JD Vance

The conversation opens with the last time the two met: a cage fight at the White House. One participant calls it "one of the craziest experiences of my life," and the other says it took "like two weeks afterwards to recover" and to ask whether it had really happened.

The participant who works in the West Wing describes watching the build-up from an office window: an "eight-story complex" going up on the South Lawn, which they called "the eighth wonder of the world being built up around it." Each day it took a couple of seconds to remember why it was there before thinking, "oh, yeah, it's UFC."

The weather nearly forced a delay. According to the discussion, there was "a real moment" when the fights would have been pushed back to a 10:30 p.m. start. The heat and humidity of mid-June in D.C. came up repeatedly. One participant thought the passing weather cooled things down by about 10 o'clock. The other relayed that Justin Gaci (spelled this way in the transcript) said the heat was a problem during his fight, that "the air was very thick," and that it felt rough right after the first round.

The date carried personal meaning. June 14 is described as the president's birthday and the speaker's 12th wedding anniversary. That speaker says their wife was about 39 weeks pregnant at the time of the recording and skipped the event because of the heat, saying she would not "sit out there for six hours."

The crowd setup produced an unusual atmosphere. The discussion puts it at about 3,000-plus people close to the octagon and 85,000 farther back. Cheers travelled outward from the cage in a delayed reaction that one participant compared to "the wave." One participant asked whether it was a once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime event, and the reply was, "Yeah, I mean, it's once ever."

It was the only time in the history of the sport where there's been seven stoppages, seven knockouts. Like every single fight was a knockout.

To put that in context, one participant said seven knockouts on one card has happened before and that the previous weekend's card had 10 stoppages. The difference is that the earlier card had 14 fights, while at the White House "This is all fights."

The two compared what they saw in the fight involving Connor. At first one of them thought he had simply slipped. After his leg gave out a second time, they hoped he was "just freaking out because he hasn't been in the octagon in five years." The other describes him grabbing his knee and buckling, then an exchange with Max Holloway. Holloway appeared to be saying he could not continue, and he answered, "fight me," before the knee buckled again and the referee stopped it.

They also discussed a fight stopped at the end of the third round, transcribed as the "Tipperio-Jus-N-Gish fight." One participant first assumed the stoppage was for a concussion. The other corrected this: the fighter "couldn't see well," something was wrong with his right eye, and stoppages are not made for suspected concussions alone. They added that fighters often compete while concussed, that a first-round knockdown probably means a concussion, and that some fighters "wake up in like the fourth round" with no memory of the first three. Both called this "Not the best way to make a living."

On whether Gaci will fight again, one participant said they had asked him at the White House. He hesitated, and his mother, who was in the Oval Office with him, answered "yes." The other expects that after that performance he would take "some life-changing money for one more fight."

Asked what Gaci could earn for another fight, the commentator says they avoid following contracts because they are "not on the business end of the sport" and money "can color your perception a little bit." They describe their job as analysis and commentary and say only that they want fighters paid as much as possible, enough to "retire and never have to do anything ever again."

The other participant notes a cultural shift over about 20 years. In their high school years the big heavyweight boxing bout was the main event, and "Now it's the UFC thing." They are unsure whether that comes from marketing or from fights that are "so much more real and intense."

The commentator answers with second-hand evidence. Friends who manage boxers, including Josh Dubin, attended a UFC event and said it was "so much better than a boxing promotion." The argument is that at boxing events most people come only for the main event, and many arrive about 15 minutes before it. A UFC arena is full several fights into a 14-fight card. Attendance at the start varies by city: places like Salt Lake City fill early because they get about one event a year. The commentator calls MMA a more exciting sport with "more ways to win," more dynamism and more stars.

The White House card was the first live fight one participant had attended. They were shocked that a fighter could survive an arm bar for so long. The commentator explains that the exchange was between Josh Hokit and Derek Lewis. Hokit is described as "a great wrestler" and "an excellent fighter" but "not really a submission specialist," and "he didn't do it right."

The technical explanation is specific. Hokit kept his hips down and knees up, with the opponent's arm "essentially flat to his chest." The correct method is to elevate the hips, create space, curl the legs heavily and arch back almost into a bridge on the top of the shoulders, which would have broken the arm. The alternative is to pull the arm to the side of the hip. The commentator sums it up as "just bad technique," adding, "no offense, Josh."

Asked whether the arm bar or Hokit's post-fight claim that Michelle Obama is a man was more shocking, the participant who works in politics picks the arm bar: "People say crazy stuff all the time." The commentator adds that Hokit says this at every fight, including in a previous interview.

The politician describes a media appearance on The View, a day or two later, to promote a book, which they found "harder than anything I've done in politics." Their communications staff worried most about being asked about the remark. The speaker remains surprised, after three or four years in politics, that a fighter's post-fight comment became national news.

The commentator partly disagrees: the setting made the story. Saying it at the T-Mobile Arena in Vegas would have been "less of a story." They describe Hokit as a very good fighter who built "this pro wrestling bad guy persona" to draw attention, with a Hulk Hogan walkout song and an American flag bandana. Offstage, they say, he is "very normal, very smart." They concede the remark was "Not the best thing to say at the White House."

The politician accepts that point but calls the reaction "totally disproportionate." They argue that Hokit was seeking an overreaction, so outrage gives him what he wants. The most one should say is that it was offensive, and then move on.

The commentator explains the reaction by pointing to incentives: "there is an economy that is essentially based on getting reactions." Many reactions are "performative," aimed at clicks, likes and views, and "social media has ruined discourse in a lot of ways" because people react on Instagram and Twitter instead of having real conversations. A remark like Hokit's becomes, in their words, "a gold nugget."

The politician extends the argument to the joke told at Madison Square Garden during the 2024 election by the Kill Tony comedian. They recall arguing with someone who said it was not a funny joke and replying that when a joke isn't 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.

The commentator says they had warned Tony long before that the joke "was going to get him stabbed," though they describe this as half joking, and Tony now jokes about it on stage. Because the joke was about Puerto Rico, the commentator adds that Puerto Ricans are among the best at taking and telling jokes, that theirs is "a culture of joking," and that "they love him still." The politician agrees, citing Puerto Rican Marines.

The commentator calls Tony "the Josh Hokit of comedy," but "very talented," a roaster who likes "being a pro wrestling heel" and wants to ruffle feathers. The politician, who says they have met him only a couple of times, describes him as more political than most comedians. Both agree that he is "on the Republican team," which the commentator links to his experience of left-wing people in California.

The politician recalls a roast joke, attributed in the conversation to Shane Gillis, that Tony Hinchcliffe "is the only dude who would be excited if J.D. Fants was here" (as transcribed). They called it a very good joke and a sign they had "made it." They added that being spoofed by South Park felt bigger than being sworn in as vice president.

A sponsor segment for The Farmer's Dog follows. It is advertising, not discussion. It cites "Research" saying dogs at a healthy weight "can live up to two and a half years longer on average" than overweight dogs, promotes portioned fresh food, and offers 50% off a first box for new customers.

After the break, the commentator says they have been in Austin for six years and that Tony was one of the first people to move with them. On trips back to California, "we were like, we were right," and the state "keeps going further and further down the toilet."

The politician raises the old worry that blue-state migrants would change Austin's politics and culture. The commentator disagrees. In their view, those migrants came because where they lived "was not tenable." They name New York, Los Angeles and San Francisco, and mention friends who hate living there but stay for family or business, or cannot sell their homes.

The commentator accuses Governor Gavin Newsom of "gaslighting everybody" with California's GDP ranking, saying the state's economy was already that size before he took office. The politician offers a different measure of a state's health: the cost of moving out compared with the cost of moving in. The commentator says that more people now leave California than arrive, which they say "has never happened before." They recall that from 1994, when they moved there, traffic and population grew every year. They loved the weather, the activities and the people, "And then politics ruined it."

The politician, whose wife is from San Diego, describes "a certain sense of like heartbreak over L.A.," calling it a quintessentially American city with beautiful architecture, ruined by scenes like Skid Row. The commentator says Skid Row is "now 55 blocks," up from 50 "just like a year or two ago."

The politician tells a story from five to seven years earlier. Their wife, then a corporate litigator at a Southern California firm, had a Christmas party in downtown L.A. The firm sent convoluted directions, and the couple later realized the purpose was to avoid Skid Row at night. Inside were fancy food and wine. Outside were armed guards and very high walls.

This reminds me of going to the U.S. Embassy and Port of Prince Haiti. Like super security, crazy wealth and privilege and status on the inside and squalor and misery on the outside.

They describe it as the first time they had thought that this part of America is "more like a third world country than anything that I thought we'd ever become."

The commentator calls the recent Los Angeles primary "super suss" and the politician agrees. Their complaints are these: Spencer Pratt, in second place, was overtaken in the mail-in ballots by the candidate transcribed as Nithia Rahman or Nitha Raman; the mail-in ballots also passed a tax increase in a state the commentator says already has the highest taxes; and there was, the commentator claims, "direct evidence" that homeless people were recruited and given cigarettes and cash to use their addresses for mail-in ballots. The conversation does not identify or present this evidence.

The politician's argument is about the statistics. After the first count, Karen Bass was first, Pratt second and Raman third. The politician says they would expect the mail-in ballots to follow roughly the same order, and they explicitly do not claim that Pratt would win them. Instead, the third-place candidate did "disproportionately better" in relative terms, enough to knock the Republican out, so that, in their words, "there's not actually a real election in California." They ask what theory would make mail-in voters so much more favorable to Raman compared with Bass, and both answer, "Makes no sense." These are suspicions raised in conversation, supported only by the vote pattern they describe.

Returning to the question of why big population centers vote Democratic, the politician calls it "very complicated" and gives several explanations. The first concedes a point the commentator made months earlier, which had annoyed them at the time but which they now think contains "an element of truth": that "Republicans still fundamentally have a cool problem." The commentator restates this as too many "dorks" on the right and agrees there are dorks on the left, "a different kind of dork."