What do a popular podcast, a historical presidential campaign, and a cage match on the White House lawn have in common? Joe Rogan and Vice President J.D. Vance. On Wednesday, the vice president sat down for a wide-ranging, three-hour interview with podcaster and comedian Joe Rogan, covering everything from wrestling techniques and Joe Biden to political corruption and foreign policy. Here are four of the highlights from the discussion.

‘Outrage Industry’

Both Rogan and Vance were present at the Ultimate Fighting Championship (UFC) event hosted at the White House last month, and the two discussed fighter Josh Hokit’s comment claiming that former First Lady Michelle Obama is a man. “People lost their minds about it,” Vance said, arguing that the Left responds to obvious jokes with intense outrage. He explained that when appearing on “The View” just days later, his communications team was most concerned over a potential response to Hokit’s joke. “An amped-up fighter told a joke after a fight, said something after a fight, and that’s actually national news,” Vance quipped. “I’m still surprised. I’ve been in politics now for three or four years, I’m still shocked by the s*** that people get really fired up about.”

Vance compared the comment to a joke made by comedian Tony Hinchcliffe at a rally for President Donald Trump at Madison Square Garden in 2024. The joke, referring to Puerto Rico as an island of garbage, garnered instant backlash and outrage. “So my response to that is … ‘Oh, he was being funny, he was being outrageous,’ and I just move on with my life,” the vice president reflected. “I remember getting into an argument with somebody about this. … I’m like, ‘He told a joke.’ And the person’s response is, ‘Well, it’s not a very funny joke,’” Vance continued. “And my response to that is, you know what happens when somebody tells me a joke that’s not funny? I don’t laugh, and then I move on with my life. This whole industry around outrage, especially getting outraged around humor, I think ,is actually really hurting the country.”

Rogan agreed. “There is an economy that is essentially based on getting reactions, and there [are] a lot of people [who] are just, for a lack of a better term, they’re not real. Their reactions are performative. Like a lot of what they’re doing is just trying to comment on things and get clicks and likes and views,” he observed. “Social media has ruined discourse in a lot of ways because people are not having real conversations about things. They’re reacting to things on Instagram and Twitter,” he continued. “They look at an opportunity like that, like, ‘Oh, I found a gold nugget,’ you know, like, ‘This is going to give me money, or this is going to give me attention.’”

Vance concurred. “I’m always a little bit caught off guard by the culture that just overreacts when clearly the thing that Josh is trying to get is the overreaction in the first place, right? So you give him exactly what he wants,” he said. “Like the worst you could say is, ‘Oh, that was an offensive comment,’ and you get on with the rest of your life. Like that’s the worst that you could say. The people who really flip out about it and kind of lose their minds, I just I don’t understand that.”

Blue State Blues

At the age of seven, Rogan moved to San Francisco with his mother, later launching a television and comedy career in Los Angeles before settling in Austin, Texas, in 2020. Rogan explained that far-left politics and Democratic governance drove him — and many others — out of California. “I think the blue staters that moved here moved here because they recognized that wherever they were living was not tenable, it was falling apart. And all of these places, like New York and really California, like especially Los Angeles and San Francisco, they’re falling apart,” Rogan noted, adding that many of his friends still live in blue states, due to family situations or businesses, but they “hate it. And then I have a bunch of [friends who] are trying to move, but they can’t sell their house. Like, it’s nuts there, man.”

“First of all, you get gaslit by [California Governor] Gavin Newsom. I mean, he’s just gaslighting everybody about how well, you know, the GDP of [California] was like the fifth largest country in the world,” Rogan continued. “Hey bro, it was like that before you were the governor,” he laughed. Vance added, “Yeah, exactly. Also, how much does a U-Haul cost if you’re leaving California? How much does it cost if you’re going in[to] California? Because that’s the real measure of whether a state’s doing well.”

“So you ask the question, why do all these blue states, why do all these big cities, population centers end up becoming blue,” Vance went on, responding to a question Rogan has asked. The vice president suggested that the answer is “complicated,” but that a key factor is that those who hold conservative political views tend to avoid cities and prefer single-family homes in affordable suburbs, while those whose lifestyles permit or necessitate living in big cities tend to adopt left-wing political views. Another likely factor, he and Rogan agreed, is election fraud.

“What happened with the last election in Los Angeles? Just the primary, I think, was crazy,” Rogan said. “So super sus[pect],” he added, referring to allegations of widespread election fraud ensuring that incumbent Mayor Karen Bass (D) faces fellow Democrat Nithya Raman in November’s election, while Republican Spencer Pratt was eliminated from the race. “It’s super sus, not just super sus that Spencer Pratt, who was in second place, got overtaken by Nithya Raman in the mail-in ballots, but that the mail-in ballots also passed a tax hike. The people voted to pay more taxes, in a state where you have the highest taxes,” he continued. “They’re like, ‘We don’t pay enough.’ That is insane. And then when you have direct evidence that they were recruiting homeless people, they were getting homeless people and giving them cigarettes and cash — there’s evidence — to use their address on mail-in ballots.”

Vance stressed the fact that the SAVE America Act, which is currently stalled in the Senate, would fix many election integrity vulnerabilities if passed, including mandating proof of citizenship when registering to vote, requiring photo identification in order to vote, and increasing security surrounding mail-in ballots.

The Future of the Democratic Party

Vance and Rogan also probed what lies ahead for the Democratic Party as radical, self-avowed socialists rise to positions of power and challenge the party’s establishment wing. Rogan reflected on the 2020 and 2024 elections, when Biden faced off against Trump, before being replaced mid-campaign by his vice president, Kamala Harris, in 2024. Vance recalled, “Legitimately, when the campaign consultants told me, ‘Hey, we’re going to hit this line because Kamala Harris came out in favor of taxpayer-funded sex changes for illegal aliens. I remember thinking to myself, ‘Come on, you guys. Like, she didn’t really say that. It’s taken out of context.’” He continued, “And then I go and look at it, and I’m like, ‘Holy s***, she actually said that.’ She really was like the very worst version of what the Democrats were producing in 2020.”

“Their party in 2020 got kind of taken over by the radicals. And I think actually, maybe you’re seeing a little bit of that happening right now where it seems like the radical organizations, the nonprofits, the donors are pushing the party in a direction that most of the voters haven’t gone in,” the vice president opined. He suggested that Biden ended up as the Democratic Party’s nomination two elections in a row because he was the only candidate who could bridge the gap between the party’s core, which Vance said was middle class, largely black voters, with the party’ radical, “crazy” wing. “You know, they don’t want to give tax breaks to major corporations. They also don’t want to trans the kids. That’s the base of their party. But then you’ve also got like the crazy people, and you have to kind of hold that together,” Vance observed. “I think the argument for Biden was he was one of the only people who could hold that together, even though he was an awful politician in his own right, even before he was like old.”

Democratic socialists “scare me,” Rogan said of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) members advancing in Democratic primaries across the country. “I am really concerned that people think that’s a good idea, and that they think that socialism just hasn’t been done correctly. That drives me nuts, because I think a lot of, like, really well-intentioned, really kind and empathetic young people think that that’s the way to go,” he continued. “I do not think they understand the dangers of this ideology, because it always leads to one thing. It leads to a very powerful military government that controls the population. Period. End of discussion.”

Rogan warned that policies like the rent-control plans being touted by New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani (D) are “step one of what’s happened in every communist dictatorship throughout history. This is what happened in North Korea. Give the government the land, and we’ll make sure that no one ever has to worry about food. What a great idea. Yeah. Look how it turned out.”

Vance suggested that unregulated capitalism and an unwillingness to ensure that citizens — especially young Americans — are treated fairly is at least partly to blame for the rise of socialism and communism in American politics. “There is a Christian idea of political economy that’s actually been lost in American politics, where it’s like we think of it as libertarianism, the hardcore free market versus socialism or communism,” he explained. “There actually is a third way that has existed in pretty much all Christian economic thinking going back 2,000 years ago, which is that extreme wealth inequality does create problems, but [you’ve] still got to have private property. You still have to have a state that protects private property rights,” he continued. “There’s a way to balance these things that I think we’ve sort of lost in our country a little bit.”

“Let me play devil’s advocate with the” DSA, the vice president said, “because I think that their ideas are crazy. And I think that you’re right, they will lead to a very totalitarian place. I’m not defending a single thing that they say. … What I am saying is I — and maybe this is just sort of the way my mind works — I tend to be a little bit more empathetic.” He continued, “Why are young people attracted to socialism in 21st century America? One of the best interviews that Charlie Kirk ever gave was right before he died. It was an episode that he did with Tucker Carlson, where he talked about the fact that if you don’t give young people a stake, if you don’t give them ownership, if you don’t give them a sense of the American dream and of possibility in the future, they’re going to become socialists.”

Creating a “zero-sum environment” for young Americans, Vance said, will almost inevitably prompt young Americans to adopt a mindset of finite success, wherein a young family’s success must come at the expense of others. “‘The only way for me to get anything is to take away from somebody else.’ So we have to get away from like the zero sum thinking,” the vice president asserted. “I think that’s like the root cause of this.”

Immigration, Economy, and Socialism

Vance stressed that the Trump administration is trying to “undo” the economic “experiment” run on the U.S. via mass immigration, outsourcing manufacturing jobs and importing “low-wage foreigners” to replace Americans in the few remaining industry sectors. “That was a bad deal for American workers. Again, it takes a long time to reverse that trend, but I think it’s one of the best parts of Trump administration policy is you do see that trend starting to reverse,” he said. “This idea that nobody should own anything, we should all become renters, whereas what we’re trying to do is lower interest rates,” he added, noting that housing prices have begun to stabilize and become a little more affordable thanks to border security and deportation efforts. “You close the border. This is one of the reasons why rents and housing costs have stabilized a little bit.”

“So I think that unless you go down that pathway of allowing young Americans to own something, socialism is the inevitable outcome. Do I think that’s good? No,” Vance observed. “But I really do worry, and I see this, frankly, more in my own party than I do on the other side. There’s this revulsion to socialism that’s totally justified, without enough thinking about how did we get here in the first place? And if, man, if we don’t fix that, and I would say if we don’t get back to a more Christian sort of understanding of economics, socialism is the alternative. Like that is where this goes.”

“There is a theory of economics that dominated in late 20th century America, which is that basically that, you know, the labor market was entirely efficient, and maybe the corporation didn’t want to pay their workers more money,” Vance recounted, “but they would be forced to pay their workers more money purely because if they didn’t do that, then they wouldn’t be able to get enough workers.” He explained, “One of the reasons why I’m such an immigration hawk is because it is really important not to flood the country with low wage immigrants, because if you give a corporation a choice between a low wage immigrant and a native worker … they’re going to be forced to pay the native worker more if there’s not a pool of low wage workers to go to.”

“This is why I think the DSA types are a little full of s*** when they talk about helping normal people,” Vance added. “If you want to help a normal person, don’t provide a corporation nine low-wage migrants to compete against them. When they’re bargaining for wages, you actually give workers more power when you have a more restricted immigration policy.”

Vance noted that manufacturing plants and factories in places like China actually have “suicide nets” to prevent workers, who are pressed to sleep in the factories and work upwards of 72 hours per week, from killing themselves. “What I want out of American life is a little bit more dignity, a little bit more, you know, yeah, I can afford to feed my family. I can also go home and actually watch my kid’s baseball game,” the vice president said. “And that balance, I think if you’re looking at it from a pure profit motive, you know, maybe the corporation isn’t going to think like that, which is why you have to give the people real power to push back and advocate for their own interests.”

“Some of this stuff is actually much longer term,” Vance said, faulting “40 years of failed bipartisan leadership,” which he said has “created, really, a kind of shell corporation out of the United States of America. We don’t make enough of our own stuff. We don’t have enough self-reliance. Our workers don’t have enough bargaining power.” He explained, “That has led, in a lot of ways, I think, to this kind of socialism fervor. And we have to keep fixing these problems. Again, I think that we’re going in the right direction — maybe people disagree — but it’s going to take years to fix this problem. And if we don’t, we are going to end up with a socialist president in this country.”