The Megyn Kelly Show - J.D. Vance on Trump, Addiction, and Family ｜ Ep. 29

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00:01:01.320 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:03.240 Your home for open, honest, and provocative conversations.

00:01:12.180 Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly.

00:01:14.020 Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show.

00:01:15.680 Today on the program, J.D. Vance.

00:01:18.320 He is the author of Hillbilly Elegy, a hugely popular best-selling memoir about his life growing up in Ohio and before that in Kentucky.

00:01:30.480 And he's considered a whisperer of the white working class that helped propel Trump to the presidency back in 2016.

00:01:39.660 Netflix is now out with a new movie based on his book.

00:01:43.460 And I've seen it.

00:01:44.540 I laughed, I cried, I felt all the feels.

00:01:48.700 And I have a history with J.D. Vance going back to 2017 when I interviewed him in an interview that remains my very favorite interview I've ever done.

00:01:57.420 The 12 minutes or so of air that we produced and it's still available on YouTube just touched me really deeply emotionally with his sister, with his honesty about his own life, a background that included abuse, drug addiction by his mom.

00:02:13.520 You know, talking about how he had Pepsi in his baby bottle, about how all the kids grown up in his area, didn't sleep in pajamas, they all slept in jeans.

00:02:22.640 Sometimes there were serious questions about where the food was going to come from.

00:02:26.680 Not as much in J.D.'s house, but he had some of that.

00:02:29.260 And, you know, just sort of this resort to violence too often, to abuse too often.

00:02:34.280 And ultimately it winds up being a hopeful message because somehow this little boy with really no advantages wound up getting up, getting out, getting himself into Yale Law School and has gone on to have a really prominent and important national voice.

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00:04:13.940 And now, J.D. Vance.

00:04:17.800 Thank you so much for being here.

00:04:19.680 Thanks for having me.

00:04:20.300 You're a good person to have on right now as we watch this election appear to come to its close.

00:04:25.500 The Trump voters right now are angry.

00:04:28.940 They're they're ticked off.

00:04:30.440 They do believe there was funny business in connection with this election.

00:04:35.620 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.

00:04:47.000 So how does that manifest now?

00:04:50.040 Yeah, I think there's there's first of all, a lot of frustration over the perceived hypocrisy.

00:04:56.820 I think, in fact, the real hypocrisy.

00:04:58.620 If I'm laying my cards on the table, right.

00:05:00.820 So you had this election in 2016 where Trump won.

00:05:04.260 It was very upsetting to a lot of people in the establishment press and other institutions.

00:05:10.540 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?

00:05:17.780 Have we missed an important part of the country?

00:05:20.600 You know, we're going to read Hillbilly Elegy or some other book to try to understand people in the middle of the country.

00:05:24.680 And then that just stopped. And it was all about Russia.

00:05:27.880 It was all about Trump's problems.

00:05:29.640 It was all about how the election in some ways was illegitimate.

00:05:34.160 And I think there's just this this this real frustration that for four years we've had this constant sense and messaging from certain quarters that the Trump presidency is illegitimate.

00:05:48.380 And, you know, we're three weeks after the election and there are these legal challenges working their way through the courts.

00:05:53.340 And people are just preoccupied with Trump needs to accept the legitimacy of the election.

00:05:59.260 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 some real frustration.

00:06:11.660 I don't think I mean, you look at the last three weeks, you've had a lot of court filings.

00:06:16.840 You've had a lot of peaceful protests. You've had a lot of people complaining on social media.

00:06:21.260 But I really don't see any any reason to think that this is going to become violent or chaotic.

00:06:26.920 I think, you know, people certainly feel that they they need to fight and they need to see this through to the end.

00:06:32.560 But I think they're supportive of the president continuing the litigation.

00:06:35.100 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 for hell for everybody.

00:06:45.720 I think that when Biden is inaugurated, people will more or less accept it.

00:06:50.100 It'll be on to the next fight.

00:06:52.060 Yeah, exactly. The fight can take many forms.

00:06:54.360 It doesn't have to be looting. It can be opposing Biden's policies and making sure that they don't get forgotten again, that the working class stays in the forefront of of one's mind, which wasn't the case during the Obama years.

00:07:07.480 I mean, I think as we've been told so many times by, you know, these sort of elite media types that Trump supporters are all they're Neanderthals, they're Nazis, they're they're racist, they're awful.

00:07:20.140 It's no one actually stops it to pay attention to what Trump did for these guys in the Rust Belt.

00:07:27.260 What's happened to the Rust Belt? Why did he win four years ago, Pennsylvania and Michigan and Wisconsin?

00:07:32.840 There was, as you point out, a period where people want to take a hard look at that.

00:07:35.860 And then and then they didn't. Then they just decided to dismiss everybody as awful, as just bigoted for voting for the guy.

00:07:42.980 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.

00:07:51.680 No, I don't I don't think they are. I don't think the country is in a uniting mood.

00:07:55.300 And, you know, frankly, this idea that we're all just going to come together over the new Biden presidency is a little bit of a joke.

00:08:01.040 I think certainly people will, you know, let their political passions subside a little bit.

00:08:05.360 Election seasons are always a little bit exhausting for people who are engaged in politics and pay attention.

00:08:11.380 But but no, I don't think people are just going to let bygones be bygone.

00:08:15.160 Because to your point, you know, the two consistent threads that have come from the mainstream press since Trump's election in 2016 have been, you know, one, the election was stolen in some way.

00:08:27.140 You know, Russians hacked the election.

00:08:28.620 If you look at public polls, a pretty large share of Democratic voters think that Russia actually like hacked into voting machines and changed the tabulation.

00:08:37.100 And so, you know, there's been this sort of the sense of illegitimacy focused around the Russia issue, but it's other issues, too.

00:08:44.440 But the second, and I think in some ways, frankly, the more pernicious instinct that's existed in our politics is, to your point, you know, turn the Trump voter into this evil, malignant force in American politics.

00:08:56.780 And I, you know, 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?

00:09:11.420 This idea is like, oh, we lost these people.

00:09:14.100 We're going to try to appeal to them, maybe even in a fake way.

00:09:17.180 Maybe we're going to lie to them.

00:09:18.380 We're at least going to try to pretend that we care about their votes.

00:09:20.960 That's how it works in a democratic society.

00:09:22.780 That just didn't happen at all over the last four years.

00:09:25.640 There's just been this idea that these people are Neanderthals or deplorables or racist.

00:09:31.420 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.

00:09:38.080 I really, really am bothered by this.

00:09:42.000 And, you know, one of the threads that came out was this idea that Trump voters are animated by an extraordinary amount of racial resentment.

00:09:51.380 And to dive into the details just a little bit, the way that's usually measured, you call people up and you ask them, you know, what do you feel about this issue?

00:09:59.460 What do you feel about that issue?

00:10:00.660 And there are two really interesting things about these academic studies that identify Trump voters as overly racist.

00:10:08.680 The first is that they're basically just asking people to discuss race issues in the parlance of modern woke politics, right?

00:10:18.620 So if you talk about racial issues as a modern college educated urban millennial, then you get low on the racial resentment score.

00:10:27.740 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.

00:10:46.600 And related to that, you know, one of the things you pretty consistently find is that if you, you know, 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.

00:10:57.940 You know who else gets really high on the racial resentment index?

00:11:01.320 Black voters and Latino voters as well.

00:11:03.560 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.

00:11:15.380 And Trump voters, I think, have been made out to be the villain because they don't use the sort of modern woke dialogue.

00:11:22.660 And I just think that's, you know, one, it's unfair to 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.

00:11:33.620 It's sort of, you know, one of the marks of not being welcome in polite society.

00:11:38.260 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.

00:11:48.120 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.

00:11:56.760 And I think that's just very dangerous.

00:11:58.220 And 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.

00:12:07.160 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.

00:12:19.800 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?

00:12:28.560 Otherwise, you're bad. And you have to hate Trump. Otherwise, you're bad.

00:12:32.180 You know, the narrative got turned on its head when we actually saw voting results.

00:12:36.320 Yeah, I think this this is a really important question. And, you know, so much is represented in the language and the rhetoric.

00:12:45.100 I just think that there's this obsession among professional class Americans to talk about these issues in a particular way.

00:12:51.840 And if you don't, you're a bad person. And the perfect representation of this is this this phrase Latinx or Latinx,

00:12:59.740 which is supposed to be a a non gendered way of talking instead of saying Latino, it's a non gendered way of talking about that ethnic group.

00:13:09.520 And one of the things you find with public polling is that the people who never use that word are actual Latinos.

00:13:18.140 And the people who use that word all the time are white Americans with professional degrees.

00:13:23.960 And so, again, there's just this weird class diversions and how you discuss these issues.

00:13:28.740 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.

00:13:40.100 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,

00:13:48.420 the language of their families is somehow discriminatory and that you, the white person with a law degree from Harvard or Yale,

00:13:56.300 you know how to modify their language in a way that's going to make them more politically correct and more acceptable and polite society.

00:14:02.840 And I don't think it's surprising at all that a lot of folks looked at that.

00:14:06.720 A lot of Latinos looked at that and said, not for me.

00:14:09.400 No, thank you. And they went for Trump in pretty surprising numbers.

00:14:13.220 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.

00:14:23.400 You know, exit polls are always very unpredictable.

00:14:27.060 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 what he didn't just win more than he won in 2016.

00:14:39.480 He actually won a majority of the overall vote.

00:14:42.220 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.

00:14:50.060 But I think Democrats really should wake up to the fact that the way in which the professionally educated leadership class, the Democratic Party, just discusses these issues, comes across as condescending and frankly, just a little bit weird.

00:15:05.540 Like, 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, like, who are these weirdos and where do they learn how to talk about that?

00:15:18.280 I think that's a big problem.

00:15:19.060 Totally. 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, W-O-M-X-N.

00:15:33.780 If I don't say that when speaking about my gender, I'm a bigot.

00:15:38.140 I'm a transphobe.

00:15:39.380 Well, screw you, TED Talks.

00:15:41.180 Women, women, women.

00:15:42.420 W-O-M-E-N. 1.00

00:15:43.420 There, I said it, and I'm going to continue.

00:15:44.600 I said, I don't need TED Talks to tell me how to spell my gender in some new way to be inclusive.

00:15:51.300 And it is annoying, and it's actually motivational.

00:15:54.120 I can see it turning a Latina or Latino into a Trump voter because they don't want to be whitesplained, too, right, by my neighbors here on the Upper West Side.

00:16:04.940 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.

00:16:15.060 That was bad.

00:16:15.740 She shouldn't have said that.

00:16:16.720 That alienated people.

00:16:18.300 And instead of actually taking their own advice, we got four years of Democrats and media amping it up.

00:16:25.780 They've gone from deplorables to Nazis.

00:16:28.820 And we have a little soundbite, J.D., that we put together, including, I think it kicks off with Christiane Amampur, who just two weeks ago, 10 days ago, doubled down on this.

00:16:40.000 She was ultimately forced to apologize, though her remarks sat out there uncorrected for a week.

00:16:44.980 But take a listen.

00:16:46.280 This week, 82 years ago, Kristallnacht happened.

00:16:49.640 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 Donald Trump.

00:16:58.320 I'm going to use an extreme example.

00:17:00.300 Think about Hitler. 0.90

00:17:01.360 So many stunning parallels to what Hitler was doing. 0.83

00:17:05.320 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.

00:17:13.920 Many tendencies like Adolf Hitler.

00:17:15.960 Does this look like Germany in 1932?

00:17:18.780 We're getting close.

00:17:20.380 And this only pertains to Adolf Hitler and pertains to nobody else.

00:17:23.320 90% of what he says, I'm like, this guy gets it.

00:17:26.800 If you've read anything about the rise of the Third Reich and Adolf Hitler, you will see the parallels.

00:17:31.720 Donald Trump is a true psychopath.

00:17:33.740 He's like Hitler or Stalin. 0.75

00:17:35.080 That sounds a lot like a certain leader that killed members of my family and about 6 million other Jews.

00:17:40.880 Oh, my God.

00:17:41.740 That was put together by the Washington Free Beacon.

00:17:43.960 But it really brings it home.

00:17:45.140 They're not going to stop.

00:17:46.180 As they're telling us that we're healed and we're unified, there's been no accounting for any of that.

00:17:51.100 In fact, there won't be because that is what they think.

00:17:53.800 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.

00:18:03.100 They were supposed to be Democrats.

00:18:04.480 They turned on their party.

00:18:07.800 Yeah.

00:18:07.980 I mean, first of all, you owe me for having forced me to listen to that.

00:18:11.240 It really drives home that there is a core component of the leadership of the country, the leadership of the Democratic Party that really isn't interested in unity and fraternity.

00:18:32.580 They're interested in submission, right?

00:18:34.580 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.

00:18:49.920 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 of helping to build this country, are going to submit.

00:19:01.920 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.

00:19:06.920 The other thing I just want to say reacting to that video is, you know, I'm not a history expert, but I understand that Kristallnacht was pretty violent.

00:19:14.660 Obviously, the Holocaust was like the most violent thing imaginable. 0.92

00:19:17.740 A hundred thousand 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.

00:19:29.300 They maintained an incredibly peaceful presence despite a very heated topic and a very heated time in our country.

00:19:36.940 So I just – the comparison and the treatment of these guys is like these violent criminals, violent thugs.

00:19:42.700 It's just bizarre because they're actually just not, right?

00:19:47.120 Like, 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's just often completely missed when people compare these folks to, you know, violent extremists of the past.

00:20:00.880 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.

00:20:20.980 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.

00:20:40.300 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.

00:20:53.400 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 could, it looks like it was largely related to the pandemic and the way Trump talks for those voters.

00:21:11.300 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.

00:21:24.300 And, you know, Obama wanted environmental regulations over, over any sort of industrial revival.

00:21:30.680 Trump was exactly the opposite.

00:21:32.240 You know, he, he tried to reduce, well, he did reduce corporate taxes.

00:21:37.060 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.

00:21:43.920 He, he went after China and their unfair trade practices.

00:21:47.540 He, he did reach new trade agreements with Canada, with, with Mexico, with South Korea, all trying to favor more domestic production, not to mention tariffs he put in place to help industry here.

00:21:58.900 And we had a boom in oil and gas production.

00:22:01.160 This is like, this is all stuff that this group of voters loved.

00:22:04.680 But now you've got not just any Democrat, but Obama's number two, Joe Biden in there.

00:22:10.300 And I just wonder what, what you think the sense is right now amongst those voters in terms of what's about to come their way.

00:22:16.560 Yeah.

00:22:16.680 I mean, just as a preliminary point, I do think that one of the lessons for Republicans, there are obviously a lot of, a lot of lessons for Democrats.

00:22:24.600 One of the lessons for Republicans from 2020 is that they maybe took the white working class for, for advantage a little bit.

00:22:34.040 I think that, you know, you should have expected that group, frankly, to go even more stronger for Trump, more strongly for Trump than they did in 2016.

00:22:41.240 There was a little bit to your point of a stagnation, not really reversal, but certainly a stagnation.

00:22:46.900 And I think that, you know, my read on this is that where Trump, you know, governed as a populist, where he really hammered China, the trade issue, the immigration issue is where he was most popular.

00:22:59.980 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.

00:23:09.840 And so I think that's, that's one of the lessons to take away from this.

00:23:13.220 Because he did ultimately cut a deal, a deal with China.

00:23:15.560 I mean, he did ultimately cut a deal, which they may not be happy about.

00:23:19.100 Yeah, he cut, he cut a deal with, with China.

00:23:21.520 And it was funny that the, the, the, the tax plan, which there were a lot of things I liked about and some things I didn't like about it.

00:23:27.460 I think to the extent that that was really focused on bringing capital investment back to the country and cutting middle-class taxes, it was really good for him.

00:23:37.860 And to the extent that it looked like something that Mitt Romney would have done, it frankly wasn't that, that popular.

00:23:42.700 And so there was this really, you know, interesting push and pull between the Trump instinct within the White House and, you know, the more establishment instinct within the White House, which is, of course, you know, something that a lot of other folks can talk to better than I can.

00:23:55.840 But, but I think on, on the Biden question, you know, what, what would worry me and, and what I think a lot of folks are, are concerned about is sort of a reversal on the China issue.

00:24:10.300 So, so I think the China issue is probably the, the most substantial of Trump's wins as a president.

00:24:19.280 I think he totally changed the conversation on China.

00:24:21.900 And if, if you think about the environmental issue as related to the China issue.

00:24:26.260 So, you know, we think of environmental issues like, okay, fuel standards, reducing emissions here at home.

00:24:31.820 But the way in which our environmental policy can be most destructive is actually on industrial power questions.

00:24:38.120 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. 1.00

00:24:47.740 And so, if you're going soft on China, which I think, frankly, Biden's secretary 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.

00:25:08.640 Which, which, of course, is sort of what you need to actually build a thriving, working and middle class in the country.

00:25:14.980 You have to have a viable manufacturing sector.

00:25:17.180 I think that's the lesson of Germany.

00:25:18.980 It's the lesson of Switzerland.

00:25:20.160 It's certainly the lesson of the United States in the last 20 or 30 years.

00:25:23.800 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.

00:25:49.260 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.

00:26:06.800 If they lose their manufacturing jobs, they have to learn to code.

00:26:09.160 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.

00:26:18.780 They're just going to have to go back to school when they're 52 years old and learn to code.

00:26:22.320 It's ridiculous.

00:26:23.180 It's unrealistic.

00:26:24.280 A lot of people aren't going to be able to do that.

00:26:26.960 And so, if that is your orientation, let's just focus on the technology sector instead of really rebuilding and reinvesting in American manufacturing.

00:26:35.520 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.

00:26:41.900 And I do worry about that.

00:26:43.640 Yeah.

00:26:43.940 Forbes reported that employment grew in manufacturing jobs by almost half a million under Trump after falling by 200,000 under Obama.

00:26:55.820 So, I mean, that's a pretty big swing.

00:26:58.060 And that's the kind of swing that can turn numbers in an election.

00:27:02.640 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.

00:27:18.760 You know, I mean, you talk about – learn to code is so absurd for most people.

00:27:22.740 I mean, I'd be one of them.

00:27:25.060 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.

00:27:38.120 There isn't this, let's go get them kind of attitude.

00:27:41.780 I can do anything.

00:27:42.740 I will learn to code.

00:27:43.780 You're talking about guys who, like, took four lunch breaks and they stretch from 20 to 60 minutes over the course of time.

00:27:50.000 Ultimately, they get fired.

00:27:50.960 It's not all about what the government can do for you.

00:27:55.280 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.

00:28:05.840 Yeah, I think there's a lot of – you know, the way I'd put it is that there's a lot of hopelessness in these communities.

00:28:09.780 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.

00:28:16.000 And there's something my grandpa used to tell me.

00:28:19.580 He was sort of an old union steel worker, voted for a Democrat pretty much every single election of his life.

00:28:25.640 I think he voted for Reagan once in 1984, otherwise voted for Democrats his whole life.

00:28:30.440 And, you know, he told me that, you know, look, there are people who just aren't doing very well, right?

00:28:39.000 In every community, in every place, you know, there are people – and, you know, he's a politically incorrect guy who said deadbeats, right?

00:28:44.540 There's deadbeats in every community.

00:28:45.760 Like, the difference between the 1950s when, you know, Middletown, our hometown, had a really viable 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.

00:29:05.180 Yeah, they were deadbeats back then, but they were enveloped in a community that could actually get them back on the right path, right?

00:29:12.220 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've got to get your head back in the game.

00:29:27.420 Let's figure this out.

00:29:28.800 Those people just aren't around in the same numbers as they were 40 or 50 years ago.

00:29:33.580 And so you just have much weaker, what I call community infrastructure.

00:29:36.840 It's not all about government supports.

00:29:38.680 It's about everything that exists in the community where you actually live.

00:29:42.220 And you take that stuff away, and it's just really hard for people to get back on their feet.

00:29:49.240 You know, yeah, some of them are not making good choices.

00:29:51.520 That is a fact of life.

00:29:52.540 I don't shy away from that in the book.

00:29:53.920 I don't shy away from talking about that in my life.

00:29:57.400 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.

00:30:15.760 And one of those institutions is good manufacturing-oriented jobs.

00:30:20.860 You know, we can talk about this question of cultural versus economics.

00:30:24.680 I think it's obviously a pretty controversial thing that the book dives right into.

00:30:29.320 You know, I've always thought that the economics and the culture are related, right?

00:30:33.000 If the culture starts to go south, it's harder to sort of maintain economic productivity.

00:30:37.620 If the economy starts to go south and the jobs disappear, then people become hopeless, and that sort of starts to affect the culture.

00:30:44.720 And I think these things are all related.

00:30:46.220 And if your solution to this problem, if your solution to these communities is, hey, you guys just need to go to Ohio State or the University of Cincinnati and pick up C++ software programming, then you're not actually going to help people.

00:31:02.100 You're making yourself feel better by ignoring them, but you are ignoring them, and I think we should just be honest about that fact.

00:31:07.620 The other important point to make here, and it's like the third rail of American politics, is this question of immigration.

00:31:17.120 And there's always the, you know, what are we talking about when we're talking about immigration?

00:31:20.500 Are we talking about wage competition among the lower class?

00:31:23.840 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.

00:31:32.480 There's this question about, is it culture or race?

00:31:35.180 Is it people just don't like Latinos?

00:31:36.860 They don't like Mexicans. 1.00

00:31:37.800 They don't like Guatemalans. 1.00

00:31:39.340 You know, I really don't think that's part of the story.

00:31:42.400 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.

00:31:52.220 And 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.

00:32:04.580 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.

00:32:21.500 And so when we, you know, I think we're going to have a big reversal of Trump era immigration policies for the Biden administration.

00:32:29.780 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.

00:32:39.240 Because if 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 a good job, they get snared up in this stuff and it's just over.

00:32:51.860 More with JD in just one second.

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00:33:47.600 You talk about culture versus economics and the effect on a community and, you know, the absurdity of the learn to code message to these coal miners, let's say. 0.99

00:33:56.640 Think about if they turned around, if, you know, Trump's administration turned around to black America in Chicago and, you know, where you talk about blight, right?

00:34:07.780 And said, learn to code.

00:34:10.240 Yep.

00:34:10.680 The outrage that we would get in that message.

00:34:14.580 You know, yes, we do have to talk about agency and willingness to get off the couch and fix your own life, for sure.

00:34:21.040 That's a massive piece of it.

00:34:23.360 But we also have to be realistic about what the economics look like and what's really realistic and expecting of these people.

00:34:32.800 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. 0.93

00:34:37.380 And what we're really talking about is people who are lower socioeconomic status and how to lift them up.

00:34:43.300 And you've got to look at both of these things.

00:34:44.780 What's their attitude and what's potentially available to them?

00:34:48.080 Yeah, there's a sociologist who's actually a very liberal guy, and I've gotten to know him a little bit.

00:34:52.780 And I cited him a few times in the book.

00:34:54.620 His name's William Julius Wilson.

00:34:57.140 And, you know, very much a guy on the left, but just incredibly thoughtful about these problems.

00:35:02.780 And, you know, he's been, I think, pretty influential in how I think about this interplay between cultural and economics.

00:35:09.320 Because, you know, you're right.

00:35:10.360 You've got to take people who are sitting on the couch doing nothing, and you've got to get them off the couch.

00:35:13.700 You've got to get them into good jobs, you know, hopefully able to support families, able to raise those families in stability and comfort.

00:35:19.580 And then, you know, you create a virtuous cycle from generation to generation instead of, you know, the vicious cycle that we sometimes have in families that are struggling with joblessness and addiction and so forth.

00:35:30.220 But, you know, one of the things that's going to motivate people to get off the couch, of course, is the existence of a good job, right?

00:35:37.080 That's an important piece of it, but it's not the only piece.

00:35:39.740 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?

00:35:46.020 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.

00:35:57.960 It creates this sort of mentality where, why try, right?

00:36:03.120 I call it, you know, learned helplessness.

00:36:06.520 You know, hopelessness is a good way to think about it.

00:36:08.980 But if you want to actually improve people's lives, you can't just say, well, here's some money, right?

00:36:17.020 Here's a check from the government, spend it well, or here's a good job, go and apply.

00:36:21.280 But you've got to create the community infrastructure that makes people feel like it's possible, that if they try, something good is actually going to come from it.

00:36:31.060 And they've got to feel pressure, too.

00:36:32.580 I mean, you know, 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.

00:36:41.180 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?

00:36:48.040 But, you know, maybe it's your wife who says you need to do the dishes or help out a little bit more. 0.53

00:36:54.880 Maybe it's somebody in your family who said you need to go and apply to that job.

00:36:58.800 You know, those things matter.

00:37:00.560 But, like, I think about my own life and all of these little influences that helped get me on the right path.

00:37:07.600 You take those influences away, and it's just me trying to figure this stuff out on my own.

00:37:12.560 And I think things just don't go as well for me, right?

00:37:14.800 If Mamaw wasn't telling me, you need to go get off your ass and apply for that job and work hard.

00:37:20.600 If I didn't have, you know, my sister and my aunt and my mom saying, you know, if you want to have a good job, you may need to go get an education.

00:37:30.060 If I didn't have people in the Marine Corps saying, you know, here's what you need to do.

00:37:33.680 Here's how you need to apply for financial aid.

00:37:35.820 Here's how you need to sort of structure your life so you can actually succeed in school.

00:37:39.420 You know, all of these weird little community influences are what I think the building blocks of success ultimately are.

00:37:47.420 And those, you know, that's sort of as I see it, the interplay between culture and economics is it's not just the good job.

00:37:54.800 It's also the full spade of community actors that make it seem both possible and available to you to actually get off that couch and go do something.

00:38:04.860 And that's what's ultimately missing when you're when you've got people who who who are really, really left behind and really don't see a path forward.

00:38:18.280 I also think that's the thing that's missing the most is people in their lives who can actually help them.

00:38:23.240 Right. It's it's back to the old. If you can see it, you can be it.

00:38:25.860 You know, it's very helpful to see role models around you who have done it.

00:38:29.440 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 is you.

00:38:41.280 The reason you can't do it is because of these immutable characteristics like you can't.

00:38:46.280 The American dream is not possible for you because the system won't allow it.

00:38:51.340 And it completely takes away a person's agency.

00:38:54.180 And they do openly crap on the American dream.

00:38:58.520 It's not possible for you.

00:39:00.160 America itself is not what people say it is.

00:39:03.460 And this anti-American sentiment cropping up, I think, is another thing that motivates a lot of voters.

00:39:09.260 But it's they're basically challenging the notion that anyone, no matter their circumstances, can achieve success in this country.

00:39:17.300 What one of the things that I think so beautiful about your book, your story and the reason why many on the left hate it is that you're you you're an example of it being possible, even under really tough circumstances, even for a kid who has almost no advantages other than a grandma and and grandpa who really loved him and decided to give him a little tough love.

00:39:45.860 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.

00:40:02.260 Let's just say for the sake of argument that you're absolutely right.

00:40:06.160 What good is that message when directed at a kid who's struggling and trying to figure out how to make their way?

00:40:12.660 Right. So I'm not one of these people who says the people, you know, says that sort of poor folks don't have any disadvantages. 0.98

00:40:20.840 Like I can't possibly look at my grandma's life and my grandma's upbringing and say, you know, she had the same set of opportunities as someone who was born in an upper class background in the 1940s in New York City.

00:40:34.400 I think, frankly, she also had a lot of advantages.

00:40:36.300 Right. She had, I think, a lot of important cultural training that she wouldn't have gotten.

00:40:40.340 But obviously, her life was hard.

00:40:43.040 I don't know if you would look at my life and say, you know, J.D. had it easy relative to a kid born of privilege.

00:40:50.120 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.

00:40:58.760 The deck is stacked against you. There's nothing you can ultimately do.

00:41:02.340 So, you know, why isn't the message that I take from that ultimately, well, I should just give off it.

00:41:07.440 Right. If the deck is stacked against me, if there is no hope that I shouldn't even try.

00:41:11.240 Right. And there's there's just this weird strain of thought in American life right now where you can't hold two thoughts in your head at the same time.

00:41:18.700 And in this particular moment, I think the two thoughts in 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.

00:41:33.340 But, two, it's still important for them to see that they have agency and that they need to try anyway.

00:41:40.420 Right. It might not always work out. And we've got to be honest about that fact.

00:41:44.000 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.

00:41:53.160 And I do, unfortunately, think that's the message that a lot of people on the left are ultimately giving to communities like mine.

00:41:59.800 And I am, you know, my, you know, my grandparents were classic blue dog Democrats.

00:42:07.140 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.

00:42:22.880 I don't think that they're wrong, that that creates special disadvantages.

00:42:28.240 But you can't just encourage people to wallow in everything that's gone wrong in their lives.

00:42:33.500 You have to be able to say, on the one hand, you know, 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.

00:42:44.440 And 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, if you're willing to work for it.

00:42:53.800 Well, I think the other piece of it, too, is once, whence, is once one achieves the American dream, the response, the collective response from the left in particular should not be, fuck off.

00:43:06.520 Like, that's, one of the problems we're seeing is, success has been so demonized in the country now.

00:43:12.480 Even if you are self-made, just having it is a problem.

00:43:15.560 You know, they'll hold it against you.

00:43:17.800 You've, you've, you must now see the rest of the country as less than.

00:43:22.140 You must not be paying your fair share.

00:43:24.880 You have to give more of it back, you know, and the less you give, the more of a miser and awful person.

00:43:29.900 It's like, I don't know, I just think we've changed the messaging from, good for you, maybe I could do it, too.

00:43:36.520 So, help me understand how to screw you. 1.00

00:43:40.200 Yep.

00:43:40.800 Yeah, there's definitely a way in which I think our country is really, I shouldn't say our country.

00:43:46.740 I think that our leadership class is really uncomfortable with success and with people who have achieved success.

00:43:52.220 So, I saw this interesting poll just a couple of days ago, and it was looking, you know, just at Trump voters, college-educated Trump voters versus non-college-educated Trump voters.

00:44:00.480 And it was, the question was, you know, do you think that it's possible for a person to achieve the American dream?

00:44:07.480 And I think it was 71% of non-college-educated Trump voters said yes.

00:44:11.800 And I think it was, you know, 40% or something of the college-educated Trump voters said yes.

00:44:16.620 And it was true for the Biden voters as well.

00:44:19.340 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.

00:44:30.120 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.

00:44:40.440 And that's just an important thing.

00:44:42.080 And I worry about our country's inability to, you know, try to uplift those who are struggling without treating those people as hopeless children who have no agency and no responsibility.

00:44:56.520 Wait, but can I ask you something about that?

00:45:00.120 Because 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 made it, it's not that great.

00:45:15.020 Like, I have to work my ass off, I never see my family, the government takes 50% of my dough, you know, I kind of made it to the promised land and meh.

00:45:27.300 What do you think?

00:45:27.800 You know, I think there's part of that going on, but 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.

00:45:50.600 And I do think that, you know, our universities, our elite media institutions have just grown pretty pessimistic about the American experience, the American experiment.

00:46:01.860 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, you know, more negative than a lot of working class Americans believe.

00:46:19.400 I also, you know, I really do think that a lot of this is like ideology ends up trumping people's ability to think.

00:46:29.120 Because one of the more interesting dynamics is 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.

00:46:45.760 They really wanted to project their own political narrative onto the book, and they wanted to sort of fit me into this box, right?

00:46:52.980 So if like JD said this thing that I agree with, I'm going to ignore that.

00:46:56.560 I'm going to only, you know, attach myself to the things that I disagree with, or vice versa, right?

00:47:01.540 People would sort of, you know, had either very strongly positive or negative views.

00:47:05.780 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.

00:47:13.360 And they sort of got that I was, 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.

00:47:26.120 And, you know, 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.

00:47:42.120 And so they're just more open-minded.

00:47:43.780 I think I predict with your movie, because the movie is now out about, 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.

00:47:57.920 It'll be reviewers versus viewers.

00:47:59.760 As we've seen in any film that, you know, that hasn't a message like yours, which is the American dream may still exist.

00:48:08.060 It may not be perfect.

00:48:08.980 It may not be pretty, but it does still exist.

00:48:10.940 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 isn't entirely about woke culture or victimization and how the country's bad.

00:48:24.720 That's what we've seen.

00:48:25.720 You know, it's one of the reasons why Roseanne, the reboot, was so successful, right?

00:48:29.500 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 horrified.

00:48:37.080 Even before her scandal, they were like, this is horrifying.

00:48:40.040 How could the show be succeeding?

00:48:41.920 And I saw this already.

00:48:43.280 There was one review by the Washington Post.

00:48:46.600 That's this is so perfect because that what their criticism of the book, the movie, is that they really wanted it to be more woke.

00:48:53.800 And this is a quote from one of the reviews.

00:48:56.880 Vance paints Appalachia as a near exclusively white space.

00:49:02.300 Erased are black residents and their history in the region. 1.00

00:49:05.120 Missing are the many generations of Native American communities. 1.00

00:49:09.020 Ignored is a growing Latino population. 1.00

00:49:11.660 Disregarded are Appalachians who embrace racial justice and acceptance of their LGBTQ neighbors. 0.98

00:49:17.940 This is a personal story of your family.

00:49:21.340 Why did you get into all that?

00:49:23.520 Right, right.

00:49:24.560 Like, can you imagine what a movie like that would look like?

00:49:27.120 You know, where you're trying to tell the story of a family, but you have to you have to actually talk about every other conceivable group.

00:49:35.120 Majority, minority, what have you, and present them on the screen so that it satisfies this sort of woke obsession.

00:49:42.420 With a little no justice, no peace sign in the background.

00:49:45.820 Yeah, it's just totally preposterous.

00:49:50.340 And as it happens, most of my family voted for Donald Trump.

00:49:53.660 My family is hardly politically monolithic.

00:49:55.920 My mom, you know, who, by the way, has been clean for six years now, is doing very well.

00:50:00.520 Just saw her a few days ago.

00:50:03.560 You know, my mom voted for Jesse Jackson in the Democratic primary in 1984.

00:50:09.180 And then she's voted for Republicans and she's voted for Democrats since. 0.81

00:50:12.560 I just think that there's this way in which elite Americans want working class Americans to be more ideological and more woke than they actually are.

00:50:23.880 You know, one of my favorite responses to the book or to the movie, I can't even remember which at this point.

00:50:29.280 But is that, you know, J.D. Vance doesn't talk enough about BIPOC, BIPOC, and LGBTQIA Americans in his sort of experience of Appalachia.

00:50:44.520 It's like, okay, so BIPOC is Black Indigenous People of Color. 0.64

00:50:50.020 LGBTQIA is lesbian, gender non-conforming, bisexual, transgender, intersex, asexual.

00:50:55.940 And I read this and I'm like, you people are crazy.

00:51:01.380 Like, truly, the authentic, real Appalachians use these, like, 14-character pronouns every time they talk about themselves.

00:51:10.580 And, you know, I just listen to this and I think, 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?

00:51:22.480 This is a particular obsession of a particular upper class of Americans.

00:51:28.200 And I think it's insane.

00:51:29.880 But don't try to pretend that that's the real America because you want it to be.

00:51:33.960 It just isn't.

00:51:34.780 Right.

00:51:35.280 A moment on the asexuals in the holler. 0.97

00:51:38.240 It's not going to happen.

00:51:42.460 You know, one of my good friends, just aside, you know, he's sort of like a populist, he calls himself a populist Reagan Democrat.

00:51:51.620 But he's a professor.

00:51:53.920 I won't give his name because I don't want him to get fired.

00:51:56.700 But he's, you know, he's a gay man, you know, in his mid-50s, just a great, great friend of ours.

00:52:04.100 And he sent me this tweet from Elizabeth Warren's campaign Twitter account back when she was still running for president.

00:52:13.380 And it was like something like, you know, we love all people who are intersex, asexual, and two-spirit.

00:52:21.080 And this guy sends me this tweet and he says, look, man, we gay guys just wanted to be left to hell alone.

00:52:28.720 You can have your two spirits.

00:52:32.140 There's something about just this bizarre way of discussing these issues that's alienating and dividing the country.

00:52:42.560 And I think, you know, ultimately it's going to be politically suicidal for Democrats if they embrace it wide scale.

00:52:47.540 Coming up in a minute with J.D., how does he think Glenn Close did in her portrayal of Mamaw?

00:52:56.400 And what real-life item of Mamaw's was Glenn Close wearing for her portrayal of the role?

00:53:02.260 And also we're going to ask him what his mom, Beverly, has to say about the film.

00:53:07.340 But before we get to that, I want to bring you a feature we call Sound Up,

00:53:11.280 which involves sound bites making the news or people in the news saying stupid, usually, things.

00:53:16.120 Today we've got one stupid and one smart.

00:53:19.280 And the first is from Governor Cuomo of New York, who has been honored with an international Emmy.

00:53:27.260 You know, these are the awards you get for outstanding work on television.

00:53:30.260 An international Emmy for his performance during the COVID quarantine.

00:53:37.280 They are celebrating how he did with his daily press briefings.

00:53:42.020 And it's insane because not only has New York just been just crushed by COVID and that we have the highest death toll,

00:53:50.340 which no one's blaming that in particular on Governor Cuomo.

00:53:53.260 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

00:54:00.860 mandating that the nursing homes in New York State take any COVID-positive patients.

00:54:06.800 They were not allowed to turn them away.

00:54:08.960 And, of course, inside the nursing homes are the most vulnerable population.

00:54:11.680 And 6,000-plus COVID-positive patients were placed in New York nursing homes and more than 6,000 died.

00:54:20.760 And it's directly as a result.

00:54:22.560 I mean, you can see that they put the virus in these homes and then thousands of people died.

00:54:26.940 And the number is actually much greater than 6,000 because many had to be moved out of the nursing homes,

00:54:31.540 sent to hospitals, and they died there.

00:54:33.340 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.

00:54:41.580 So this is a terrible thing.

00:54:43.200 And even J.D. has said she wouldn't be trying to blame anybody for any of this if Cuomo would just take some responsibility for it,

00:54:51.520 if he would apologize, if he would explain what the thinking was.

00:54:55.380 But he won't.

00:54:56.580 He's blamed the nursing homes, the nurses, God, Mother Nature, the old people themselves.

00:55:03.240 Old people, they die, he said. 1.00

00:55:05.320 He's been so callous and crass about it.

00:55:07.360 So for him to be given an award is pretty outrageous.

00:55:10.840 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.

00:55:20.300 So we're going to play for you first Governor Cuomo and then Janice on Fox & Friends reacting.

00:55:25.160 Listen.

00:55:25.300 What an honor and pleasant surprise during these hard times.

00:55:29.100 I thank the International Academy and Bruce Paisner for this incredible award.

00:55:33.800 Thank you to all the members of the Academy.

00:55:36.520 Your work has brought smiles and hope and relief for so many people during these difficult days.

00:55:42.520 I wish I could say that my daily COVID presentations were well choreographed, scripted, rehearsed, or reflected any of the talents that you advance.

00:55:52.920 They didn't.

00:55:53.740 They offered only one thing, authentic truth and stability.

00:55:58.200 But sometimes that's enough.

00:56:00.700 Every time we see this governor celebrating himself on television, it's just a reminder of the people that we lost, partly because of his leadership.

00:56:11.100 So, Janice, this was a statement from the Academy.

00:56:14.840 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.

00:56:26.820 What's your reaction?

00:56:27.640 I heard that to get an Emmy Award, you have to send videotape of yourself to the board members.

00:56:37.840 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.

00:56:52.900 He could start his award-winning speech by saying, I'm really sorry for your loss.

00:56:58.120 That's something we have never heard from this governor at any of his meetings or his PowerPoint presentations.

00:57:06.260 Well said, Janice.

00:57:08.040 She made the point, well, while this guy's going to be taking home his Emmy, Janice and these other 6,000 families are taking home urns and caskets.

00:57:19.240 And this is no time for his victory lap with his book talking about leadership lessons during the COVID crisis.

00:57:26.800 And it's certainly not the time for awards.

00:57:29.780 How crass of the international Emmys.

00:57:32.700 How callous and cold toward the families who are still suffering from these losses.

00:57:38.600 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.

00:57:50.180 And so to reward it with this kind of an award is just wrong.

00:57:54.320 It's just wrong.

00:57:55.000 So obviously I'm on Janice's side and I would be even if she weren't one of my closest friends.

00:58:00.080 Okay, more on that as we get it.

00:58:01.580 By the way, Cuomo said we all have to not travel for Thanksgiving.

00:58:04.420 But guess what he was going to do?

00:58:05.420 Make his mom and some family members travel to him.

00:58:08.220 No problem.

00:58:09.180 He can do it, but we can't do it.

00:58:10.760 And then when he got outed for that, he had to reverse the order.

00:58:13.800 Aren't you sick of these politicians doing this?

00:58:15.700 Do as I say, not as I do.

00:58:17.180 Rules for thee, but not for me.

00:58:19.780 Anyway, back to J.D.

00:58:25.800 Just so the audience knows, Hillbilly Elegy, you wrote it sort of on the side.

00:58:30.600 You were in law school and Amy Chua, Tiger Mom. 0.65

00:58:33.340 She wrote the book about what's the name of her book?

00:58:36.340 The Battle Cry of the Tiger Mother?

00:58:38.600 The Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, yeah.

00:58:40.880 She's amazing.

00:58:42.620 She's awesome. 0.83

00:58:43.900 I'm in love with Amy Chua.

00:58:45.020 You should read whatever she writes.

00:58:46.280 She's so open-minded.

00:58:47.620 She's got her very strong thoughts on how things should be, but she doesn't shut down opposing

00:58:52.040 viewpoints.

00:58:53.040 Anyway, she was your professor at Yale Law.

00:58:55.300 And so you write the book.

00:58:57.200 She encourages you to keep writing.

00:58:59.540 You wind up getting it published.

00:59:01.700 The initial order was for 10,000 copies.

00:59:04.640 And how many copies has the book sold now?

00:59:08.340 I don't know.

00:59:10.060 But it's, I think, somewhere between two and three million at this point.

00:59:14.860 OMG.

00:59:15.780 I mean, that's huge.

00:59:16.960 Huge by any measure.

00:59:19.440 And in the book, it's, you're so honest.

00:59:25.360 You are very honest about growing up in your younger, more formative years in Appalachia

00:59:32.460 in the holler where Mamaw was and had a house.

00:59:36.120 And then you guys moved to Ohio.

00:59:38.400 And you had a drug-addicted mother who went from man to man, some of whom were abusive, 0.90

00:59:48.140 as was she.

00:59:50.240 And the moment you write about in the book, as I think one of the lowest, is portrayed

00:59:55.200 in the movie, which is by Ron Howard.

00:59:57.680 And I think that was, you tell me, but I think it was the car.

01:00:02.020 Yeah, yeah.

01:00:02.500 There's a scene where, you know, a scene in the movie, but a scene from my own life

01:00:08.580 where, you know, Mom sort of loses her temper in a car and, you know, threatens to crash 0.99

01:00:15.200 it.

01:00:15.480 And then, you know, eventually, you know, one thing leads to another and the cops come

01:00:19.560 and they arrest her and, you know, sort of sets off a pretty traumatic set of moments

01:00:23.940 in our childhood.

01:00:24.760 And, you know, I mean, I don't know if you got this from the book, Megan, but, you know,

01:00:29.720 one of the things that I've always felt is that, you know, I think people sort of hear

01:00:37.720 the word abuse and they think like sociopathic, you know, sort of constant physical and emotional

01:00:45.700 trauma.

01:00:46.680 And that's just sort of what's going on the whole time.

01:00:49.400 And, you know, by the standards of like an objective child psychologist, I certainly had

01:00:54.940 a traumatic childhood.

01:00:56.000 There are, you know, these ways you can measure it, you know, how many experiences of what they

01:01:00.100 call ACEs or adverse childhood experiences.

01:01:02.940 And, you know, certainly both Mom and her children had a lot of ACEs when they were growing

01:01:08.080 up and when we were growing up.

01:01:10.080 But I never felt like we had this sort of deeply traumatic or unusual childhood, right?

01:01:16.480 I mean, that's sort of one of the points of the book is that, you know, yeah, we experienced

01:01:20.780 some ACEs, but, you know, a lot of kids in our neighborhood and a lot of families did

01:01:26.520 as well.

01:01:28.080 And I try to, you know, there's this book that I read when I was a teenager, I think it's

01:01:35.300 called A Child Called It.

01:01:37.300 And you may have read this book, but it's about, I think, a truly sort of psychopathic,

01:01:41.780 almost torturing mother and the way that she treated her kid. 1.00

01:01:45.880 And that was just never how I felt about our family.

01:01:49.240 And it's certainly not how I feel about our family now.

01:01:51.400 I think that we definitely were a traumatic and chaotic bunch, but there was just a way

01:01:57.180 in which it was a little bit more normal.

01:01:59.900 And this sort of goes back to the culture point that I make.

01:02:02.220 It's not that anybody in our family was especially me.

01:02:06.140 And I mean, there are a lot of good things about mom during my childhood and we're, you know,

01:02:11.620 very, very close today, but there was just a weird way in which these sorts of moments

01:02:18.520 that do leave their marks on kids and do cause real problems later on, were kind of normal.

01:02:25.600 And I think part of our challenge, if we actually care about, you know, the most disadvantaged

01:02:30.200 kids in our communities is that we've got to figure out ways to make that sort of stuff

01:02:35.160 a little bit less normal.

01:02:36.220 And I even see it, you know, to be honest with, with my, you know, we have two little

01:02:39.660 ones, a three-year-old and a nine-month-old, and they're both doing well, but I often have

01:02:44.700 to catch myself because just the natural way that I respond, you know, to my toddler going

01:02:49.580 completely insane, you know, I have to check myself and say, you know what, this, this is

01:02:54.300 not the normal way to do things.

01:02:55.880 This is not a good thing.

01:02:57.440 But if you don't know that and you don't have any sense of what is normal and isn't normal,

01:03:01.880 then I think it can just be very easy to sort of fall into that cycle where, again, it's

01:03:06.740 not an intense, aggressive level of abuse.

01:03:09.620 It's just a sort of baseline level of chaos and trauma that ultimately isn't good for these

01:03:14.200 kids.

01:03:15.340 Well, of course, the consciousness of it is more than half the battle.

01:03:18.460 You know, the fact that you can stop and say, wait, is this a good instinct?

01:03:21.380 That's more than half the battle.

01:03:22.920 And it's what most people who do engage in that cycle of abuse do not have.

01:03:27.020 And you've, of course, got Usha, who's amazing, and we'll get to in a second.

01:03:31.300 Your wife is spectacular and extremely accomplished and smart and a great partner to you, which

01:03:36.940 is another big advantage.

01:03:39.240 But we talked about this a little when when we met and I interviewed you on camera, those

01:03:44.500 some of those childhood experiences, those ACEs.

01:03:49.000 And I do wonder whether because abuse can cause in adulthood, you know, physical problems.

01:03:55.880 It can cause substance abuse problems, psychological issues like depression, anxiety.

01:04:00.560 A lot a lot of people have those without having had abuse in their past, even if that abuse

01:04:04.840 was normalized within the community, you know, which maybe that takes away the element of

01:04:08.200 shame because everyone's having it.

01:04:09.980 You know, that would be an interesting thing to look at.

01:04:12.680 But do you have you felt any of that?

01:04:15.640 Because not only did you have this tumultuous background, but then, you know, you're performing

01:04:21.180 at these elite levels now, you know, in venture capital, first in San Francisco.

01:04:25.640 Now you've got this other thing going on in Ohio.

01:04:28.820 So that's stressful in and of itself.

01:04:31.000 And I wonder if you're feeling any of that manifest.

01:04:34.260 You know, I think that the way it manifests in me to the extent I notice it at all is that,

01:04:41.840 you know, in sort of super stressful moments, I kind of get this adrenaline rush.

01:04:46.860 And I talk about in the book, there's there's been this documented sort of fight or flight

01:04:50.600 response.

01:04:51.120 I definitely kind of have this this fight response when there are sort of moments of

01:04:55.940 high stress and high tension.

01:04:58.040 And so I think by and large, that serves me reasonably well.

01:05:03.140 I think that the main thing is just your point.

01:05:05.100 I have to be self-aware sometimes and check, you know, maybe my my most aggressive impulses at

01:05:09.760 certain times.

01:05:10.520 It's I'm getting to the point now where it's a little bit just more normal, where I've

01:05:14.220 kind of like accepted that there are certain instincts that I have that aren't necessarily

01:05:17.940 super, super positive.

01:05:19.800 And you sort of, you know, you check them in various ways before they really go off the

01:05:24.080 rails.

01:05:25.320 I do, you know, there's there, you know, one of the pioneers in looking at adverse childhood

01:05:30.920 experience, this woman, Nadine Burke Harris, who's a brilliant doctor.

01:05:35.480 And I believe she's a psychiatrist working in California.

01:05:42.220 And, you know, Nadine actually has a really great book about this, which I encourage people

01:05:46.540 to read.

01:05:47.040 But, you know, I remember reading her book and there's a story where I don't totally remember

01:05:50.940 the details, but where she talks about this guy who had had a pretty traumatic, chaotic

01:05:55.640 childhood, had sort of achieved the American dream, had a pretty stable, happy life, a happy

01:06:00.860 marriage, and just like drops dead of a heart attack at 63.

01:06:04.540 And one of the things she talks about in the book is that you do have these, you know, even

01:06:08.160 for people who pretty much have their lives under control, who sort of have, you know, quote

01:06:13.360 unquote escaped the trauma of their past, they tend to have much worse health outcomes later

01:06:19.340 on.

01:06:19.580 They have higher incidences of heart attacks, of pulmonary disease, even of cancer.

01:06:24.980 And so there's this weird, unexplained link between having a chaotic childhood and having

01:06:29.020 these negative physical health moments later on.

01:06:31.380 So there's definitely a part of me that worries, you know, that I'm sort of, you know, I have

01:06:35.500 a little bit less time on the clock than you might otherwise think.

01:06:39.340 And so I feel that pressure sometimes, but yeah, I wouldn't say that like emotionally

01:06:43.980 or psychologically, I still feel especially affected by it, by what happened when I was

01:06:47.800 a kid and, you know, I'm 36 years old.

01:06:49.640 It's been a long time.

01:06:50.460 It's over half of my life at this point where I've sort of been on my own.

01:06:54.140 Well, there was also a study out of UCLA that showed the presence of a loving parental

01:07:00.180 figure can provide protection to an abused child.

01:07:03.760 And, you know, I don't know if I want to use the word rescue, but at least it provides

01:07:09.140 a barrier to some of those negative effects.

01:07:11.540 And you had that, you had that in Mama, your maternal grandmother, who is the star of your

01:07:18.160 book, the star of your life, the star of this movie, played by Glenn Close in the movie.

01:07:26.480 Spectacularly.

01:07:26.980 I mean, you knew Mama, but I'm just saying Glenn transformed herself in a compelling way.

01:07:32.460 And I thought, I just, I was completely enthralled by the performance.

01:07:36.540 What, first of all, let's just start with Glenn and then we'll get to the real character.

01:07:39.900 How'd you think Glenn Close did?

01:07:41.920 I thought you did great.

01:07:43.540 Yeah, we, we, you know, we, we visited the set a few times and they, they filmed in, you

01:07:49.480 know, a little bit in Middletown and, and mostly in, um, Macon, Georgia and surrounding areas.

01:07:54.160 And, you know, I, I took my aunt, my mom and my uncle, um, and, and Usha down to, to Macon,

01:08:01.300 uh, for a couple of days.

01:08:02.920 It really was just sort of a family reunion kind of thing where we all got to hang out

01:08:06.700 together and it was a fun time.

01:08:08.460 But the first time that my aunt, my, my mom and my uncle saw Glenn Close in her full, her

01:08:16.140 full makeup and costume, uh, really was, was one of the more emotional moments of my life.

01:08:21.700 I mean, you know, my uncle was not an emotional man, but was speechless.

01:08:25.060 My, my aunt was sort of kind of like physically see her breath being taken away and it couldn't

01:08:30.920 really speak just because of how, how emotional she was.

01:08:34.640 And it's bizarre how much she looked like her and how much she acted like her.

01:08:40.980 You know, I, I, I think she did a great job.

01:08:43.640 It's impossible, of course, in a two hour movie to capture the personality that was mammal.

01:08:47.580 She really was just this larger than life figure.

01:08:50.380 But there were these little things that I can't believe that Glenn got right, that she

01:08:56.380 did.

01:08:56.840 Right.

01:08:57.000 So mammal always, she held her cigarette in a particular way.

01:09:00.640 And when you see it, you know, it, and it's hard to describe.

01:09:04.240 She, she asked all of us, like, how did mammal hold her cigarette?

01:09:07.300 We tried to explain it to her.

01:09:09.280 Um, but she somehow sort of translated our confused ramblings about it into something that was very

01:09:15.940 good and, you know, mammal had this twitch that she did with her mouth when she would get really 1.00

01:09:21.380 annoyed at something.

01:09:22.660 And in Glenn got that right.

01:09:24.760 And there were just all these little things about her personality that, you know, even though you

01:09:28.380 can't capture it all in two hour movie, these sort of little things just made such a, such a big

01:09:35.040 impact on us.

01:09:36.420 And you talked about the movie where he's real, I just have to say one, one more thing about this.

01:09:40.540 The most, you know, typically don't let this stuff get to me, but one movie review called

01:09:46.280 Glenn Close's portrayal of caricature called Mammaw caricature.

01:09:50.760 And that really pissed me off because that's what Mammaw looked like. 1.00

01:09:54.820 And that's how she acted. 0.73

01:09:56.280 And the idea that she was a caricature, I think is just pretty insulting because she, she,

01:10:02.360 she was a big personality and she was, she was loud and she laughed, you know, with her 0.94

01:10:07.960 whole body and she loved to cuss. 1.00

01:10:10.400 Uh, but she was just this incredibly loving and positive person for all of us.

01:10:15.560 And she, she wasn't a caricature.

01:10:17.340 She was just a real person who was a, a really, really big and positive influence for our whole

01:10:23.020 family.

01:10:23.940 Honestly, you can't pay attention to those.

01:10:25.340 I do think some of these reviewers, this Hollywood reviewers, or even, even worse news

01:10:30.780 reviewers, but, uh, Hollywood reviewers can be the meanest soulless, most soulless people

01:10:35.700 in, in the business.

01:10:37.400 And I, they, they get off on writing hurtful things about, um, artistic products that don't

01:10:44.520 line up with their own ideology for whatever reason.

01:10:46.600 So please, I urge you to not pay any attention to that.

01:10:49.220 And, and by the way, I know if the audience, if they have any question about whether Glenn

01:10:55.080 Close's portrayal is a caricature, they should just stay tuned for the credits where there's

01:10:59.620 actual video of Mamaw and you still think you're looking at Glenn Close.

01:11:04.720 It's the same person.

01:11:06.180 I mean, and by the way, is it true that she actually wore, Glenn actually wore Mamaw's

01:11:10.600 glasses?

01:11:10.960 She did.

01:11:11.960 She did.

01:11:12.740 Yeah.

01:11:12.980 Yeah.

01:11:13.140 My, my aunt gave her, um, Mamaw's glasses to use for the movie.

01:11:17.640 And so those are actually Mamaw's glasses.

01:11:19.760 I met that aunt.

01:11:20.840 That's Aunt Wee, Aunt Lori. 0.98

01:11:22.640 Yeah.

01:11:23.160 Yeah.

01:11:23.340 That's Aunt Wee. 1.00

01:11:23.900 That's right.

01:11:24.560 Yeah.

01:11:24.960 She's awesome. 0.83

01:11:25.740 She's portrayed in the book and I had the pleasure of meeting her and some of your family.

01:11:29.040 So Mamaw is the star.

01:11:31.860 She, uh, she's somebody who said a woman ain't fully dressed without a gun. 1.00

01:11:37.600 And, uh, she was tough.

01:11:40.060 And then the book and the movie portray how she got after you.

01:11:44.660 It wasn't all like, JD, you're wonderful.

01:11:47.020 Not at all.

01:11:47.740 She was like, get it together and was tough on you when she needed to be.

01:11:52.100 But you told me once before, she just got me.

01:11:55.380 She just got me.

01:11:56.460 And, and I know you wrote in the book, thinking about it now, how close you were to the abyss.

01:12:00.720 It gives you the chills.

01:12:01.780 And you wrote, I am one lucky son of a bitch.

01:12:04.420 So how much of that had to do with Mamaw?

01:12:07.960 Oh, I mean, most of it, um, you know, a lot, of course, a lot of other folks in, in my life,

01:12:13.720 my sister, my aunt, mom, and, you know, her, her, her own way.

01:12:17.180 We're all, all just really, really important.

01:12:19.060 But Mamaw was really, I think the piece that held it all together.

01:12:22.480 Um, she was.

01:12:24.660 You want, when I, I, I've thought a lot about me saying that she just got me.

01:12:30.600 And I think part of what she understood is that you don't really trust yourself until

01:12:39.260 you're sort of forced to experience a certain amount of stress or a certain amount of criticism

01:12:44.300 and you survive it.

01:12:45.220 Right.

01:12:46.000 And so what Mamaw, I think, tried to instill was a sense of resilience that she could be 0.89

01:12:52.220 a mean old hag. 1.00

01:12:54.080 She could criticize me.

01:12:55.540 She could tell me to get off my ass and do the dishes and help her. 1.00

01:12:58.380 She could do all those things.

01:12:59.860 And I didn't sort of buckle.

01:13:01.860 Um, it wasn't, I wasn't too emotionally frail for it.

01:13:04.800 And that kind of gave me this sense of, of strength.

01:13:08.260 And that was just a really, that was a really powerful part of the way that, that she and

01:13:12.240 I interacted that she could kind of, you know, give me, um, you know, give me these, these

01:13:20.020 little encouragements and these big criticisms.

01:13:22.420 And it would somehow all work in a way where the light bulb went on and I understood her,

01:13:29.040 but I also gained some sense that, you know, yeah, I can, I can, I can stand up to criticism.

01:13:32.920 I can deal with this.

01:13:33.820 And, you know, my, my Marine Corps recruiter once joked that, uh, you know, most kids really

01:13:40.300 struggle with the culture shock of bootcamp because you just have these drill instructors

01:13:43.520 yelling at you all the time.

01:13:44.940 She, she, he was like, yeah, the drill instructors aren't nearly as mean or as scary as your mammals. 0.99

01:13:49.120 You'll be fine.

01:13:49.640 He was right.

01:13:50.500 You know, when, when they, when they.

01:13:52.420 You sort of realize these weird ways where they try to get under your skin and mammal

01:13:56.040 would do that too.

01:13:56.840 But once you sort of recognize it as such, it's a lot easier to deal with.

01:14:01.800 Well, I think one of the first things people wondered about you when we saw you making the

01:14:05.540 press rounds as this graduate of Yale law school, it's like, this guy's writing a book

01:14:09.980 about Appalachia about, you know, life in the holler.

01:14:12.620 Like, how did he get from A to B?

01:14:15.080 I like how on earth did the kid who couldn't see it learn to be it?

01:14:19.340 How did it happen?

01:14:20.120 And my own takeaway was, let me introduce you to mamaw who took you into her custody after 1.00

01:14:26.760 one of the abusive incidents with your mom.

01:14:29.280 I think it was the car incident, wasn't it?

01:14:30.900 Where she took you in after?

01:14:33.000 Yeah, it was sort of a, it was sort of lumpy from, you know, that the car incident happened

01:14:37.500 around the time I was 12.

01:14:38.960 And then, you know, I was kind of back and forth between mom and mammal's house until

01:14:43.620 I was about 14.

01:14:44.600 But it was, I was, it was 14 when I sort of more completely moved in with mammal.

01:14:49.740 So that was, you know, it was four years that I was with her basically all through high school.

01:14:54.180 And that's what did it.

01:14:55.820 Because after, after high school came the Marine Corps, which helped.

01:15:00.540 You completed a four-year education in two years at Ohio State.

01:15:04.500 And then came Yale Law.

01:15:05.780 Can I ask you, how did you get into Yale Law?

01:15:08.200 Did you have perfect grades at Ohio State?

01:15:09.940 Was it your, do you think your unique background helped you?

01:15:12.560 What, what was it that made you extraordinary?

01:15:14.340 Because you have to be extraordinary to get in there.

01:15:16.280 You know, I, I think it was a combination of an unusual story.

01:15:20.780 You know, I was a veteran.

01:15:21.940 There were only four veterans in my class.

01:15:24.160 I, you know, I had good grades at Ohio State.

01:15:26.260 I had good test scores.

01:15:27.420 You know, it's, it's a little bit of luck.

01:15:29.360 I think, you know, you, you, you, part of applying to law school or I guess really any,

01:15:35.380 any school is you have to figure out how to market yourself a little bit.

01:15:38.780 And I think I just, you know, tried to sort of tell a story of a kid from, you know,

01:15:43.240 in my essays of a kid raised by his grandparents.

01:15:46.280 From a non-conventional background who had good enough grades and, you know,

01:15:50.700 they, they let me in.

01:15:52.720 But I, I don't know.

01:15:53.880 I, I can't, I can't provide any more insight to that.

01:15:56.580 I think a lot of it is luck.

01:15:58.620 And, you know, what, what is probably the case is that if you get good enough grades

01:16:03.140 and you have good enough scores and you're not a, a total, totally terrible person,

01:16:07.980 you can get into a, a pretty good school.

01:16:10.700 And, you know, what determines whether you get into a pretty good school or a great school

01:16:14.140 is a little bit of a chance.

01:16:16.280 Mm-hmm.

01:16:17.920 Let's talk about addiction.

01:16:21.140 Because that's another theme of, of the story, both on, on the page and on the screen.

01:16:27.300 And your mother is now thankfully a recovering addict, but she's been an addict for a long,

01:16:33.740 long time.

01:16:34.120 And as somebody who's had this in my own family of origin, um, I thought the movie did a wonderful

01:16:43.320 job of showing how explosive this can be on a family that, you know, how drugs,

01:16:50.560 they kidnap your loved one.

01:16:54.560 And like a, like a true kidnapper, they, they demand a ransom that you can never really

01:17:02.900 pay off, you know, and that never really leads to the return of your family member as

01:17:09.720 you knew her.

01:17:10.640 Yeah.

01:17:11.380 That's an interesting way of putting it.

01:17:13.260 Um, it's one of those things where you try to make sense of it until you just realize

01:17:18.520 that you can't actually make sense of it because your mom was, and is, like I said, she's been

01:17:24.880 clean for six years.

01:17:25.780 She's so smart.

01:17:27.340 She's so funny.

01:17:29.000 She's just, you know, one of these like charismatic people, which is, is true of a lot of the folks

01:17:33.140 in our family.

01:17:33.700 It's true of, of Mamaw. 0.89

01:17:35.060 It's, you know, true of, of my sister and my cousin, Rachel, in their own ways.

01:17:39.820 You know, these are sort of people who can, you know, show up at a totally different family's

01:17:46.220 family reunion and get invited to give a speech to the whole family.

01:17:50.240 That actually, you know, that happened when we went to visit the set in Macon, Georgia,

01:17:53.480 our hotel room was, sorry, this is a diversion, but our hotel room was in a hotel where this

01:18:01.040 big family was having like a 300 person family reunion.

01:18:04.160 And my whole family got invited to the family reunion because, you know, they met some of

01:18:08.200 my family and they were just so taken with them.

01:18:10.260 So taken with, with my uncle, with my cousin, with mom, with everybody.

01:18:14.920 And I think that's, that's sort of what is so difficult again, to understand or to try

01:18:20.940 to apply any reason to and like, mom is just this person with so much going for, why did

01:18:26.520 she kept on being, keep, keep on being attracted to the drugs? 1.00

01:18:30.920 Like, what was it?

01:18:32.740 And I, I think that, you know, part of it is, is definitely that I think her life just

01:18:39.760 didn't go in the way that she hoped it would.

01:18:41.880 She was a very promising student in her own right.

01:18:44.560 And, and things, you know, went off the rails, you know, got pregnant very young, had my

01:18:48.060 sister and, you know, that, that, that changes things and changes the calculus pretty quickly.

01:18:53.280 Um, but it's always just like, there was something that the rest of life couldn't provide some

01:19:01.180 sensation, some feeling that kids and partners and friends and family just couldn't quite fill

01:19:09.440 that void and she kept on, you know, she should have kept on returning to the drugs. 0.98

01:19:15.700 And there was a time when I was writing the book where I thought to myself, you know, is,

01:19:21.240 should I put this in there because mom's going to read it and, you know, people are going to

01:19:26.340 read this stuff about our family.

01:19:28.700 And I, I really just thought to myself, well, mom's not going to read it because she'll be

01:19:32.080 dead by the time the book comes out.

01:19:33.400 Um, and I was just confident that's how it would end, right?

01:19:38.940 That, that every call it six months, 12 months, because sometimes it might even go a little

01:19:44.360 bit longer, but there would always be a relapse.

01:19:46.560 It would always land her in the hospital. 0.93

01:19:48.280 It would always nearly kill her.

01:19:49.760 And eventually, uh, she was going to play Russian roulette too many times and she was not

01:19:53.840 going to come back from it.

01:19:55.500 And, and, and again, just as unreasonably as addiction takes hold of some people, uh, for

01:20:02.220 some people they're, they're just able to, to snap out of it.

01:20:05.420 And, um, I have tried to psychoanalyze and think about what it is, what it is that has

01:20:13.800 made mom six years clean.

01:20:15.300 And I really do feel this time confidence for the first time in my life, uh, that she, she

01:20:19.700 won't use drugs again.

01:20:21.580 And I think, you know, part of it is definitely just getting your life in order, having a good

01:20:26.680 relationship with your family and your kids, you know, not being stressed out about things,

01:20:31.180 job, money, husbands, whatever.

01:20:34.640 So just having your life in order in a way helps a lot, but there were times when mom

01:20:39.420 had her life in order and she went back to drugs and, um, she just hasn't this time.

01:20:44.220 And I don't, I don't get it.

01:20:45.920 I wish that I could say something more insightful about it, but the, the, the, the reason that

01:20:52.580 void exists is psychologically complex and really difficult to try to explain away using

01:20:59.720 rationality.

01:21:00.520 It's so much about feelings and so much about intuition.

01:21:03.520 Well, I, I understand what you said about, you know, she's looking for a way to feel

01:21:08.260 better about her life.

01:21:10.020 And there is a scene in the, in the movie that it confused me the way I felt it has her.

01:21:16.140 She's a nurse. 1.00

01:21:16.760 She stole drugs, uh, in the hospital and then puts on roller skates and is going through 0.77

01:21:22.880 the ICU on roller skates skates.

01:21:25.420 And she's totally joyful.

01:21:27.560 She's on drugs. 1.00

01:21:28.500 She's high, but she is smiling and she's laughing and you kind of get it.

01:21:33.940 I liked the way the film was done.

01:21:35.280 It's by Ron Howard.

01:21:36.220 I think if I didn't mention that, but if you kind of get, it's like, Oh my God, there it

01:21:42.060 is some joy for this poor woman who in every scene faces one struggle or another and, and

01:21:47.400 may often have a good attitude about it, but you don't, you don't see a lot of joy.

01:21:51.200 And it's like, it kind of shows you how the drugs can be an escape to joy, to happiness,

01:21:56.180 if only for a moment.

01:21:57.360 And of course the bitter irony is the come down after and the real effect of drugs on your

01:22:01.800 life is anything but joyful.

01:22:03.700 And, you know, I thought Amy Adams did a great job of taking us there.

01:22:09.180 Her physical transformation was shocking, right?

01:22:12.700 Amy Adams looked nothing like herself.

01:22:15.120 And I thought it was perfect because having seen this happen to, you know, someone close

01:22:20.160 to me, the physical transformation can be dramatic.

01:22:23.660 You know, the, the gray hair and the teeth and just the, the weight gain or extreme weight

01:22:31.060 loss one way or the other.

01:22:32.060 And I remember looking at my family member thinking she's in there, but where, where,

01:22:40.060 and, and if, if, and when I can get her back, what am I going to get?

01:22:46.280 You know, who, who will it be?

01:22:49.220 You know, do you ever have that feeling?

01:22:51.000 Oh yeah.

01:22:51.720 Yeah.

01:22:52.040 I mean, I, you, first of all, the person is always there, right?

01:22:55.620 And it's even when they're at the peak of their toughest moments, you know, the book,

01:23:01.820 sort of dramatizes the scene where, you know, mom has this, this overdose and I'm, I'm trying

01:23:07.480 to help her find a place to stay for the night.

01:23:09.280 And, you know, it's, it's not a totally perfect match with my life, but you know, there are

01:23:13.440 significant parts of it that are true.

01:23:15.740 And what I remember, sorry, sorry.

01:23:18.160 Yeah.

01:23:18.400 The movie dramatizes those parts.

01:23:20.820 Um, but fundamentally like they're, they're real and they're there.

01:23:26.480 Um, and what I remember most about that time of my life is actually not the stress of trying

01:23:36.140 to find mom a place to stay or sort of the uncertainty about what to do.

01:23:39.720 Um, it was that mom was still like mom most of the time, right?

01:23:45.180 She was still sort of her funny self.

01:23:47.700 You know, you pull up to this hotel and she looks at it's like, Oh, no, I really have to

01:23:52.160 stay in this dump. 0.95

01:23:53.720 Um, or, you know, you, you, you walk by, I mean, this is like one of the more crystal

01:23:59.760 memories of my life because it was like, again, it was like a scene out of a movie.

01:24:03.400 I remember there was like a guy actually shooting up in the parking lot.

01:24:07.740 Um, the, the hotel was just sort of depressing and decrepit in a way that was pretty, you

01:24:14.100 know, pretty, pretty hard to believe.

01:24:17.300 And, you know, we chose it because they had an open room and because it was cheap enough

01:24:21.220 for me to afford, I was still, you know, at that point, I didn't have a whole lot of

01:24:24.720 money.

01:24:26.140 Um, but you see, we, we, we walked by this guy, like doing drugs in his pickup truck and

01:24:30.820 mom's like, Oh, Hey, do you want to go say hi to Terry?

01:24:33.400 It's like, what?

01:24:34.080 You don't really know that person.

01:24:35.140 You know, she, she says, of course not.

01:24:36.920 Of course I don't know this person.

01:24:37.960 Right.

01:24:39.780 That's just who, that's like who she is.

01:24:41.700 Right.

01:24:41.920 Like this is how mom has always been.

01:24:46.960 And you're right.

01:24:47.700 Like she was always in there.

01:24:49.940 And I always just, as a kid wanted her, you know, desperately to sort of come out and

01:24:55.480 figure it out.

01:24:56.500 And of course there's a part of it where you feel inadequate yourself.

01:24:59.780 I don't know if you've, you've experienced this, but you wonder why.

01:25:03.400 Why you can't get that person who's in there all the time is because of something about

01:25:07.280 you, something you've done, something you failed to do.

01:25:10.380 So you're always worried about that and trying to modify your behaviors in such a way where

01:25:15.880 you don't trigger them.

01:25:16.780 And you get to get the, you know, the good person that you know is in there all the time.

01:25:20.100 And, um, but I think eventually most people just get to the point where they, they kind

01:25:25.500 of psychologically give up with somebody who's chronically addicted.

01:25:28.360 You know, I've talked to so many people about it since the book came out and you know, what,

01:25:35.720 what I, what I always, it's just so true and it's so consistent.

01:25:40.340 And I hear it so many times that I think it's, it's nearly a universal response is that everybody

01:25:45.580 eventually reaches a breaking point where they just start grieving for the person and

01:25:51.300 they lose all hope that the person can ever come back.

01:25:54.220 And that loss of hope, I think it's sort of a protective, it's like a psychologically

01:26:01.360 protective measure because you want to stop investing yourself emotionally in this idea

01:26:07.600 that this, this person can get better.

01:26:09.580 And of course, what, what's so crazy about that is I feel like all of us have gotten there

01:26:14.040 with, with mom and then it just changed and things got better.

01:26:18.920 And again, it's, it's one of those things where I, I truly, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a

01:26:25.220 practicing Christian and there, there is a part of me that wonders, is it just like an

01:26:29.260 act of God?

01:26:30.120 Is there just this moment where something supernatural happens?

01:26:35.240 Because that's the only way I can even try to explain it in my mind is eventually a switch

01:26:40.860 flipped that had never been able to, I'd never been able to flip before.

01:26:45.020 I've tried to flip it myself so many times before and I hadn't.

01:26:47.900 You know, people ask me actually about, about mom being clean is, you know, do you think

01:26:51.560 the book helped, right?

01:26:52.640 Do you think that, uh, the book made mom more sober or sort of at least opened up some lines

01:26:59.940 of communication and got her on the right path?

01:27:02.220 And I would love to say the answer is yes, but I don't think, I don't think it is.

01:27:05.840 You know, frankly, if I had known that when the book came out, mom would be, I think about

01:27:09.540 she was like two and a half years sober at that point, I probably wouldn't have published

01:27:12.600 it.

01:27:13.360 Because if anything, I think it's probably made it harder for mom to stay on the straight and 0.97

01:27:16.760 narrow, but to her credit, she has, um, you know, having all these stories out there

01:27:21.200 about you, it hasn't been easy.

01:27:22.740 Um, and I, I admire mom for kind of taking it on the chin. 0.99

01:27:27.220 Um, you know, there, there was actually a funeral for a family friend, not too long after the

01:27:32.820 book came out and, um, there were people posting about the book and whether, you know, I was

01:27:42.900 going to be there or sort of other people in the family were going to be there on Facebook.

01:27:46.760 And I think mom got on Facebook and said basically, yeah, I'm the drug addict in the book and I'll

01:27:52.440 be there.

01:27:52.840 And I, you know, there's, there's, there's, so anyway, long way of saying, I don't think

01:27:59.100 the book has been, you know, at least all the way positive.

01:28:03.120 Maybe there've been some positive components and good conversations that mom and I had.

01:28:07.020 That's definitely true, but it's, it's also just been very stressful.

01:28:10.440 And so I don't think I can take any credit for it.

01:28:13.040 Um, I think if there's anything, you know, that, that I could take even indirect credit for,

01:28:18.440 or it might be the grandkids, you know, when, when our son, Yoon was born, my sister's oldest

01:28:24.220 kid or sorry, my sister's youngest kid was, was a teenager at that point.

01:28:28.300 Um, and, and I think that, you know, having the relationship with her grandkids to work

01:28:34.400 towards and mom is just such a great grandma and the kids love her.

01:28:37.620 I think that was a really powerful thing and it's helped her a lot, but at a certain level,

01:28:43.500 I'm just trying to invent theories or explanations for, for a phenomenon that I can't really reasonably

01:28:51.960 explain.

01:28:53.040 Well, while you're, I know that mama wasn't the greatest mom to your mom, but she was a

01:28:58.320 great grandmother.

01:28:58.980 And so while your mom may not have had the best role model as a mom, she certainly got

01:29:04.640 a good role model and had to be a great grandma. 1.00

01:29:07.280 And, um, you know, you, you manifest that in both in the telling of both stories.

01:29:11.820 I mean, I love that scene they put in the movie of you with your mom in the hotel, because

01:29:16.560 I think when you're dealing with an addict for most of the time, you as the family member

01:29:21.940 go through this, if I could just, if I could just, and you're, you're deluding yourself

01:29:28.380 that if you just gave this money or offer this help or got her into this rehab or whatever,

01:29:32.800 you're going to get her over the bridge.

01:29:34.500 She's going to bridge back to sober and normal and, you know, not, not addicted.

01:29:39.140 And it takes years of doing that and failing for you to finally let go of if I could just

01:29:47.580 and learn to just not walk away, but take care of yourself.

01:29:53.100 And that's what happened in that scene in the movie where, you know, the, your Amy Adams

01:29:57.200 wanted the fictional you to stay with her when the alternative was going and making this

01:30:03.640 really important interview.

01:30:04.640 And if you had stayed with her, you would have missed this interview.

01:30:07.540 You would have missed the chance to change your life and you leave, you, you do it, which

01:30:13.200 is an empowering moment in the films.

01:30:15.060 I think most people dealing with addicts finally have to get to the point of letting go of it.

01:30:19.960 And, and ironically, it can help the addict, you know, it can help them reach rock bottom.

01:30:24.220 It could help them realize they have to help themselves or what's, what they're about to lose,

01:30:27.860 you know, that the, the family's not going to save them.

01:30:31.700 Um, and I think it's amazing.

01:30:33.620 I, having now covered you for a couple of years and followed you, I love that Beverly

01:30:38.780 is six years sober.

01:30:41.440 That's such a game changer for you, your family, your kids, all of them.

01:30:47.000 And I, I read that she said, um, the quote I read, I think it was your, your cousin who

01:30:52.560 wrote an article as a journalist about, about this and said, she said, I'm going to stand

01:30:56.160 proud when this movie comes out.

01:30:58.040 It's, it is what it is.

01:30:59.460 And I am who I am and I'm okay.

01:31:01.440 And it's helped us all grow.

01:31:04.020 You got to feel pretty good about that.

01:31:06.940 Yeah, I do.

01:31:08.080 I do.

01:31:08.960 Um, you know, when, when you, when you grow up in a tough environment and you see so many

01:31:16.760 of these, these social problems and they kind of surround you, there's a part, at least

01:31:22.680 of me that wondered like, is, is there just something wrong with us?

01:31:26.160 Right.

01:31:26.900 Is, is it, is it genetic?

01:31:29.600 Is it psychological?

01:31:31.060 Is it, you know, what, what makes this happen again and again?

01:31:38.260 And one of the things the book allowed me to do was take a much bigger view of this.

01:31:43.360 It wasn't just like, well, things were kind of crappy last year and they're crappy this

01:31:47.860 year.

01:31:48.160 And it seems like it's never going to change, but this ability to put the problems of our

01:31:52.820 family in this, this multi-generational context.

01:31:55.040 So like, you know, why are our families so traumatic?

01:31:58.100 You start to understand because that cycle of childhood trauma and chaos, it recreates

01:32:04.040 and replicates itself.

01:32:05.940 Um, you know, why was this the land of opportunity in the 1950s, but now it feels like a place

01:32:11.140 people are just desperate to get out of, you know, why is this addiction epidemic sort

01:32:15.480 of taking hold of our community, but specifically our family.

01:32:19.260 And I think kind of zooming out a little bit, which is what the book tried to do.

01:32:24.020 Um, obviously in the context of my own family did help us all understand these things a little

01:32:30.820 bit better and kind of start to appreciate the connections between what was going on,

01:32:36.040 not just in Mammal's life, but when Mammal was a childhood running or as a child running

01:32:40.940 from Jackson, Kentucky in the mid 1940s and how there was a through line, you know, 60,

01:32:48.640 70 years later to the way that I sort of instinctively react to conflict when a guy cuts me off, when

01:32:55.160 I'm driving my kids around.

01:32:57.400 And I think that, that context and that through line gave us a little bit more of an anchoring,

01:33:04.040 a little bit more of an appreciation and, and importantly, just led to a lot of conversations.

01:33:10.380 Um, you know, we never talked about this stuff.

01:33:13.740 Um, the book sort of forced that and forced it in an uncomfortable way.

01:33:18.640 So I do think if there is a positive for the, to the book, for my family, it's the, it's just

01:33:26.380 given us a lot to think about and chew on together.

01:33:28.760 And that's been a little cathartic sometimes, right?

01:33:30.880 It's like, you know, we actually talk about this stuff and get it out in the open and

01:33:35.040 even yell at each other a little bit.

01:33:36.920 It kind of feels better afterwards because you've at least talked about things that people are

01:33:41.400 thinking and feeling.

01:33:43.340 Um, and, and that, that is, that is something I appreciate about the book and the experience of

01:33:47.580 writing and publishing as it's, it's at least served as a forcing function in that way.

01:33:51.660 Absolutely.

01:33:52.320 It's, it's a bit of a cleansing process.

01:33:54.860 You mentioned the road rage.

01:33:56.220 I, I love, there's the line in the book that says hillbillies could go from zero to murderous

01:34:00.680 in a fucking heartbeat. 0.89

01:34:02.000 That's not cut off a hillbilly for the love of God.

01:34:06.820 This holiday season, when driving home from Thanksgiving, do not.

01:34:09.980 Yeah, yeah, no, no, really.

01:34:13.120 Um, yeah, my, my wife sort of recognized, you know, when we were dating, she recognized this

01:34:17.500 impulse in me where, you know, if somebody cut you off, it's like a challenge to your

01:34:21.320 manhood and you have to go cut them off and then, you know, threaten to get out of your

01:34:25.100 car and beat their ass. 0.86

01:34:26.220 And, you know, it's just one of these things where, you know, you can't do that, right?

01:34:30.140 When you've got a family that depends on you and two kids, it's, it's understandable that

01:34:34.120 that's your instinct, that that's what you grew up around, that you just can't do it.

01:34:37.060 And that, that recognition has been pretty powerful.

01:34:40.040 Well, not only that, but your wife's got this killer career who I mentioned her earlier, 1.00

01:34:43.940 but Usha clerked for Brett Kavanaugh when he was on the court of appeals and then moved

01:34:47.920 on to a clerkship after that with chief justice, John Roberts.

01:34:52.160 Um, so she's pretty accomplished and impressive too. 1.00

01:34:56.840 Is that, is that humbling?

01:34:58.280 What's that like?

01:35:00.380 Yeah, you know, it's, it's, it's definitely, um, kind of.

01:35:07.060 I know that I'd say it's humbling, you know, Usha, I guess, I guess it is like, Usha

01:35:13.820 definitely brings me back to earth a little bit.

01:35:16.940 And if I, if I maybe get a little too cocky or a little too proud, I just remind myself

01:35:20.440 that she's, she's way more accomplished than I am.

01:35:23.480 Um, you know, what, what, what is interesting about, about my life and just about, about,

01:35:31.240 you know, Usha, um, as part of it is that, you know, somebody pointed out that there's,

01:35:38.740 there's this weird way in which like every phase of your life, you have this like strong

01:35:44.240 female that you could attach yourself to, right? 0.98

01:35:46.720 It was your mammal, it was your sister, it was your aunt, and now it's Usha.

01:35:50.700 And I think that's probably a pretty critical insight that like, I'm, I'm one of those,

01:35:55.000 I'm one of those guys who really benefits from having like a sort of powerful female 0.99

01:36:01.160 voice in his left shoulder saying, don't do that, do do that.

01:36:04.340 Uh, it just, it, it, it just, it just is important.

01:36:08.020 Um, and, you know, Usha is just people, you know, I think look at her credentials and think,

01:36:16.860 oh, she's, you know, she's, she's, she's so impressive. 0.69

01:36:18.820 And just, I think people don't realize how just brilliant she is.

01:36:24.380 Um, you know, she is one of these people who, first of all, she reads books like faster

01:36:32.300 than anybody that I've ever seen read a book.

01:36:34.340 Um, you know, she can read like a thousand page book in a few hours sitting and just 0.99

01:36:38.460 absorb the information incredibly.

01:36:40.160 And she, you know, she's one of these people where, you know, Amy Chu actually once said

01:36:43.620 this about Usha and it's so true.

01:36:45.240 It's like a perfect crystallization of how she thinks that, you know, Usha can take an

01:36:51.140 incredibly complex set of facts and information and details and just absorb them on first reading

01:36:59.420 or on first hearing it.

01:37:00.680 And then if you ask her about it, she can spit it out in a way that makes more sense

01:37:05.360 coming out than it actually did going in.

01:37:07.380 Right.

01:37:07.540 She can sort of like harmonize information faster than anybody that I've ever met.

01:37:14.240 She must be terrifying to argue with. 0.97

01:37:16.700 Oh my God.

01:37:17.380 It's terrible.

01:37:18.060 It's, it's just terrible.

01:37:19.580 Uh, she uses, you know, so much facts and logic.

01:37:22.500 And I just constantly, I'm like, no, no, no, no.

01:37:24.360 Facts and logic.

01:37:24.840 You can't do that.

01:37:25.900 I know.

01:37:26.960 That is tough in a spouse, JD.

01:37:28.880 I have to feel for you there.

01:37:30.660 Yeah.

01:37:31.140 It's, it's very, it's very tough.

01:37:33.360 Well, can I ask you about that?

01:37:34.260 Cause I am thinking about when I was thinking about you and your life and I love, I love

01:37:38.480 that you're happily married.

01:37:39.300 You've got your two boys now and you know, you move back to Ohio and you're doing venture

01:37:44.820 capital for companies that are not in Silicon Valley that are sort of outside and more fly

01:37:50.560 over country.

01:37:51.200 I like that.

01:37:52.040 Of course, all the rest of us hope you run for office someday, which I know you told me

01:37:55.360 last time, maybe we'll see, but what do you, what do we have to feel hopeful about?

01:38:02.060 Right.

01:38:02.340 It's, this is right around Thanksgiving.

01:38:03.840 So what are we, what are we feeling good about when it comes to our country and ourselves?

01:38:08.280 First of all, I'm one of these people who believes that to actually solve problems,

01:38:14.040 you have to be pretty honest with yourself about what the problems are.

01:38:18.420 That's sort of the first and most important step.

01:38:21.100 And when I think about what I'm most optimistic at a national level, it's even if you're not

01:38:25.720 happy that Biden was elected, or even if you are really, really frustrated as, as a lot

01:38:32.620 of folks are, and, you know, to be clear, I didn't vote for Biden.

01:38:36.160 I voted for Trump.

01:38:37.200 Um, I don't think that we're having the same dumb conversations about the problems that

01:38:47.240 we were 30 years ago.

01:38:49.000 Uh, there is a recognition and, and, you know, like I know a lot of people don't like AOC.

01:38:53.760 A lot of people don't like Bernie Sanders.

01:38:55.260 A lot of people don't like Tucker Carlson, who's become a good friend of mine, but those

01:39:00.360 people I think are at least circling around the fact that you do have real problems in

01:39:05.440 this country, that you do have an opioid problem.

01:39:07.560 That's killing tens of thousands of people.

01:39:09.140 You do have the decline of the American manufacturing sector in a way that's, that's caused a lot of

01:39:15.040 hopelessness and a lot of joblessness.

01:39:16.480 You do have these multi-generational cycles of family poverty and trauma and abuse.

01:39:21.940 I think there was this weird conceit that we had that things were just getting better

01:39:27.460 indefinitely.

01:39:28.060 It was the end of history that if there was any real problem in America, we could solve

01:39:32.060 it with a little redistribution from rich to poor.

01:39:35.040 And I at least think that most people on frankly, both the left and the right recognize that's

01:39:40.180 not happening and that we're actually making real progress in understanding the nature of

01:39:47.200 the challenges.

01:39:47.800 So I'm optimistic about the fact that we're just being honest with ourselves about the real

01:39:51.540 problems that exist in the country, at least more so than we were, uh, a couple, a couple

01:39:56.580 of decades ago.

01:39:58.260 Um, I, I'm, I'm optimistic that, you know, we just went through in some ways, a very traumatic

01:40:08.780 moment of American history, a really tough election, a pandemic killed a lot of people,

01:40:15.460 the economic fallout from the pandemic and some of our response to it, that has caused

01:40:20.440 a lot of misery, but we're still basically here, right?

01:40:24.360 People are still getting together with their families.

01:40:26.420 Mostly.

01:40:27.020 I know some people, you know, are, are, are, are being cautious and I understand that.

01:40:31.380 Um, but there's, they're still finding ways to be together, uh, to talk to one another,

01:40:37.060 where, you know, children are still, um, you know, I, I think of them as, as, you know,

01:40:42.760 it's trite, but it's the most important thing that children are still being born and raised.

01:40:47.040 And, you know, we have a, a, a next generation of Americans that's coming online.

01:40:52.580 And I think that's, that's just, it's hard not to be optimistic about that.

01:40:57.280 And, you know, as, as tough as it's been, the country is actually still standing, which

01:41:03.200 is, which is sort of crazy. We've, we've survived most of the way through a pandemic.

01:41:07.700 We appear to have vaccines that are coming online.

01:41:10.420 The economic damage has been severe.

01:41:12.420 The social damage has been severe, but it hasn't wiped the country off the face of the

01:41:16.620 earth. And I, I guess the way that I put it is, is I think we've shown ourselves to be a

01:41:20.240 pretty resilient country. So even though there are a lot of problems, there's also a lot of

01:41:24.100 resilience out there. And I take some solace in that.

01:41:26.780 I know that, uh, you, you wrote in the book, I want people to know what it feels like to

01:41:31.920 nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it, um, to see sort of what the other possibilities

01:41:40.100 are, right? Like you were one of those people, you know, of what you speak, you lived it and

01:41:46.160 you, you managed to get yourself out even without a lot of role models, which hopefully now you

01:41:50.560 will be. Hopefully now the kids sitting in their neighborhoods and Middletown or what have

01:41:56.360 you will say when asking the question, why try, why try? Because JD Vance, because there

01:42:03.800 is a way forward because maybe, maybe I could be at Yale law school or in the Marine Corps

01:42:08.060 or married to Usha, someone like her with kids and a brilliant future ahead of me. Maybe I could,

01:42:15.880 maybe notwithstanding what people are telling me. I could, I don't know, JD. I think we need

01:42:23.140 more of that and more of the possibility of agency and, and less of the, you're downtrodden,

01:42:30.540 you're a victim and there's no way forward. And I'm, it's one of the reasons I'm doing the show.

01:42:35.240 And it's one of the reasons why I find your message so super empowering. Um, last question,

01:42:40.520 do I, do I hear you offering this from the bully pulpit one day? You were a little down on the

01:42:46.440 possibility. You were down on politicians and I know you've, you've been scolded for being too down

01:42:50.700 on that because you don't want to discourage good people from going into running for office, but

01:42:54.420 realistically, cause I, I don't want you on the couch. I don't want you to, you know, retreat to

01:43:01.580 that instinct just in case Usha is too busy with her law job to get you off of there. Like, are you

01:43:07.160 going to get out there? Cause we need people like you. Well, I think I'll continue to talk a lot about

01:43:12.900 stuff that matters and try to be involved in the policy conversation on the right. You know, I've,

01:43:17.080 done a fair amount of work there, try to encourage your different folks to think about certain issues

01:43:21.980 in, in, in different and hopefully innovative ways. I mean, to, to, to be honest, the thing about

01:43:28.020 politics, uh, and I'll, I'll just, I'll be very direct is, um, I'm feeling a little selfish right

01:43:34.440 now. And, and what I mean is that, you know, I, I woke up this morning, um, it was up late last

01:43:42.140 night. And so I had both the boys this morning by myself, we made breakfast together. You know,

01:43:47.060 we played together, you know, you and the toddler told me a lot of goofy, ridiculous jokes,

01:43:52.300 and I'm just not quite ready to give up on that yet. And I think that, you know, there is a reason

01:43:59.040 that people call politics sacrifice. Uh, you got to spend a lot of time away from your family. You've

01:44:03.800 got to, got to work on things. And I think it's, you know, I I've come around to the view, at least

01:44:07.760 that a lot of people do it for noble reasons. Some people don't, but a lot of people do it for

01:44:12.080 noble reasons. Um, so I'll tell you the same thing I told you a few years ago, which is definitely

01:44:16.760 not, not, you know, something I'd rule out sometime down the road, but you know, right, right now it's

01:44:24.040 like the only thing I really want, I didn't care about law school. I didn't care about having a nice

01:44:28.480 job. I didn't care about making money, certainly not writing a big book, but the only thing I really

01:44:32.900 wanted is, is the life that I have right now, like getting up and, you know, knowing that I'll

01:44:38.780 be able to give my kids the things that I didn't have and knowing that they look at their mom and

01:44:44.280 dad as a rock, that they'll always be there for them. And just getting to spend that time with them,

01:44:50.540 you know, spending time with mom who's been sober for six years, having, you know, my sister and my

01:44:55.600 aunt build a relationship with my kids, like all of those things I've selfishly want to continue for at

01:45:01.500 least a little while before I think about politics. And, you know, once, once I get to the point where

01:45:05.900 I feel like I've had at least enough of that, that I've gotten my fill, then maybe that's a

01:45:12.180 different conversation then. But, but for now I'm, I'm sort of, unfortunately, maybe to you,

01:45:17.700 content to be a little selfish and just enjoy this while I can.

01:45:22.180 Well, you're young, so it's okay. I'll, I'll allow it, but don't, don't be too selfish for too long.

01:45:29.060 I, cause I, everything you've gone through, everything your family's gone through,

01:45:33.700 they, they make me believe the line from Hillbilly Elegy that

01:45:37.100 hillbillies are the toughest goddamn people on this earth. And we, we need more people like that 1.00

01:45:43.140 with thick skins and a tough attitude to, to take on some of these battles that we all want fought.

01:45:48.260 Listen, do me a favor, send my love to your family. And we, Lindsay, who I met and loved.

01:45:53.740 And, um, just know that as always, I'm rooting for you.

01:45:58.020 Thanks, Megan. I appreciate it.

01:46:02.440 Today's episode was brought to you in part by Truthfinder. Start your search today. To learn

01:46:07.520 more, go to www.truthfinder.com slash Kelly. Want to tell you that as we head into this

01:46:14.940 Thanksgiving holiday, I'm thankful for a lot of things. Very, very thankful for my family,

01:46:20.560 all of whom are doing well and healthy. That's a blessing, especially my mom who she's getting up

01:46:26.560 there in the years and, uh, she's great. And I'm going to be seeing her and I'm just so,

01:46:30.800 so grateful. I miss her. I haven't seen my mom in over a year, in almost a year and a half now.

01:46:38.920 I'm going to see her. I'm not going to be in New York. And, uh, I can't wait to put my arms around

01:46:43.740 her and give her a big hug. And I'm also thankful for all of you. I'm thankful for the folks who are

01:46:48.660 subscribing to this podcast and listening and helping to make us consistently at the top of

01:46:53.460 the podcast charts, even though we're just a little baby podcast. We're just like, we're in

01:46:57.440 our infancy, but we're crushing it. Thanks to you guys. And, uh, I know there's a lot of choices

01:47:02.080 out there. You don't have to be downloading and subscribing, but you, you are, and it's wonderful

01:47:06.120 to see. I love that we're having these experiences together and we're learning together. So thank you

01:47:10.860 for that. And if you haven't already done that, then go ahead now. Now's a good time to subscribe

01:47:14.320 and download and rate five stars and review. And, uh, before we go, I want to tell you that

01:47:19.200 next up on the pod on Friday will be Shelby Steele and his son, Eli Steele, who have just come out with

01:47:25.300 a new movie called what killed Michael Brown. And they're taking a hard look at sort of what's

01:47:31.760 really going on in communities like Ferguson, Missouri and within the black community. And they

01:47:37.920 also look at that Michael Brown case in particular, but I want to tell you in advance that there was a

01:47:41.900 very powerful moment, very powerful moment in this interview that surprised us all. It had, I was

01:47:48.900 that night. I was like, Doug, you're not going to believe what happened on this podcast. It was really

01:47:53.320 moving and kind of profound. So that's all I'm going to say, cause it's a tease. And I do want you to

01:47:58.580 tune in and hear it and experience it for yourselves. Uh, but trust me, it doesn't disappoint. So have a

01:48:04.140 wonderful holiday and I'll talk to you on Friday. Thanks for listening to the Megan Kelly show. 0.93

01:48:09.620 No BS, no agenda and no fear. The Megan Kelly show is a devil may care media production in

01:48:16.880 collaboration with red seat ventures.

The Megyn Kelly Show - November 25, 2020

J.D. Vance on Trump, Addiction, and Family ｜ Ep. 29

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