32 - JD Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares

American Dreams and Nightmares
Information
Guest	J. D. Vance
Length	02:18:08
Release Date	29 April 2020
Apple Podcasts	Listen
Links
Portal Blog	Read
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It is said that there is not one American Dream but many, and few have lived more than JD Vance. Growing up in Appalachia on the border between poverty and the lower working class, JD knew economic fear first hand as well as the cultural devastation of the region's post-coal era. Working his way up, he joined the elite US Marine Corps and entered Yale University to attend the country's most exclusive law school. Not content to stop there, he found his way to Venture Capital in San Francisco while marrying into a multicultural relationship with a wife of Indian descent, herself supercharged with a dynamism informed by the classic immigrant experience.

So it was something of a surprise when JD became a national best selling author with his book Hillbilly Elegy which poignantly tells the tale of growing up in a family under pressure, rocked by one of the most difficult economic experiences to be found anywhere in the United States.

Eric and JD sit down to discuss the history of coal and politics, the evolving American Left in the era after the demise of organized labor. Through it they discuss the difficulty of finding out footing in the collision and disappointment of so many American Dreams which all too frequently remain tantalizingly out of reach for the majority of those who dare to dream them.

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Transcript

00;00;05;00 - 00;00;48;10
Eric Weinstein: Hello, this is Eric with some thoughts before we get to this week's main conversation. What I want to talk about initially this week is the real raison d’être for long form podcasting as I see it. I would like to think that all listeners to this podcast understand the very real danger that cranks and crackpots pose to our society, when they are not recognized as such. The idea of visiting a witch doctor, faith healer or tarot card reader to treat your infection with the coronavirus hopefully sounds insane to you. If it doesn't, this likely isn't the podcast for you, as I'm just going to assume here that such actions are a priori crazy. You are probably fairly able to spot many such charlatans easily from their bizarre behavior patterns, which do not bear a moment's scrutiny. But what about people who have more complex presentations?

Stephen Wolfram’s Announcement of a Theory of Everything

00;00;48;12 - 00;02;53;23
Eric Weinstein: Over the past couple of weeks, I have been asked multiple times every day what I think about Stephen Wolfram’s supposed announcement of A Theory of Everything two weeks ago, on April 14th. I thought perhaps I would take this opportunity to clarify what I do think. The short answer is that I don't think that this is what happened. I think he announced a program in line with previous investigations of his into the properties of cellular automata, where simple computational rules result in output of unexpected intricacy, richness and beauty. If you have ever toured the famous Mandelbrot set, played the late John Conway's Game of Life, studied Go, or even played Cat's Cradle with yarn, you're familiar with this phenomenon of explosions of unexpected structure from minimal assumptions. My interpretation of Wolfram's announcement is that he believes he has a research program that will one day show that the richness of our world can be found to result from a specific computational rule that his team will be able to locate using tools of modern computing. I'm happy to be wrong if this is not what he announced, but that's what I gleaned after a short look at some of the video and materials that he released. It looks to me like a program to search for a final theory, rather than something close to a final theory. The next two questions, however, are often where things become complicated. Question 2 can be phrased as something like, why do you suppose he doesn't simply write a paper and submit it for peer review? And question 3 would be, do you think he's a crank? The short answer to question 2 is, I think, like many other experts, he lost a good deal of faith in the ability and willingness of the community of theoretical physicists to fairly judge in good faith new, idiosyncratic work via an anonymous and unaccountable system which is always ripe for abuse. As for question 3 the simple answer to whether or not he's a crank has been, I'm not going to dignify your ugly question with an answer. Theoretical physics, you see, at its absolute highest levels, has been in some strange state of advanced crankiness for decades. But what does it really mean to say that the mainstream and leadership of the field are “cranky”? Can the mainstream truly be fringe? Wrong, perhaps. But fringe in some sense means both distant from the center and wacky.

What is a "Knarc"?

00;02;53;23 - 00;04;15;06
Eric Weinstein: There is no concept in English, of which I am aware, for a group of experts promoting a prima facie insane perspective from the highest positions of trust, expertise and leadership. Stephen Wolfram, in my opinion, is far less nutty than the arrival of new high energy physics preprints that are posted daily on the so-called Arxiv server used by all leading theorists. A quick review on any given day, chosen at random, reveals that these papers are generally not in any way tied to particles, forces, dimensions, or symmetries that have ever been seen in any experiment. They are not actually high energy physics theories at all, because they are not tied to any energy scale, they aren't attempting to understand the physical world, and they aren't even theories, so far as I can tell. As far as high energy physical theory, that would be zero for three and beyond pathetic. What they really represent are the mathematical explorations of fragments of long ago exhausted dreams for unification, now 20 to 50 years past their due date. This is why we need a new concept, which I have called the Knarc. Aside from being Swedish slang for hard recreational drugs, it is also the word crank spelled backwards. You can think of the two meanings as being related, by virtue of the fact that our central institutions are almost all growth-dependent structures, now increasingly dominated in our low-growth world by leaders addicted to desperate measures to cover for their lack of competence, progress and honesty.

00;04;15;07 - 00;04;35;07
Eric Weinstein: Quite simply, the mainstream may still be tautologically at the center, but it is often no less wacky than the fringe that it denigrates. Think about it. President Donald Trump is a good example of a Knarc freestyling about getting disinfectant inside the body to kill Covid from the presidential lectern, and then lying about it, claiming it was sarcasm when he was caught.

00;04;35;09 - 00;05;09;25
Eric Weinstein: The Surgeon General, the CDC, and the WHO are all knarc organizations for giving deadly, faulty, and transparently self-inconsistent recommendations on the use of face masks, to say nothing of our friends in the People's Republic of China who are blatantly lying about all aspects of the Covid epidemic, so far as I can tell. Joe Biden, Trump's likely opponent for perhaps the world's most demanding job, is a knarc for running when he should be retiring, given embarrassing signs of mental decline and his constant inability to remember what he is talking about from moment to moment with alarming frequency for a mere septuagenarian.

00;05;09;27 - 00;07;04;29
Eric Weinstein: Once you have a concept of a dependably crazy bipartisan center ignoring reality to quickly extract as much as possible from the accumulated wealth and credit of civil society before the bills all come due and are sent to the next generation for payment, you realize that if there are any reliable experts left, you would expect them to be straddling the worlds between the central knarcs and the cranks of the fringe. And this gets to the difficult problem we now face, but which we cannot face up to: the coming total collapse of authoritative sources. You will notice that Wikipedia's history of surprisingly high quality comes from an insistence on using reliable, published sources of information as primary material. But don't take it from me. In Wikipedia's own words: “If no reliable sources can be found on the topic, Wikipedia should not have an article on it.” In short, when reliable sources cannot be found, communal sense making breaks down and comes to an end. In my lifetime, I have seen the universities, the scientific journals, the papers of record all succumb to the political economy of perverse incentives in a low growth world. Said differently, we now run the risk that if previously reliable published sources, which prided themselves on a goal of objectivity, become captured by political incentives, secondary structures like Wikipedia will begin to degrade and unravel as a result. Thus, we can formally at least understand the logic of the CEO of YouTube when she tells us that she must remove videos that contradict authoritative sources to protect the public health during a pandemic. But when she tells us that the World Health Organization is such an unquestionable source, we must, by the same logic of public health, actually consider whether YouTube should be nationalized, given that the W.H.O. appears to be in thrall to mainland China and unable to acknowledge the existence of Taiwan's efforts to control the virus, while they continue to spout nonsense about the transmission of the virus and PPE.

00;07;04;29 - 00;07;49;26
Eric Weinstein: A free and advanced society, must question the now unreliable W.H.O. and do so vigorously and ferociously whether or not YouTube and its parent company have continuing business interests involving East Asia. Of course, the idea of nationalizing YouTube because its CEO is chilling a conversation that needs to take place in the middle of a geopolitical health crisis is a confusing issue. Yet who can deny that she is blatantly exercising the privileges of a publisher while retaining the legal protections of a platform? One senses immediately that it is a conversation that cannot take place within a framework of thoroughly nutty, yet central institutions that share a common interest in being spared difficult questions, particularly as regards Communist China.

00;07;50;01 - 00;08;17;14
Eric Weinstein: On the other hand, figuring out how to make it impossible for Google, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook and other publishers to exercise editorial control while posing as platforms is an essential conversation that must not be handed off to cranks, trolls and crackpots. The lacuna that is opened up between the cranks of 4Chan and the comparably nutty Knarcs of the great boardrooms, lying and colluding to protect their empires from oversight, clawbacks and regulation, is therefore of utmost importance.

The Role of Long-Form Podcasting in Modern Discourse

00;08;17;16 - 00;08;41;01
Eric Weinstein: And this is where we find long form podcasting. By getting to know an individual host with all of his or her strengths and weaknesses, we have some hope for a new form of semi-reliable media. This sector may not yet fact check as regularly as the New York Times, but it is less likely to credulously quote the ridiculous China Covid statistics, Epstein autopsy report, or W.H.O. mask recommendations.

00;08;41;04 - 00;09;30;19
Eric Weinstein: It is also more willing to take on the perverse incentives destroying the credibility of the platforms, elected representatives, scientists, universities, hospitals and other previously trusted institutions. I wish I could say that this was because of something intrinsic to the medium, but really it is because of this: long-form podcasting is something new. There is still room for growth, and it is still difficult to control. As long as those two features hold true, the sweet spot for sense making is likely to be found in long-form podcasting, which lies in a no-man's land between the cranks and the knarcs. It's not perfect, but it's the best we have at a very difficult moment. I'll be back with some words to introduce today's guest, after these words from our sponsors.

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00;09;30;21 - 00;10;29;27
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00;10;30;00 - 00;11;35;24
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The Left's Historical Relationship with Appalachia

00;11;35;26 - 00;11;53;21
Eric Weinstein: Today's guest is J.D. Vance, the author of Hillbilly Elegy, and he's a former colleague of mine from our mutual days in San Francisco. I don't think at the time I knew anything about him setting out to write a book, let alone such an outstanding and important one. Oddly, J.D.’s family and mine tangentially connect through the Appalachian experience.

00;11;53;24 - 00;13;08;03
Eric Weinstein: Once upon a time, the American political left was very focused on the economic plight of both American southern blacks and the Appalachian poor. It's not hard to see why, in that both were subjected to different levels of enslavement and government supported terror from those who exploited and controlled every aspect of their lives and labor. In large measure, the left was thus drawn to both for two main reasons. In the first place, the brazen enormity of the exploitation made a powerful case that the left was truly interested in defeating the evils of legalized human exploitation and control of the economically downtrodden. This also provided a large voting base within the wider category of organized labor. But in another vein entirely, these groups metabolize that injustice and somehow produced from it much of the rich and interesting American folklore and ethnomusicology that in part define us and bind us as a nation. These are, after all, what folklorists think of as the two most generative American subcommunities, where southern blacks had tales that made Harriet Tubman into Moses. The Appalachian hillbilly had fashioned the Irish born Mary G. Harris into American labors iconic Mother Jones, the woman who mothered her era's workers into a fearsome force to be reckoned with in the deadly skirmishes with company armies of detectives that, in fact, defined the period as such.

00;13;08;03 - 00;14;16;21
Eric Weinstein: In my family, far removed in Los Angeles, we grew up listening to the plight of both groups, with respect to Appalachia in songs like “Sixteen Tons” or “Which Side Are You On?” or “The L and N Don't Stop Here Anymore”. Incredibly specific details like name-checking or county-by-county-level descriptions were dispensed in song of an Appalachian world far removed from my family. And, a strategy. This had the effect of getting lots of people, far removed from Kentucky or West Virginia, to feel as if we knew the place intimately, and wanting to learn all we could about the Battle of Blair Mountain, or the evil J.H. Blair of Harlan County. But most of the left then moved on from this odd attachment, and they did so without the ability to get rid of all of the evidence of the historically critical connection. The publication Mother Jones, for example, continued on, but now without a particular passion for the highly religious, heteronormative, family-focused culture of miners, steelworkers and their descendants, which had been the object of Mother Jones’ original interest. The people of Appalachia increasingly felt that they were being abandoned by the American left, and thus they lean to the right as they sense that they were now being treated as antiquated relics from the era of organized labor.

00;14;16;24 - 00;15;34;00
Eric Weinstein: It's hard to get the modern left to properly sing “Which side are you on?” when it taunts, “Will you be a man?” or celebrates our ecologically disastrous reliance on coal in general and coal mining in particular. Yet there are some of us on the left which still think that the minute that the Democratic Party truly abandoned southern Ohio or eastern Kentucky because they can't see their connection to these people of the region, well, then it ceases to be the left or even very American for that matter. In that sense, JD’s obvious love and feel for this region during the largely post-coal era, in some sense, feels like a great opportunity for a spiritual renewal of the left, and a reconnection, as well, with the national interest of the American family under stress. I know, of course, that this opportunity is very unlikely to be taken up by the leadership of the current Democratic Party, but of course it would be if the left actually wanted to win and, furthermore, make winning matter in the best tradition of the thinking left. It would also be therapeutic, in my opinion, for us all to reacquaint ourselves with just how much actual genius there is within our most downtrodden people. So sit back, relax, and I hope that after a few words from our sponsors, you'll enjoy my unbroken conversation with J.D. Vance, the author of the incredibly moving Hillbilly Elegy.

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00;15;34;03 - 00;16;43;27
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J.D. Vance’s Life Story

00:17:01 - 00:27:50

00;16;44;00 - 00;17;01;06
Eric Weinstein: Hello, you found The Portal. I'm your host, Eric Weinstein, and I get to sit down today with my friend J.D. Vance. JD, you're the author of Hillbilly Elegy, but before that, you were working with, friends of ours inside of, the sort of Peter Thiel Universe. Welcome to The Portal.

00;17;01;09 - 00;17;02;23
JD Vance: Thank you. Thanks for having me.

00;17;02;25 - 00;17;14;18
Eric Weinstein: It's a great honor. So, this is kind of one of these funny stories where I knew you in one capacity, and the next thing I know, you've written the book that the entire country is talking about. Did you see that coming?

00;17;14;21 - 00;17;34;05
JD Vance: No. Definitely not. In fact, I remember. I don't know if you remember this, but I ran into you, and I think it was Kevin in the dining hall, Kevin Harrington, at the Presidio. And the book had, I think, just come out or was just about to come out and it was sort of this throwaway thing, like it was the side projects that I was working on.

00;17;34;05 - 00;17;53;12
JD Vance: You know, I always worked full time, and I just thought the book would come out. I would be proud of it, happy about what I had wrote, but that would be pretty much it. And of course, it really took off. And, you know, if I was going to quantify the expectations versus the reality, you know, the initial print run on the book was 10,000 copies.

00;17;53;12 - 00;18;04;01
JD Vance: The publisher thought that would be more than enough, that it wouldn't sell that many. And, we sold out after a couple of weeks and it was just off to the races from there. It was pretty crazy.

00;18;04;03 - 00;18;16;18
Eric Weinstein: And am I—so the book is Hillbilly Elegy, but you were just coming fresh today from having seen a movie being made out of your book. Can you say more about that?

00;18;16;20 - 00;18;47;16
JD Vance: Yeah. So Ron Howard at Imagine is making, you know, making Hillbilly Elegy into a movie, and he's been working on it for a couple of years. And I've been, you know, various stages of involved at various stages of the process. And I saw the first cut of it before I came in here. So if I seem like I'm on drugs, it's because I'm still sort of floating through Los Angeles, unsure what exactly happened and what to make of it and how to process it. But, as weird as I expected it to be to see my life story put into a movie, it was even weirder.

00;18;47;17 - 00;18;53;00
Eric Weinstein: Weirder still? So your family members, played by anyone famous?

00;18;53;03 - 00;18;54;25
JD Vance: Glenn Close is playing my grandma.

00;18;55;02 - 00;18;55;12
Eric Weinstein: What?

00;18;55;12 - 00;19;43;12
JD Vance: Yeah, and I think in big ways, is sort of the hero of my own life and of the book. Amy Adams is playing my mom. Freida Pinto is playing my wife. The actor who's playing me is Gabriel Basso, he's playing the older version of JD. And, really got to know these guys, really enjoyed it. I actually started to appreciate that filmmaking is sort of an art form if you do it the right way, which was not how I went into the process expecting to feel about it. But it looks pretty good, you know, knock on wood. I think it's going to actually come out pretty well. I, you know, I watched it with my wife. And the thing that I told her beforehand is I just want to feel like they didn't screw it up. I recognize this is the first cut. It's a rough draft. It's not the final movie, but I just want to walk out of there feeling like they didn't screw it up. And I really felt like that, so I'm pretty happy.

00;19;43;19 - 00;19;47;02
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is fantastic. And I couldn't be happier for your success now.

00;19;47;03 - 00;19;48;16
JD Vance: Thank you.

00;19;48;19 - 00;19;55;29
Eric Weinstein: One of the, so a couple of odd features, you're coming from southern Ohio with family in Kentucky.

00;19;56;02 - 00;19;56;29
Eric Weinstein: Sure.

00;19;57;01 - 00;21;01;07
Eric Weinstein: And of course, southern Ohio has more to do with Kentucky than it does to do with, let's say, Cleveland or something like that. So it's culturally closer to Appalachia. Now it happens—and you may not know this—that I was a folklore minor in college, and hillbilly culture and black culture are sort of the two great wellsprings of American folklore. And so, I was always of the opinion that this was like one of the great artistic regions of our country. And one of the things that that meant was, is that we were left with a lot of folk song, which describes a world that I feel has been almost forgotten by coastal America in particular—and this is quite funny—left-of-center coastal America. And one of the things that I'm dying to talk about is coal and its legacy, as we sort of distance ourself from this sort of dirty form of energy that we—

00;21;01;07 - 00;21;01;26
JD Vance: Sure.

00;21;01;28 - 00;21;30;12
Eric Weinstein: We, because we're so awake, and climate-aware, we sort of are embarrassed because of the environmental degradation. But this was really the wellspring of both culture and in some sense, the soul of the American left. And something absolutely bizarre has happened. And I wondered if we could, because the book has been out for some time. So we're not going to get really fresh questions about the book.

00;21;30;12 - 00;21;30;22
JD Vance: Sure.

00;21;30;22 - 00;21;48;16
Eric Weinstein: But I thought what we might do is sort of examine, the legacy of Appalachia with respect to politics, where the country is going and what you were trying to do with the book when you wrote it. So can you say what it was were intending to do when you wrote Hillbilly Elegy?

00;21;48;18 - 00;23;33;28
JD Vance: Yeah. So what I was intending to do, I think, is write a reflection on this idea of the American Dream and it's something that we've become so jaded that it almost feels sort of trite or cheesy to even talk about it. But when I was like a kid growing up in the late 80s, the early 90s, I really had this sense that America was a place where you could be anything, where you could do anything. And of course, over the course of my life, I sort of realized that notion is a little bit more complicated than I had expected that it would be. I realized it was a little bit more challenging. I realized when I got to Yale Law School, which was sort of the culmination of, you know, my sort of educational and work career up to that point, that the American Dream was, in a very real sense, in crisis. And yet I still sort of held on to it. It was still sort of a really important part of my identity. And I wanted people to sort of understand that, to understand how you could simultaneously accept that America was imperfect but still love it, that you could still believe that this was the land of opportunity, even though you recognize that most people around you weren't necessarily able to achieve the full measure of that opportunity, and that kind of tension, that really complicated relationship that I had with the American Dream was sort of the message that I wanted to to deliver. And, you know, my ultimate hope was that somebody would pick up Hillbilly Elegy, would kind of understand the people that I came from, the people that I grew up around, why they thought the way that they did, why they, you know, sort of thought about their country the way that they did and ultimately why those people are struggling in very real ways from, you know, the opioid epidemic to a host of other sort of sociological and economic factors and, that that's, you know, that's that's why I wrote it.

00;23;34;01 - 00;24;19;02
JD Vance: I don't think I had any sort of super groundbreaking insights in the book. The one truly original thought that I thought that I had was that, there were really high rates of religious identification in the part of the country that I came from. But religious participation, it's sort of fallen off a cliff. So you had this weird juxtaposition of people who are devoutly religious but not connected to a real church. And I thought that had all these sort of interesting implications. And then I think Robert Putnam came out with a book like a year before mine, that sort of just, you know, said everything I wanted to say on that front, but much more interestingly. So it sort of progressively evolved into, more and more of a story about my own life and my family's history so that people would sort of understand these things and understand where a lot of people were coming from.

00;24;19;04 - 00;24;31;16
Eric Weinstein: So, I love picking up the thread of the American Dream because I'm a total believer in the American Dream, and I more or less want to just fight anyone who wants to get in its way.

00;24;31;18 - 00;24;32;10
JD Vance: Right.

00;24;32;12 - 00;24;56;25
Eric Weinstein: And so as a non, as an unreconstructed believer, it's kind of interesting to hear some me talk about it. Now, am I right, you did not grow up particularly well off? You weren't, you know, because right now we're living through a very bizarre moment in time in which white skin is assumed to be connected to a trust fund by many people.

00;24;56;25 - 00;25;28;21
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah. You know, I sort of grew up, I'd say, from the time I was born till when I was 13 or 14, kind of oscillating between working class, lower middle class and sort of right on the edge of, of what you would call poor. And then by the time I was in high school, I was living with my grandma full time. My grandfather died and we were, you know, genuinely poor. I think I never really felt hungry. There's sort of ways in which the social safety net definitely worked for us, but we were very, very, you know—

00;25;28;25 - 00;25;29;13
Eric Weinstein: Marginal.

00;25;29;13 - 00;26;18;01
JD Vance: Yeah, we were very marginal. Resources were very tight. And the idea that, you know, you could afford things that seemed necessary, like a college education to get ahead in America, just seemed totally out of reach. It's one of the reasons that I joined the military, not the only reason. I was very patriotic family, of my grandma’s six grandchildren, three of them joined, enlisted in the Marine Corps. It was right after September 11th, I think, that I enlisted like three weeks after we invaded Iraq in March of 2003. So it wasn't just sort of that it was my pathway to a better life, but definitely we grew up in a pretty rough environment in a lot of ways. And the fact that I made it is, on the one hand, I think, evidence of the American Dream, but on the other, you know, I don't think you can read too much into one person's story because there is a lot of evidence that that people are struggling in the—

00;26;18;01 - 00;26;55;17
Eric Weinstein: Well I mean, I think that's true, but I don't want to discount your particular story, because each link in your, or each step on your ladder is like a different version of the American Dream. Not only do you enlist in our military, but you enlist in a branch that at least in my family, and in my world, still carries a lot of prestige, The Marine Corps. So you do four years in the Marine Corps, and then you're off to a college education at Ohio State?

00;26;55;19 - 00;27;19;08
JD Vance: Yeah. So I go to Ohio State. I remember feeling this intense sense of being very old there, you know? So I got to Ohio State in September of 2007. I was 23 years old. And we would talk in like introductory political science classes about what was going on in Iraq. And, you know, I had friends who were like, still there. And I had just come back, you know, a year earlier.

00;27;19;11 - 00;27;21;22
Eric Weinstein: So you were wisened from direct experience.

00;27;21;22 - 00;27;46;23
JD Vance: Yeah. And I think that I just felt, you know, with everything from the dating scene to most of my friends from high school, if they had gone to college, they had already graduated. Like I was just desperate to sort of get out. So I graduated very quickly and a place like Ohio State, that was possible. You could take as many credit hours as you wanted, and as soon as you got the degree requirements met, you were you were out of there. So I actually spent less than two years at Ohio State, and then went to Yale Law School right after that.

00;27;46;24 - 00;27;50;23
Eric Weinstein: So, arguably, the country's top law school.

00;27;50;23 - 00;27;51;00
JD Vance: Right.

00;27;51;08 - 00;27;53;12
Eric Weinstein: From a theory perspective.

Intergenerational Trauma and the American Dream

00;27;53;14 - 00;28;18;29
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah, you—definitely the highest in sort of the objective rankings. But I do think there's an interesting question about what it means to be the top educational institution. But then in a world where things are as corrupt as they are right now, though, I mean, to your point, at that time, I wasn't thinking that. To me, Yale Law School was that was my ticket, right? As soon as I got the call, because they call people when they let them in, they don't send letters.

00;28;19;00 - 00;28;19;28
Eric Weinstein: Oh wow.

00;28;20;01 - 00;28;45;21
JD Vance: Small classes. And I will never forget I was at a friend's house. I got a phone call on my cell phone. It was a 203 number, which I knew from sort of law school admissions message boards that was a New Haven area code. And I just knew I was like, okay, I'm never going to have to worry about money. My life is going to be set. Things have worked out for me. That was sort of my instant reaction to that. I think it was a, yeah, it was a really transformational moment.

00;28;45;23 - 00;29;11;18
Eric Weinstein: So it's interesting. So neither you nor I did very well in high school. We both have ended up in somewhat similar worlds a little bit, but when I, you know, when I, got a PhD from Harvard, I had none of that feeling that things were going to be okay. Because it wasn't a professional degree, it was an academic degree.

00;29;11;18 - 00;29;11;24
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;29;11;25 - 00;29;36;15
Eric Weinstein: And I think people discount just how weird it is to both have a sense of being economically marginal and economically secure, and the message not being entirely clear one way or the other. I've met very rich people who can, because of the way in which they grew up, never get a sense of comfort that things are going to be okay.

00;29;36;17 - 00;30;05;19
JD Vance: Yeah. It's interesting you say that because I do think there's a way in which I've realized that that sense of scarcity is always going to be with me, but it's just not the same as, like really being in scarcity. I always have, you know, I think my wife has told me that, there's always this way in which I'm terrified that things are going to go radically wrong very quickly. You know, that some investment that we made, even though it's in, you know, a super safe public equity, is just going to go to zero.

00;30;05;20 - 00;30;06;08
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00;30;06;10 - 00;30;10;16
JD Vance: That taxes are going to go up so high on our house that we're going to have to move out of our house.

00;30;10;19 - 00;30;12;05
Eric Weinstein: Your wife grew up where?

00;30;12;07 - 00;30;20;08
JD Vance: She grew up in San Diego, sort of very middle class, daughter of Indian immigrants. I think herself very much a believer in the American Dream.

00;30;20;08 - 00;30;26;01
Eric Weinstein: The reason I bring it up is that both of us have married people from the subcontinent.

00;30;26;02 - 00;30;26;11
JD Vance: Sure.

00;30;26;18 - 00;30;58;14
Eric Weinstein: And my belief is, is that partition casts a pall over people who come from India whose families went through that. I don't know whether that's part of your story is certainly part of my wife's story, where they were Hindus living in Karachi. And so whether you interact with the Holocaust or partition, or the Armenian Genocide or anything like that, there are these weird intergenerational sort of, traumas that get passed.

00;30;58;14 - 00;31;10;18
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah. So they grew up in South India and Chennai, and to the best of my knowledge, no family members were implicated in the partition, though I'm actually ashamed to say that I don't think I've actually asked her parents that question.

00;31;10;21 - 00;31;12;22
Eric Weinstein: Well, if they were Tamils, it's probably not—

00;31;12;23 - 00;31;13;03
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;31;13;03 - 00;31;13;18
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00;31;13;21 - 00;31;14;15
JD Vance: They weren't.

00;31;14;17 - 00;31;14;27
Eric Weinstein: Oh, they weren't?

00;31;14;27 - 00;31;16;05
JD Vance: They were not. They were Hindu.

00;31;16;09 - 00;31;23;13
Eric Weinstein: They're not well—Tamil—Chennai was Madras, which would be in Tamil Nadu. But—

00;31;23;16 - 00;31;24;18
JD Vance: So yeah...

00;31;24;22 - 00;31;26;06
Eric Weinstein: They might have been some other ethnic group.

00;31;26;13 - 00;31;30;03
JD Vance: Well they, they spoke Telugu at home.

00;31;30;11 - 00;31;31;25
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

00;31;31;27 - 00;31;34;24
JD Vance: Does that shed any light on what their likely ethnicity was?

00;31;35;00 - 00;31;37;08
Eric Weinstein: I think so, but—

00;31;37;10 - 00;31;37;15
JD Vance: Again—

00;31;37;23 - 00;31;39;06
Eric Weinstein: Dravidian languages are not my—

00;31;39;06 - 00;31;41;25
JD Vance: I’m ashamed to say that I don't know more about my wife's family.

Societal Inequality and the Perception of Appalachia

00;31;41;25 - 00;31;43;04
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's get back to—

00;31;43;09 - 00;31;43;15
JD Vance: Sure.

00;31;43;16 - 00;33;12;17
Eric Weinstein: Ohio then. So one of the things that really moved me is, is that you've invited me to gatherings where people who are very worried about inequality in the United States and the health of working families, and the the number of people who are marginal, and the disappearing middle class, and the swelling ranks of the poor, are talking about these issues. And I can find myself as the only Democrat invited to the table, and I can listen for hours upon hours to Republicans pouring their heart out, trying to figure out how to help the working poor, the people affected by the opioid epidemic, and trying to figure out what the hell is going wrong with our country. And I have to say that when I come back to my coastal friends who are left of center, I feel like a lot of this has just fallen off the radar. Like people, it's—they weirdly look down on this region in ways that make me incredibly uncomfortable. Like we talked, I gave you my idea of for Birthright Ohio, that like Birthright Israel, we should tour people from the coasts and show them, you know, what kind of standard of living they could have if they moved to the interior and brought some of their technical know how and got over their bigotry.

00;33;12;18 - 00;34;04;13
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah, there definitely is that sense of bigotry and, you know, the way that I would illustrate this is when I was in law school, I was a third-year student in a seminar and, you know, these seminars are 12 or 13 people. I made some point, and the point kind of implied that I was in the military and this sort of, you know, very nice student turn to me and said, “oh, you were you in the military?” And I said, “yeah, I was in the I was in the Marine Corps”. And she said, “Oh my God, that's so surprising. You just seem so nice!” And, you know, it's so—yeah. Somebody made the comment to me later, years later, when I told that story that, if I sort of lived in hyper woke, you know, that if that had happened 2017 or 2018, instead of 2013, I would have called it a microaggression.

00;34;04;13 - 00;34;04;23
Eric Weinstein: Yeah!

00;34;04;26 - 00;35;28;15
JD Vance: It sort of hit me that that was like my brief flirtation with a microaggression. But there is this weird way in which, whether it's the reaction to the Trump phenomenon or just general lifestyle, voting habits, cultural attitudes, whatever the case may be, there's this way in which I think left-of-center elites, especially, are not comfortable with the idea that there is a population in the middle of the country, primarily but not exclusively white, that's just doing very poorly, and they have specific class political interests that are not really being given good expression in current American political and cultural discourse. And sort of the way that I think about this most strongly is like in response to Trump's election, you know, there were all of these sort of absurd think pieces and academic research papers that back them up, and the social scientists like, you know, “let's try to quantify just how racist the average Trump voter is”. And some of these studies they wouldn't even control for age, some of these studies they wouldn't even control for income. There were these weird ways in which, like basic, you know, basic research practices weren't being followed. But then if you really looked at the questions that they were asking to sort of tease out whether people were racist—

00;35;28;15 - 00;35;28;22
Eric Weinstein: Right.

Race Relations and the Impact of Sanitized Rhetoric

00;35;28;28 - 00;35;50;22
JD Vance: And you realize that they're basically just penalizing people who don't have college educated attitudes about race, that what they're really sort of—when they say that a person has a high degree of racial animus in a lot of these studies, it's “did you go to an elite university and learn to talk about race like a person who graduated from an elite university?

00;35;50;22 - 00;35;51;25
Eric Weinstein: I think this is an amazing point.

00;35;51;26 - 00;36;15;09
JD Vance: And it's, you know, that has blinded a lot of people, I think, to just, you know, how much frustration, how much hurt there is. And it’s made left-of-center politics in this country, really, really perverse. I don't think all leftist politics, by the way, I mean, there are these weird pockets of leftist politics in the country that still sort of get it.

00;36;15;11 - 00;36;15;21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

00;36;15;21 - 00;36;20;07
JD Vance: But most don't, especially at the elite level.

00;36;20;09 - 00;37;03;22
Eric Weinstein: So this is actually personally really, I don't get a chance to talk about this that often. I have the sense that people who've worked on the same factory floor of different races and have actually come to understand each other, maybe have each other over to each other's homes, but maintain a certain sense of, like, we can be close, but we're also separate, and we have to joke about our differences. And sometimes it erupts into a fight, and sometimes you bury the hatchet, and sometimes it's kind of the spice of life—that richness of actually different races dealing with each other in a work environment—

00;37;03;22 - 00;37;05;07
JD Vance: Like sharing a life together.

00;37;05;07 - 00;37;33;06
Eric Weinstein: Like sharing a life together, but like, maybe you belong to different neighborhoods, you know, because the neighborhoods segregate and you sort of, you—I mean, I think you know what I'm talking about, I'm trying to talk about it in terms that are actually weirdly, I mean it's the inverse of what you're saying. I come from the group that is now—I mean, this is like, this is so complicated. Three out of my four grandparents never got a college degree, you know?

00;37;33;10 - 00;37;33;27
JD Vance: Yep.

00;37;34;00 - 00;38;09;05
Eric Weinstein: And in the two generations since then, I'm supposed to pretend that I've always come from this exalted group of educated people like, “well, and of course, in our stratum, you know, this isn't an issue”. But like, to me, this is just like the last four minutes we've been college educated, and somewhat for you. Now I want to go back and I want to try to talk about the way in which races actually interact, and men and women actually interact.

00;38;09;05 - 00;38;09;13
JD Vance: Right.

00;38;09;13 - 00;38;19;04
Eric Weinstein: And I can't use the college educated language of elite universities to talk about that. There's this weird way in which you're separate, but you're also actually intertwined.

00;38;19;04 - 00;38;34;25
JD Vance: Yes. Yeah. And I actually think it's very bad for like real race relations in the country. Right? This, this sort of fake. We're not going to talk about 70% of the issues that you might talk about in a normal conversation, because we're terrified that we're going to offend each other.

00;38;34;26 - 00;38;35;03
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00;38;35;09 - 00;39;18;18
JD Vance: I think that's a really way to actually, again, share a life. And a conversation with somebody. You know, I think about, you know, my real experience of this having never worked on a factory floor, you know, I guess I maybe worked at a factory for like three months out of my life. was in the, in the military, right. Still sort of like the genuinely multiracial multi-ethnic multi-class institutions in American life. And so many of the conversations that I had with, like my 19 year old, you know, friends that I was in boot camp with would absolutely offend and scandalize the average—

00;39;18;18 - 00;39;20;15
Eric Weinstein: But it was the basis of intimacy, right?

00;39;20;15 - 00;39;20;23
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;39;20;23 - 00;39;21;22
JD Vance: Absolutely. Right. I mean, like.

00;39;21;22 - 00;39;30;18
Eric Weinstein: You're going to joke about the most offensive things in order to show, hey, if we can get through that, maybe I can actually deal with you in a firefight and trust you.

00;39;30;19 - 00;40;10;01
JD Vance: Yeah, absolutely. You know, some people, like, make fun of each other. That's a natural thing to happen among people who are genuinely friends. I think especially like young people, they're kind of ribbing each other. They're testing the boundaries a little bit, and there's a way in which that kind of real conversation is no longer welcome in elite circles. And I, you know, I think sort of the pro spin on it is that, you know, maybe an environment that's multiracial, where jokes are flying everywhere, maybe people are sort of secretly offended, but in a hyper cleansed environment and the average elite university people aren't as offended.

00;40;10;01 - 00;40;10;12
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, I don't wanna—

00;40;10;19 - 00;40;11;16
JD Vance: But I don't buy that.

00;40;11;16 - 00;40;19;15
Eric Weinstein: I don't want to pretend that joking is just awesome, because there's a lot of people of that simplistic attitude—

00;40;19;15 - 00;40;20;08
JD Vance: Of course, yeah.

00;40;20;10 - 00;40;31;04
Eric Weinstein: You know, there's a lot of harm that can be done by bad and unskilled jokes, but in my experience, you make too much of an unskilled joke, you learn very quickly not to do it again.

00;40;31;04 - 00;40;31;16
JD Vance: Yes.

00;40;31;16 - 00;40;32;25
Eric Weinstein: And people get better over time.

00;40;32;25 - 00;41;04;13
JD Vance: Yes, exactly. Exactly. Yeah. So I think there were maybe imperfections and certainly, you know, people said things to others that went too far in some way, I'm sure. But being I think probably our society, especially in elite circles, college educated circles is too much in the direction of terror over offending somebody's sensibilities. And it's really hard to build a real relationship with somebody when that's when that's where you're going.

Intimacy and Real Conversations Across Racial and Class Divides

00;41;04;18 - 00;41;25;25
JD Vance: I mean, I think you and I have had this conversation, maybe in private or maybe I've had it with somebody else. But, you know, I have a couple of friends who are practicing devout Muslims, and there's a way in which people who are serious about their faith, Muslims, talk about terrorism in a way, Islamic terrorism—

00;41;25;25 - 00;41;26;04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah!

00;41;26;06 - 00;41;48;06
JD Vance: In a way that 99% of public intellectuals and commentators would be terrified to talk about it. But again, when you, like, really know somebody and you're talking about real issues in the intimacy of somebody's home and you're not worried that everybody who's saying something is saying it in bad faith, you can actually have a lot of really interesting discussions.

00;41;48;06 - 00;42;32;00
Eric Weinstein: You know, I'll be honest. I learned—I started off saying, you know, we can't talk about Islam as having a connection to terror. And it was my Muslim friends who said, “What is your problem? What are you doing? Have you touched a pod? Have you gone mad? Did you blow a neuron out?” You know, “Of course there's a problem! That's what we talk about. And honestly, Eric, you sound like an idiot.” You know, and it was a very powerful argument. Now, if you ask how we joke, you know, probably we—I occasionally make a joke with very close Muslim friends about terror or oil, and they make a joke about how I control all of the newspapers in the movie studios.

00;42;32;02 - 00;42;33;16
JD Vance: Yep.

00;42;33;19 - 00;42;43;09
Eric Weinstein: And those kinds of jokes have this role in building intimacy. And of course, they're dangerous, but that's why they work to build intimacy.

00;42;43;09 - 00;42;43;13
JD Vance: Right.

00;42;43;15 - 00;42;49;25
Eric Weinstein: And what concerns me is that nobody's ever going to get intimate if everybody's terrified of being real.

00;42;49;29 - 00;42;50;05
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;42;50;07 - 00;43;06;16
Eric Weinstein: And you can't just also say, well, the comedians are right. Everything offensive is awesome, and we should just celebrate the First Amendment every time somebody says something hurtful because, you know, there really is something about learning to be decent, but we're not going to learn how to be decent by being terrified of each other.

00;43;06;19 - 00;44;06;00
JD Vance: Right. Right. Yeah. You know, one of my best friends from law school is this guy Jamil Giovanni, I think you've interacted with Jamil, at least a little bit. Very smart guy, lives in Toronto, wrote a book called “Why Young Men” about sort of the connection between young men and attraction to sort of violent movements, be they, you know, Islamic or white supremacist or whatever. And I was, one of my favorite moments from law school was Jamil and I and a bunch of our classmates, we went to, like, this late night chicken restaurant. We were, you know, gorging after a night of drinking. And afterwards, like all of our classmates had just left this terrible mess. And Jamil and I sort of stayed back to kind of clean up so that the people who work there didn't have to clean up the entire mess. And we sort of had this real moment of connection that we're probably the only two people here have actually had to clean up somebody else's mess before.

00;44;06;02 - 00;44;06;12
Eric Weinstein: Oh interesting.

00;44;06;12 - 00;44;53;02
JD Vance: And that that sort of sense of, you know, clearly different nationalities, different races. He's a black guy from Toronto. I'm a white guy from southern Ohio. But that that sense of commonality led to so many fruitful conversations about race, about class, about Canada, about America. And there's a way in which sanitized rhetoric actually prevents those types of relationships from developing. And I don't know what to do with it. I mean, again, I'm not super cynical about this. I think that it comes from a good place, a genuine desire, at least in some cases, not all cases, to prevent offense, but it can be just destructive to—

00;44;53;04 - 00;44;54;10
Eric Weinstein: Well, I also think it's really—

00;44;54;10 - 00;44;54;25
JD Vance: Friendship.

00;44;55;01 - 00;45;06;15
Eric Weinstein: It's really important to understand what racism is and is not, which you can't do if you're not willing to sort of investigate and interrogate it in yourself.

00;45;06;17 - 00;45;06;28
JD Vance: Sure.

00;45;07;05 - 00;45;33;15
Eric Weinstein: And in general, I find that everyone has programing—I mean, our friend David Eagleman has made this point that if you put a bracelet on a rubberized hand that says, you know, Jew, Christian, atheist, Hindu, and then you stab the rubberized hands with a fork, people react to the one that is labeled with their group differently, you know?

00;45;33;15 - 00;45;33;27
JD Vance: Absolutely.

The Left’s Shift Away from Its Historical Roots

00;45;33;29 - 00;46;43;25
Eric Weinstein: It's just very funny that we sort of have to deny that we have any kind of evolutionary programing towards tribe or group. Now, okay, once you actually have sort of wrestled with this in yourself, you know, then you're open to actually solving richer problems. And I don't know how we get back to that because, you know, what I see is that there's a very thin layer of people who have found their way to high leverage positions, particularly within media, within universities, within HR departments, who are hell bent on making sure that speech is policed in a very counterproductive way to actually making progress on these issues. And I guess, you know, the weird thing that I have to say is that I associate this much more with the Left, and so one thing I would love to talk to you about is the way in which the Left moved, bizarrely, by using our shared interest in Appalachia.

00;46;43;27 - 00;47;02;17
JD Vance: Sure, sure. Yeah. So you mentioned you mentioned coal earlier, and of course, one of the hotbeds of the American labor movement was, I mean, genuinely violent union reactions against what was going on in coal country. And—

00;47;02;19 - 00;47;11;27
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's say what it was, which is—I've almost never heard this word used in a modern context—it's a form of slavery in the 20th century.

00;47;11;27 - 00;47;12;16
JD Vance: Yep.

00;47;12;19 - 00;47;19;03
Eric Weinstein: And the people enslaved were often whites. I mean, there was black slavery through coal as well.

00;47;19;03 - 00;47;23;10
JD Vance: Sure. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you had a lot of black coal miners. Other places did as well.

00;47;23;16 - 00;47;24;13
Eric Weinstein: Right.

00;47;24;16 - 00;47;52;03
JD Vance: But yeah. No, it was I mean, the entire economy was sort of different and segregated, right? They didn't pay people in dollars that they could use. They paid them in company script. They lived in houses that were typically owned by the company, where very often the wages that they earned just covered the home and the food that they ate, which very often was sort of at starvation levels. There was this weird way in.

00;47;52;03 - 00;47;53;08
Eric Weinstein: They had to shop in the company store.

00;47;53;15 - 00;47;54;03
JD Vance: Exactly like the—

00;47;54;03 - 00;47;54;25
Eric Weinstein: With the company script!

00;47;54;25 - 00;48;01;02
JD Vance: The script kind of covered up for the fact that it gave people a sense of agency where there really wasn't any.

00;48;01;03 - 00;48;08;26
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's go further. These coal barons had private armies in the form of things like the detective agency.

00;48;08;26 - 00;48;09;10
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;48;09;13 - 00;48;11;25
Eric Weinstein: And these were effectively private armies.

00;48;11;25 - 00;48;12;09
JD Vance: Yes.

00;48;12;09 - 00;48;16;22
Eric Weinstein: And the unions had private armies themselves.

00;48;16;25 - 00;48;17;04
JD Vance: Yeah.

00;48;17;04 - 00;48;20;25
Eric Weinstein: So you had like, you ever hear this group I think was the Dirty 11?

00;48;21;00 - 00;48;22;01
JD Vance: Yeah. Of course.

00;48;22;01 - 00;49;04;07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. Okay. Well, here's—let's get into this, because I think that one of the funny things is that the culture seeped in to U.S. culture in a way that the current lefties do not understand. And I think of myself as left-of-center. But I don't think of myself as a—what these guys now call themselves as “progressives,” because it doesn't seem progressive in any way, shape or form. So, for example, our friend Christina Hoff Sommers, who is a feminist who associates with second wave feminism—

00;49;04;07 - 00;49;06;00
JD Vance: Yep.

00;49;06;02 - 00;49;51;10
Eric Weinstein: You know, is notable for saying that she doesn't think that the wage gap is what it is frequently quoted as being, which is a 25% discount for women doing the same work as men. Now, she was protested, at, a university in Oregon by a bunch of kids who were singing a rewritten song. And it went like this, “no platform for fascists, no platform at all. Which side are you on? Which side are you on?” Now, that song comes from 1931, I think, from a woman named—it's credited on Wikipedia, I think, to Pete Seeger, but it's Florence Reece.

00;49;51;10 - 00;49;51;15
JD Vance: Yep.

00;49;51;21 - 00;49;53;14
Eric Weinstein: Who was the wife of Sam Reece.

00;49;53;18 - 00;49;54;08
JD Vance: Yep.

00;49;54;11 - 00;50;05;27
Eric Weinstein: Who was a union organizer who was being hunted by the the army of the Union boss. And they shot up her house.

00;50;05;29 - 00;50;17;08
JD Vance: And I believe she's even—you mentioned 20th century. I mean, this was like going into the sort of mid to late 20th century. There's a, you know, brilliant documentary.

00;50;17;08 - 00;50;17;23
Eric Weinstein: It goes up till the ‘70s.

00;50;17;23 - 00;50;36;09
JD Vance: Right. It is a brilliant documentary called Harlan County, USA, which, I believe that she's featured in this documentary. She’s much older at that point, of course, but she's singing the song in the documentary. And to your point about private armies, this incredibly violent attempt to suppress people from demanding—

00;50;36;09 - 00;50;37;11
Eric Weinstein: This is actual tyranny!

00;50;37;11 - 00;50;48;09
JD Vance: It’s actual tyranny. It's like corporate tyranny, and people fought back against it. And of course, sort of extracted some measure of wage protections, health protections and so forth.

00;50;48;09 - 00;51;17;14
Eric Weinstein: With? With guns! And explosives! No, let's celebrate this, because one of the things is it's very weird to hear people—I don't know if you've ever seen this cartoon where there's like a giant chalkboard and it's got like a bunch of hash marks on it, and on one side says, like “number of school killings” or “numbers of people killed in schools”. And on the other side, it says “number of times guns have been used to fight off tyranny” or something like that.

00;51;17;14 - 00;51;18;06
JD Vance: Yeah, yeah.

00;51;18;06 - 00;51;22;21
Eric Weinstein: And there's no—there's no hash mark! And I think, you guys just don't know anything!

00;51;22;21 - 00;51;23;02
JD Vance: Right.

00;51;23;02 - 00;51;24;06
Eric Weinstein: You're just ignorant!

00;51;24;10 - 00;51;29;18
JD Vance: [laughter] Yeah. And, the—

00;51;29;20 - 00;51;40;00
Eric Weinstein: And I'm not a gun nut. Like, I'll talk gun control, but I'm not going to tell my friends who enjoy firearms and the fact that it may be a hedge against tyranny, that they have no point.

00;51;40;03 - 00;51;56;28
JD Vance: Well, and if you think about the cultural legacy that leaves for the women who grew up in that part of the country. Right? So my grandmother was born into deep poverty and in Appalachia. She was born in 1933. She left, in sort of the mid 40s, but kept on coming back. And—

00;51;57;01 - 00;51;57;25
Eric Weinstein: This is Glenn Close?

00;51;58;01 - 00;52;05;24
JD Vance: Yeah. This is, you know, now being played by Glenn Close. But my mamaw, when she died, she owned 19 handguns.

00;52;05;24 - 00;52;06;05
Eric Weinstein: Yeah!

00;52;06;10 - 00;52;35;24
JD Vance: And many of which were loaded. And we would find them sort of stocked—when she died we would find them stocked all over the house, you know, in a cupboard, in a wardrobe, in sort of a coat pocket, because she couldn't get around very well. And she wanted to make sure that no matter where she was, if somebody came in, she was within arm's reach of a gun. And, you know, for mamaw, like, I don't think she was ever a member of the NRA. But guns were part of her sense of her cultural identity. And—

00;52;35;29 - 00;52;37;00
Eric Weinstein: Women shot, man!

00;52;37;00 - 00;52;37;08
JD Vance: Right!

00;52;37;08 - 00;52;54;06
Eric Weinstein: They had to! This is the thing, these women were so tough! Like Florence Reese. How tough was she? And, you know, do you know—I don't know if I exactly have my folkloric tradition right, but there was another song called Lay the Lily Low, which I think she borrowed the tune from—

00;52;54;06 - 00;52;54;22
JD Vance: Okay.

00;52;54;24 - 00;53;04;03
Eric Weinstein: Which was a song about a woman who cross-dresses to join the army to take care of her man.

00;53;04;03 - 00;53;04;27
JD Vance: I don't know this one.

00;53;04;27 - 00;53;07;00
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so this is like the issue.

00;53;07;02 - 00;53;07;10
JD Vance: Right.

00;53;07;10 - 00;53;33;19
Eric Weinstein: I'm so fucking fed up with the left because, like, if you actually look at the traditions that you're spitting on, it's highly feministic, it's violent in the face of oppression, it speaks to labor and inequality and redressing inequality in a very forward fashion.

00;53;33;19 - 00;53;33;27
JD Vance: Yep.

00;53;34;03 - 00;54;41;09
Eric Weinstein: And now there's like this, “we’re too good for this”. So my claim is, is that the word “deplorable”—most of my left-of-center friends don't understand this the way I do—I view it as the word for democratic apostates, people who left the Democratic Party when, I don't know if you remember, Hillary Clinton went to Bombay and she said, “well, the parts of the country that are productive voted for me”. And I thought, okay, so you go to foreign soil to complain about those of us who are shit out of luck at the moment? And I showed you before we started, like, so you mentioned the movie about Harlan County, USA, or, you know, people can look up “Harlan, Bloody Harlan”. There's a lyric in “Which side are you on”, which goes, “They say in Harlan County, there are no neutrals there. You'll either be a union man or thug for J.H. Blair”. Harlan, because it showed up in the song, I thought it'd be interesting to look at this voting pattern, and it was more or less blue throughout the 20th century, up until 1980.

00;54;41;09 - 00;54;42;05
JD Vance: Yep.

00;54;42;07 - 00;54;52;22
Eric Weinstein: And suddenly the blue starts plummeting. And by the time you get to Trump, it's like 8% blue. And it's just otherwise it's just Trump country,

00;54;52;23 - 00;54;53;00
JD Vance: Right.

00;54;53;06 - 00;55;13;06
Eric Weinstein: And why did you lose these people? Because they started detecting, in my opinion—you correct me if I'm wrong—that they're not wanted, that they're backward, they're pitiful, they're violent, they're benighted. You know, the kind of people who might say “nucular” rather than “nuclear”, and we can't have that.

00;55;13;06 - 00;55;14;06
JD Vance: Right.

00;55;14;09 - 00;55;15;11
Eric Weinstein: WTF, man?

00;55;15;14 - 00;55;39;28
JD Vance: Well, you know, of course they're all just racists reacting to the Civil Rights Act of 1964. It just took them nearly two decades to actually react to it. Right? That's that that's one of the things that's always falls apart about the white-working-class-is-just-racist narrative, is that they stuck with the Democrats, most of them, well after the passage of the 1987 Rights Act.

00;55;40;03 - 00;55;44;14
Eric Weinstein: Maybe I'm I'm ignorant. I think a lot of racists voted for Obama.

00;55;44;17 - 00;55;46;25
JD Vance: Yeah, I'm sure that there were.

00;55;46;28 - 00;55;49;07
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I don't think racism is what people think it is.

Cultural Identity, Intergenerational Trauma, and the American Dream

00;55;49;08 - 00;56;06;25
JD Vance: No, I agree. So your point about Harlan County, your point about the voting patterns, the deplorables comment. There's sort of so many reactions that I have to that. So let me just—let me try to organize my thoughts into sort of three separate categories and I'll say what I'm saying. You can riff on it—

00;56;06;25 - 00;56;08;01
Eric Weinstein: We should have had alcohol here because—

00;56;08;01 - 00;58;09;12
JD Vance: I know. I know, I know. Okay, so the first is a comment about the connection that's always existed between a sort of social and cultural conservatism and a concern for working class Americans. I don't like to use the term “progressive” because it's been so perverted, but a broad belief that we should be using various apparatuses of power to actually make it easier for working and middle class people to have a good life. Right? Call it economic leftism, call it whatever you want. That's always been deeply connected to social conservatives. So if we're going to talk about Reese, one of the facts that I often bring up about her that nobody knows, is that she had ten children, right? And she was a deeply committed family woman, in addition to a union organizer and the coal miners who were striking, whether it was in the early 20th century, the mid 20th century, they understood their occupation. And you talk to coal miners today and you still hear this. There's this sense that they're doing something that actually powers the rest of the country. Like Mamaw, my grandma, would talk about the way in which coal miners won World War two. They defeated Nazism, they defeated fascism, because what was powering all those ships? What was making it easy for the American economy to catch up to Nazi Germany super quickly? It was coal powered industrialization in the United States. There was this sense that their work was connected to their love of country in a way that I think most left-of-center people are deeply uncomfortable with. I'm surprised by how uncomfortable people who are left-of-center, who are under 40 years old, are at talking about their country as if it's a lovable place that people could have pride in. There's a real discomfort with patriotism among the under 40 crowd that's left-of-center.

00;58;09;12 - 00;58;24;25
Eric Weinstein: Let's just—let's call this out because this is one of the reasons I think that I'm allowed to hang out with you guys is that patriotism is connected to nationalism, nationalism is connected to ultra-nationalism, ultra-nationalism is connected to like National Socialism—

00;58;24;25 - 00;58;25;05
Eric Weinstein: right,

00;58;25;05 - 00;58;28;29
Eric Weinstein: And Nazism. So somehow it's like you've got an American flag, you must be a Nazi.

00;58;28;29 - 00;58;29;03
JD Vance: Yes.

00;58;29;03 - 00;58;32;17
Eric Weinstein: Like Jesus, did you realize what you did there?

00;58;32;19 - 01;00;04;05
JD Vance: Yeah. No. So it's totally insane, but it's—I think it's a significant part to me of what is driving the left-of-center disconnection with the white working class. That used to be a real important part of the base of the Democratic Party. So that's sort of one category of responses I have to what you said. The second is that there is a way in which the narrative that Clinton tells about Left Coast or Blue America being more productive than Red America, that it actually just is kind of true. And it's also kind of false. And that's sort of my third point. But there is a way in which Los Angeles is a more economically vibrant part of the country than where I grew up. It just is. People make more money, they fly to more places, they have more economic activity. There is a real sense in which my party, I'm a Republican, I've sort of been involved in conservative politics since I was able to be, where we still very often act like we represent the people who are in the most productive parts of the country, and not in a lot of the parts of the country that have been—and it's an overused phrase, but it's true—have been left behind. And there is this disconnect. I mean, you know, I know, you know, you're sort of a guy on the left who likes to beat up on the left, and I'm a guy on the right.

01;00;04;05 - 01;00;06;28
Eric Weinstein: No I don't like that to beat up on the Left. I have to beat up on the left because—

01;00;06;29 - 01;00;10;24
JD Vance: Sure. Well, I'll say that. I’m a guy on the right who feels like I have to beat up on the right.

01;00;10;24 - 01;00;12;13
Eric Weinstein: You have to beat up on the right.

01;00;12;15 - 01;01;08;09
JD Vance: I think the the adoption of like a hyper-neoliberal economics on the Right has been absolutely devastating for the people who actually vote for Republican candidates to say nothing of their, like, moral claim to having a good life separate from what they do in politics. And I do think that this point about representing people who are not doing as well economically, it's sort of out of fashion. People don't like to be the party that has the parts of the country that sort of aren't doing as well economically. And, and I just really hate that. I think that one of the shibboleths that needs to die in the Republican Party is that we represent as Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan said in 2012, “the good, noble entrepreneur who built their own business”. And yeah, those people are great. And obviously we know a lot of them, and I admire a lot of them. But they're not everything. And there is some dignity—

01;01;08;09 - 01;01;09;06
Eric Weinstein: No it’s worse than that—

01;01;09;09 - 01;01;12;06
JD Vance: There is some dignity just in having a job.

01;01;12;09 - 01;01;12;21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;01;12;23 - 01;01;53;09
JD Vance: Whether it's in coal mining or manufacturing or, you know, legal support where you do something that you're reasonably proud of, you put food on the table and you go home at the end of the day and you feel like you can look your kid in the eye and say, “I did something. I'm proud of what I did, and I have enough material comfort that I can actually spend time, quality time with my family”. There just—in other words, I think there's a way in which politicians aren't comfortable on the Right with the fact that workers are much more likely to be voting for Republicans these days than business owners. And that has changed from 40 years ago, and they haven't quite caught up on that.

01;01;53;10 - 01;02;31;21
Eric Weinstein: Well let's talk about our mutual disease on both Left and Right in recent times. So to me, I have a theory which doesn't win me a lot of friends at fancy dinner parties, which is that the idealism of an age is usually the cover story of how some small group of people has learned how to make money. So what we are living with, in large measure, is Davos idealism. You know, “We Are the World” is a story about breaking your tie to your fellow countrymen. It's about learning to hate your country.

01;02;31;23 - 01;02;32;03
JD Vance: Yes.

01;02;32;09 - 01;02;45;28
Eric Weinstein: Because I—why should I be shackled to some guy, you know, in Perry County, Kentucky. I guess we were talking earlier about, Jean Richie.

01;02;46;05 - 01;02;46;07
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;02;46;08 - 01;02;57;07
Eric Weinstein: We can get back to that, but, like, why is that important when there's somebody in Laos who can be lifted out of poverty and aren't all people—like, I just don't have any of these feelings at all!

01;02;57;08 - 01;02;57;14 JD Vance: Yeah.

01;02;57;15 - 01;03;18;04
Eric Weinstein: There's this whole thing about, like, the Rawlsian Veil. And my feeling is, yeah, that person in Laos may be just as—may be a much better person than the person in Kentucky. But the person in Kentucky is my responsibility. The person in Laos is not, right? And I have more responsibility for my family than I do for my city, than I do for my—for another state.

01;03;18;04 - 01;03;18;14 JD Vance: Yes.

01;03;18;14 - 01;03;41;27
Eric Weinstein: But there is a way in which, like, just the rings of responsibility, the way in which we freed up this ability to make money recently was “let's tell a story that divorces us from each other at a national level, and then talk about how we're going to uplift people in Africa and Asia, so that we can ignore the people that we’re hurting at home.”

01;03;41;29 - 01;03;42;24
JD Vance: Yeah. So—

01;03;42;24 - 01;03;47;20
Eric Weinstein: And I think that's a Left and Right bipartisan effort to screw over our own countrymen.

01;03;47;27 - 01;04;07;24
JD Vance: So I agree, and this sort of goes to something else I was going to say in response to the point about, you know, the labor movement in Appalachia, coal, and how it got divorced from the left. And I think a big part of what happened is that the economic trends that we we both worry a lot about—

01;04;07;24 - 01;04;08;04
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;04;08;05 - 01;04;16;28
JD Vance: Had a geographic expression that we weren't fully cognizant of when it was happening. And now I think it's just hit us in the face and it makes all these problems even worse. Right?

01;04;16;28 - 01;04;17;18
Eric Weinstein: Say more.

01;04;17;20 - 01;04;59;13
JD Vance: So if you live in Los Angeles, you're more likely to travel to Beijing, China, or to Paris, France, than you are to Morgantown, West Virginia. Even though Morgantown is a university town or, you know, Mingo County, West Virginia, which is a much more rural and sort of economically depressed part of West Virginia. There's a way in which the logic of a hyper-globalized economy has made it harder for people to actually spend real physical time with their fellow citizens, right? So one of the reasons the military always worked super well is because it was this sort of forcing function of making people who came from all across the country share a room together, share a mission together.

01;04;59;13 - 01;04;59;23
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01;04;59;23 - 01;05;45;19
JD Vance: And that was like a very powerful creator of national solidarity and cohesion. Not surprising, I think, that the Congress that passed the 1964 Civil Rights Act was almost 90% veteran, primarily from World War II. But of course, some folks from Korea, you basically had a generation that had fought together, bled together, died together, felt invested in something, and then they were able to sort of accomplish like one of, I think, the great legislative things in American history. You don't have that sense of solidarity because these people don't live with each other anymore. You are invested in the global economy, almost by definition. You're invested in geographies. You're more likely to see that poor person in Laos because you own the factory or more likely, you manage the factory.

01;05;45;19 - 01;05;49;16
Eric Weinstein: I don't think—you lost me there. Everything else, I was with you.

01;05;49;19 - 01;05;49;28
JD Vance: Okay.

01;05;49;29 - 01;06;06;00
Eric Weinstein: I really think that this has to do with a giant mimetic complex that got pushed out. You can never have gone to Laos. You're not really—I took your point about Shanghai, you know, Hong Kong. That's closer.

01;06;06;07 - 01;06;07;29
JD Vance: Maybe Laos is too far, but—

01;06;08;02 - 01;06;20;24
Eric Weinstein: Okay. But look, there is some way in which, if you're on this archipelago of bustling cities, you're closer in some metric, between LA and Shanghai than you are LA to Bakersfield.

01;06;20;24 - 01;06;21;05
JD Vance: Yes.

01;06;21;05 - 01;06;21;16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;06;21;21 - 01;06;39;10
JD Vance: Well, even in just in like the amount of time that it takes you to get to certain parts of the country, it takes you much less time to go to certain parts of Europe. And I think that's—I think that does have a really powerful psychological effect, when you spend more time with one group of people and less time with another.

01;06;39;10 - 01;06;44;29
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, I was talking to my contractor who was working on my house today.

01;06;46;06 - 01;07;08;14
Eric Weinstein: Maybe it was yesterday, and I was saying—he found out that I had this podcast because people that he works with listened to it—I said, you know, I have a huge following in construction, and my take on it is, is that people in construction are constantly improvising. It's a fundamentally creative activity.

01;07;08;14 - 01;07;08;23
JD Vance: Yep.

01;07;08;24 - 01;07;37;10
Eric Weinstein: You're given some problem, somebody else screwed something up. You have detective work to figure out what was there before. Then you have a question about, will this work, will that work? Then there's the engineering problem. So I view a lot of that stuff as much more intellectual than a lot of the paper pushing, because a lot of the paper pushing is just, you know, you have to be aware of certain rules. I mean, if you're doing truly creative accounting, you might go to jail, but maybe that's really creative.

01;07;37;10 - 01;07;38;00
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;07;38;02 - 01;07;52;26
Eric Weinstein: But a lot of what I see is that, people who listen to this program are spread out all over the economic spectrum, but they tend to be grouped by are—the question of, are they thinking for themselves? Are they forced to think for themselves?

01;07;52;26 - 01;07;53;14
JD Vance: Sure.

01;07;53;16 - 01;08;26;00
Eric Weinstein: And what I see there is that we're very uncomfortable with, how the sort of new intellectualism shakes out. And because that's my audience—like when I went to visit you in Ohio, the person who shuttled me to you was a huge fan of the show, I didn't know, and working some very regular job, but super highly intellectual. And this is what he was doing with his mind! You know—

01;08;26;00 - 01;08;26;22
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01;08;26;24 - 01;08;41;28
Eric Weinstein: I think we're nuts! I think we've gone crazy. I think we just absolutely can't bring ourselves to realize that farmers are wrestling with genetics, that people who are working with their hands are very often solving puzzles at an incredible rate.

01;08;42;05 - 01;08;42;27
JD Vance: That's really interesting.

Globalization, Economic Displacement, and The Precariat

01;08;42;27 - 01;08;49;10
Eric Weinstein: And we've come up with an explanation, which is that everybody should learn how to sign pieces of paper to make money, which is not how it—

01;08;49;10 - 01;08;49;19
JD Vance: Right?

01;08;49;19 - 01;08;50;00
Eric Weinstein: Works!

01;08;50;00 - 01;10;11;09
JD Vance: Well if you think about globalize—this is a very fascinating point—and if you think about the effects of globalization on what I broadly call the professional or managerial class, is that it's taken people who, you know, by the objective measures that we have: SAT scores, LSAT scores, whatever, are sort of at the top of the cognitive pyramid. And it's fundamentally turned them into people who are more, who spend more of their time finding labor and tax arbitrage than actually creating something new. Right. So this is like my hyper bullish—sorry, my hyper bearish version of globalization is not just that it, you know, there's all of the, okay, so we lost 7 million jobs to China from 1999 to 2006. Like, oh my god that's catastrophic, especially in the region of the country that I came from. I think you can see sort of a whole host of things that happened in the wake of that, the opioid epidemic, rise in family breakdown and family trauma and so forth, that is all very, very bad. But an effect that we don't talk enough about is that, you know, you know this stuff better than I do, right? Labor is a substitute for capital and vice versa. And if you're investing and just taking some function that already exists and paying a guy in China a third what you pay the guy in Ohio to do—

01;10;11;10 - 01;10;11;18
Eric Weinstein: Right.

01;10;11;18 - 01;11;07;14
JD Vance: Then you're not invested in creating new things. And so, you know, the tech slowdown thesis that I know you and I are both very much on board with, I think is partially, though not entirely. It really is a globalization story because it's turned our creative class into paper pushers. And the way that you see this anecdotally, of course, is, you know, I talk about sort of feeling like once I got to Yale, my ticket was punched, like there was this sense of relief that I would never face real economic scarcity of the kind that I had experienced when I was a kid. And the weird thing is, then you get to Yale Law School and everybody talks about how much they hate their jobs, right? Like investment bankers are the people who sort of won the meritocratic game, people who are working at the best 50 law firms in America. They're sort of the people who won the game, and yet they all hate their jobs.

01;11;07;16 - 01;11;20;14
JD Vance: And there's something very bizarre about that, about winning every single competition that you were supposed to win. And the prize at the end of the rainbow is a hyper noncreative and miserable position.

01;11;20;17 - 01;11;29;12
Eric Weinstein: So I think—this is really something that I've been talking with Peter about for years—Peter Thiel.

01;11;29;15 - 01;11;29;29
JD Vance: Same.

01;11;29;29 - 01;12;05;26
Eric Weinstein: And more or less, the claim that I make is, is that every named occupation is over. If you can name something—okay. If you can name something that's a track, by the time you win that game—and maybe not the ultimate huge winner—but if you've more or less ticked all the boxes on your way through that track, that track is now so pressurized that you are weirdly precarious in one way or another. Either you're working yourself to a crisp to maintain your position—

01;12;05;26 - 01;12;06;15
JD Vance: Right.

01;12;06;17 - 01;12;45;06
Eric Weinstein: And so maybe there's money rolling in, but in fact, you're actually not doing healthy things to your body, to your family. You're putting everything at risk all the time, or it's more precarious than you would imagine. So, for example, you may feel that Yale Law prepared you to have that that secure position. But what if you had gone to Juilliard as a cellist? Do you really believe that there's always going to be an orchestra? Like, what if you mangle your hand, you know? I don't think—I think that there's this very weird thing—I started to hear about “The Precariat”. Precarious people.

01;12;45;09 - 01;12;46;02
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;12;46;05 - 01;12;52;14
Eric Weinstein: I have never felt other than precarious. You and I both didn't do so well in high school?

01;12;52;15 - 01;12;53;21
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;12;53;23 - 01;13;05;07
Eric Weinstein: Yeah. So, you know, I trained for a position in mathematics, and I just went through my applications for my first postdoc in 1991.

01;13;05;07 - 01;13;05;21
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;13;05;24 - 01;13;17;12
Eric Weinstein: And it's—I got rejected from all sorts of tiny schools which said we have no jobs this year. I don't think people who say, “well, you know, of course we'll be fine. I worry about the rest of the country.”

01;13;17;13 - 01;13;18;00
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;13;18;02 - 01;13;36;05
Eric Weinstein: I think very often those people have no real honest connection, that they feel much more precarious. There's almost no thing that is low variance. Am I wrong, or can you think of a named occupation which you'd feel great if your kid made all the hurdles?

01;13;36;12 - 01;14;17;04
JD Vance: No, not at all. And I think the precarious point is interesting, though. I think it's related, but it is separate from the fact that these jobs, even if they weren't precarious, are still kind of miserable. They're just not creative. They're not interesting, but something you said is, is it gets to sort of my theory about a couple of the Democratic presidential candidates. And so here's this is friend of mine. His name is Julius Krein. I don't know if you know Julius, but he wrote this article recently called “The Real Class War” of American Affairs, and one of the arguments that is sort of interesting is if you think about, you know, there's this weird question of—if you view it from 30,000 feet—

01;14;17;05 - 01;14;17;15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;14;17;19 - 01;16;22;20
JD Vance: Why is Elizabeth Warren the most favored candidate of Silicon Valley in terms of donations? You know, Google employees are donating more to her candidacy than anybody else. She's saying she's going to break up the company where a lot of their sort of, you know, wealth and income is tied up in, like, how does this make sense? And one way of viewing it is that it's a class war—Elizabeth Warren is the candidate of The Precariat in their class war against the super rich. So if you think of her big proposals, student debt relief and free college, that doesn't benefit my family—well, most of my family, it doesn't benefit. It really benefits the person who went to Harvard undergrad and then Yale Law School and Columbia Business School and has $300,000 worth of debt. There’s this really interesting argument that Medicare For All—though I'm, you know, a fan of universal health care in sort of the abstract, the question of how to do it is really difficult. There's this really good argument that in a society where the bureaucracy is as corrupt as ours is that Medicare for all is basically just a massive wealth transfer to the hospital-physician industrial complex, right. So the question is like, does Medicare for all, you know, what industry in America is the government effectively the sole buyer of goods and services? And has that had this massive monopsonistic deflationary effect on cost? And the answer is of course not. The only example is the defense industry. And so you can maybe imagine a scenario where Medicare for all is just a pretty big giveaway to physician networks and hospitals in the same way that our defense industrial complex is a massive giveaway to Boeing, Raytheon and so forth. And if you sort of tick off through the list of her proposals, they're not benefiting the top 1%, but they’re not really benefiting the bottom 50% either. They're really targeted towards The Precariat. And I do think that this sort of, this dynamic in American politics is very important.

01;16;22;20 - 01;16;29;27
Eric Weinstein: So might this be like upper five figures to low seven figure families?

01;16;29;29 - 01;16;38;12
JD Vance: That's sort of how I'm thinking of. And of course it depends on cost of living. Right. You know, mid six figures in Google and the Bay area means something much different—

01;16;38;12 - 01;16;39;22
Eric Weinstein: Sure. It's a rough—

01;16;39;27 - 01;17;48;27
JD Vance: Right. But yeah, that's basically how I'm thinking of it is, you're not a person who can sort of make a living off of capital income. You still have to very, you know, have to work for a living. You feel—to your point about being precarious—it's not just that you could sort of lose your job and lose your good life, but it's all of these sort of, you know, what we think of as creature comforts, but are really just things that help you establish some sense of social prestige in a world where social prestige is very scarce, right. So the best schools for your kids, you have the dynamic of, you know, the wives of bankers waiting in line for two days outside of the nicest preschool in lower Manhattan, because, you know, they just, that's like the only school that will both give their kids a good education, but make them sort of feel proud about what their kids are doing when they're talking about it at their dinner parties. And there is just this weird way in which The Precariat is like the most unexplored political grouping in the country right now, and of course, most of them are Democrats.

01;17;48;29 - 01;18;31;14
Eric Weinstein: And it's very mysterious, like, I don't know whether I've ever told you this crazy story, but when I moved to New York, we needed preschools, and I didn't understand that New York had gone insane. And so there was one preschool on the upper East Side of Manhattan that you had to call to get an application. And we then learned that you were supposed to get your entire family to call at the same exact moment, but it turned out that we were all calling the public number, and that the people who were really supposed to go to the preschool were given a second private number, like, the whole thing—

01;18;31;14 - 01;18;33;03
JD Vance: How screwed up is that.

01;18;33;06 - 01;18;38;29
Eric Weinstein: Well, it did have the effect of making me not want to go there under any circumstance.

01;18;38;29 - 01;18;40;27
JD Vance: Oh, yeah, but possible there.

Embedded Growth Obligations, Sharp Minds vs Sharp Elbows

01;18;40;27 - 01;19;18;23
Eric Weinstein: But the—look, I think we're destroying ourselves. I mean, I think that, you know, if I look at my relationship to Harvard, Harvard is two separate things. One, it's a feather in the cap for people I don't give a shit about. And maybe they pay some extra money or whatever, but they and their douchey children, you know, can go and have at the power structure and do whatever the fuck they want. I'm sorry. I mean, I'm hearing passion come out of my voice. And then the real Harvard, in my opinion, is not this power mad group.

01;19;18;25 - 01;19;19;16
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;19;19;19 - 01;20;29;19
Eric Weinstein: It's, like, the actual smart people. And that's a resource. And maybe that's somewhat prestigious, but that's not the thing that makes Harvard, you know, makes you associated with sticking your pinky out when you take tea to your lips. You know, there's the question about the actual geeks who push forward mathematics, physics, biology. And that's a different kind of glamor, you know, that's a very different world. I am furious that these two things are fused the way they are, because my feeling is, is that one of those things, which is this prestige game, is putting the other one at risk. Like these—this is where, you know, even what you said before about the creative class. I don't know who the creative class is, or the smart class! I have better conversations with people who've left the educational system and gone and done something technical and unforgiving than I do with the people who study, you know, how to arbitrage tax regimes in different countries.

01;20;29;19 - 01;20;51;07
JD Vance: Yep. So I guess I share your concern that the bad Harvard is affecting the good Harvard, though I don't—

01;20;51;10 - 01;20;59;16
Eric Weinstein: I mean, I lived it where the bad Harvard wanted to raise everyone's taxes and slash their benefits by messing with the CPI.

01;20;59;19 - 01;20;59;29
JD Vance: Right.

01;20;59;29 - 01;21;09;05
Eric Weinstein: In the same year that the good Harvard was trying to say, “hey, there's an entirely different framework for calculating CPI that none of you know, that solves a lot of your long standing problems.”

01;21;09;05 - 01;21;09;10
JD Vance: Right.

01;21;09;17 - 01;21;26;11
Eric Weinstein: And I watched the bad Harvard hold the good Harvard's head under the toilet water, you know, until it asphyxiated, and I said, okay, now I understand how the game is played. We have a problem right now where we're fighting for the soul of our institution.

01;21;26;22 - 01;23;15;19
JD Vance: So I agree with you in that the thing that really weirds me out about the universities, especially the elite universities. And you've talked about, I think, on this program and certainly in, you know, in conversation with me about this sort of embedded growth expectations of a lot of these institutions, right. So law firms kind of make sense when, you know, 10% of people are making partner, 10% of people are getting hired, 20% of people are sort of cycling out, and you're sort of replacing the various people in the cogs in the wheel. You know, the same is true of investment banks, of financial firms, of companies, these sort of things, so many of them work within constitutional government, right, it works when the pie is growing and there are taxes to distribute to the priorities of left and right. What is weird to me about universities is that they've become sociopathic, even though they're still growing. Now, maybe the growth is, like, fake and everybody knows that it's going to unwind eventually. But like Harvard has an unlimited amount of resources, basically—relative to its—unlimited is overstating it—they have a lot of resources, right? Harvard is not a law firm where the partners are sticking around, and they can't hire new partners because they don't have any revenues coming in. Harvard's endowment grows every single year, probably more than they're paying their salaried professionals. And yet it's still so jacked up, right, in other words, like, some of these institutions that we talk about as being screwed up, I can tell a story about them not growing as driving a lot of why they're not healthy.

01;23;15;20 - 01;23;18;04
Eric Weinstein: Well, but I think a lot of what this has to do with—

01;23;18;05 - 01;23;21;07
JD Vance: Why is Harvard so screwed up, basically is the question I'm asking.

01;23;21;10 - 01;23;42;11
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Well, I refuse to answer that on principle because I do love Harvard. But I will answer, why is Harvard, MIT, Princeton, Yale, so screwed up? And why are we left with only a tiny number of institutions, maybe Caltech and Chicago, that aren't completely succumbing to this disease?

01;23;42;11 - 01;23;45;14
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;23;45;17 - 01;27;10;12
Eric Weinstein: I think it has to do with the idea that the generations—first of all, let me say something controversial: I think that the baby boom takes a lot of heat for the Silent Generation. A lot of these problems began with the generation before the baby boomers. They tried to figure out how to save the world from stagnation and low growth. And when they couldn't do it, they started realizing, okay, well, these fake growth stimulus techniques are sufficient to grow certain slices of the pie at the expense of others, if not the entire pie. And the baby boomers just sort of signed on to that and made everything completely insane. The weird thing about the universes is that there was a cultural thing—all of these people go back and forth between different universes with different levels of endowments, right? So here's the weird thing. Choose any one of the great research universities. Without knowing it, which one you chose, it is almost certainly headed by a baby boomer, whereas in the 1970s and early 80s it would have probably a 50% chance of being headed by a Gen-Xer or a Millennial. So they changed the retirement age and you couldn't discriminate on the basis of age. So now almost all of these institutions are headed by baby boomers. Without knowing anything further, I can also say that almost all of them have had the number of administrators on payroll skyrocket above the number of new enrollments. Their tuitions have climbed above medical inflation, the number of old professors getting grants has climbed relative to the number of new professors getting grants. In other words, there's one superarching, overarching story, which is a story of intergenerational warfare. And the funniest part about it was that if you were part of the generation that had declared intergenerational warfare on the Gen-Xers and Millennials, and then now the Gen Z crowd, if anyone mentioned what you were doing, you would accuse them of intergenerational warfare. So my claim is, is that Harvard could afford to buck this trend. They could lead! You know, oddly, I think Ohio State, where you were, decided to lead against the protesters who showed up in the office, you know, and said something to the effect of, we understand that you feel very strongly about your views, and we're going to give you the right to go to jail for them. And you'll notice that there's no administrators, there's no office staff here because they've all gone home, because this is no longer a safe space for them. And by reading them the riot act, Ohio led the way, and Chicago led the way, saying, this is not a safe space. This is an educational institution. There are a tiny number of schools that are bucking this trend. Harvard could have been one of them, but Harvard doesn't believe enough in itself. And this is the thing that really makes me angry, which is there is a pride in believing in the United States. You know, what I love about your story is, how many American Dreams have you lived, sir? There's one about the Marine Corps—

01;27;10;16 - 01;27;10;27
JD Vance: Sure.

01;27;11;03 - 01;27;25;02
Eric Weinstein: There's one about going to college. There's another one about going to Yale Law. There's another one about working in finance and Venture Capital. And then there's another one about becoming a bestselling author! Okay. The reason that you're so out of—

01;27;25;06 - 01;27;27;00
JD Vance: A father, that's, you know.

01;27;27;02 - 01;27;32;18
Eric Weinstein: In an interracial relationship with, you know, the melting pot in your house!

01;27;32;18 - 01;27;33;05
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;27;33;07 - 01;28;12;25
Eric Weinstein: Okay. You are the American Dream on steroids, JD. And the reason that you have this backwards right-of-center perspective is, is that it's worked for you over and over again. Like, you have a weird ability to throw off the learned helplessness that the country is in. And I don't think that it's any longer impossible. I mean, it's still possible to do what you're doing, but the amount of will to buck that thing is gotten harder—this is no longer within reach of the median individual. The American Dream is still alive.

01;28;12;26 - 01;28;14;10
JD Vance: Yep.

01;28;14;12 - 01;28;34;27
Eric Weinstein: Our problem is, is that we've got to put it in reach of the median human being who is not going to do something this agentic. And it's ridiculous—I'm sorry—it's offensive. It makes me sick when we start talking about, well, you can always become an entrepreneur. Well, okay, what if I'm supposed to be a mathematician?

01;28;35;01 - 01;28;35;19
JD Vance: Yep.

01;28;35;21 - 01;28;38;09
Eric Weinstein: I wanted to do math, man! That's a job!

01;28;38;16 - 01;28;39;01
JD Vance: Right.

01;28;39;08 - 01;29;02;03
Eric Weinstein: Right?! Okay, so maybe I can push pieces of paper. Maybe I can have a podcast. That's a crazy thing to train somebody in mathematics and say, “oh, boo hoo, you don't get to do what you trained for.” No. That's ridiculous. If you train in this kind of a specialized way because your government tells you that there's a shortage, just what you said before: the coal miners, the steelworkers thought they were part of a something.

01;29;02;03 - 01;29;03;11
JD Vance: Yep.

01;29;03;13 - 01;29;23;12
Eric Weinstein: This idea that we are going to try to turn this into a pin factory in the market gives you your full worth by telling you what your paycheck is. Fuck. That. Shit. I mean that is a destruction of narrative at the hands of a crowd who have disconnected us from each other.

01;29;23;15 - 01;30;06;29
JD Vance: Yeah. So let's play this out in the context of Harvard or Yale or sort of whichever elite university we're going to pick on, because I buy the argument that sort of the Boomers, the Gen-Xers, have sort of screwed this up. And I'm consistently frustrated by when some campus protest happens and some administrator or somebody else sort of folds. But, there's also the question of why those protests are even happening in the first place. And it occurs to me that if Harvard did exactly what we wanted it to do, and the president of Harvard, in the face of some ridiculous sit in in his office, just said, you guys are children, get out of my office, you're going to prison.

01;30;07;01 - 01;30;15;16
JD Vance: Maybe that fixes some of the problem, but it still seems like a lot of the problem with the institution is the kids who are there, right?

01;30;15;18 - 01;30;17;09
Eric Weinstein: Look to Chicago.

01;30;17;11 - 01;30;19;01
JD Vance: Yeah. I don't, you know—

01;30;19;07 - 01;30;20;14
Eric Weinstein: If we didn't have the University—

01;30;20;14 - 01;30;22;10
JD Vance: I know Chicago the least of all the elite places.

01;30;22;10 - 01;30;33;12
Eric Weinstein: Okay. University of Chicago, they are—they've become more and more and more important as time goes on. Because—

01;30;33;18 - 01;30;40;17
JD Vance: How much of that is selection bias, that they've planted the flag and said, we're going to be the place that isn't screwed up. And so they're just getting the non screwed up kids?

01;30;40;17 - 01;31;12;24
Eric Weinstein: I think it has something to do—there's some of that. But it didn't happen by accident. It was founded by the Rockefellers in the late 1800s. So it's a very recent entry, like, I think Stanford is kind of comparably recent. This isn't from the 1600s or the 1700s. This is, you know, this is yesterday, okay? I think Chicago had black and women graduates and PhDs from the beginning, so they don't have a lot of guilt.

01;31;12;26 - 01;31;13;14
JD Vance: Yep.

01;31;13;16 - 01;31;36;09
Eric Weinstein: And this is one of the reasons I think, like, people ask me, Eric, why do you not go in for all of this hand-wringing about whiteness and reparations? And I think it has to do with the fact that my family's been giving it the office since the nineteen-teens and twenties. So we've always been good on this stuff. So I don't—I'm really not interested in guilt and hanging my head and I'm not embarrassed.

01;31;36;10 - 01;31;36;18
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

01;31;36;19 - 01;31;53;07
Eric Weinstein: I’m just not! Chicago isn't embarrassed. They've been meritocratic. And they actually believe that women and blacks can survive in a meritocracy without putting your finger on the scales, because they've proven it.

01;31;53;07 - 01;31;54;04
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;31;54;06 - 01;32;08;27
Eric Weinstein: Right? Now, that kind of bad attitude means that they can buck a trend that the rest of the country can't. Harvard, you know, has had uncomfortable relationships with Jews. It's had uncomfortable relationships with women.

01;32;09;02 - 01;32;09;11
JD Vance: Sure.

01;32;09;12 - 01;32;10;10
Eric Weinstein: So of course it's guilty!

01;32;10;13 - 01;32;11;10
JD Vance: Now with Asians

01;32;11;14 - 01;32;30;19
JD Vance: With Asians, right! It can't do anything! Right? Right. Okay. That's a big problem. And I think that that has something to do with the idea that if you're really meritocratic, you just don't have the same kind of weird guilt.

01;32;30;22 - 01;33;10;28
JD Vance: Yeah, I'm sympathetic to that, though I still don't think it sort of solves the problem for why so many of the kids who are going to other institutions, I mean, I guess I'm getting at a slightly separate question, which is, even if we assume that Chicago for, you know, all the reasons that you said is managed to avoid the most sociopathic tendencies in American life right now, it'd be interesting to actually see what's happening in the hard sciences in Chicago. Like, you know, we should revisit the question in ten years, what's happened to sort of their commercialization efforts in the hard sciences. It be sort of an interesting way to gauge how healthy a university is in some ways.

01;33;10;29 - 01;33;26;29
Eric Weinstein: Well I don’t think, by the way, Chicago isn't healthy in standard terms. When your unofficial slogan is “where fun goes to die”—the point is you're selecting for kids who are just pathologically serious and not necessarily well rounded!

01;33;27;07 - 01;33;27;19
JD Vance: Sure.

01;33;27;19 - 01;33;45;04
Eric Weinstein: Like, I don't understand why we keep asking for “well-rounded” applicants. Why do we want you to have started a fake NGO as an 11th grader to show us, you know. And why do we care about your Nordic skiing abilities? None of that makes sense.

01;33;45;09 - 01;34;29;23
JD Vance: Because we're—yeah, I mean, my answer to that question is that we're selecting—and I don't like this, but I think the institutional answer to this question is we're selecting for managers. So I don't know if you're familiar with James Burnham or his book on the managerial elite, but it was his sort of argument is that the whole Marx class war dynamics sort of misses that there are all of these like managers who are hyper technocratic, who in a lot of ways are sort of the most important, you might call them The Precariat. I think the, you know, Burnham's managerial elite is very similar to your Precariat. And what that sort of—what's required for that skillset, like, think about this: if you're going to be a mid-level bureaucrat at the EPA—

01;34;29;23 - 01;34;30;16
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

01;34;30;18 - 01;34;41;03
JD Vance: Then “well-rounded” is actually pretty useful, because you have to be kind of a chameleon, you can't be too deep on any one thing, you can't be too interesting on any one thing.

01;34;41;03 - 01;34;47;16
Eric Weinstein: No, no, no, but that would be—I'll take polymaths, but polymaths aren't the same thing as “well-rounded”. Exactly!

01;34;47;17 - 01;34;51;20
JD Vance: “Well rounded” almost sort of assumes a certain level of shallowness. Right?

01;34;51;22 - 01;35;16;11
Eric Weinstein: Well, polymaths can be somewhat shallow. Certainly what you do is, is that you try to figure out what's the 80% that I need from that subject for 20% of the effort, right? Like, it's very much a Pareto-aware thought process. But the key thing is what happens to the freaks, the mutants, the disagreeables, the people that we've used to power our society historically—

01;35;16;11 - 01;35;16;15
JD Vance: Right.

01;35;16;16 - 01;36;00;20
Eric Weinstein: When they can't get access to their own institutions—and this is where I get very revolutionary—my feeling is, it's not your Harvard, it's our Harvard! Let's just break open the doors and let the freaks and the mutants play and get the douchebags out! Right? Chicago is much more about that. And you know, we have to appreciate that it's really important that MIT not focus on well-rounded people. “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!

Keep Activism Out of Scientific Research

01;36;00;23 - 01;36;44;06
JD Vance: That's a slogan that can go on the Statue of Liberty. I mean, the thing is, I mean, I think that I agree with everything you said. I am certainly terrified of the quality of the research that's coming out. You know, I do, like, a lot of life sciences stuff. And there's this way where I'm like, super optimistic on life sciences because it seems like we figured a lot of things out that we have to figure out to sort of make next level innovations, while at the same time, the people who are getting NIH grants, like, often aren't the most exciting young scientists. It's, you know, people who aren't that exciting and aren't that young.

01;36;44;08 - 01;37;02;07
Eric Weinstein: Well, look at the difference between NIH and Howard Hughes. Howard Hughes has historically had more risk-taking because it's not under the same administrative structure. Okay. So now start thinking about how do we fund a skunkworks, right, for really crazy stuff. More DARPA. More—

01;37;02;09 - 01;37;02;22
JD Vance: Yes.

01;37;02;22 - 01;37;03;21
Eric Weinstein: Like turn that stuff—

01;37;03;23 - 01;37;03;28
JD Vance: Right.

01;37;04;00 - 01;37;31;04
Eric Weinstein: Take Jeff Epstein and all the sort of weird stuff he was doing and get rid of the creeps and do it as a government project. Right? We've got to realize that—like, here's a great test in the life sciences: we should have a test which looks at all of the disgusting things that nature actually does. And if you look at biology, biology is absolutely abhorrent!

01;37;31;04 - 01;37;31;16
JD Vance: It’s vile.

01;37;31;16 - 01;37;32;12
Eric Weinstein: It's vile!

01;37;32;13 - 01;37;33;10
JD Vance: Absolutely.

01;37;33;13 - 01;37;48;19
Eric Weinstein: It should be a test to enter any biological program that you can get the analysis of these things right without a whiff of political correctness entering your analysis. These aren't even human systems.

01;37;48;21 - 01;38;19;08
JD Vance: Well, yeah, I mean, but things are so broken, right. So I'm very good friends with a guy who I won't use his name because I wouldn’t want him to get in trouble. You know, Democrat, certainly voted for Hillary Clinton, brilliant, brilliant guy. Like a credible Nobel Prize winner in neuroscience and neuropsychiatry. They don't get it for neuropsychiatry, but that's sort of his field, right?

01;38;19;08 - 01;38;19;15
Eric Weinstein: Okay.

01;38;19;17 - 01;39;04;16
JD Vance: What is the—what do brain circuits do? How do they change? And what does that mean for sort of various Neurosci conditions that we're still not very good at treating. And he's a brilliant, brilliant scientist at one of our ten best research institutions. Now, I came across an article a few years ago in The Atlantic, and the basic gist of it was a very well-credentialed neuroscientist had said, effectively, that there are no structural differences between the male and female brain. And she said this at the Aspen Ideas Institute. I forget the name of the neuroscientist, but sort of a pretty easy article to Google based just on that description.

01;39;04;19 - 01;39;05;07
Eric Weinstein: Got it.

01;39;05;10 - 01;39;46;11
JD Vance: And, like, I've invested enough and looked enough at neuroscience companies. Like, I know that there are sort of some important structural differences in the amygdala, for example. I know that different hormones, testosterone and estrogen, have different effects on sort of different structures within the brain. And so I just emailed my buddy and I said, you know, this article jumps out at me as kind of absurd. And he immediately wrote back, he’s like, this is the dumbest thing I've ever heard. If we had a healthy academic culture, like, this person would not be able to get away with saying these things. Like there would be professional repercussions for being an expert in the field, but being so wrong about that field.

01;39;46;11 - 01;39;47;19
Eric Weinstein: Right!

01;39;47;21 - 01;40;09;05
JD Vance: But there aren't, and not even that, but she was at one of our most elite gatherings saying this, and he is saying, “this is both absurd, but you can't tell anybody that I'm telling you this, because, while every single neuroscientist who works at my university would agree with this email that I'm sending you, we would be terrified to actually say it.”

01;40;09;05 - 01;40;11;03
Eric Weinstein: Well, this is what I can't—this is why—

01;40;11;05 - 01;40;15;20
JD Vance: That brokenness, like, I think you and I agree that that is—there's something, okay, woah—

01;40;15;21 - 01;40;17;27
Eric Weinstein: It's threatening our entire literature.

01;40;17;29 - 01;40;29;15
JD Vance: That's like threatening our civilization. But why is it happening like that is the question that I still just haven't figured out, because of course, you know, if you want to solve it, like you've got to get to the why—

01;40;29;16 - 01;40;30;17
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's get to it.

01;40;30;19 - 01;40;31;02
JD Vance: Okay, yeah.

01;40;31;06 - 01;40;32;02
JD Vance: Let's have the dangerous, awful—

01;40;32;02 - 01;40;36;07
JD Vance: I don't know if I'm going to be helpful here because I, you know, I think about this all the time and I haven’t figured it out.

01;40;36;07 - 01;40;54;06
Eric Weinstein: Well, let's imagine that you just look among biological females. Right? And you just look at the ratio of the second and fourth digits as some indication of, you know, what hormones somebody was exposed to in utero. And then you start to find some differences in brain structure. That's okay.

01;40;54;08 - 01;40;55;05
JD Vance: Yes.

01;40;55;08 - 01;41;11;06
Eric Weinstein: As soon as it goes male-female, look, here's the big problem: are men are better at anything than women? Now, don't answer. Okay, we know that we're allowed to say that we were better at peeing standing up, but that's it, man. Okay.

01;41;11;06 - 01;41;11;28
JD Vance: Right.

01;41;12;00 - 01;41;19;15
Eric Weinstein: That would be very weird to have an entire gender that has effectively no function comparatively.

01;41;19;15 - 01;41;22;05
JD Vance: Yeah, that would help it stand out for selection?

01;41;22;05 - 01;41;22;24
Eric Weinstein: What?

01;41;22;27 - 01;41;24;18
JD Vance: That would help it stand out for selection.

01;41;24;21 - 01;41;25;28
Eric Weinstein: Well.

01;41;26;00 - 01;41;27;12
JD Vance: If we're—

01;41;27;14 - 01;41;29;15
Eric Weinstein: So then you look at something like chess.

01;41;29;17 - 01;41;30;07
JD Vance: Sure.

01;41;30;10 - 01;41;41;00
Eric Weinstein: Chess does not know male from female. And you can paint the pieces black or pink, or you can put fur trim on them. You can do anything that you want.

01;41;41;01 - 01;41;41;25
JD Vance: Yep.

01;41;41;28 - 01;41;50;09
Eric Weinstein: You could pour money into it. I don't know. But I have this terrible statistic. I don't like the IQ and race or IQ and gender stuff.

01;41;50;12 - 01;41;53;23
JD Vance: Sure. Neither do I.

01;41;53;27 - 01;41;57;02
Eric Weinstein: But I can't stop people from playing chess.

01;41;57;02 - 01;41;58;11
JD Vance: Sure.

01;41;58;13 - 01;42;50;01
Eric Weinstein: And the chess statistics are horrible. I don't want to over-focus on them, but people ask this question, okay, well, what if it's 99 to 1 of the top 100 chess players are male? Now, do I think that none of that is structural oppression? No. I think some of that is structural oppression. I'm in no doubt that there's a path-dependent thing where we've traditionally had boys playing chess more than girls, blah, blah, blah. Do I think that you would get to 50:50 in chess ability if boys and girls were started on a completely equal playing field? I do not. Do I think it's because girls are not as good intellectually at that? Not necessarily. I think it's a very weird kind of solipsistic activity where you, you know, you can play against the computer and find it satisfying.

01;42;50;07 - 01;42;50;23
JD Vance: Yep.

01;42;50;26 - 01;43;44;07
Eric Weinstein: Okay. Whatever that is, I've got too much information about a difference between men and women in a skill that doesn't appear to know gender, you know, from Adam. Now I have to retreat from the amount of information I have. I need something that is so strong that it can undo—because 99 to 1 is just, it's too much! Now, I'm—no one will be happier if 50 years from now this podcast is unearthed, and it's like, “can you imagine this guy didn't realize it was all structure oppression?” And I just want to say, you know, congratulations to my future critics. But I think that the problem here is, we don't want to confront the fact that biology carries implications.

01;43;44;09 - 01;43;45;27
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;43;46;00 - 01;44;07;06
Eric Weinstein: We have too much information about ourselves, and it's in conflict with some of what I think are our best traits. 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.

01;44;07;08 - 01;44;07;18
JD Vance: Right.

01;44;07;22 - 01;44;12;27
Eric Weinstein: But you know, my brother's point is, well, or maybe they radiate heat really efficiently.

01;44;13;00 - 01;44;13;17
JD Vance: Is that true?

01;44;13;22 - 01;44;14;17
Eric Weinstein: That's what his belief is.

01;44;14;20 - 01;44;15;21
JD Vance: Oh.

01;44;15;23 - 01;44;30;27
Eric Weinstein: Well, you know, certainly if you look at a variable like height, you know, pygmies, are not the same average height. There's no reason that any continuous variable will have a mean value that's the same in any widely separated population.

01;44;30;29 - 01;44;31;17
JD Vance: Okay.

01;44;31;19 - 01;44;34;08
Eric Weinstein: Forget IQ, you know, just weight, height.

01;44;34;10 - 01;44;34;18
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;44;34;18 - 01;44;35;24
Eric Weinstein: It would be very weird—

01;44;35;26 - 01;44;36;04
JD Vance: I think

01;44;36;04 - 01;44;40;07
Eric Weinstein: If pygmies and Eskimos and Inuit were exactly the same.

01;44;40;09 - 01;44;41;02
JD Vance: Sure.

01;44;41;04 - 01;45;10;25
Eric Weinstein: So we know this and we know that this is going to get us into trouble if it starts to conflict with our founding fictions. And I love our founding fictions, but they're fictions! I know they're fictions. Every smart person is supposed to know that our founding fictions are fictions. You know, I always bring up the fact that Elizabeth Taylor apparently had a mutation, says that she had two rows of eyelashes, which was pretty flattering. Right? So is it surprising that somebody with two rows of eyelashes is pretty hot?

01;45;10;28 - 01;45;11;03
JD Vance: Right.

01;45;11;03 - 01;45;14;01
Eric Weinstein: I don't know.

01;45;14;03 - 01;45;23;00
JD Vance: Yeah. I mean it's obviously, like, I'm not uncomfortable with the idea of biological differences. You know—

01;45;23;02 - 01;45;23;06
Eric Weinstein: Yes you are!

01;45;23;06 - 01;45;33;26
JD Vance: Men are—well so I recognize that it is socially disfavored, but I also, just as a basic rational matter, understand that men are better at some things, and women are better at some—

01;45;33;26 - 01;45;36;15

Eric Weinstein: But take that part of your brain—I have that part of my brain too.

01;45;36;16 - 01;45;36;26
JD Vance: Sure.

01;45;37;02 - 01;45;39;16
Eric Weinstein: And then I'm raising a girl and a boy.

01;45;39;18 - 01;45;39;28
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;45;39;28 - 01;45;55;14
Eric Weinstein: And I've got another part of my brain that's not at all comfortable with this. I've got an inner conflict and rather than saying, like, I'm fine with this and anybody who isn't is a pussy, I'd much rather say, look, this is a struggle, man.

01;45;55;17 - 01;45;55;23
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;45;55;23 - 01;46;17;11
Eric Weinstein: And the idea that you're just going to socially execute anyone who is struggling with these conflicts, like, you know, take multiculturalism. You and I are both benefiting from multiculturalism. I know that cultures are based on exclusion and multiculturalism is based on inclusion.

01;46;17;13 - 01;46;17;21
JD Vance: Right.

01;46;17;23 - 01;46;56;28
Eric Weinstein: So it's a conflict between the inclusion of exclusive groups! Now, there's no question—like, is tolerance of intolerance tolerance? Or is it intolerance? There are all of these puzzles that come with adulthood. And the terrible thing is being told by this kind of robotic army that if you struggle with these things, you're the bad person. No, it means you're a leader! It means you're possibly going to drag us out of our madness. Maybe you're going to upgrade the ideas that are behind the founding of our nation, around an Enlightenment document. What do you think?

01;46;57;00 - 01;48;20;21
JD Vance: Well, I—just a lot of thoughts there. I mean, one, I do think that the—you're right that there's a way in which, you know, if you're just focusing on gender, there are, like, obvious biological differences that you're still sort of allowed to acknowledge, like, differences between average height, differences between average weight. There are sort of less obvious ones that I think that even 30 years ago were not controversial to acknowledge. So, for example, I think the data is very clear that the, average woman is much more unhappy right now—sorry, the average mother of young children is much more unhappy right now with the time that she's able to spend with her family, as opposed to at work than the average, you know, father of young children. And it's not to say fathers aren't unhappy with sort of the work-life balance issue, but if you look at the data, it's just very clear that women express a stronger dissatisfaction with their current weighting between the time spent at work, time spent with kids. Now I'm sort of kind of saying that because that's rooted in the data, though I sort of acknowledge that there are people who even think that is, you know, structural or cultural, that's sort of evidence of patriarch—

01;48;20;21 - 01;48;21;29
Eric Weinstein: Some part of it’s going to be that.

01;48;22;00 - 01;48;28;18
JD Vance: And some part of it probably is that, though I just don't think that there's any argument that all of it is structural.

01;48;28;18 - 01;48;30;02
Eric Weinstein: Well, that's the point. Is that—

01;48;30;02 - 01;48;31;00
JD Vance: That, to me, is—

01;48;31;02 - 01;48;38;25
Eric Weinstein: You’re constantly looking at things where some amount of it is probably structural, and the people who don't want to acknowledge—go ahead—

01;48;38;25 - 01;50;15;24
JD Vance: Yeah. So there are two separate issues here, right? There's sort of the tension between acknowledging that there are cultural drivers for some of these problems, and there are biological drivers— I wouldn't say problems, I don't think a difference is necessarily a problem—cultural drivers for some of these differences, there are biological drivers for some of these differences and so forth. But there's also—that tension I guess has probably existed in every, like, reasonable or rational person, but something about the way in which those tensions are resolved publicly, in institutions that are in some ways designed to resolve them, is really, really warped right now. And the fact, you know, for example, that, you know, when Elizabeth Warren came out with her sort of big family proposal and one of the things was universal daycare, right, like a lot of women in my family, a lot of women I know with young children are sort of saying, well, why are we subsidizing professional class—they're not putting it in these terms—why are we subsidizing professional class preferences when it comes to child raising? Because the idea of putting your kids in daycare and getting back to work as quickly as possible is something that's, like, very unique to our time and to the well-educated. Again, if you look at preferences, a lot more women would prefer to spend a little bit more time at home. Like, why isn't that a reasonable policy intervention to our current moment? Make it easier for—

01;50;15;26 - 01;50;20;22
Eric Weinstein: I don't—I'm not even comfortable with “well-educated”. I want to say university-educated.

01;50;20;25 - 01;50;21;02
JD Vance: Well-credentialed.

01;50;21;03 - 01;50;22;17
Eric Weinstein: Yeah, well-credentialed. There you go.

01;50;22;19 - 01;52;33;08
JD Vance: But why is it not a reasonable thing to say, “we should, as a policy, as a pro-family policy, make it easier for parents of small children who want to spend more time at home to do it”? Like, why—that seems to be a thing that's reasonable. And to acknowledge that if you do that, probably more women than men are going to take advantage of the option to spend a little bit more time at home as opposed to a little bit less time at work. Or of course, you probably know this, but one of the takeaways of family leave policies in Europe, especially in northern Europe, is that the more generous the family leave policies are, the more that women over time tend to withdraw from the workforce. And one of the theories for why is, you know, they actually enjoy spending time with children. And if it's economically feasible, a lot of people choose to spend time with their kids instead of at work. That is a reasonable thing for people to choose to do. And there are actual critics—especially on the Right, by the way, but I think you see it, you're starting to see on the Left as well—there are critics on the left who say about those policies that they're anti-feminist and pro-patriarchy, because their long-run effect is to enable women to make preferences that they apparently actually have. Now, and here's another, here's another version of this that I'm, like, really—that really, really bothers me. So my friend Oren Cass, who you've spent some time with—I think he's a brilliant, brilliant sort of right-of-center policy thinker—he's made an argument that one of the goals of American economic policy should be not just higher consumption, meaning more money in people's pockets to buy things, but a well-functioning labor market. This is one of the things that Oren is really into. And his argument is that a well-functioning labor market, especially for men, is a major driver of whether families are intact and stable. In other words, for whatever reason, whether it's biology or culture, when men lose their jobs, divorce rates go up, addiction goes up, family trauma goes up.

01;52;33;08 - 01;52;39;29
Eric Weinstein: I'm seeing this in my friend group, where so many men lose their footing in this treacherous labor market—

01;52;40;00 - 01;52;40;08
JD Vance: Yes.

01;52;40;14 - 01;52;50;14
Eric Weinstein: And the home goes haywire! And we can't talk about it because, in part—I mean, let's swim all the way upstream on this one, JD—

01;52;50;17 - 01;53;34;25
JD Vance: But anyway, so let's do that, just to bracket that for a second—the point I wanted to make is that the tension between how much of these choices is driven by culture versus structure—and I agree with you that it's both and in different areas the weighting is different—but that is an issue that I think people of goodwill are sort of meant to sit down and try to figure out, but you can't even have these conversations in certain circles. You cannot talk about family policy on the left right now in a way that acknowledges that the way that mothers’ preferences change is different from the way that fathers’ preferences change.

01;53;34;29 - 01;53;50;20
Eric Weinstein: Well, so, first of all, you have to—so you have to start adjusting, which is, like, my basic take is, I want to talk about households that raise babies with two people in the household.

01;53;50;22 - 01;53;51;14
JD Vance: Sure.

Lasting Societies are about Babies

01;53;51;17 - 01;54;07;14
Eric Weinstein: Okay? They don't have to be male and female. They don't even have to be nonbinary—there's like a breadwinner and a caretaker, because—and I'm going to hopefully lose the percentage of my listenership that can't take this—but societies are about babies.

01;54;07;16 - 01;54;08;21
JD Vance: Yes.

01;54;08;23 - 01;54;09;18
Eric Weinstein: And a society—

01;54;09;22 - 01;54;10;05
JD Vance: Hard agree.

01;54;10;12 - 01;54;15;12
Eric Weinstein: A society that is not about babies is not a long-term society.

01;54;15;12 - 01;54;16;09
JD Vance: It's a dying society.

01;54;16;09 - 01;54;29;14
Eric Weinstein: It's a dying society. So all I know is that there's no way we could have built what we saw out of our window when it was still light in one generation. Rome wasn't built by a single collection of adults.

01;54;29;20 - 01;54;30;01
JD Vance: Yes.

01;54;30;05 - 01;54;51;07
Eric Weinstein: Okay. When you can't talk about babies and the fulfilling nature of babies—and, having had two of my own, it is very hard to construct work to compete with kin work, because babies are friggin satisfying! They're maddening!

01;54;51;10 - 01;54;51;12
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;54;51;15 - 01;54;56;05
Eric Weinstein: I think we overdo it. We don't give women respite when they stay home with kids.

01;54;56;05 - 01;54;56;17
JD Vance: Sure.

01;54;56;17 - 01;55;08;28
Eric Weinstein: And it's also true for gay couples where one dad is staying home or if they're two mommies, doesn't matter. Babies are fulfilling! And—

01;55;08;28 - 01;55;09;22
JD Vance: Yes.

01;55;09;25 - 01;55;37;26
Eric Weinstein: If we can't say that—so one of my theories about universities is that we withhold tenure for reasons that we don't talk about: it's that a certain number of women will have children and find it more satisfying than the incredibly productive career they used to be very engaged with. Okay, now the idea is you want to make sure that they're essentially aging out of fertility before you give them a permanent offer.

01;55;38;03 - 01;55;39;07
JD Vance: Yeah.

01;55;39;09 - 01;58;02;16
Eric Weinstein: So when you take your ovaries to work, and the fact that you have—you're bequeathed a legacy of certain maternity and uncertain paternity, that's part of the human endowment. So mothers have always known it was their child, fathers have never been exactly certain until the present. Okay. So now we have this situation in which females are built to invest in the continuation of our species differently than males because sperm is cheap and eggs are dear and paternity is uncertain. I feel entirely comfortable saying that, just from the biology. And anybody who doesn't want to agree to that is just incompetent, and they need to leave the conversation. I'm not even going to bother having it with them. With that said, we now have a new set of issues, which is that, let's assume, as I do, that mean intelligence for females is the same as for males by Fisherian Equivalence of some kind. Okay. What are we going to do with all these super well-educated females who now have this trade off? I think what we need to start doing is to talk about the trade off. Do you want to engage in kin work? Do you realize that there is a high probability that you will find this very satisfying? And I keep saying, should we pay women more than men because of the unincorporated burden of kin work, which they are asymmetrically shouldering? So I think what you see is that there are these sort of two constellations. There's the constellation that says, you know, “we should base ourselves around adjustments to a traditional family structure because that was honed by evolution”. And there's another constellation that says, “we now know that we can, using birth control, using paternity tests, get much closer to gender equality. We should start from something that thinks of us as a worker before thinking of it as a breeding engine, and start from there”. So whether the office or the Savannah, in essence, is your basic idea of the point to expand around, I know that the solution is going to be more office than the Savannah would say, and it's going to be more Savannah than the office will admit. It's somewhere in—it's somewhere between these things.

01;58;02;19 - 01;59;33;17
JD Vance: Yeah. And to your point about how fulfilling children can be, I just don't think that we can—or I should say, it's very hard to overstate the cost to mothers and fathers of not spending an appropriate amount of time with your kids. And while there are real advantages to having—you know, it's sort of a classic division of labor argument that you want people doing the thing that they're most inclined to do, that they're going to be most productive in doing—that logic, if taken to too much of an extreme, it doesn't just lead to a world in where, you know, where mothers and fathers aren't spending any time with their kids—it sort of leads to a world where you have, you know, the people who are of a certain social class making and caring for all the kids, while all the other people in a different social class are the ones doing productive labor. Which, by the way, is a world that we're getting much closer to than I'm comfortable with. So I share your view that you don't want to sort of cut people out of the labor force. My wife is a working mother. We have somebody who helps us take care of our kids. She loves her job. She's very good at it. I think it would be bad, for the productive economy, for her to be sort of taken out of it. At the same time, I think it's bad for both of us to spend not enough time with our kid. And I think it's terrible for the kid as well. And we've got another one on the way, and I—

01;59;33;19 - 01;59;34;03
Eric Weinstein: Congratulations.

01;59;34;09 - 02;01;14;18
JD Vance: Thank you. And I think that we've gotten to a point in our society where we're simultaneously having a lot of our citizens engaged in work that actually isn't that meaningful or fruitful or productive on the one hand, and on the other hand, we're having people spend more and more time on that and less and less time on things that are a little bit more fulfilling and sort of ultimately, you know, necessary for the sustainment of civilization. And one of the weirdest things about the American economy of the past 20 or 30 years is that, for I think as long as we've had good data on this fact, working class people tended to spend more time at work than upper class people. That's, like, completely inverted now. So you have this weird situation where, again, the managers—call them The Precariat, whatever you're going to call them—are spending much, much more time at work, and than they have sort of in any generation in the past, and consequently they're spending less time with their kids, they're having fewer children. And I think that just makes the entire world of professional America kind of sociopathic and icky. And you go to the neighborhoods—and Los Angeles is, like, one of my favorite cities, I really like it here, actually—but you go to DC, I think DC has the lowest fertility rate of any major American city. Los Angeles probably isn't far behind, I think San Francisco maybe second lowest?

02;01;14;18 - 02;01;15;15
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02;01;15;17 - 02;02;23;10
JD Vance: It's bizarre. It's like a wasteland with no children. And there's a way in which it's very short term productive because you have all these, you know, “knowledge economy”, quote unquote, workers in San Francisco who don't have to go home and take care of kids. Or maybe they have one kid that they can pay somebody else to take care of, but they're losing something about, like, what makes life worth living. And I tend to think that that over the long term has really negative effects on our society. So like, there's this really interesting study that came out—maybe came out a year or so ago—but it sort of tracked economic dynamism against fertility rates in different locations. And one of the things it consistently finds is that places that have more kids are more technologically innovative. There's a good argument to be made that the most advanced Western economy, in terms of technological innovation right now, is also the one with the—it's the only one with an above-replacement fertility rate. That's Israel. That hasn't been teased out enough, that the short-term trade off between productivity and spending time with kids has made our society pretty wicked.

02;02;23;10 - 02;02;35;16
Eric Weinstein: Well, I'll go further. I look at these millennials who are having trouble forming families, and a lot of them are about to go, you know, over the border of 30. And—

02;02;35;19 - 02;02;40;07
JD Vance: And were lied to, by the way, about how fertility changed. I think that—

02;02;40;07 - 02;02;40;24
Eric Weinstein: Oh—

02;02;40;24 - 02;02;41;21
JD Vance: Sorry, I didn't—

02;02;41;21 - 02;02;46;15
Eric Weinstein: No no no no no, I'm just, I'm emotionally reacting in real time. Go ahead.

02;02;46;17 - 02;03;14;28
JD Vance: Well I've seen this with a lot of people in my friends circle, my wife's friends and so forth. I had no idea how much harder—and my wife and I've been pretty lucky on this front, 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.

02;03;14;28 - 02;03;15;28
Eric Weinstein: I keep talking about the—

02;03;15;28 - 02;03;17;18
JD Vance: And I feel like nobody told—

02;03;17;18 - 02;03;17;28
Eric Weinstein: Well—

02;03;17;29 - 02;03;18;13
JD Vance: Me this.

02;03;18;14 - 02;03;49;26
Eric Weinstein: And we need financial products to get young people money earlier in their lives. And I'm going to say, let's just—maybe I'll burn all of my listenership—a lot of the money that baby boomers are spending on weekend getaways and new toys and third homes and second homes and all this stuff is actually money that you were supposed to be putting towards your children's security so that they can enjoy it while they're young, to raise families so that you get grandchildren.

02;03;49;26 - 02;03;50;22
JD Vance: Yes.

02;03;50;24 - 02;04;05;25
Eric Weinstein: And this idea of, we don't want to push anybody to have grandchildren, we don't want to push anyone to get married, we don't want to do—I mean, at some level, this is what a self-extinguishing strategy sounds like on its way out.

02;04;05;25 - 02;04;06;04
JD Vance: Yeah.

02;04;06;07 - 02;04;12;24
Eric Weinstein: It's so pure. It's so loving. It's so giving. It's so forward-thinking that it doesn't make any sense.

02;04;12;24 - 02;04;13;13
JD Vance: Yes.

02;04;13;15 - 02;05;21;22
Eric Weinstein: Right? Like, in essence, you either care about things that go past your lifespan—and just, maybe this is a place to close it out and invite you back—I was thinking about how weird it is that the American left doesn't relate very strongly to the concept of the American family, but something weird's it out just the way it's weirded out by the flag and an excess of patriotism. You know, it's also weirded out currently by traditional families, which make up the majority of families. Okay. Who was Mother Jones? Like, why is there a magazine named Mother Jones? Why those two words? Because there was an actual woman named Mother Jones! And if my memory serves correctly, she lost a mess of sons, and so she had no where to mother! And so she decided that she was going to mother these dangerous bad boys of coal and steel and their fight for masculinity and dignity, and teach them to fight like hell.

2;05;21;28 - 02;05;22;06
Eric Weinstein: Yeah.

02;05;22;11 - 02;05;47;11
Eric Weinstein: And, you know, I was thinking about this thing that you were saying about Glenn Close portraying your grandmother. This is another thing that makes me crazy. We are supposed to hold up older women. Post-menopausal females are very rare in the natural world. In general, almost no species has them. Grandmothers and great-grandmothers are super special.

02;05;47;11 - 02;05;47;22
JD Vance: Yes.

02;05;47;22 - 02;06;35;21
Eric Weinstein: To say nothing of grandfathers and great grandfathers. The idea that you're honoring your own grandmother by getting Glenn Close to player in a Ron Howard picture—there's a version of that in every family, where we hold up our old women for all the service they've done at home. They're the celebrities of the house, and one of the benefits about doing your stuff, doing your work inside of a home and inside of the family structure, is that you get celebrated as a super important person by a collection of people who've tracked your entire life history, and that really concerns me. That's the other side of babies. If you're not taking care of your grandmothers, and you're not taking care of your babies, what are you?

02;06;35;22 - 02;06;45;20
JD Vance: Yes. Well, you're worker bees and you're sort of living in, like, a Marxist conspiracy dystopia. I mean, this

02;06;45;20 - 02;06;46;28
Eric Weinstein: Even worker bees—

02;06;47;03 - 02;06;48;02
JD Vance: I—right, even worker—

02;06;48;08 - 02;06;55;06
Eric Weinstein: Even worker bees are taking care of the Queen's offspring, who are more closely related to them than they would be to their own.

02;06;55;09 - 02;07;44;23
JD Vance: Well, there definitely is a way in which, you know, I'm obviously not a Marxist, but where I think that there's like a Marxist conspiracy version of the modern American work environment, that we all became sort of hyper liberated and we could sort of, you know, buy and sell our labor on the free market and were, in some ways, sort of less encumbered in our jobs and more able to switch than we have been in sort of any recent period. And yet the end result is that it's made us much more willing to sacrifice ourselves to the interests of a corporation than for our own families. And I think that's really, really icky.

02;07;44;25 - 02;07;50;22
Eric Weinstein: And I do want people with real choices as to whether or not to invest kin work or in—

02;07;51;00 - 02;07;51;09
JD Vance: 100 percent.

02;07;51;09 - 02;07;59;21
Eric Weinstein: Professional work, because, like, if somebody is on the trail of a vaccine, you know, I don't want to tell them, no, no, no, you need to have two babies in order to make everybody happy.

02;07;59;23 - 02;08;08;26
JD Vance: 100%. Like, I think it's super important that we, one, not idealize especially the 1950s version of an American housewife, because, as my grandma told me, it was very lonely.

02;08;08;28 - 02;08;09;05
Eric Weinstein: Yep.

02;08;09;06 - 02;08;24;16
JD Vance: It was not the multigenerational world that she, you know, her mother and her grandmother had grown up in, it was very often not chosen, even a little. And I do try to emphasize the point about choice, you know, whether it's structurally driven, culturally driven, individually driven—

02;08;24;18 - 02;08;26;12
Eric Weinstein: You want it to be informed choice. That was your point.

02;08;26;13 - 02;08;49;07
JD Vance: A hundred percent. But there is this weird way in which, you know, there's this curve of fertility rate versus preferred fertility rate. How many children are women having versus how many children do they want to have? And for like the first time the past ten years, that curve is inverted. So women are now saying they want more children than they are having.

02;08;49;13 - 02;09;01;11
JD Vance: And that was like not true for any period in American history. That's pretty disturbing, right? We finally reached a point at which family preferences have become inverted against—

02;09;01;16 - 02;09;09;01
Eric Weinstein: Are you open to paying women more money than men in order to renew our society? If that's what it takes?

02;09;09;03 - 02;09;37;23
JD Vance: If it would work? Yes. Well, I mean, there's a good argument that one of the real screwed up incentives that's built into our tax code is that we don't treat unpaid domestical labor—we don't treat home work as work, kinwork, for tax purposes, and that creates these sort of massive incentives to join the paid labor market as opposed to do the things that you might—

02;09;37;23 - 02;09;42;11
Eric Weinstein: Well, and also with the divorce structure, you know, that it's much harder to—

02;09;42;16 - 02;09;50;16
JD Vance: Yeah, 100%. So there's the marriage penalties, all these weird ways in which a traditional family life is in some ways disfavored,

02;09;50;16 - 02;09;50;26
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02;09;50;26 - 02;10;27;20
JD Vance: By our public policy. But you said something that really is important to me. One of the great things that I admire about Appalachian culture is that there is a prevalence of multigenerational families in a way that most, at least, most sort of American subcultures I haven't seen the same thing. Like, it was super common for 3 or 4 generations of family members to live under the same roof. By the way, that was sort of something that public policy for certain parts of our country's period tried to actively fight against, try to turn these multi-generational families into the classic nuclear family.

02;10;27;21 - 02;10;40;04
Eric Weinstein: Because they are rivals to the state, this is your point about Marxism, which is that, you know, you can be very far left-of-center and progressive and still hate Marxism, you know, which is where my family—

02;10;40;04 - 02;10;40;15
JD Vance: Right.

02;10;40;15 - 02;10;58;15
Eric Weinstein: Is. And the point there is, when you start hearing the market fundamentalists say, well, why should you be allowed to die near where you grew up? I hear something else in that which is like, wow, you really want the market to replace the family.

2;10;58;15 - 02;10;59;05
JD Vance: Yes.

02;10;59;07 - 02;11;48;16
Eric Weinstein: Because if you can bike to your uncle's place, you've got a very strong fabric that can be an insurance policy when, you know, somebody in the economy isn't fired, you know, you can do your work at home. Like, there's this issue that the family, as an economic unit, has to be reexamined because of the atomistic pressure in the previous era to disconnect ourselves from each other. And I just—you know, this is sort of where it cashes out for me—we're being induced to see ourselves through the lens of capital versus labor, the market, our wages, our worth. And this is ending, I can tell—

02;11;48;23 - 02;12;24;09
JD Vance: Yeah. So, one, I mean strongly agree, and the multi-generational point is especially important. You know, my—I love my wife's family, you know, grew up in India, immigrated to the country about a year before my wife was born, just devoted to my wife, to their grandchild, to future grandchildren, just like very great people. And you can sort of see the effect it has on him to be around them, like they spoil him and sort of all the classic stuff that grandparents do to grandchildren. But it makes him a much better human being to have exposure to his grandparents.

02;12;24;09 - 02;12;25;14
Eric Weinstein: Well, I don't know if—

02;12;25;16 - 02;12;27;25
JD Vance: And the evidence on this, by the way, is super clear.

02;12;27;25 - 02;12;33;14
Eric Weinstein: That's the whole purpose of the postmenopausal female, in theory! But let me ask you a question, not knowing the answer—

02;12;33;14 - 02;12;35;02
JD Vance: Please.

02;12;35;05 - 02;12;44;12
Eric Weinstein: When your child was born, did your in-laws, and particularly your mother-in-law, show up in some huge way?

2;12;44;14 - 02;12;45;24
JD Vance: She lived with us for a year!

02;12;45;29 - 02;12;46;10
JD Vance: Right.

02;12;46;13 - 02;12;47;07
JD Vance: So, you know—

02;12;47;07 - 02;12;48;09
Eric Weinstein: So I didn't know the answer to that.

02;12;48;13 - 02;12;48;21
JD Vance: No.

02;12;48;21 - 02;12;52;14
Eric Weinstein: So that’s this weird, unadvertised feature of marrying an Indian woman.

02;12;52;14 - 02;13;11;25
JD Vance: So it's. Yeah, it's in some ways the most transgressive thing I've ever done against sort of the hyper-neoliberal approach to work and family is that when we sort of got to the point of wanting a family and we both just said, you know—my wife had a clerkship starting with the chief justice of the Supreme Court—

2;13;11;25 - 02;13;12;16
Eric Weinstein: Right.

02;13;12;18 - 02;14;16;17
JD Vance: And it was about a year down the road and we sort of start doing the math like, all right, if we start now and we get pregnant early, like, you're going to have not a very long maternity leave before you have to do this super demanding, super important job. And I was kind of like, you know, in hindsight, maybe it was like a little stupid. But we had this conversation where we just said whatever, like, let's just do it and we'll deal with it, right? There wasn't this moment, you know, 70,000 years ago, where the cavemen would say, like, oh, we've gotta move into a better cave, right? Or I've gotta get a better job hunting wooly mammoths before we can have this baby. You just make family life work. And it was sort of easy for us because my wife had this baby seven weeks before she started the clerkship. It was still not sleeping any more than an hour and a half in a given interval. And her mom just took a sabbatical. She's a biology professor in California, just took a sabbatical for a year, and came and lived with us and took care of our kid for a year.

02;14;16;19 - 02;14;17;01
Eric Weinstein: Okay, so—

02;14;17;01 - 02;14;20;00
JD Vance: And it was just one of these things where it's like, this is what you do.

02;14;20;00 - 02;14;22;12
Eric Weinstein: So, a biology professor, PhD—

02;14;22;15 - 02;14;23;09
JD Vance: Yes.

02;14;23;11 - 02;14;24;23
Eric Weinstein: Drops what they're doing—

02;14;24;26 - 02;14;26;14
JD Vance: Yeah.

02;14;26;16 - 02;14;30;28
Eric Weinstein: To immediately tend to the needs of a new mother with her infant!

02;14;30;29 - 02;14;32;15
JD Vance: Painfully economically inefficient!

02;14;32;16 - 02;14;34;11
Eric Weinstein: Can I just propose a really—

02;14;34;15 - 02;14;44;10
JD Vance: Why didn't she just keep her job, give us part of the wages to pay somebody else to do it, right? Because that is the thing that the hyper-liberalized economics wants you to do.

2;14;44;12 - 02;14;54;02
Eric Weinstein: We got kicked out of our bedroom, because my in-laws just, like, moved in and it's like, okay, you need to learn how to do this. You need the relief. You need the help.

02;14;54;03 - 02;14;54;07
JD Vance: Yeah.

02;14;54;08 - 02;14;58;21
Eric Weinstein: Do you want to honor these two women, by name, at the close of this podcast?

02;14;58;22 - 02;15;10;23
JD Vance: Yeah. So, Usha Chilukuri, now Usha Vance, is my wife, and Lakshmi Chilukuri is her mom. And I love them both very much. And, you know, life wouldn't be worth living without them.

02;15;10;25 - 02;15;48;21
Eric Weinstein: Okay. And so in my case, my wife is Pia Malaney, which some of my listeners will know. But, Esther Silliman, who became Esther Malaney, is my wife's mother, and she's the one who moved in and showed us how it's done. And, you know, I just think that, in part, one of the things that we need to do is to recognize that these are really celebrated roles and that if you get any notoriety behind you, you should be able to say thank you and to put that out there. And I hope that this Glenn Close role in your own family—I mean, what a great honor for your grandma too!

02;15;48;25 - 02;17;05;15
JD Vance: Well, I appreciate that. And certainly, it looks like Glenn—having watched the movie for the first time—really knocked it out of the park, so I'm very, very excited about that. But I'll say, you know, one of the things that just—to sort of bring this full circle to where we started—is that the economic logic of always prioritizing the paid wage laborer over other forms of contributing to a society is, to me, it's actually a consequence of a sort of fundamental liberalism that is ultimately going to unwind and collapse upon itself. I think it's the abandonment of a sort of Aristotelian virtue politics for a hyper market-oriented way of thinking about what's good and what's desirable. If people are paying for it and it contributes to GDP and it makes the economic consumption numbers rise, then it's good. And if it doesn't, it's bad. I think that entire sort of—to me, that's sort of the root of our political problem.

02;17;05;17 - 02;17;10;09
Eric Weinstein: Families are maddening things, but we've had families for a lot longer than we've had offices.

02;17;10;09 - 02;17;11;06
JD Vance: Yes, we have.

02;17;11;13 - 02;17;39;29
Eric Weinstein: JD, you're welcome back any time. It's an absolute thrill for you to come and visit. His book is Hillbilly Elegy, soon to be a major motion picture, fingers crossed! You've been through the portal with JD Vance. Please subscribe on Apple, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts. And after you're done, head over to YouTube and both subscribe and click the bell icon to make sure that you're notified when our next episode drops. And thanks everybody. Be well.