Well, thank you very much, J. D. Vance. Because of the vice president’s appearance on Joe Rogan’s podcast this week, I found myself googling photos of Joe Biden licking an ice-cream cone to pass judgment on whether, as Vance claimed, they look “suggestive.” I will save my final ruling for the end of this article, to keep you in suspense.
Watching Vance’s media appearances is uniquely painful. He lacks the authentic berserk of Kash Patel, or the pageant-queen polish of Karoline Leavitt, or his boss’s unique corkscrew approach to conversation. Like Stephen Miller, Vance desperately wants to be funny and cool. Like Stephen Miller, he is neither. And that’s before we get to the awkwardness of knowing that Vance—a Yale Law School graduate—has voluntarily lobotomized himself in the pursuit of power and attention. Greater love hath no man than this, than he lay down his dignity to be Donald Trump’s lackey.
Vance was allegedly on The Joe Rogan Experience to promote his second memoir, Communion, which I haven’t read. (He fooled me once by presenting Hillbilly Elegy as the sincere output of a thoughtful writer, and I won’t be fooled again.) Luckily, that doesn’t matter, because the two men spent most of their time on weightier matters, such as alien abductions and which foodstuffs risk making you look gay. When Jesse Watters of Fox did the latter bit a few years ago, his suggestions were at least excitingly left-field—soup, plus anything drunk through a straw—but Vance and Rogan just went with the obvious corn dogs and bananas. “Anything that looks like a dick,” Rogan helpfully explained.
[Vivian Salama: The conversions of J. D. Vance]
Vance then spent a lot of time defending his negotiations to end the war with Iran—which, as you might have noticed, have not turned out particularly well. The people criticizing his efforts, he said, want America “to bomb and bomb and bomb. And the honest view, Joe, is that they do not actually have a solution.” He added: “They’ll say things like, ‘Well, just bomb them to oblivion.’” Madness! Who are these idiots? Vance blamed Mike Pence, his very own Ghost of Christmas Past, but inexplicably failed to mention President Donald Trump and Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, who began the war by promising to bomb Iran “back to the Stone Age.” Perhaps Vance’s amnesia is political genius: He simply picks his favorite of the nine conflicting opinions that Trump has expressed on any given subject, and enthusiastically agrees with it.
The Iran discussion was one of several stretches in which Vance, who sits near the top of the government of the world’s most powerful country, affected the demeanor of a guy spitballing at the bar: Someone should really look into this. “You know, I will go to my deathbed believing there’s a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he told Rogan about the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation. He also suggested that Epstein had caused wokeness in academia. Really. “He was funding a ton of scientists but like when he died it’s almost like the era of censorship started to break,” he observed. Yes, as if Epstein’s pedophilia were not horrifying enough, Vance seemed to hold him responsible for land acknowledgments.
The other explanation for this hey-I-wonder approach is that Vance is dealing with the cognitive dissonance between his own self-image as a smart guy and the constant requirement to defend dumb and inconsistent actions by hallucinating that he is not really part of this administration, but instead a mere interested bystander. Vance treats the vice presidency the way that Instagram influencers approach a vacation in the Maldives: It only truly exists when converted into content. In one telling exchange, Vance said that he felt like he had “made it” when he was satirized on South Park, rather than at his inauguration.
Rogan was, by his usual collegiate standards, pretty tough on Vance over U.S. support for Israel, probing whether Trump would have gone to war in Iran without Benjamin Netanyahu’s lobbying. But then the podcaster swerved into suggesting Trump had been blackmailed over the Epstein files, a connection that made no sense until he asked whether Jeffrey Epstein was a CIA or Mossad agent. In the interview’s most viral moment, Vance joined Rogan in a kind of shrugging speculation, suggesting that the disgraced financier “clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence”. Vance had asked for any relevant documents and came up with nothing, he said, “but if that shit existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026.”
Vance played the same card when talking about the possibility of a vast alien conspiracy, one of Rogan’s animating obsessions: “I’ve said that I’m going to, like, I’m going to look into the UFO thing,” the vice president said, “and I’ve been saying for a year and a half, and I haven’t done it yet because I haven’t had the time.” Sir, you had time to fill in as host of Charlie Kirk’s podcast after he died. You can take five minutes to send Kash Patel a memo with the words: Roswell fake Y/N?
Vance often feigns ignorance for strategic reasons, because the pose gets him out of all kinds of trouble. He pretended not to understand what he called the “over-reaction” to fighter Josh Hokit taking the mic at the White House UFC event to shout that Michelle Obama was a man. Vance left it to Rogan to explain that it might be bad form to visit the official residence of every president since John Adams and make baseless insinuations about a former first lady for attention. “If he said Michelle Obama’s a man at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas, it’s like, okay, less of a story,” said Rogan, adding: “Not the best thing to say at the White House.”
[From the October 2024 issue: How Joe Rogan remade Austin]
Vance took a similar wide-eyed approach with his criticisms of California Governor Gavin Newsom, whom he disdained as a populist, before suddenly remembering that Republicans now like that word. “There’s a real populism that I’m very much a fan of because I think you should be responsive to people,” he said, recovering, “but there’s like a faux populism of the way that I’m going to appeal to people is by assuming that they’re idiots and acting like they’re idiots.” Again, Mr. Vice President, are you aware that you are saying these things out loud?
Two hours in, Vance and Rogan began to talk about whether there’s “a meaningful difference between an angel or a demon and a space alien with super technology.” Rogan suggested that his guest should hurry up with Iran war negotiations and get on with the real business of the government, such as finding out whether the government is secretly hoarding extraterrestrial corpses. “I’m skeptical that it’s true that we have the physical remains,” Vance said, before promising that he would take a photograph of them if he found them. Show it to the “ladies of The View,” suggested Rogan, “the intellectual leaders of our world.” The ABC show’s hosts may look like philistines to Rogan, but when Vance appeared on their show last month, they asked him tough questions about deaths in ICE custody, not Area 51.
The final half-hour of Rogan’s interview dealt with Vance’s book, his surprising support of labor unions, and the effect of immigration on wages. But I know what you’re thinking—Joe Biden. A waffle cone. Maybe some rainbow sprinkles. Could that really be as unbearably erotic as J.D. Vance made out? The answer is no. As is the answer to the question, “Does J.D. Vance have the capacity to feel shame?”