The Megyn Kelly Show - J.D. Vance on Trump, Addiction, and Family | November 2020 Re-Release

Episode Date: July 21, 2024

Today we're re-releasing an episode from our archives, when J.D. Vance was a guest on the show in November 2020. In the years since the interview, Vance has gone on to become U.S. senator from Ohio, and this week, named former President Trump's VP nominee. In this episode, Vance and Megyn discuss Trump and the 2020 election, his family and their portrayal in the movie adaptation of "Hillbilly Elegy," addiction in America, the blindspots of the Democratic party, failure of the elites, and much more.

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and this bonus weekend episode. With Senator J.D. Vance being named former President Donald Trump's vice presidential nominee, we wanted to look back at the time J.D. was on this show. Back in episode 29, we were just little babies at the time. We were only audio at the time as well. No video. It was November of 2020. We had launched the show in September. It was a very different time in our country, quite tumultuous, as you may remember, just weeks after President Biden was elected. Think of that. And J.D. was

just a mega bestselling author back then. He hadn't even done anything in politics, certainly not a U.S. senator or a vice presidential nominee. We talked for two hours more about a wide range of topics from the 2020 election to his family, to our interview for NBC back in 2017, to some blind spots that the Democratic Party has, and yes, whether he might get into politics. It's a great window into who he is and super fun to listen to now that you know where life took him over the next few years. Enjoy, and I'll see you Monday. Thank you so much for being here.

Thanks for having me. You're a good person to have on right now as we watch this election appear to come to its close. The Trump voters right now are angry. They're ticked off. They do believe there was funny business in connection with this election. And I was thinking about you because Hellbilly Elegy tells us the code to follow when one feels that one has been wronged. And that code is to fight, to fight. So how does that manifest now? Yeah, I think there's first of all, a lot of frustration over the perceived hypocrisy.

I think, in fact, the real hypocrisy, if I'm laying my cards on the table, right? So you had this election in 2016, where Trump won. It was very upsetting to a lot of people in the establishment press and other institutions. And for basically, you know, like two weeks, there was this period where all of these people asked themselves, oh, have we gotten something wrong? Have we missed an important part of the country? We're going to go read Hillbilly Elegy or some other book to try to understand people in the middle of the country. And then that just stopped. And it was all about Russia. It was all about Trump's problems. It was all about how the election in some ways was illegitimate. And I think there's just this real frustration that for four years,

we've had this constant sense and messaging from certain quarters that the Trump presidency is illegitimate. And we're three weeks after the election, and there are these legal challenges working their way through the courts, and people are just preoccupied with Trump needs to accept the legitimacy of the election. So I think that hypocrisy, the fact that nobody accepted his election and his supporters are supposed to accept the election so quickly after it's done, I think just causes some real frustration. I don't think, I mean, you look at the last three weeks, you've had a lot of court filings, you've had a lot of peaceful protests, you've had a lot of people complaining on social media. But I really don't see any reason to think that this is going to become violent or chaotic. I think people

certainly feel that they need to fight and they need to see this through to the end. I think they're supportive of the president continuing the litigation. But I also don't think, you know, frankly, these are the sorts of people who are going to go burn up stores and set cars on fire and make life a living hell for everybody. I think that when Biden is inaugurated, people will more or less accept it. It doesn't have to be looting. It can be opposing Biden's policies and making sure that they're Neanderthals, they're Nazis, they're they're racist, they're awful. It's no one actually stops it to pay attention to what Trump did for these guys in the Rust Belt. What's happened to the Rust Belt? Why did he win four years ago, Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin? There was, as you point out, a period where people want to take a hard look at that. And then and then they didn't. Then they just decided to dismiss everybody as awful, as just bigoted for voting for the guy. And I just wonder whether these folks are, you know, in a uniting mood right now, as we're as we're being told we must unite around Biden's agenda.

No, I don't I don't think they are. I don't think the country is in a uniting mood. And frankly, this idea that we're all just going to come together over the new Biden presidency is a little bit of a joke. I think certainly people will let their political passions subside a little bit. Election seasons are always a little bit exhausting for people who are engaged in politics and pay attention. But no, I don't think people are just going to let bygones be bygones. Because to your point, the two consistent threads that have come from the mainstream press since Trump's election in 2016 have been, one, the election was stolen in some way. Russians hacked the election.

If you look at public polls, a pretty large share of Democratic voters think that Russia actually hacked into voting machines and changed the tabulation. And so there's been this sense of illegitimacy focused around the Russia issue, but it's other issues too. But the second, and I think in some ways, frankly, the more pernicious instinct that's existed in our politics is, to your point, turn the Trump voter into this evil, malignant force in American politics. And I'm 36 years old now, and I can't think of any period where the winner or the loser in a presidential election has spent the next four years obsessing about the character defects of the other side of the country, right? This idea is like, oh, we lost these people. We're going to try to appeal to them, maybe even

in a fake way. Maybe we're going to lie to them. We're at least going to try to pretend that we care about their votes. That's how it works in a democratic society. That just didn't happen at all over the last four years. There's just been this idea that these people are Neanderthals or deplorables or racist. And I, you know, obviously sort of coming from this community, Megan, sort of, you know, white working class community with a lot of Trump voters. I really, really am bothered by this. And one of the threads that came out was this idea that Trump voters are animated by an extraordinary amount of racial resentment. And to dive into the details just a little bit, the way that's usually measured is you call people up and you ask them, what do you feel about this issue? What do you feel about that

issue? And there are two really interesting things about these academic studies that identify Trump voters as overly racist. The first is that they're basically just asking people to discuss race issues in the parlance of modern woke politics, right? So if you talk about racial issues as a modern college-educated urban millennial, then you get low on the racial resentment score. And if you talk about race issues in a way that most non-college-educated people are going to talk about them, even if you are not yourself racist, just the fact that you don't have the same sort of verbal rules that you're following, they're going to get you tagged as high on the racial resentment score, which allows people to dismiss you. And related to that, one of the things you pretty consistently find is that if you look at white voters and you give

them or white working class voters, you give them a high score on this racial resentment index. You know who else gets really high on the racial resentment index? Black voters and Latino voters as well. And so there's been this sort of ignorance that there's just like a basic disconnect in how American elites and the rest of the country talk about racial politics questions. And Trump voters, I think, have been made out to be the villain because they don't use the sort of modern woke dialogue. And I just think that's, you know, one, it's unfair. Two, obviously, people are going to feel put upon if you just call them racist because, you know, being called a racist can get you fired. It's sort of, you know, one of the marks of not being welcome in polite society.

And then the third piece of it is just that it's created a society where we're not actually trying to listen to or understand where these folks are coming from. There's just, again, no even pretense that we're going to try to understand these voters' concerns, make their lives better, make an appeal to them. And I think that's just very dangerous. You can't expect to run an election like that and then just have these folks come back to the table willing to unify with the people who were calling them racist just a few months ago. Absolutely.

And as you look at sort of how the election has shaken out thus far, Trump improved his margins largely with Hispanic voters, a little with Black voters. I mean, what do you think those folks are trying to say to the people who are telling everyone you have to speak about race and ethnicity in the way we want, otherwise you're bad, and you have to hate Trump, otherwise you're bad? You know, the narrative got turned on its head when we actually saw voting results. Yeah, I think this is a really important question. And, you know, so much is represented in the language and the rhetoric. I just think that there's this obsession among professional class Americans to talk about these issues in a particular way. And if you don't, you're a bad

person. And the perfect representation of this is this phrase, Latinx or Latinx, which is supposed to be a non-gendered way of talking. Instead of saying Latino, it's a non-gendered way of talking about that ethnic group. And one of the things you find with public polling is that the people who never use that word are actual Latinos. And the people who use that word all the time are white Americans with professional degrees. And so again, there's just this weird class divergence in how you discuss these issues. And I just think of it as like this ultimate example of elitism, because you're basically telling Latinos, you know, I know a number of Latinos. A lot of them are very proud of the language, whether it's their first language or

their second language, Spanish. You're telling them that the language of their home, the language of their families is somehow discriminatory and that you, the white person with a law degree from Harvard or Yale, you know how to modify their language in a way that's going to make them more politically correct and more acceptable in polite society. And I don't think it's surprising at all that a lot of folks looked at that. A lot of Latinos looked at that and said, not for me, no thank you. And they went for Trump in pretty surprising numbers. And it's, you know, I think that people who have looked at the exit polls on this stuff have actually underappreciated how powerful the Latino shift to Donald Trump was. You know, exit polls are always very unpredictable. But there are counties along the Rio Grande River Valley that are like 95 percent Hispanic where Trump didn't just win more than he won in 2016. He actually won a majority

of the overall vote. So we're talking about a pretty dramatic shift to the president and to the Republican Party, which I think if Republicans can hold on to, it would be great. But I think Democrats really should wake up to the fact that the way in which the professionally educated leadership class of the Democratic Party just discusses these issues comes across as condescending and frankly, just a little bit weird. I mean, how many times have you listened to these people talk, whether it's about racial politics or economic issues or gender and sexuality, and just thought to yourself, who are these weirdos and where do they learn how to talk?

Totally. I think that's a big problem. Well, I can relate to the Latinx thing as a woman, because I was told by Ted talks that we need to say women. Like, I don't even know how you pronounce it, but it's W O M X N.

Wim. If I don't say that when speaking about my gender, I'm a bigot. I'm a transphobe. Well, screw you, TED Talks. Women, women, women, W-O-M-E-N. There, I said it and I'm going to continue to say it. I don't need TED Talks to tell me how to spell my gender in some new way to be inclusive. And it is annoying and it's actually motivational. I can see I can see it turning a Latina or Latino into a Trump voter because they they don't want to be white splained to write by my neighbors here on the Upper West Side. And then, you know, what we get is a situation where four years ago we had Hillary Clinton calling them all deplorable. And then Trump won. And people said, Oh, we better not do that. That was bad. She shouldn't have said that. That alienated people. And instead of actually taking their own advice, we got four years of Democrats and media amping it up. They've gone from deplorables to Nazis. I think it kicks off with Christiane Amanpour, who just two weeks ago, 10 days ago, doubled down on this. She was ultimately forced to apologize, though her remarks sat out there uncorrected for a week. But take a listen.

This week, 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened. It was the Nazis' warning shot across the bow of our human civilization after four years of a modern day assault on those same values by by Donald Trump. I'm gonna use an extreme example think about Hitler. So many stunning parallels to what Hitler was doing. In describing Hitler's psychological profile and this only pertains to Adolf Hitler. There is so much that is resonant of the Third Reich in this administration. Many tendencies like Adolf Hitler. Does this look like Germany in 1932? We're getting close. And this only pertains to Adolf Hitler and pertains to nobody else. 90% of what he says, I'm like this guy gets it. If you've read anything about the rise of the

Third Reich and Adolf Hitler, you will see the parallels. Donald Trump is a true psychopath. He's like Hitler or Stalin. That sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews. Oh, my God. That was put together by the Washington Free Beacon. But it really brings it home. They're not going to stop that as they telling they're telling us that we're healed and we're unified. There's been no accounting for any of that. In fact, there won't be because that is what they think. That's what they think of Trump's voters, 74 million people and especially the white working class who will never be forgiven for putting him in office to begin with.

They were supposed to be Democrats. They they turned on their party. Yeah, I mean, you know, first of all, a core component of the leadership of the country, the leadership of the Democratic Party that really isn't interested in unity and fraternity. They're interested in submission, right? When you talk about people like that, when you call them Nazis, when you compare them to people who murdered 6 million innocent people, you're not making a play for them to come to the table, meet as equals, hash out our differences and move forward as a country together. You're basically asking them to submit. And I don't think people should be surprised that a very proud group of people who feel

rightfully so, like they had a huge part in helping to build this country, are going to submit. They're just not going to do it. And so I think we're going to have a pretty chaotic politics from this point forward. The other thing I just want to say reacting to that video is, you know, I'm not a history expert, but I understand the Kristallnacht was pretty violent. Obviously, the Holocaust was like the most violent thing imaginable. 100,000 front voters gathered in D.C. a couple of weeks ago to protest. And the violence was primarily from like left wing paramilitary groups against them. They maintained an incredibly peaceful presence despite a very heated topic and a very heated time in our country. So I just, the comparison and the treatment of these guys is like these violent criminals, violent thugs. It's just, it's just bizarre because they're actually just not, right? They're angry, they're frustrated. And there are a lot of people who are expressing their views, but they're not doing it violently. And that, that's just often completely missed when people compare these folks to violent, violent extremists of the past.

You know, I go back to the end of Obama's second term, and I was talking with folks close to the White House about sitting down with him, because even then, this is before Trump had even secured the nomination on the Republican side. Obama was regretting not having paid more attention to this group of voters. He he's smart and he understood they were unhappy and his policies had not helped them. And this could be a growing force in American politics. And I think he had genuine regret over not considering them and their needs more. And certainly they had the final say in the election of Donald Trump. But I wonder what's going to happen now, because there's a reason, of course, these folks voted for Trump and a lot of the white working class still voted for Trump.

Most of them still voted for Trump this time around. His share of white men went down a little, but they still were on Team Trump, even though he lost those states more because of suburban voters and seniors. And it looks like it was largely related to the pandemic and the way Trump talks for those voters. But looking back at what Trump did, you know, one of the reasons he was elected was he promised he was going to roll back a lot of these regulations Obama had put in place that he was going to be for the working class. And, you know, Obama wanted environmental regulations over over any sort of industrial revival. Trump was exactly the opposite. You know, he he tried to reduce what he did reduce corporate taxes. He he tried to encourage the return of production to the United States where he would try to shame any company that was going to take its plant overseas. He he went after China and their unfair trade practices.

He he did reach new trade agreements with Canada, with Mexico, with South Korea, all trying to favor more domestic production, not to mention tariffs he put in place to help industry here. And we had a boom in oil and gas production. This is like, this is all stuff that this group of voters loved. But now you've got not just any Democrat, but Obama's number two, Joe Biden in there. And I just wonder what you think the sense is right now amongst those voters in terms of what's about to come their way. Yeah, I mean, just as a preliminary point, I do think that one of the lessons for Republicans, there are obviously a lot of lessons for Democrats, we'll talk about it. One of the lessons for Republicans from 2020 is that they maybe took the white working class for advantage a little bit. I think that you should have expected that group, frankly, to go even more stronger for Trump, more strongly for Trump than they did in 2016. There was a little bit,

to your point, of a stagnation. Not really a reversal, but certainly a stagnation. And I think that my read on this is that where Trump governed as a populist where he really hammered China, the trade issue, the immigration issue is where he was most popular. And, you know, when when he governed as a traditional Republican, I do think that he probably, you know, led to some stagnation in that voting bloc. And so I think that's that's one of the lessons to take away from this. Because he did ultimately cut a deal with China. I mean, he did ultimately cut a deal, which they may not be happy about. Yeah, he cut ultimately cut a deal with China. I mean, he did ultimately cut a deal, which they may not have been happy about. Yeah, he cut a deal with China. And it's funny that the tax plan, which there were a lot of things I liked about and some things I didn't like about

it. I think to the extent that that was really focused on bringing capital and investment back to the country and cutting middle class taxes, it was really good for him. And to the country and cutting middle-class taxes, it was really good for him. And to the extent that it looked like something that Mitt Romney would have done, it frankly wasn't that popular. And so there was this really interesting push and pull between the Trump instinct within the White House and the more establishment instinct within the White House, which is, of course, something that a lot of other folks can talk to better than I can. But I think on the Biden question, what would worry me and what I think a lot of folks are concerned about is sort of a reversal on the China issue. So I think the China issue is probably the most substantial of Trump's wins as a president.

He totally changed the conversation on China. And if you think about the environmental issue as related to the China issue, so we think of environmental issues like, OK, fuel standards, reducing emissions here at home. But the way in which our environmental policy can be most destructive is actually on industrial power questions. Because if the Chinese are allowed to pollute as much as they can, then they can build and make things and manufacture things much more cheaply than we can. of state looks like a soft on China guy, while at the same time, putting America under stricter environmental regulations than the Chinese, then what you could have is a real stagnation in American manufacturing output, which of course is sort of what you need to actually build a

thriving working and middle class in the country. You have to have a viable manufacturing sector. I think that's the lesson of Germany. It's the lesson of Switzerland. It's certainly the lesson of the United States in the last 20 or 30 years. And so there is this fear that a lot of the wage growth that you saw over the last four years is going to get reversed in this preoccupation with, instead of building a viable manufacturing sector for the middle class, with this idea that you can just transition the existing middle class to the jobs of the future. And I think that's an important piece of the puzzle, but there's just no way. And I think if you actually listen to, for example, Rahm Emanuel talk about the economic prospects of the Midwest. Rahm Emanuel said, I think it was on CNN or some other network a couple of weeks ago, well, these folks just have to learn to code.

They lose their manufacturing jobs. They have to learn to code. And I'm a very big fan of investing in the future of the economy. But you can't tell tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of manufacturing workers, they're just going to have to go back to school when they're 52 years old and learn to code. It's ridiculous. It's unrealistic. A lot of people aren't going to be able to do that. And so if that is your orientation, let's just focus on the technology sector instead of really rebuilding and reinvesting in American manufacturing. I think a lot of people are

going to get left behind. And a lot of the progress we made over the last few years is going to stagnate. And I do worry about that. Now, Forbes reported that employment grew in manufacturing jobs by almost half a million under Trump after falling by 200,000 under Obama. So, I mean, that's a pretty big swing and that's the kind of swing that can turn numbers in an election. And so if Biden gets in there and starts re-implementing these regulations on manufacturing, on trying to protect the environment at the expense of the American worker, it could have real life consequences in terms of our electoral politics and in terms of lives. You know, I mean, you talk about, like, learn to code is so absurd for most people. I

mean, I'd be one of them. But Hillbilly Elegy takes a hard look at sort of the malaise happening in these communities and the Rust Belt, almost the lack of agency a lot of these workers have. There isn't this let's go get them kind of attitude. I can do anything. I will learn to code. You're talking about guys who like took four lunch breaks and they stretched from 20 to 60 minutes over the course of time.

Ultimately, they get fired. It's not all about what the government can do for you. A lot of it has to do with attitudes that have been cultivated in these communities that might not lend themselves to brilliant careers as coders. Yeah, I think there's a lot of, you know, the way I put it is that there's a lot of hopelessness in these communities and they've been battered in a lot of different ways for the past, you know, not 30 or 40 years, but 50 or 60 years. And there's something my grandpa,

grandpa has used to told me, he was sort of an old union steel worker, voted for a Democrat, pretty much every single election of his life. I think he voted for Reagan once in 1984, otherwise voted for Democrats his whole life. And, you know, he, he told me that, you know, look, there are people who just aren't doing very well. In every community, in every place, there are people, and he's a politically incorrect guy. He said deadbeats. There's deadbeats in every community. manufacturing sector, you know, really robust private sector unions, because the jobs that supported private sector unions actually existed and hadn't been all shipped to China and Mexico.

Yeah, they were deadbeats back then, but they were enveloped in a community that could actually get them back on the right path, right? When you take a community where all of those sort of support structures have been weakened, where, you know, the churches have been weakened, the jobs don't exist anymore, the people who, if you were slacking on the job in the 1950s, would have said, hey, man, you got to get your head back in the game. Let's figure this out. Those people just aren't around in the same numbers as they were 40 or 50 years ago. And so you just have much weaker, what I call community infrastructure. It's not all about government supports. It's about everything that exists in the community where you actually live. And you take that stuff away and it's just really hard for people to get back on their feet. You know, yeah, some of them are not making good choices. That is a fact of life. I don't shy away from that in the book. I don't shy away from talking about that in my life. But if you're going to actually help those people, I think we should help people, whether they're ambitious or not, whether they want to learn to code or whether they just want to work in a simple manufacturing job and be able to earn a living wage, is you've got to have a viable and robust set of institutions. And one of those institutions is good manufacturing oriented jobs. You know, we can talk about this question of cultural versus economics. I think

it's obviously a pretty controversial thing that the book dives right into. You know, I've always thought that the economics and the culture are related, right? If the culture starts to go south, it's harder to sort of maintain economic productivity. If the economy starts to go south, it's harder to maintain economic productivity. If the economy starts to go south and the jobs the University of Cincinnati and pick up C++ software programming, then you're not actually going to help people. You're making yourself feel better by ignoring them, but you are ignoring them. I think we should just be honest about that fact. The other important points to make here, and it's like the third rail of American politics, is this question of immigration. And there's always the, you know, what are we talking about when we're talking about immigration? Are we talking about

wage competition among the lower class? I think that's actually a big driver of why a lot of Latinos in the Southwest went to Donald Trump is because he was a little bit stricter on immigration. There's this question about, is it culture or race? Is it people just don't like Latinos? They don't like Mexicans. They don't like Guatemalans. I really don't think that's part of the story. But the third thing that we just don't talk about on the immigration side is the opioid epidemic and the effect that having this really porous border has. We know that probably 80,000 or 90,000 pretty young Americans are going to die of an opioid overdose. That has been pretty consistent for a long time.

But one of the ways that those drugs are getting in, especially fentanyl, which is a very powerful opioid that pretty much instantly gives you an overdose if you take a sufficient dose of it. Fentanyl is being manufactured in China and primarily coming across the southern border. And so I think we're going to have a big reversal of Trump-era immigration policies from the Biden administration. But if they're listening to me, and they probably aren't, I would say whatever you do on the southern border, make it as hard as possible to bring fentanyl into American streets, because you want to talk about hopelessness in towns like mine. Talk about the meth and the fentanyl that are coming into these communities, where even if you have people who

are working good jobs, they get snared up in this stuff and it's just over. More with JD in just one second. But first, have you ever Googled yourself, your neighbors? The majority of Americans admit to keeping an eye on their online reputation, but Google and Facebook are the tip of the iceberg when it comes to finding public records. There is an innovative website called Truthfinder, and it's now revealing the full scoop on millions of Americans. Truthfinder can search through hundreds of millions of public records in a matter of minutes. Truthfinder members can begin searching in seconds for sensitive data like criminal, traffic, and arrest records. Before you bring someone new into your life and around the people you care for, consider trying Truthfinder. What you find may astound you. This might be the

most important web search that you ever do. So go to truthfinder.com slash Kelly right away to start searching coal miners, let's say, think about if they turned around, if, you know, Trump's administration turned around to black America in Chicago. And, you know, we're talking about blight. Right. And said, learn to code. Yep. The outreach that we would get in that message. You know, yes, we do have to talk about agency and willingness to get off the couch and fix your own life for sure. That's a that's a massive piece of it. But we also

have to be realistic about what the economics look like and what's really realistic and expecting of these people. And I just think you can't if you can't do it with the black community, you can't do it with the white community. And what we're really talking about is people who are lower socioeconomic status and how to lift them up. And you've got to look at both of these, his name's William Julius Wilson. And, you know, very much a guy on the left, but just incredibly thoughtful about these problems. And, you know, he's been pretty influential in how I think about this interplay between cultural and economics, because you're right, you've got to take people who are sitting on the couch doing nothing, and you got to get them off the couch, you got to get them into good jobs, you're hopefully able to support families able to raise those families and stability and comfort. And then you create a

virtuous cycle from generation to generation instead of the vicious cycle that we sometimes have in families that are struggling with joblessness and addiction and so forth. But one of the things that's going to motivate people to get off the couch, of course, is the existence of a good job. That's an important piece of it, but it's not the only piece. Another thing that's going to motivate people to get off the couch is when their neighbors and friends are also getting off the couch, right? When you're in a community where there just isn't a lot going on, where a lot of people are doing drugs, a lot of people aren't finding good jobs. Even the guys who want to go and work and find good jobs. It creates this sort of mentality where why try, right? I call it learned helplessness. Hopelessness is a good way to think about it. But if you want to actually improve people's lives,

you can't just say, well, here's some money, right? Here's a check from the government, spend it well, or here's a good job, go and apply. But you've got to create the community infrastructure that makes people feel like it's possible. And if they try, something good is actually going to come from it. And we've got to feel pressure too. I mean, I've certainly been, I'm sure all of us have been in moments in our lives where we're feeling a little bit lazy, a little bit shiftless, unsure what we want to do. You know, one of the things that helps break you out of that pattern is somebody in your life saying, Hey, you know, do something else here.

Right. Um, you know, go, you know, maybe it's, maybe it's your wife who says you need to do the dishes or help out a little bit more. Maybe it's somebody in your family who said you need to go and apply to that job. You know, those things matter. But like, I think about my own life and all of these little influences that helped get me on the right path. You take those influences away and it's just me trying to figure this stuff out on my own. And I think things just don't, don't go as well for me, right? If mamaw wasn't telling me, you need to go get off your ass and apply for that job and work hard.

If I didn't have my sister and my aunt and my mom saying, if you want to have a good job, you may need to go get an education. If I didn't have people in the Marine Corps saying, here's what you need to do. Here's how you need to apply for financial aid. Here's how you need to sort of structure your life so you can actually succeed off that couch and go do something. really, really left behind and really don't see a path forward. I also think that's the thing that's missing the most is people in their lives who can actually help them. Right. It's back to the old, if you can see it, you can be it. You know, it's very helpful to see role models around you who have done it. But I also think this is one of the problems with identity politics, because the

messaging from people who are obsessed with their gender, their skin color, their sexuality, uh, is you, the reason you can't do it is because of these immutable characteristics. Like you can't, you, the American dream is not possible for you because the system won't allow it. And it completely takes away a person's agency and, And they do openly crap on the American dream. It's not possible for you. America itself is not what people say it is. And this anti-American sentiment cropping up, I think is another thing that motivates a lot of voters. But they're basically challenging the notion that anyone, no matter their circumstances, can achieve a kid who has almost no advantages other than a grandma and grandpa who really loved him and decided to give him a little tough love.

Yeah. I mean, the thing I always ask people when they talk about the structural and systemic factors that make it hard or impossible for people to achieve is let's say you're absolutely right. Let's just say for the sake of argument that you're absolutely right. What good is that message when directed at a kid who's struggling and trying to figure out how to make their way? I'm not one of these people who says that poor folks don't have any disadvantages. I can't possibly look at my grandma's life and my grandma's upbringing and say, she had the same set of opportunities as someone who was born in an upper class background in the 1940s in New York City. I think, frankly, she also had a lot of advantages. She had, I think,

a lot of important cultural training that she wouldn't have gotten. But obviously, her life was hard. I don't know anybody who would look at my life and say, you know, J.D. had it easy relative to a kid born of privilege. But so what, in some ways? Is the takeaway from that to tell a kid like me when I was 12 years old, your life is unfair, the deck is stacked against you, there's nothing you can't hold two thoughts in your head at the same time. And in this particular moment, I think the two thoughts of this particular question, the two thoughts that we have to hold in our head at the same time are one. Yes, life can be hard for people who are born poor in tough circumstances. But two, it's still important for them to see that they have agency and that they need to try anyway, right? It might not always work out. And we got to be honest about

that fact. But the worst of all possible worlds is where people are just told there's no hope, there's no reason to try, there's no reason to make anything of yourself. And I do unfortunately think that's the message that a lot of people on the left are ultimately giving to communities like mine. I am, you know, my, you know, my, my grandparents were classic blue dog Democrats. And I'm actually sympathetic to a lot of the arguments that folks on the left make about, you know, certain unfairnesses, you know, especially when it comes to people who don't, who don't have a lot of money, who grew up in traumatic homes, who grew up in abused and neglected environments. I don't think that they're wrong, that that creates special disadvantages,

but you can't just encourage people to wallow in everything that's gone wrong in their lives. You have to be able to say, on the one hand, we as community leaders, as policymakers, as media folks, are going to try to make it a little bit easier for those who are disadvantaged to have a shot at the American dream, while at the same time, telling people who are struggling to achieve the American dream, it's possible. It is out there for you if you're willing to work for it. Well, I think the other piece of it too, is once, once is once one achieves the American dream, the response, the collective response from the left in particular should not be fuck off. Like that's the, one of the problems we're seeing is success has been so demonized in the country. Now, even if you are self-made, just having it is a problem. You know, they're they'll,

they'll hold it against you. You must now see the rest of the country as less than. You must not be paying your fair share. You have to give more of it back. And the less you give, the more of a miser and awful person you are. It's like, I don't know. I just think we've changed the messaging from, good for you. Maybe I could do it to help me understand how to screw you. Yep. Yeah, there's definitely a way in which I think our country is really I shouldn't say our country.

I think that our leadership class is really uncomfortable with success and with people who have achieved success. But I saw this interesting poll just a couple of days ago, and it was looking just at Trump voters, college educated Trump voters versus non-college educated Trump voters. And it was, the question was, you know, do you think that it's possible for a person to achieve the American dream? And I think it was 71% of non-college educated Trump voters said yes. And I think it was, you know, 40% or something of the college educated Trump voters said yes. And it was true for the Biden voters as well. I don't remember the exact numbers, but it was basically the people who

didn't have college degrees were actually more optimistic about their future and more optimistic about the chances for the American dream than people who had gone to college. And I think that's because they haven't thankfully absorbed the message that their lives are hopeless just because they don't have all the advantages in the world. And that's, that's just an important thing. And I, I worry about our, our country's inability to, you know, try to uplift those who are struggling without treating those people as hopeless children who have no, have no agency and no, no responsibility. Um, you know, there's, can I ask you something about that? Cause I, I wonder is the other piece of that,

the people who are college educated saying, eh, I don't know. Is that, do you think born of, I, I made it. It's not that great. Like I have to work my ass off i never see my family the government takes 50 of my dough you know i i kind of made it to the promised land and what do you think you know i i i think there's there's part of that going on but the the biggest when i looked at that poll what i took away from it is that if you're a working class American versus a professionally educated American, a person with post bachelor's education, then you're fundamentally living in two different media and information environments. that our universities, our elite media institutions have just grown pretty pessimistic about the American experience, the American experiment. And consequently, people who have spent their lives in those academies, in those media environments, I think they've just absorbed that things are more pessimistic and more negative than a lot of working class americans

believe i also you know i i really do think that a lot of this is like ideology ends up trumping people's ability to think because one of the more interesting dynamics is in in in in response to the book is that people who were, you know, really well educated, who are sort of the winners in American society, both in terms of their income and their prestige, they really wanted to project their own political narrative onto the book. And they wanted to sort of fit me into this box, right? So if like JD said this thing that I agree with, I'm gonna ignore that. I'm gonna only attach myself to the things that I disagree with or vice versa. Right. People would sort of, you know, had either very strongly positive or negative views. And what I found, you know, is that working class Americans were actually better able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time. They sort of got that I was making both an argument about the fact that,

yeah, sometimes life is unfair, but you still got to try to work against that unfairness and make something of yourself anyway. And I think that's just because people who don't grow up in a particular media environment are not constantly looking for alarm bells that a particular idea or concept violates one of their, the sort of sacred tenets of their faith or ideology. And so they're just more open minded. I think I predict with your movie, cause the movie is now out about, uh, you know, based on your book, you're going to get slaughtered by the reviewers and you're going to get completely loved by the actual viewers. It'll be reviewers versus viewers, as we've seen in any film that, you know, that hasn't

a message like yours, which is that the American dream may still exist. It may not be perfect. It may not be pretty, but it does still exist. And that even shines a spotlight on this group of people, you know, people in Appalachia, people struggling with the opioid crisis in a way that that isn't entirely about woke culture or victimization and how the country's bad. That's what we've seen. You know, it's one of the reasons why Roseanne, the reboot was so successful, right? Like they talked about these issues in a way that really resonated with real America, even though the people who wrote about that, the reboot were like, they're horrified or even before her scandal, they were like, this is horrifying. How could the show be succeeding? And I saw this already. There was one review by the Washington Post.

This is so perfect because their criticism of the movie is that they really wanted it to be more woke. And this is a quote from one of the reviews. Vance paints Appalachia as a near exclusively white space. Erased are black residents and their history in the region. Missing are the many generations of Native American communities. Ignored is a growing Latino population. Disregarded are Appalachians who embrace racial justice and acceptance of their LGBTQ neighbors. This is a personal story of your family. Why did you get into all that? Right, right. Can you imagine what a movie like that would look like, where you're trying to tell the story of a family, but you have to actually talk about

every other conceivable group, majority, minority, what have you, and present them on the screen so that it satisfies this sort of woke obsession. It's just preposterous. With a little no justice, no peace sign in the background. Yeah, it's just totally preposterous. And as it happens, most of my family voted for Donald Trump. My family is hardly politically monolithic. My mom, who, by the way, has been clean for six years now, is doing very well. Just saw her a few days ago. My mom voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1984. And then she's voted for Republicans and more woke than they actually are. Vance doesn't talk enough about BIPOC, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA Americans in his sort of experience

of Appalachia. It's like, okay, so BIPOC is Black Indigenous People of Color, LGBTQIA is Lesbian, Gender Non-Deforming, Bisexual, Transgender, Intersex, Asexualual and i read this and i'm like you people are crazy like truly the authentic real appalachians use these like 14 character pronouns every time they talk about themselves and you know i i just listen to something who who are you kidding that you think this is the way that Appalachians or frankly anybody else, black, white, brown, whatever, talks about themselves and their communities? This is a particular obsession of a particular upper class of Americans. And I think it's insane. But don't try to pretend that that's the real America because you want it to be.

It just isn't. Right. A moment on the asexuals in the holler. It's not going to happen. You know, one of my good friends, just a side, you know, he's sort of like a populist. He calls himself a populist Reagan Democrat, but he's a professor. I won't give his name because I don't want him to get fired. But he's a gay man in his mid-50s, just a great, great friend of ours. And he sent me this tweet from Elizabeth Warren's campaign Twitter account back when she was still running for president. And it was like something like, you know, we love all people who are intersex, asexual and two spirit. And this guy sends me this tweet and he says, look, man, we gay guys just wanted to be left to hell alone. You can have your two spirit.

There's something about just this bizarre way of discussing these issues that's alienating and dividing the country. And I think, you know, ultimately is going to be politically suicidal for Democrats if they embrace it wide scale. Coming up in a minute with J.D., how does he think Glenn Close did in her portrayal of Mamaw? And what real life item of Mamaw's was Glenn Close wearing for her portrayal of Mamaw and what real life item of Mamaw's was Glenn Close wearing for her portrayal of the role. And also we're going to ask him what his mom, Beverly, has to say about the film. But before we get to that, want to bring you a feature we call Sound Up, which involves soundbites making the news or people in the news saying stupid, usually things. Today, we've got one

stupid and one smart. And the first is from Governor Cuomo of New York, who has been honored with an international Emmy. You know, these are the awards you get for outstanding work on television, an international Emmy for his performance during the COVID quarantine. They are celebrating how he did with his daily press briefings. And it's insane because not only has New York just been just crushed by COVID and we have the highest death toll, which no one's blaming that in particular on Governor Cuomo, but what pals like mine, Janice Dean, are trying to call attention to is the fact that he issued an order during the COVID crisis mandating that the nursing homes in New York State take any COVID positive patients. They were not allowed to turn them away. And of course, inside the nursing homes are the most vulnerable population. And 6,000 plus COVID

positive patients were placed in New York nursing homes and more than 6,000 died. And it's directly as a result. I mean, you can see that they put the virus in these homes and then thousands of people died. And the number is actually much greater than 6,000 because many had to be moved out of the nursing homes, sent to hospitals, and they died there. And as Janice has been pointing out, they're not counting the hospital deaths when they tally up the number of seniors from nursing homes who died. So this is a terrible thing. And even JD has said she wouldn't be trying to blame anybody for any of this. If Cuomo would just take some responsibility for it, if he would apologize, if he would explain what the thinking was, but he won't. He's blamed the nursing homes, the nurses, God, Mother Nature, the old people themselves.

Old people, they die, he said. He's been so callous and crass about it. So for him to be given an award is pretty outrageous. And it just speaks to how silent the press has been on his failures, that a group like this would even think it would be okay to honor him in this way. So we're going to play for you first Governor Cuomo and then Janice on Fox and Friends reacting. Listen. What an honor and pleasant surprise during these hard times. I thank the International Academy and Bruce Paisner for this incredible award.

Thank you to all the members of the Academy. Your work has brought smiles and hope and relief for so many people during these difficult days. I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations were well choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents that you advance. They didn't. They offered only one thing, authentic truth and stability. But sometimes that's enough. Every time we see this governor celebrating himself on television, it's just a reminder of the people that They said the governor's 101 daily briefings worked so well because he effectively created television shows with characters, plot lines and stories of success and failure. What's your reaction? I heard that to get an Emmy award, you have to send videotape of yourself to the board members.

And so to think that the governor was going through some of his TV appearances talking about deaths in New York and submitting those videos to the Emmy folks really makes me physically sick. He could start his award-winning speech by saying, I'm really sorry for your loss. That's something we have never heard from this governor at any of his meetings or his PowerPoint presentations. his Emmy, Janice and these other 6,000 families are taking home urns and caskets. This is no time for his victory lap with his book talking about leadership lessons during the COVID crisis. And it's certainly not the time for awards.

How crass of the international Emmys, how callous and cold toward the families who are still suffering from these losses. I mean, you can say Cuomo isn't entirely to blame for these deaths, but you certainly can't say he did the right thing by issuing that order and by not showing any empathy for these families. And so to reward it with this kind of an award is just wrong. It's just wrong. So obviously I'm on Janice's side and I would be even if she

weren't one of my closest friends. Okay. More on that as we get it. By the way, Cuomo said we all have to not travel for Thanksgiving, but guess what he was going to do? Make his mom and some family members travel to him. No problem. He can do it, but we can't do it. And then when he got outed for that, he had to reverse the order. Aren't you sick of these politicians doing this? Do as I say, not as I do. Rules for thee, but not for me. Anyway, back to J.D. Just so the audience knows, Hillbilly Elegy, you wrote it sort of on the side.

You were in law school and Amy Chua, Tiger Mom. She wrote the book about, what's the name of her book? The Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother? Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, yeah. She's got book about, what's the name of her book? The Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother? Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. Yeah. She's amazing. She's awesome. I'm in love with Amy Chua. You should read whatever she writes. She's so open-minded. She's got her very strong thoughts on how things should be, but she doesn't shut down opposing viewpoints. Anyway, she was your professor at Yale Law. And so you write the book. She encourages you to keep writing.

You wind up getting it published. The initial order was for 10,000 copies. And how many copies has the book sold now? I don't know. But it's, I think, somewhere between two and three million at this point. OMG. I mean, that's huge. Huge by any measure.

And in the book, it's, you're so honest. You are very honest about growing up, um, in your younger, more formative years in Appalachia in the holler, uh, where my mom was and had a house. And then you guys moved to Ohio and you had a drug addicted mother who went from man to man, some of whom were abusive as was she. And the moment you write about in the book, as I think one of the lowest is portrayed in the movie, which is by Ron Howard. And I think that was, you tell me, but I think it was the car. Yeah, yeah. There's a scene where, you know, a scene in the movie, but a scene from my own life where, you know,

mom sort of loses her temper in a car and, you know, threatens to crash it. And then, you know, eventually, you know, one thing leads to another and the cops come and they arrest car and, you know, threatens to crash it. And then, you know, eventually, you know, one thing leads to another and the cops come and they arrest her and, you know, sort of sets off a pretty traumatic set of moments in our childhood. And, you know, I mean, I don't know if you got this from the book, Megan, but, you know, one of the things that I've always felt is that, you know, I think people sort of hear the word abuse and they think like sociopathic, you know, sort of constant physical and emotional trauma. And that's just sort of what's going on

the whole time. And, you know, by the standards of like an objective child psychologist, I certainly had a traumatic childhood. There are these ways you can measure how many experiences of what they call ACEs or adverse childhood experiences. And certainly both mom and her children had a lot of ACEs when they were growing up and when we were growing up. But I never felt like we had this sort of deeply traumatic or unusual childhood. I mean, that's sort of one of the points of the book is that, you know, yeah, we, we experienced some ACEs, but you know, a lot of kids in our neighborhood and a lot of families did as well.

And, and I try to, you know, there's, there's this book that I read when I was a teenager. I think it's called a child called it. And you may have read this book, but it's about, I think, a truly sort of psychopathic, almost torturing mother and the way that she treated her kid. And that was just never how I felt about our family. And it's certainly not how I feel about our family now. I think that we definitely were a traumatic and chaotic bunch, but there was just a way in which it was a little bit more normal. And this sort of goes back to the culture point that I make. It's not that anybody in our family was especially mean. I mean, there are a lot of good things about mom during my childhood

and we're very, very close today. But there was just a weird way in which these sorts of moments that do leave their marks on kids and do cause real problems later on, were kind of normal. And I think part of our challenge, if we actually care about, you know, the most disadvantaged kids in our communities, is that we've got to figure out ways to make that sort of stuff a little bit less normal. And I even see it, you know, to be honest, with my two little ones, a three-year-old and a nine-month-old, and they're both doing well. But I often have to catch myself because just the natural way that I respond to my toddler going completely insane, I have to check myself and say, you know what? This is not the normal way to do things. This is not a good thing.

But if you don't know that, and you don't have any sense of what is normal and isn't normal, then I think it can just be very easy to sort of fall into that cycle where, again, it's not an intense, aggressive level of abuse. It's just a sort of baseline level of chaos and trauma that ultimately isn't good for these kids. Of course, the consciousness of it is more than half the battle. You know, the fact that you can stop and say, wait, is this a good instinct? That's more than half the battle. And it's what most people who do engage in that cycle of abuse do not have. And you've, of course, got Usha, who's amazing. And we'll get to in a second.

Your wife is spectacular and extremely accomplished and smart and a great partner to you, which is another big advantage. But we talked about this a little when we met and I interviewed you on camera, some of those childhood experiences, those ACEs. And I do wonder whether, because abuse can cause in adulthood, physical problems, it can cause substance abuse problems, psychological issues like depression, anxiety, a lot, a lot of people have those without having had abuse in their past, even if that abuse was normalized within the community, you know, which maybe that takes away the element of shame, because everyone's having it, you know, I, that would be an interesting

thing to look at. But do you have you felt any of that? Because not only did you have this tumultuous background, but then, you know, you're performing at these elite levels now, you know, in venture capital, first in San Francisco, now you've got this other thing going on in Ohio. So that's stressful in and of itself. And I wonder if you're feeling any of that manifest. You know, I think that the way it manifests in me to the extent I notice it at all is that, you know, in sort of super stressful moments, I kind of get this adrenaline rush. And I talk about in the book, there's there's been this documented sort of fight or flight response, I definitely kind of have this this fight response when they're they're sort of moments of, of high stress and high tension.

I think by and large, that serves me reasonably well. I think the main thing is just your point. I have to be self-aware sometimes and check maybe my most aggressive impulses at certain times. I'm getting to the point now where it's a little bit just more normal, where I've accepted that there are certain instincts that I have that aren't necessarily super, super positive. And you sort of, you know, you, you check them in various ways before they really go off the rails. Um, I do, you know, there's there, you know, one of the pioneers in looking at adverse childhood experience, this woman, Nadine Burke Harris, who's a brilliant doctor. And I believe she's a psychiatrist

working in California. And Nadine actually has a really great book about this, which I encourage people to read. But I remember reading her book and there's a story where I don't totally remember the details, but where she talks about this guy who had had a pretty traumatic, chaotic childhood, had sort of achieved the American dream, had a pretty traumatic, chaotic childhood, had sort of achieved the American dream, had a pretty stable, happy life, a happy marriage, and just like drops dead of a heart attack at 63. And one of the things she talks about in the book is that you do have these, even for people who pretty much have their lives under control, sort of a, quote, unquote, escaped the trauma of their past, they tend to have much worse health outcomes

later on. They have higher incidences of heart attacks, of pulmonary disease, even of cancer. And so there's this weird unexplained link between having a chaotic childhood and having these negative physical health moments later on. So there's definitely a part of me that worries, that I'm sort of, I have a little bit less time on the clock than you might otherwise think. And so I feel that pressure sometimes. But I wouldn't say that like emotionally or psychologically, I still feel especially affected by it by what happened when I was a kid. And, you know, I'm 36 years old, it's been a long time, it's over half of my life at this point where I've sort of been on my own. Well, there was also a study out of UCLA that showed the presence of a loving

parental figure can provide protection to an abused child. And, you know, I don't know if I want to use the word rescue, but at least it provides a barrier to some of those negative effects. And you had that, you had that mama, your maternal grandmother, who is the star of your book, the star of your life, the star of this movie, played by Glenn Close in the movie, spectacularly. I mean, you knew Mamaw, but I'm just saying Glenn transformed herself in a compelling way. And I thought I just I was completely enthralled by the performance. First of all, let's just start with Glenn and then we'll get to the real character. How do you think Glenn Close did? I thought you did great.

Yeah, we, you know, we visited the set a few times. They filmed in a little bit in Middletown and mostly in Macon, Georgia and surrounding areas. And, you know, I took my aunt, my mom and my uncle, um, and Usha down to, to Macon, uh, for a couple of days. It really was just sort of a family reunion kind of thing where we all got to hang out together and it was a fun time. But the first time that my aunt, my, my mom and my uncle saw Glenn Close in her full makeup and costume, really was one of the more emotional moments of my life. I mean, my uncle was not an emotional man, but was speechless.

My aunt was sort of, you kind of like physically see her breath being taken away and you couldn't really speak just because of how emotional she was. And it's bizarre how much she looked like her and how much she acted like her. You know, I think she did a great job. It's impossible, of course, in a two-hour movie

to capture the personality that was Mammal. She really was just this larger-than-life figure. But there were these little things that I can't believe that Glenn got right that she did. So Mammal always, she held her cigarette in a particular way. And when you see it, you know it. And it's hard to describe. She asked all of us, how did Mammal hold her cigarette?

We tried to explain it to her. But she somehow sort of translated our confused ramblings about it into something that was very good. Mammal had this twitch that she did with her mouth when she would get really annoyed at something and in glenn got that right and there were just all these little things about her personality that you know even though you can't capture it all in a two-hour movie these sort of little things just made such a such a big impact on us and you talked about the movie reviews oh i just have to say one

one more thing about this the most you know typically don't let this stuff get to me but one movie review called glenn close's portrayal a caricature called mamaw caricature and that really pissed me off because that's what mamaw looked like. And that's how she acted. And the idea that she was a caricature, I think is just pretty insulting because she, she, she was a big personality and she was, she was loud and she laughed, you know, with her whole body and she loved to cuss. But she was just this incredibly loving and positive person for all of us. And she, she wasn't a caricature. She was just a real person who was a really, really big and positive person for all of us. And she wasn't a caricature. She was just a real person who was a really, really big and positive influence for our whole family.

Honestly, you can't pay attention to those. I do think some of these reviewers, Hollywood reviewers or even worse, news reviewers, but Hollywood reviewers can be the meanest, soulless, most soulless people in the business. And they get off on writing hurtful things reviewers can be the meanest soulless most soulless people in in the business and i they get off on writing hurtful things about um artistic products that don't line up with their own ideology for whatever reason so please i urge you to not pay any attention to that and by the

way i know i mostly stay away from it if they have any question about whether glenn close's portrayal is a caricature they should just stay tuned for the credits where there's actual video of Mamaw. And you still think you're looking at Glenn Close. It's the same person. I mean, and by the way, is it true that she actually wore Glenn actually wore Mamaw's glasses? She did. Yeah. Yeah. My aunt gave her Mamaw's glasses to use for the movie. And so those are actually Mamaw's glasses.

I met that aunt. That's Aunt Wee, Aunt Lori. Yeah, that's Aunt Wee. That's right. Yeah, she's awesome. She's portrayed in the book and I had the pleasure of meeting her and some of your family.

So Mamaw is the star. She's somebody who said, a woman ain't fully dressed without a gun. And she was tough. And the book and the movie portray She's somebody who said a woman ain't fully dressed without a gun. Yep, that's right. She was tough. And the book and the movie portray how she got after you. It wasn't all like, J.D., you're wonderful. Not at all.

She was like, get it together and was tough on you when she needed to be. But you told me once before, she just got me. She just got me. And I know you wrote in the book, thinking about it now, how close you were to the abyss, it gives you the chills. And you wrote, I am one lucky son of a bitch. So how much of that had to do with Mamaw? Oh, I mean, most of it. Of course, a lot of other folks in my life, my sister, my aunt, mom, and her own way were all just really, really important.

But Mamaw was really, I think, the piece that held it all together. I've thought a lot about me saying that she just got me. And I think part of what she understood is that you don't really trust yourself until you're sort of forced to experience a certain amount of stress or a certain amount of criticism and you survive it. Right. And so what Mamaw, I think, tried to instill was a sense of resilience that she could be a mean old hag. She could criticize me. She could tell me to get off my ass and do the dishes and help her. She could do all those things. And I didn't sort of buckle. Um, it wasn't, I wasn't too emotionally frail for it. And that kind of gave me this sense of, of strength. And that was just a really, that was a really powerful part of the way that, that she and I interacted,

that she could kind of, you know, give me, um, you know, give me these, these little encouragements and these big criticisms and it would somehow all work in a way where the light bulb went on and I understood her, but I also gained some sense that, you know, yeah, I can, I can stand up to criticism. I can deal with this. And, you know, my, my Marine Corps recruiter once joked that most kids really struggle with the culture shock and boot camp because you just have these drill instructors yelling at you all the time. He was like, the drill instructors aren't nearly as mean or as scary as your mammals. You'll be fine. He was right. You sort of realize these weird ways where

they try to get under your skin and mammal would do that, too. But once you sort of recognize it as such, it's a lot easier to deal with. Well, I think one of the first things people wondered about you when we saw you making the press rounds as this graduate of Yale Law School, it's like this guy's writing a book about Appalachia, about, you know, life in the holler. Like, how did he get from A to B? Like, how on earth did the kid who couldn't see it learn to be it? How did it happen? And my own takeaway was, let me introduce you to Mama, who took you into her custody after one of the abusive incidents with your mom. I think it was the car incident, wasn was sort of lumpy from, you know, that the car incident happened around the time I was 12. And then, you know, I was kind of back and forth between mom and Mamaw's house until I was about 14. It was, I was, it was 14 when I sort of more completely moved in with Mamaw. So that was, you know, it was four years that I was with her, basically all through high school. And that's what did it because after after high school came the Marine Corps, which helped. You completed a four year education in two years at Ohio State. And then came Yale Law. Can I ask you, how did you get into Yale Law? Did you have perfect grades at Ohio State? Was it your do you think your unique background helped you? What what was it that made you extraordinary? Because you have to be extraordinary to get in there.

You know, I think it was a combination of an unusual story. I was a veteran. There were only four veterans in my class. I had good grades at Ohio State. I had good test scores. It's a little bit of luck. I think you're part of applying to law school or I guess really any school. You have to figure out how to market yourself a little bit.

And I think I just try to sort of tell a story of a kid from, in my essays, of a kid raised by his grandparents from a nonconventional background who had good enough grades. And they let me in. But I don't know. I can't provide any more insight to that. I think a lot of it is luck. And what is probably the case is that if you get good enough grades and you have good enough scores and you're not a totally terrible person, you can get into a pretty good school. And what determines whether you get into a pretty good school or a great school is a little bit of a chance. Let's talk about addiction, uh, because that's another theme of, of the story, both on, on the page and on the screen. Uh, your mother is now thankfully a recovering addict, but she's been an addict for a long, long time. And as somebody who's had this in my own family of origin,

um, I thought the movie did a wonderful job of showing how explosive this can be on a family that, you know, how drugs, they kidnap your loved one. And like a true kidnapper, they demand a ransom that you can never really pay off. And that never really leads to the return of your family member as you knew her. Yeah, that's an interesting way of putting it. It's one of those things

where you try to make sense of it until you just realize that you can try to make sense of it until you just realize that you can't actually make sense of it because your mom was and is like i said she's been clean for six years she's so smart she's so funny she's just you know one of these like charismatic people which is true of a lot of the folks in our family it It's true of Mamaw. It's true of my sister and my cousin, Rachel, in their own ways. These are people who can show up at a totally different family's family reunion and get invited to give a speech to the whole family. That actually happened when we went to visit the set in Macon, Georgia. Our hotel room was, sorry, this is a diversion, but our hotel room

was in a hotel where this big family was having like a 300 person family reunion. And my whole family got invited to the family reunion because, you know, they met some of my family and they were just so taken with them. So taken with, with my uncle, with my cousin, with mom, with everybody. And I think that's, that's sort of what is so difficult, again, to understand or to try to apply any reason to. It's like, mom is just this person with so much going for her. Why did she keep on being attracted to the drugs? What was it? And I think that part of it is definitely that I think her life just didn't go in the way that she hoped it would. She was a very promising student in her own right.

And things, you know, went off the rails. You got pregnant very young, had my sister. And that changes things and changes the calculus pretty quickly. But it's always just like there was something that the rest of life couldn't provide some sensations, some feeling that kids and partners and friends and family just couldn't quite fill that void. And she kept on, you know, she should have kept on returning to the drugs. And there was a time when I was writing a book where I thought to myself, you know, is, should I put this in there? Because mom's going to read it. And, you know, people are going to read this stuff about our family. And I really just thought to myself, well, mom's not going to read it because she'll be dead by the time the book comes out. And I was just confident that's how it would end, right? That every, call it six months, 12 months, because sometimes it might even go a little bit longer, but there would always be a relapse. It would always land her in the hospital. It would always nearly kill her. And eventually she was going to play Russian roulette too many times and she was not going to

come back from it. And again and, and again, just as unreasonably as addiction takes hold of some people, uh, for some people they're, they're just able to, to snap out of it. And, um, I have tried to psychoanalyze and think about what it is, what it is that has made mom six years clean. And I really do feel this time confidence for the first time in my life, uh, that she, she won't use drugs again. And I think, you know, part of it is definitely just getting your life in order, having a good relationship with your family and your kids, you know, not being stressed out about things, job, money, husbands, whatever. So just having your life in order in a way helps a lot.

But there were times when mom had her life in order and she went back to drugs and, um, she just hasn't this time. And I don't, I don't get it. I wish that I could say something more insightful about it. But the, the, the, the reason that void exists is psychologically complex and really difficult to try to explain away using rationality. It's so much about feelings and so much about intuition. Well, I, I understand what you said about, you know, she's looking for a way to feel better about her life.

And there is a scene in the, in the movie that it confused me the way I felt. It has her, she's a nurse. She stole drugs in the hospital and then puts on roller skates and is going through the ICU on roller skates skates. And she's totally joyful. She's on drugs. She's high, but she is smiling and she's laughing and you kind of get it. I liked the way the film was done. It's by Ron Howard, I think, if I didn't mention that. But if you kind of get, it's like, oh my God, there it is, some joy for this poor woman who in every scene faces one struggle or another and may often have a good attitude to happiness, if only for a moment. And of course, the bitter irony is the come down after and the real effect of drugs on your life is anything but joyful. And, you know, I thought Amy Adams did a great job of taking us there. Her physical

transformation was shocking, right? Amy Adams looked nothing like herself. And I thought it was perfect because having seen this happen to, this happen to someone close to me, the physical transformation can be dramatic. The gray hair and the teeth and just the weight gain or extreme weight loss one way or the other. And I remember looking at my family member thinking,'s in there, but where, where, and, and if, if, and when I can get her back, what am I going to get? You know, who, who will it be? You know, do you ever have that feeling? Oh yeah. Yeah. I mean, I, you, first of all, the person is always there. Right. And it's even when they're at the the peak of their you know toughest moments you know the book sort of dramatizes this scene where your mom has

this this overdose and i'm trying to help her find a place to stay for the night and you know it's it's not a totally perfect match with my life but you know there are significant parts of it that are true and what i remember sorry sorry yeah the movie dramatizes those parts um but fundamentally like they're they're real and they're there um and what i remember most about that time of my life is actually not the stress of trying to find mom a place to stay or sort of the uncertainty about what to do. It was that mom was still like mom most of the time, right? She was still sort of her funny self. You know, you pull up to this hotel and she looks at it and is like, oh, do I really have to stay in this dump? Or, you know, you walk by, I mean, this is like one of the more crystal

memories of my life because it was like, again, it was like a scene out of a movie. I remember there was like a guy actually shooting up in the parking lot. Um, the, the hotel was just sort of depressing and decrepit in a way that was pretty, you know, pretty, pretty hard to believe. And, you know, we chose it because they had an open room and because it was cheap enough for me to afford. I was still, you know, at that point I didn't have a whole lot of money. Um, but you see, we, we, we walked by this guy, like doing drugs in his pickup truck and mom's like, Oh, Hey, do you want to go say hi to Terry? It's like, what? You don't really know that person. You know, she, she says, of course not.

Of course I don't know this person. Right. She who she is. This is how mom has always been. And you're right. She was always in there. And I always, just as a kid, wanted her desperately to come out and figure it out. And of course, there's a part of it where you feel inadequate yourself. I don't know if you've experienced this, but you wonder why you can't get that person who's in there all the time. It's because of something about you, something you've done, something you failed to do. So you're always worried about that and trying to modify your behaviors in such a way where you don't trigger them and you get to get the good person that you know is in there all the time. But I think eventually most people just get to the point where they kind of psychologically give up with somebody who's chronically addicted.

I've talked to so many people about it since the book came out. And what I always, it's just so true and it's so consistent. I hear it so many times that I think it's nearly a universal response is that everybody eventually reaches a breaking point where they just start grieving for the person and they lose all hope that the person can ever come back. And that loss of hope, I think it's sort of a protective, it's like a psychologically protective measure because you want to stop investing yourself emotionally in this idea that this person can get better. And of course, what's so crazy about that is I feel like all of us have gotten there with mom. And then it just changed and things got better. And again, it's one of those things where I truly, you know, I'm a practicing Christian

and there is a part of me that wonders, is it just like an act of God? Is there just this moment where something supernatural happens? Because that's the only way I can even try to explain it in my mind, is eventually a switch flipped that I'd never been able to flip before. I've tried to flip it myself so many times before, and I hadn't. People ask me actually about mom being clean. Do you think the book helped? Do you think that the book made mom more sober or sort of at least opened up some lines of communication and got her on the right path? And I would love to say the answer is yes, but I don't I don't think it is. Frankly, if I had known that when the book came out, mom would be about two and a half years sober at that point, I probably wouldn't have published it. Because if anything, I think it's probably made it harder for mom to stay on the straight and narrow, but to her credit, she has, you know, having all these stories out there about you,

it hasn't been easy. And I admire mom for kind of taking it on the chin. You know, there was actually a funeral for a family friend not too long after the book came out and, um, there were people posting about the book and whether, you know, I was going to be there. I was sort of other people in the family were going to be there on Facebook. And I think mom got on Facebook and said, basically, yeah, I'm the drug addict in the book and I'll be there. You know, there's, there's, so anyway, the long way of saying, I don't think the book has been at least all the way positive. Maybe there have been some positive components and good conversations that mom and I

had. That's definitely true, but it's also just been very stressful. And so I don't think I can take any credit for it. I think if there's anything that I could take even indirect credit for, it might be the grandkids. When our son, Ewan, was born, my sister's oldest kid, or sorry, my sister's youngest kid was a teenager at that point. And I think that having the relationship with her grandkids to work towards, and mom is just such a great grandma

and the kids love her. I think that was a really powerful thing and it's helped her a lot. But at a certain level, I'm just trying to invent theories or explanations for a phenomenon that I can't really reasonably explain. Well, I know that mama wasn't the greatest mom to your mom, but she was a great grandmother. And so while your mom may not have had the best role model as a mom, she certainly got a good role model and had to be a great grandma. And, you know, you manifest that in both in the movie of you with your mom in the hotel, because I think when you're dealing with an addict for most of the time, you as the family member go through this. If I could just if I could just and you're you're deluding yourself that if you just gave this money or offer this help or got her into this rehab or whatever, you're going to get her over the bridge. She's going to bridge back to sober and normal and, you know, not, not addicted. And it takes years of doing that and failing for you to finally

let go of, if I could just, and learn to just not walk away, but take care of yourself. And that's what happened in that scene in the movie where, you know, the, your Amy Adams wanted the fictional you to stay with her when the alternative was going and making this really important interview. And if you had stayed with her, you would have missed this interview. You would have missed the chance to change your life and you leave, you, you do it, which is an empowering moment in the films. I think most people dealing with addicts finally have to get to the point of letting go of it. And ironically, it can help the addict, you know, it can help them reach rock bottom. It could help them realize they have to help themselves or what's what they're about to lose, you know, that the, the family's not going to save them. Um, and I think it's amazing. I having now covered you for a couple of years and followed you. I love that Beverly is six years sober.

That's such a game changer for you, your family, your kids, all of them. And I, I read that she said, um, the quote I read, I think it was your, your cousin who wrote an article as a journalist about, about this and said, she said, I'm going to stand proud when this movie comes out. It is what it is, and I am who I am, and I'm okay, and it's helped us all grow. You got to feel pretty good about that. Yeah, I do. I do.

You know, when you grow up in a tough environment and you see so many of these, these social problems and they kind of surround you, there's a part, at least in me that wondered like, is there just something wrong with us? Right. Is, is it, is it genetic? Is it psychological? Is it, you know, what, what makes this happen again and again? And one of the things the book allowed me to do was take a much bigger view of this. It wasn't just like, well, things were kind of crappy last year and they're crappy this year and it seems like it's never going to change. But this ability to put the problems of our family in this multi-generational context. So like, you know, why are our families so traumatic? You start to understand because that cycle of childhood trauma and chaos, it recreates and replicates itself. You know, why was this the land of opportunity in the 1950s,

but now it feels like a place people are just desperate to get out of? You know, why is this addiction epidemic sort of taking hold of our community, but specifically our family? And I think kind of zooming out a little bit, which is what the book tried to do, obviously in the context of my own family, did help us all understand these things a little bit better. start to appreciate the connections between what was going on, not just in Mamaw's life, but when Mamaw was a childhood running, was a child running from Jackson, Kentucky in the mid 1940s, and how there was a through line, you know, 60, 70 years later, to the way that I sort of instinctively react to conflict when a guy cuts me off when I'm driving my kids around. And I think that context and that through line gave us a little bit more of an anchoring, a little bit more of an appreciation, and importantly, just led to a lot of conversations. We never talked about this stuff.

The book sort of forced that and forced it in an uncomfortable way. So I do think if there is a positive to the book for my family, it's just given us a lot to think about and chew on together. And that's been a little cathartic sometimes, right? It's like, you know, we actually talk about this stuff and get it out in the open and even yell at each other a little bit. It kind of feels better afterwards because you've at least talked about things that people are thinking and feeling. And, and that, that is,

that is something I appreciate about the book and the experience of writing and publishing as it's at least served as a forcing function in that way. Absolutely. It's, it's a bit of a cleansing process. You mentioned the road rage. I, I love, there's a line in the book that says hillbillies could go from zero to murderous of a cleansing process. You mentioned the road rage. I love there's a line in the book that says, hillbillies could go from zero to murderous in a fucking heartbeat. Do not cut off a hillbilly. For the love of God.

This holiday season when driving home from Thanksgiving, do not. Yeah, yeah, no, no, really. Yeah, my wife sort of recognized it. When we were dating, she recognized this impulse in me where, you know, we're dating, she recognizes impulse in me where, you know, somebody cut you off, it's like a challenge to your manhood, and you have to go cut them off. And then, you know, threatening to get out of your car and beat their ass. And, you know, it's just one of these things where, you know, you can't do that, right? When you've got a family that depends on you and two kids, it's, it's understandable that that's your instinct,

that that's what you grew up around, but you just can't do it. And that recognition has been pretty powerful. Well, not only that, but your wife's got this killer career who I mentioned her earlier. But Usha clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the Court of Appeals and then moved on to a clerkship after that with Chief Justice John Roberts. So she's pretty accomplished and impressive, too. Is that humbling? What's that like? Yeah, you know, it's definitely, I don't know that I'd say it's humbling.

You know, Usha, I guess it is. Like Usha definitely brings me back to earth a little bit. And if I maybe get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself that she's, she's way more accomplished than I am. Um, you know, what,

what, what is interesting about, about my life and just about, about, you know, Usha, um, as part of it is that,

you know, somebody pointed out that there's, there's this weird way in which like every phase of your life, you have this like strong female that you could attach yourself to, right? It was your mammal, it was your sister, it was your aunt, and now it's Usha. And I think that's probably a pretty critical insight that like, I'm one of those, I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having like a sort of powerful female voice in his left shoulder saying, don't do that, do do that. It just, it just, it just is important. And, you know, Usha is just, people, you know, I think,

look at her credentials and think, Oh, she's, you know, she's, she's, she's so impressive. And just people don't realize how just brilliant she is. Um, you know, she is one of these people who, first of all, she reads books like faster than anybody that I've ever seen read a book. Um, you know, she can read like a thousand page book in a few hours sitting and just absorb the information incredibly. And she's one of these people where, Amy Chu actually once said this about Usha, and it's so true. It's like a perfect crystallization of how she thinks that Usha can take an incredibly complex set of facts and information and details and just absorb them on first reading or on first

hearing it. And then if you ask her about it, she can spit it out in a way that makes more sense coming out than it actually did going in, right? She can sort of like harmonize information faster than anybody that I've ever met. She must be terrifying to argue with. Oh my God, it's terrible. It's, it's just terrible. Um, she uses so much facts and logic and I just constantly, I'm like, no, no, no, no. You can't do that. I know. That is tough in a spouse, JD. I feel for you there. Yeah. It's, it's very, it's very tough. Well, can I ask you about that? Cause I am thinking about when I was thinking about you and your life and and I love that you're happily married. You've got your two boys now. You move back to Ohio and you're doing venture capital for companies that are not in Silicon Valley, that are sort of outside and more flyover country. I like that. Of course, all the rest of us hope you run for office someday, which I know you told me last time, maybe, we'll see. But what do we have to feel hopeful about, right? This is right around Thanksgiving.

So what are we feeling good about when it comes to our country and ourselves? First of all, I'm one of these people who believes that to actually solve problems, you have to be pretty honest with yourself about what the problems are. That's sort of the first and most important step. And when I think about what I'm most optimistic at a national level, it's even if you're not happy that Biden was elected, or even if you are really, really frustrated as a lot of folks are. And, you know, to be clear, I didn't vote for Biden. I voted for Trump. I don't think that we're having the same dumb conversations about the problems that we were 30 years ago. There is a recognition. And, you know, like I know a lot of people don't like AOC.

A lot of people don't like Bernie Sanders. A lot of people don't like Tucker Carlson, who's become a good friend of mine. But those people, I think, are at least circling around the fact that you do have real problems in this country, that you do have an opioid problem that's killing tens of thousands of people. You do have the decline of the American manufacturing sector in a way that's caused a lot of hopelessness and a lot of joblessness. You do have these multi-generational cycles of family poverty and trauma and abuse. I think there was this weird conceit that we had that things were just getting better indefinitely. It was the end of history, that if there was any real problem in America, we could solve it with a little redistribution from rich to poor. And I at least think that most people, frankly, both the left and the right recognize that's not happening and that we're actually making real progress in understanding

the nature of the challenges. So I'm optimistic about the fact that we're just being honest with ourselves about the real problems that exist in the country, at least more so than we were a couple decades ago. I'm optimistic that we just went through, in some ways, a very traumatic moment of American history, a really tough election, a pandemic, killed a lot of people, the economic fallout from the pandemic and some of our response to it that has caused a lot of misery, but we're still basically here, right? People are still getting together with their families mostly. I know some people, you know, are being cautious and I understand that, but they're still finding ways to be together, to talk to one another. You know, children are still, you know, I think of them as, you know,

it's trite, but it's the most important thing. The children are still being born and raised. And, you know, we have a next generation of Americans that's coming online. And I think that's just, it's hard not to be optimistic about that. And, you know, as tough as it's been, the country is actually still standing, which is sort of crazy. We've survived most of the face of the earth. And I guess the way that I put it is I think we've shown ourselves to be a pretty resilient country. So even though there are a lot of problems, there's also a lot of resilience out there. And I take some solace in that. I know that you wrote in the book, I want people to know what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself. And why you might do it to see sort of what the other possibilities are, right? Like you were one of those people, you know, of what you speak, you lived it and you,

you managed to get yourself out even without a lot of role models, which hopefully now you will be. Hopefully now the kids sitting in their neighborhoods in Middletown or what have you will say when asking the question, why try? Why try? Because J.D. Vance, because there is a way forward, because maybe, maybe I could be at Yale Law School or in the Marine Corps or married to Usha, someone like her with kids and a brilliant future ahead of me. maybe I could, maybe notwithstanding what people are telling me, I could. I don't know, JD. I think we need more of that and more of the possibility of agency and less of the, you're downtrodden, you're a victim and there's no way forward. And it's one of the reasons I'm doing the show. And it's one of the reasons why I find your message so super empowering. Um, last question. Do I, do I hear you offering this

from the bully pulpit one day, you were a little down on the possibility you were down on politicians. And I know you've, you've been scolded for being too down on that because you don't want to discourage good people from going into running for office, but realistically, cause I, I don't want you on the couch. I don't want you to retreat to that instinct just in case Usha's too busy with her law job to get you off of there. Are you going to get out there? Because we need people like you. Well, I think I'll continue to talk a lot about stuff that matters and try to be involved in the policy conversation on the right. I've done a fair amount of work there, try to encourage different folks to

think about certain issues in different and hopefully innovative ways. I mean, to be honest, the thing about politics, and I'll just, I'll be very direct is I'm feeling a little selfish right now. And what I mean is that, you know, I woke up this morning. Usha was up late last night. And so I had both the boys this morning by myself. We made breakfast together. You know, we played together. You and the toddler told me a lot of goofy, ridiculous jokes. And I'm just not quite ready to give up on that yet. And I think that, you know, there is a reason that people call politics sacrifice. You got to spend a lot of time away from your family. You've got to work on things.

And I think it's, you know, I've come around to the view at least that a lot of people do it for noble reasons. Some people don't, but a lot of people do it for noble reasons. So I'll tell you the same thing I told you a few years ago, which is definitely not, you know, something I'd rule out sometime down the road. But, you know, right, right now, it's like the only thing I really want, I didn't care about law school, I didn't care about

getting a nice job, I didn't care about making money, certainly not writing a big book. But the only thing I really wanted is, is the life that I have right now, like getting up and, you know, knowing that I'll be able to give my kids the things that I have right now. Getting up and knowing that I'll be able to give my kids the things that I didn't have and knowing that they look at their mom and dad as a rock, that they'll always be there for them. And just getting to spend that time with them. Spending time with mom who's been sober for six years, having my sister and my aunt build a relationship with my kids. All of those things, I selfish, my sister and my aunt build a relationship with my kids, like all of those things, I selfishly want to continue for at least a little while before I think about politics. And, you know, once once I get to the point where I feel like I've had

at least enough of that, that I've gotten my fill, and maybe that's a different conversation then. But for now, I'm sort of, unfortunately, maybe to you, content to be a little selfish and just enjoy this while I can. Well, you're young, so it's okay. I'll allow it. All right. Thank you. Don't be too selfish for too long. Because everything you've gone through, everything your family's gone through, they make me believe the line from Hillbilly Elegy that hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth. And we need more people like that with thick skins and a tough attitude to take on some of these battles that we all want fought. Listen, do me a favor, send my love to your family, Aunt Wee, Lindsay, who I met and loved. And just know that as always,

I'm rooting for you. Thanks, Megan. I appreciate it. Thanks for listening to The Megyn Kelly Show. No BS, no agenda, and no fear.