around and said, well, who are the people that I actually want to be like? Who are the people I most admire in the world? And I slowly realized that the ones who were the most virtuous, the ones who were the best at the things that actually mattered, they were Christians. And their faith motivated not an obsession with getting ahead, but an obsession with treating people well, or an obsession with developing the strength of character that mattered so that you could withstand very tough circumstances.

I started to think: there are these rays of sunshine from Christians that I knew in my life, from Christian ideas that were in the background of my own intellectual curiosity. And if there are all of these rays of sunshine where Christianity seems to be warmer and truer than something else, maybe the rest of it actually has something to be said for it too. That kind of led me down a pathway of thinking about my faith in a way that I never had when I was a teenager. And it finally just hit me — there is something deeply profound about this. At first it was an intellectual thing. But over time it became a more emotional and more practical thing. And eventually I got baptized. I'd never been baptized as a kid. Even though my wife is not Christian, I take our three kids to church every single week, and she's remarkably patient about it. It really did transform me, but in a slower way.

Steven Bartlett: Atheism is a form of religion in a way, isn't it? It has the same level of certainty. And that's why I describe myself as an agnostic, because it feels a little bit arrogant to say that I know.

JD Vance: Yeah. That's interesting.

Artificial Intelligence, Inequality, and the Future of Work

Steven Bartlett: I'm going to take a bit of a hard turn — AI. AI is going to cause a lot of job disruption, and it's a big topic of conversation for my audience. When you look at the words of the big AI CEOs over time, one thing I find fascinating is if you look at Sam Altman's words about the impact AI is going to have, it's very dystopian. You look at Elon — very, very dystopian. And right now I think the only thing that's as unpopular as AI is ICE in the US. Eric Schmidt, who I know you know because he was an investor in your company — the other day when he was doing that commencement speech in front of the college students, he was booed every time he said the word. Are you scared about the potential economic impact and unemployment impact of artificial intelligence?

JD Vance: I'd say I'm less scared about that than I am about other things. Historical analogies are always fraught. And by the way, I think the AI company CEOs — there's a certain incentive to be super dystopian. It's like a form of viral marketing: if people are really scared of your product, that must mean it really works. And if they're not scared of your product, maybe it actually doesn't work that well. So I think there's something weird there — something synergistic about the most pessimistic predictions about AI and some of the people who are making them.

But set that to the side, because I do have some real concerns. On the job displacement thing — let me back up for a second, because I bring a certain bias to this. When I was in the early 2010s, I had this almost religious idea that there was an inevitable march of economics from agricultural to industrial to service-based. And the reason that all of my friends and family were losing their jobs was because that was just an inevitable economic trend — that advanced economies de-industrialized. There was even this argument at the time that the reason manufacturing employment was going down in the United States was because of automation, because of technology — that it had nothing to do with outsourcing or with immigration, but was purely because technology had replaced all these workers with robots. I think that story is totally false.

Now, the robots that exist in manufacturing — did they make people more productive? Absolutely. Did they cause a change in what a manufacturing line worker was doing in 2005 versus 1955? Absolutely. So the change is there. But in reality, there was a ton of manufacturing job growth — it just wasn't happening in the United States. And I think sometimes we tell ourselves a story that technology always leads inevitably to job loss, to make up for the fact that what often leads to job loss among populations is either outsourcing or immigration.

So what do I think is actually going on with AI? If you go back to the industrial revolution — the last significant major disruption in the labor market — you actually had way more people working at the end of the industrial revolution than you did beforehand. Some of the jobs were different. There was some job disruption. But when I look at AI, I don't see mass unemployment as the most likely consequence. I think people will become more productive. I think some people's jobs will change. Some people will lose their jobs. But I just don't buy this idea, and I haven't seen any evidence in the data, that it's going to lead to mass unemployment.

Let me tell you what does worry me. Going back to the industrial revolution — was mass joblessness the main consequence of the shift from an agricultural to an industrial economy? No. But what did happen? Rich people got way richer. And that led to, in Europe, fascism and communism. In fact, your country and my country are pretty much the only two countries that successfully avoided either a fascist or a communist revolution in response to the industrial revolution.

That's by the way one of the really interesting things about Christianity — the seminal text about how capital and labor could work together, about how you could have social harmony compared to Marx, who was saying there's an inevitable social division, was Pope Leo XIII, who wrote in his famous encyclical that the way to preserve harmony between the social classes was to ensure that the workers could bargain. This is where the idea of collective bargaining had a Christian underpinning — to make sure that the capitalists weren't able to take advantage of the workers, that they had to respect them.

That model of social harmony is something we're either going to follow in the age of AI, or we're going to wake up and realize that rich people have gotten way richer, the average American, the average Brit, the average Western society member has stagnated, and people really hate relative poverty. You can give people iPhones and the creature comforts of a 21st-century economy, but if you make rich people way richer, you are going to have significant problems. That is one of the consequences I see from AI.

The other thing I really worry about with AI is surveillance. A friend of mine once said that AI is fundamentally a communist technology in that it allows governments and corporations to surveil people in very profound and different ways. That scares me a lot. I don't want a social credit system powered by AI. I don't want you to not be able to buy a beer because some tech CEO has given you a score based on an artificial intelligence algorithm that nobody actually understands. That scares me too. But I don't think we're going to have mass unemployment. We might have mass inequality. That's its own problem. It's a different problem, though.

Steven Bartlett: According to current 2026 Federal Reserve and Census Bureau data, financial inequality in the United States has reached its highest level in nearly four decades. And obviously we've seen this headline this week of the US's first trillionaire. Which has sparked this debate. You think about the explosion we're seeing in robotics and Elon Musk's pay packet rewarding him for getting a million humanoid robots out there at a certain timeline, and Elon himself saying there'll be a billion humanoid robots at some point — more humanoid robots than humans. It appears to me that there will be some kind of job disruption. Wealth is presumably going to accrue to these large corporations — the Metas, the Anthropics, the OpenAIs. How do you think about redistributing that wealth? We already have crazy inequality. Bernie Sanders is saying people need to own 50% of these AI companies.

JD Vance: The president, by the way, likes that idea too. He likes that idea. I don't know that he would say 50%, but he does like that idea. There's a concept in the social welfare literature of redistribution versus predistribution. The idea of predistribution is that you give workers, you give normal people, a seat at the bargaining table. And I don't think it's just economic. The economic thing is very important — you want the worker whose life has been transformed by this technology to have a seat at the table, to be able to actually bargain with the company for better wages. Now, that's impossible if you think about it — the individual worker negotiating against, you know, Dario from Anthropic. It's not going to happen. But workers working together — this is where the idea of collective bargaining came from.

There's a deeply Christian concept here that you have to give everybody in the country a seat at the table. What about the cultural piece of it? How will AI transform the culture that we consume, that we distribute, that we make? Back in the '50s and '60s, it was broadly accepted — now it wasn't a censorship regime, there was nothing legal going on here — but it was broadly accepted that Hollywood would consult with the religious leaders at the time to ensure that the content they were making was actually consistent with the sensibilities of their membership and consistent with some basic Christian ideas. That wasn't forced, but there was this mechanism that gave everybody a seat at the table. And I think that's one of the bad things about the decline of institutional Christianity in this country — we do not have a mechanism that forces powerful people to actually work with everybody else. Religion was one of the ways that happened in the West. Probably the most profound and effective way. We just don't have it anymore, and I really worry about that.

Steven Bartlett: So the president is supportive of the United States owning these big AI companies?

JD Vance: He likes the idea — as a sort of sovereign wealth fund idea of the United States taking some stake in these AI companies. He said so publicly. I'm not breaking news. But the president is a very unconventional person. You would say a Republican is not supposed to think like that. The president doesn't care. He just thinks the thoughts that he has and tries to determine: is this a good idea or a bad idea? I would call him a radical pragmatist, though I think most Europeans think he's this hyper-ideological person. He's extremely pragmatic about this stuff.

But one very important thought: the idea that we're going to allow these companies — let's say 10 or 20 years down the road — to accumulate trillions and trillions of dollars of wealth, and then we're going to be able to successfully redistribute it to workers. I'm very skeptical of that. I think that's what I'd call a liberal concept — this idea that you can just tax people and give it to poor people and it works out. Then you turn the poor people into effectively subservients of the rich people. You have to give everybody a stake in the society. I haven't quite figured out how this is going to work in the age of AI. I think labor unions are a very important model here. But the model where you just take from some people and give to other people — that's never provided a stable society. You've got to give the workers a seat at the table.

Mamaw's Legacy and Grief

Steven Bartlett: Mamaw. She passed away when you were 21 years old — rushed to hospital with a collapsed lung, two days after her 72nd birthday — and she was taken off life support. She was clearly the most important figure in your life from reading your story. She hasn't gotten to see the position you rose to today. I read that you didn't cry when she passed away — you didn't process those emotions because you sensed that your entire family was on the verge of collapse and you wanted to give the impression of emotional strength. What would she think of you today?

JD Vance: She was a deeply patriotic person. I think she'd be amazed by this. The pageantry, being able to go to the White House — just things like that would have been very, very meaningful to her.

Steven Bartlett: What would you say to her?

JD Vance: I would say thank you. The most important lesson I've learned is that the difference between good people and people who struggle is that good people have a good sense of gratitude. I don't know that I would be alive were it not for this woman. I certainly wouldn't be here.

And the one thing Mamaw would worry about — and I think I've done a pretty good job, just to be clear — Mamaw would worry a lot about the pomp and the circumstance. In the same way that she would be amazed by it, she would also always say, "Don't get too big for your britches." What that means is: don't let it go to your head. Don't think that you're better than somebody just because you have a title or because you have more money than they do. I have to constantly remind myself that I get to be Vice President for four years. I'm going to do as good of a job as I can for those four years, but it doesn't make me better than anybody. And it doesn't mean that I know more than anybody. If you start to see yourself as better, you become unable to successfully govern a democratic country.

Steven Bartlett: Have you ever grieved the loss of Mamaw?

JD Vance: Oh, absolutely. I think I wrote in the book — I didn't cry when she died. I cried a lot two days later. I've grieved her for a long time. My biggest regret with Mamaw is just that she never met Usha. And there's something so similar about them, but so different. They're both incredibly smart. Even though Mamaw left school in middle school and Usha went to law school, they're incredibly blunt people. Usha just doesn't have a filter. It's one of the things I was immediately attracted to about her — even if she was going to offend you, she was going to say exactly what was on her mind. But they came from such different worlds.

When mom met Usha — Usha ethnically is Indian, she was born in the United States — my mom said, "What is she like ethnically?" And I said, "Mom, she's Indian." And my mom says, "Which tribe?" So they came from very different worlds, both mom and Usha, but also Mamaw and Usha. That is the biggest regret about her death — that the most important person in my life for the first 20 years never got to meet the most important person for the rest of it. I really wish those two people could have met, because they're amazing people.

Steven Bartlett: The emotion is still right on the surface for you.

JD Vance: Very much so.

Closing: Aliens, Faith, and Communion

Steven Bartlett: We have a closing tradition on this podcast where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they're leaving it for. The question left for you is — I think it was slightly biased — but the question is: are aliens real?

JD Vance: It's interesting. The answer is I don't know. It is something that I have sworn to myself — I'm now a year and a half into this job — that I would go through all of the highly classified information about everything that we know about UFOs. I just haven't done it yet. It's one of these crazy things where you get in the job and the day-to-day just takes over.

But look, I believe in things that I think are true and rational, but I recognize that there may be even crazier things out there. I believe that a Jewish man about 2,000 years ago was the only begotten son of God, was literally crucified, and then rose from the dead three days later. I recognize that sounds a little out there, but I think that it's true. And I 100% believe that people have mystical experiences. I've talked to people who have been involved in exorcisms. The rational mind says, "Well, that's just schizophrenia or some other mental illness." I've talked to people who said, "Yeah, 99.9% of the people that I've looked at to do an exorcism on were schizophrenic or had some other mental illness." But there's something there — there are weird things out there that we cannot explain.

I remember not long after my grandmother died, my sister got kind of angry with her daughter — her daughter was maybe seven or eight years old at the time — and the light bulb just exploded. And both of us looked at each other like: that was Mamaw. I write about this in Communion — I was talking to a New York Times writer about the pope and different perspectives on the pope, and we're having this conversation, and a glass just falls off the bar in a totally crazy way and shatters and stops us in our tracks. We both just looked at each other and said, "What the hell was that?" I'm a believer in mystical experiences. I don't think they happen that often, but I think that people have experiences that are impossible to explain if you have a purely narrow, hyper-rational view of the world. In other words, I think the hyper-rational view of the world is actually not totally accurate. There's some weird stuff out there.

Steven Bartlett: So you think aliens could be real?

JD Vance: I do.

Steven Bartlett: Communion — it's really interesting because I went on a similar journey to you in terms of new atheism. Very rational, how could any of this be true, arguing with Christians every time I had the opportunity to, in part to try and figure out my own opinion. It was like a sparring match. And I now find myself as an agnostic person, being open-minded and curious to new ideas. It's almost a humility — I wasn't humble before in that season of my life, but now I'm open to the possibility that I could be completely wrong. And listening intently.

I think this is why this book is so interesting — because you represent, I think, the journey of a lot of people who have rationally talked themselves out of the possibility of faith, but then have felt something is missing at some level, felt like they've been lied to by themselves or society or some kind of culture, and then have had the open-minded exploration back to a place of meaning. And I would say that meaning and that sense of purpose is so absent in society at the moment. The Christians that I've interviewed here — it doesn't feel to me to be a coincidence that they're the most virtuous, anchored, stable, happy, empathetic, charitable individuals I get to sit with. And that itself appears to be proof of something.

JD Vance: Sure.

Steven Bartlett: Your book, Communion: Finding My Way Back to Faith, is a wonderful journey in that direction for anybody who finds themselves at any stage in that journey. And it's out right now. Mr. Vice President, thank you so much for your time. I realize you're very busy, so it's a true honor that you chose to give me some of your time today. I really, really appreciate it.

JD Vance: I really enjoyed this. Thank you.