32 - JD Vance - American Dreams and Nightmares: Difference between revisions

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.

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.

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.

Glenn Close is playing my grandma.

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?

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.

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.

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—