“What is it like, running for vice president of the United States? How crazy is this experience?”

So began another long-form interview for Joe Rogan, the nation’s most popular podcaster, which will be available to more than 14 million followers on Spotify. Kamala Harris was invited to interview but wanted to dictate the terms – where, how long, etc. Rogan said no.

But JD Vance happily obliged, as had Donald Trump a few days earlier.

Answering Rogan’s “what’s it like” question, “It’s pretty weird, pretty weird,” said Vance. “The first time that I’ve been in a public spot without Secret Service in the room is right now.” Vance went on to relate how Donald Trump asked him to be his running mate — how it began with Vance initially missing Trump’s call while he was playing with his seven-year-old son, then getting a text message from a Trump staffer.

The 40-year-old Vance frantically called the former president back, of course, whereupon Trump told him, “JD, you just missed a very important phone call. I’m gonna have to pick somebody else now.”

Rogan asked, “Was there any part of you that was, like, ‘Do I really want this job?’ Because it comes with so much … it comes with this enormous change in your life, this insane responsibility. Everybody’s watched presidents, especially, age radically, dramatically. Everyone but Trump. Trump was like — dude just didn’t age.”

Vance acknowledged the agelessness of Trump, then said:

I definitely thought, obviously, ‘Yeah, this is a big thing.’ … Even though I’m a senator, we’re still pretty anonymous. … Most people, if you went somewhere, didn’t know who you were. … In some ways, it’s really nice because people come up and say really nice things to you. They tell you they’re praying for your kids, they’re praying for your family. But it’s also very weird. … When we were in New York for the MSG rally, a few people saw me and flashed the universal New York sign for ‘We’re number one,’ right. … But it’s definitely weird not being anonymous anymore.

If you’re keeping time at home, you’re now 11 minutes into “The Joe Rogan Experience,” and you have just 186 more minutes to go.

“It’s funny,” Vance continued, “the morning he was shot in Butler, PA, was the first time that he and I ever talked about [being Trump’s running mate] … which was two days before he made the selection. … He basically said, ‘Well, I think I’m gonna probably pick you, but I don’t know, and I’m not ready to make a decision.’ And then he looked at one of his staff members who’s in the room and says, ‘Actually, wouldn’t it really set the world ablaze if we made the decision today? And so why don’t you come up with me, and we’ll just do the announcement in Butler, PA?’”

Trump talked himself out of it, though, due to lack of planning and preparation, and the two of them left Mar-a-Lago with the decision on the table. “I go back home to Ohio, he gets shot. Y'know, the initial reaction is, I actually thought they had killed him because, when you first see the video, he grabs his ear, and then he goes down, and I thought, ‘Oh my God, they just killed him.’ … But then I go into, like, fight-or-flight mode with my kids … we were at a mini-golf place in Cincinnati, Ohio. I grab my kids up, throw them in the car, go home and load all my guns, and basically stand like a sentry at our front door.”

Rogan then asked Vance about the would-be assassin, and Vance’s response showed how remarkably little he knows about the subsequent investigation, even compared to Rogan. “There’s nothing about this that I have access to information I can’t talk about,” he said.

Rogan thinks it’s beyond fishy. “Well, there was a lot of weird stuff to it,” he says. “Where he lived was professionally scrubbed. So they got there, there’s no silverware … place is scrubbed. There’s nothing. There’s no DNA, no hard drives, nothing. … And then, instantly, that guy’s dead. And then, they take a hold of his body. He’s cremated 10 days later. There’s no press conference. There’s no toxicology report. And no one talks about it on the news.”

Rogan and Vance then marveled at how the shooter could get as close to Trump as he did. “It is shocking that he’s alive. It really is. … I’m a person of faith, but I think it’s a genuine miracle that that guy didn’t kill him. But how did he get so close? There’s a lot of really big questions that we need to be asking. … The whole thing is very fishy to me, and I hope that we win and then get to the bottom of it because I think somebody clearly screwed up.”

(As an aside, I, too, believe that the incident is beyond fishy. On July 18, five days after the assassination attempt, I warned about the FBI’s involvement in the investigation, warned that the bureau wasn’t interested in transparency and would run out the clock until Election Day and beyond. And here we are. The bureau, when it wants to, can scoop up January 6 tourists in a matter of hours, but it has zero interest in sharing information about a would-be presidential assassin and his motives — especially information that would make Trump more sympathetic and his political enemies less so.)

Just as with Trump’s interview with Rogan, the Vance interview was wide-ranging. And how could it not be when it lasts three hours? Their conversation moved from the Butler shooter to the Nashville shooter, and to manifestos and to “transgenderism” and to the deep injustice of allowing men to compete in women’s sports. Then on to the “green” movement and the big money that surrounds it and how it affects American energy. Then to Big Pharma and its massive advertising footprint and its lack of accountability for what it’s doing to the American people. And to the disaster in East Palestine, and its effects on the people of a rural Ohio town, and the lack of answers about it.

Free speech came up, naturally, and the deep state’s corruption regarding Hunter Biden’s laptop. Vance noted, as we have, that Joe Biden traded his political influence for money, and that if the American people had known about it, they would’ve returned Donald Trump to the White House in 2020 for a second term. (And, of course, we’d be covering the end of the Trump-Pence administration, and JD Vance’s life would be toiling in relative anonymity, perhaps as one of 100 U.S. senators or perhaps having written a sequel to his Hillbilly Elegy memoir. We’ll never know.)

“It wasn’t Hunter Biden doing cocaine with a stripper,” said Vance, who then noted how convinced he was that the “Russian disinformation” lie changed the 2020 electoral outcome:

I think it was both the corruption of the FBI and the intelligence services, but also the big technology companies themselves. Both of them are to blame. And I think, fundamentally, if they had not done what they did, Donald Trump would’ve won another term as president of the United States. You’re never going to be able to convince me that if millions upon millions of swing voters knew the evidence of Joe Biden’s corruption, and it was staring them in the face, that we would not have been able to pull that one out.

Hmm … where have we heard that before?

The Rogan-Vance discussion ended on geopolitics, with Vance lamenting the entanglements and the stupid wars and the American establishment’s overriding belief: “this idea that we’re going to remake the entire world in America’s image.”

“The biggest world-historical catastrophe, I think, in the history of the United States of America,” Vance concluded, “was the Iraq War. Because, unlike other mistakes that we’ve made, it was truly unforced. There was no reason, in hindsight, to do it. There was nothing that we got out of it. We lost, I mean, so many innocent people. We spent trillions of dollars. We destroyed the social cohesion we had gotten after 9/11 … and we created in Iraq, effectively a proxy of Iran. … It’s telling now that 20 years later, the biggest foreign policy threat that we face in the Middle East is Iran. And we created a massive ally of the Iranians in the Iraqis, and none of the people who actually presided over that disaster are saying, ‘Maybe we really, really screwed up, and maybe we should reevaluate some of our assumptions.’”

In closing, Vance expressed qualified confidence in the outcome on November 5: “I feel good about it, but I don’t feel great about it because there are a lot of ways in which Democrats are gonna try to motivate their base down the stretch. … I wouldn’t put it past them, maybe they do try to cheat. I don’t know what it looks like in five or six days, but I know that the best thing we can do to prevent that from happening is to get out there and make our voices heard.”