On a 2020 Podcast, JD Vance Agreed With Host Who Said ‘The Whole Purpose of the Postmenopausal Female’ Is to Help Raise Kids

(AP Photo/Paul Vernon)

The childless cat ladies of America may have a new ally against Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) after newly resurfaced audio from a 2020 podcast revealed him agreeing with a host who declared that “the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female” was to help raise children.

Vance, recently tapped as former President Donald Trump’s running mate, was a guest on the April 29, 2020 episode of The Portal , hosted by Eric Weinstein , and the two discussed Vance’s life story, delving into issues regarding families and children.

The audio clip was flagged on The Platform Formerly Known as Twitter by Heartland Signal , the newsroom for Chicago-based progressive radio station WCPT 820 AM.

During their discussion (starting around the 2:12 mark), Vance talked about how his wife Usha Vance’s parents were “just devoted” to his son, and it “makes him a better human being to have exposure to his grandparents.”

“And the evidence on this, by the way, is like super clear –” said Vance.

“That’s the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory,” Weinstein interjected as Vance immediately responded, “yes.”

Vance went on to say that his mother-in-law took a year-long sabbatical from her job as a professor of biology to live with his family to help care for his newborn son.

Weinstein remarked that having a grandmother to help raise his children was a “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman,” and Vance again agreed, “yeah,” calling it “in some ways the most transgressive thing I’ve ever done against sort of the, the, the hyper neoliberal approach to, to work and family.”

What his family had done was “painfully economically inefficient,” Vance continued, because “hyper-liberalized economics wants you” to just have the mother “keep her job” and use “part of her wages to pay someone else” to care for the children.

Weinstein is the managing director of Thiel Capital, the venture capital firm founded by Peter Thiel , the billionaire political activist who also backed Vance’s political rise, with his own history of controversial remarks .

At another point in the podcast (starting around 0:31:00), Weinstein asked about Usha Vance’s family background, bringing up his own wife Pia Malaney’s family history as Hindus living in what became Karachi, Pakistan after the partition, and how that  affected them, as an example of the “weird, intergenerational, sort of, traumas that get passed” down through generations. (The 1947 Partition of India , which resulted in the creation of India, intended to be majority Hindu, and Pakistan, intended to be majority Muslim, sparked widespread unrest, violence, and a massive refugee crisis. An estimated 1 million people died, 2 million went missing, and 10 to 20 million displaced.)

Weinstein asked Vance where Usha’s family was from, and Vance ended up admitting he is “ashamed” he doesn’t really know much about them:

VANCE: Yeah. So they grew up in South India, in Chennai, and to the best of my knowledge, no family members were implicated in the partition. Now I’m actually ashamed to say that, I don’t think I’ve actually asked her parents that question.

WEINSTEIN: Well, if they were Tamils, it’s probably not that —

VANCE: Yeah, they weren’t.

WEINSTEIN: They weren’t?

VANCE: They were not. They were Hindu.

WEINSTEIN: They’re not? Well, Tamil — Chennai was Madras which would be in Tamil Nadu, but they might have been some other ethnic group.

VANCE: Well — they, they spoke Telugu at home. Does that shed any light on what their likely ethnicity was?

WEINSTEIN: I think so, but Dravidian languages are not my —

VANCE: [Laughter] Again, I’m ashamed to say that I don’t know more about, about my wife’s family.

WEINSTEIN: Well, let’s get back to Ohio then.

Later (1:35:53), as part of a long discussion about higher education and research, Weinstein advocated for a “Harvard” kind of institution to be established for “polymaths” and “the freaks, the mutants, the disagreeable, the people that we’ve used to power our society historically,” because they “can’t get access to their own institutions.”

“It’s really important that MIT not focus on well rounded people,” said Weinstein. “Well rounded is for the second string. That’s for the betas. Give us the freaks, the mutants, the poorly adjusted, yearning to breathe free. That’s what we need, man.”

“That’s a slogan that can go on the, the Statue of Liberty,” replied Vance. “I mean, the thing is, I mean, I, I think that I agree with everything you said.” He continued to say that he was “certainly terrified of the quality of the research that’s coming out,” because he likes “a lot of life sciences stuff” because he was “super optimistic” about the potential for “next-level innovations,” but the people who were getting NIH grants “often aren’t the most exciting young scientists.”

Vance and Weinstein also chatted in depth about their views on biological differences between men and women and different races, starting around the 01:38:00 mark.

Vance mentioned that he has “invested enough and looked enough at neuroscience companies” that he knows “that there are sort of some important structural differences in the amygdala” of the brain between men and women, “for example, I know that different hormones, testosterone, and estrogen have different effects on sort of different structures within the brain.”

This led into a long discussion from Weinstein about how “99 to 1 of the top 100 chess players are male,” and it doesn’t matter if you “paint the [chess] pieces black and pink,” or “put fur trim on them,” leading into talking about runners and equality:

WEINSTEIN: I love the idea of all men are created equal. I know from marathon running that Ethiopians and Kenyans are not quite created equal. Either that or they’re very, very lucky. Or maybe they’ve just got more heart than the rest of us.

VANCE: Right.

WEINSTEIN: But you know my brother’s point is, or maybe they radiate heat really efficiently.

VANCE: Is that true?

WEINSTEIN: That’s what his belief is.

VANCE: Oh.

In light of the controversy over Vance’s “childless cat ladies” comments and uncertainty about the ongoing availability of IVF fertility treatments in the wake of the Dobbs Supreme Court decision, it is perhaps noteworthy that Vance said that he and his wife had no major fertility challenges (2:03:45). The Vances have three children , ages 6, 4, and 2. Usha Vance is currently 38 years old.

“My wife and I have been pretty lucky on this front,” said Vance. “We haven’t had to do any sort of significant therapeutic interventions on the fertility front, but it is just much easier to have a baby when you’re 22 than it is when you’re 32. And it’s easier when you’re 32 than it is when you’re 38.”

Wednesday evening, Taylor Van Kirk , a spokesman for Vance, provided the following statement to Mediaite:

The media is dishonestly putting words in JD’s mouth – of course he does not agree with what the host said. JD reacted to the first part of the host’s sentence, assuming he was going to say: “that’s the whole purpose of spending time with grandparents.” It’s a disgrace that the media is lying about JD instead of holding Kamala Harris accountable for her policies that caused sky high prices for groceries and everyday necessities, a disaster at the southern border, and a historic drug overdose epidemic.

Vice President Kamala Harris’ campaign posted a clip of Vance and Weinstein’s remarks on its official social media accounts , highlighting both the “postmenopausal female” and “weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman” comments.

Listen to the full episode on Apple Podcasts or read an unedited transcript of the episode on The Portal’s wiki here .

This article has been updated with additional information.