i'm happy to throw my reference

librarian at the library of congress all day here, the library of congress, national book festival. we are recognizing and celebrating the importance of reading and authors and books. the library. congress makes it seem easy to do this every year, but the truth is, the national book festival is a huge it's a huge financial undertaking, and it has been made possible by generous support from our sponsors. you can see who they are in your program and on the video monitors around convention center. but we can't take for granted

that this event will continue exist. so i would ask you to consider making a contribution right now, using your cell phone, you can send a text to a one time gift that will be added to your mobile phone bill. the details are on the screen on the back of your program. and as soon as you finish making that contribution, please silence your cell phone and now onto the main event i'd like to introduce names co-chair of the national book festival, david rubenstein and. hey, we're we're very honored to have one of the best selling authors in the country with us today, a person who wrote his first book and already in the new york times best seller list. how many people here have read the book wow? okay. how many people are going to read the book? okay. how many people are here by the book today? okay.

our special gas is j.d. vance. and why don't you ask him to come up? j.d.. so thank you very much for coming. let me give people who may not know your background a little introduction. j.d. is a native of middletown ohio. okay, and a graduate of the middletown high school. he then went into marines for four years, served in iraq. and came back, went to ohio state and finished it in two years, then went to yale law school, graduated there as member of the yale law journal, clerked for a federal judge for a year. he is now in the investment world based in part in washington, dc. he is married to a former

classmate from yale law school who is here somewhere maybe on our way with bringing two month old son. so if you see a two month old son somewhere, that's his son. so let's start there. surely when you started to write this book in your wildest imagination, you could not have thought that you were going to write a new york times bestseller in your first book, or did, you know, i certainly didn't think that i would. so was it where did the idea for the book come from? well, it actually started in law school and really the genesis was that i was very interested in some of the the concepts and the ideas i wrote about in the book, in most specifically, this question of upward mobility in the united states and at yale, we had to write basically this thesis by the end of third year in order to graduate and. i really wanted to write it about sort of the legal and policy implications of social mobility in the united states or the thereof, and the more that i

started to talk through idea and the people that were advising me, the more that especially my my, my primary adviser, a woman named amy chua, who herself is a pretty successful author. she continues the author of tiger. she's the author of battle hymn of the tiger mother. and she encouraged me and more to to bring my experiences to bear because she thought that i could write something that was both hopefully intellectually interesting, but also personally and emotionally powerful. and as i as i continued to write the book, i was honestly a little resistant to that. at first. i didn't like the idea of opening up my personal life and telling all these personal stories. but the more that i wrote, the more that i realized that to the degree that i had a unique contribution, it was that i understood these things from the inside as opposed to just as an academic, right? so you had the idea of writing a book. how long did it take you to write the book? well, i was i was always working on it part time. so i always had another job while i was writing the book.

i think that it probably took me about two and a half years, so i started writing it. yeah, towards the middle of 2013 and i finish towards the end of 2015. so you write in longhand, you do on a computer or yet. no, i on my computer. yeah. my handwriting is absolutely terrible. all right. and so as you're writing it, did you have any publisher lined up or did you just say, i'll write it and then i'll get a publisher? yes. so this is interesting in some ways, exemplifies something that i really write about in the book this idea of social capital and how social connections can have these really important benefits. so because of amy, when i started to really think about making this into a book project, you know, she okay, let me introduce you to these people that i know in the publishing world. and so one of the people she introduced me to is this this woman who eventually became my and really good friend, tina bennett. and as i quickly learned, when you an idea and you have somebody like tina really advocating for it the publishing, finding publisher is is is relatively easy and that's

that's sort of what happened with me is that the hard part for me was getting into the agent publishing world and then once i was there, it wasn't hard to find the publisher sometimes the first time authors say, you know, this shouldn't be that hard to write a book. and then about halfway through they say, how i get out of this project. so were in that category. did you ever want to abandon it? yeah, i definitely didn't want to abandon it. if my wife is here, she can probably tell you how miserable i was about that 50% way through. through the writing process. yeah. i mean, for me, what was so tough is once i got about halfway through the book, you know, obviously it was to late to give up. i couldn't just stop writing it, but, you know, writing an additional 40, 50,000 words just seemed so imposing. and i realized then what what i didn't realize going into the project is that i probably had about a 10 to 1 ratio of of words typed to words that made it into the final manuscript. and so i just didn't realize what a long slog it would be

until i was about halfway through it. and i definitely thought to myself, would it be possible to get out of this? so your publisher had some confidence with the initial print run was 10,000? that's right so 10,000 isn't 500,000, but 10,000 is good for a first author at what? when the book came out, did people say, hey, there aren't enough copies out anymore? we have to go print more? yes. so this happened relative hively quickly after the book came out, i want to say, you know, two or three weeks maybe there was an interview i did with magazine, the american conservative, that went viral, as they say, online a lot of people were sharing it on twitter and facebook and so forth. and i went, go check my amazon ranking, which, you know, those of you who've written a book will know that your amazon ranking is a way to check in real time how your book is actually selling. so there was a point in my life where i was checking it like obsessively, probably every seven or 8 seconds and i go to

check my my amazon ranking and it says, you know, like book is out of stock will ship in about a week. and i realized then that oh wow, we don't have enough books that are out there. and so that's when they really started to turn on the proverbial presses. how many have now been printed? you just say so. don't know how many total are in print. i know that hard copies we've sold just under a million and it's it's a little over a million if you count digital copies and audio and all that stuff. so the title. okay. yeah. now the title very often authors don't come up with a title right away. and was that your idea for the title and or where did it come from? yeah, it came through a conversation with my agent. this this woman, tina. you know, i really wanted the word hillbilly to be in the in the book title. and the reason i wanted that word to be in the title is because i thought it captured both the sort of particular kind of subsegment that i was trying to write about.

but i also thought that it captured obviously this this sort of interesting insider outsider dynamic that exists in my family where my grandma would say, you know, we're hillbillies. we're a lot of college, other hillbillies. but if anybody else calls you a hillbilly, then you have to punch them in the nose. and so it was this sort of interesting word that it always had a really textured meaning. as i grew up. and so i wanted that word to be in the title. but elegy was something that it really had to take a while before i was one comfortable all with making it. hillbilly elegy and i think that was tina's idea and. i actually pair elegy with hillbilly, and there were a couple of reasons for that. so now as the book has become so well known, you are reasonably well can you go to a restaurant without people asking for autographs or selfies or that hasn't come to be a problem yet. it depends where i'm at, so i get noticed, you know. so back in columbus, i get noticed a pretty fair amount. i get noticed sometimes in d.c. i certainly get noticed a lot back in eastern kentucky or in

southwestern ohio. but, you know, like i was in nashville, i don't know, a week, week and a half ago, and i didn't get noticed once there. so, you know, it if you have a record, you have to make a record there, i think. yeah, that's right. i think so. so now, what has been the reaction of your family and many of the family secrets that many people really want revealed about themselves? everybody has family secrets. you seem to reveal every family secret. what was reaction of your family to this? well i didn't reveal every family secret. i have to material for a second book. yeah. you know, it's interesting i in talking to my family about revealing some of these secrets i think that that i've noticed there's been a slight tone from when i started to write the book to where it is now. and i think that were much more open about spilling the family history on the pages of a book that no one expected anybody to. but i think i think now now that we're at the number of copies

we've sold and people are talking about the book, there's maybe a little bit more sensitive but yeah, you know some people say, look, it's in the family. we shoot near the family's dirty laundry. some people, i think, appreciate that it was an important and worthwhile story to tell. some people come down a little bit in the middle. so do any of them say. well, how come i don't get any royalties from? this they don't say that to you yet. i haven't gotten that yet. but maybe. maybe i will now, especially since this is on c-span. okay, so let's talk about the book itself. i have read it and enjoyed it a great deal. i would say. i think its success is due to three things i think go through each of those three. one is i think the writing style was very crisp, very clear, very to the point, not a lot of excess verbiage. second, your personal story is extraordinary, which is the kind of thing that it's almost like a novel. it's hard to believe it was true. and then third, the impact the the relationship between what's going on in the country, the

opioid crisis problem of unemployment in certain parts in the country. so let's go through each of these first. all right. first, the writing style where you a gifted writer in college and law, where did you get this? i would i would call very, very clear writing style. yeah, i think definitely law school helped a lot in that regard. one of the things they teach you in law school was you don't write a lot with a lot of excess verbiage. try to be clear and concise, direct, but also engaging and, you know, thinking about how to how to as a lawyer cut out some of the excess words was definitely helpful. but, you know, it's interesting you ask if i was talented writer, i'm always i mean, i don't necessarily think that i am a talented writer, but it's because there was this eighth grade biography, you that i had to write. and when my fam my family still has this eighth grade biography and it's interesting because it's obviously very similar to what's in hillbilly elegy and they'll pass it around and go, oh, j.d., you know, he was such

a great writer even when he was 14 years old. and then when my wife picks up that same thing and reads it, she'll go, your family's not being honest with you. you're not that kind of writer. you're 14 years old. so i don't know. i do think that law school helped. i mean, there's the story that i tell in the book where the first big writing assignment i had in law school, i handed it in and i was pretty proud of it. and this this law school professor it back and circled this big section and said, this is a vomit of sentences as a paragraph. so they give you asked him if i was a talented writer, he'd probably say no. so now today, having had a first book that's very successful, normally publishers will go to the author and say, you are ernest hemingway? you are great. let's have another book right away. and the sooner you get it out, the better. so surely they are after you to write another book. are you thinking of writing one right now? yeah. so? so definitely thinking about writing another book. i think i eventually will. you know, my view on this is that it's not that i'm trying to undertake tomorrow.

oh, so if i write another book it'll be a couple of from now as opposed to immediately. and but eventually there will be a paperback edition. this. that's right. and will you edit it or change it a little bit or you just go out the same way? i think i'll probably go out at the same way. i would like to add a chapter just to contextualize some of the political salience that a lot of people have attributed to the book, because, of course, you know, when i started writing this in 2013, i had idea that it would be attached to 2016 election. and in this really, you know, frankly to me, pretty bizarre way. so i think would like to write at least a little bit about that because i haven't talked a ton about that. but otherwise the rest of the book will stay the same before the paperback comes out or maybe after the paperback comes out. there is supposed to be a movie. ron howard is, i guess a movie or maybe directing it as well. who is going to play you. i don't know. the thing about this is that, you know, i want it to be

somebody who's good looking but not so good looking that people are disappointed when they actually meet me. right. okay. but but but, yeah, i this is the question that i have real, real, real trouble meeting because know who really fits into that, you know not too warm. not too cold. can i'm sure you'll find somebody. let's go to the second part of why i think the book is so successful and that is your life story. so for those who may not have read the book and, i don't want to give away everything in it, but give away a fair bit. where are you? she was born in middletown, southwestern oil. right. and your mother and biological father married at the time? they were okay. and did they get divorced shortly thereafter? very shortly after, i think i was maybe a year old when they got divorced. but before memory or so, your biological mother was raising you for the early years. right. and then you have a very close relationship with your maternal grandfather and, maternal grand mother. right.

and what was their name that you call them? i call them mama and papa. their names were bonnie and jim. and is that a hillbilly type word, the address of unique to your family? no, i think that it's definitely pretty common in the broader culture. it's not exclusive learned to, you know, sort of hillbilly culture, but it's definitely something that people from that region of the country disproportionately, they call their grandparents mama, papa. now people who might live on the east coast would say, well, what's hillbilly about ohio? that's the center of the united states. sure. but you might describe that your roots and your family's roots were really from kentucky. describe how you came to high on your family, came ohio. yes. so they were part of this really massive migration from places like eastern kentucky, east tennessee, west virginia to the midwest. right. and i think they move they also brought a lot of their their cultural attributes with them. and so, again, even though my family in southwestern ohio, you know, we traveled back eastern kentucky a lot because i spent so time with my grandparents. i spent a lot my formative years

in eastern kentucky and always felt that that was sort of our real homeland. and it's interesting that that's a pretty common attitude. you know, folks, there are country music songs about this there are a lot of stories really similar to mine where people who grew up in the industrial midwest grew up in michigan or indiana or ohio, felt like their real was back in west virginia because they spent so much of their lives back in those places. and that's where their family was really from okay, so you're growing up and you have a step sister or a full sister? yes, sister. yes. so, yeah different dads, same mom. okay. and so both of you are being raised by your single mother. yep. and how did she support herself. yeah. so you know, mom, i remember because me nurse sometimes i'm after, you know, maybe i was eight or nine or so. so for a couple of years she was a nurse. and actually, as i write about in the book, those were pretty good times economically know we weren't struggling economically during that period our lives before then.

you know, i don't know. i think that you know she she worked odd jobs as my grandparent helped out a little bit and then you know certainly of the stories in the book is that you know after her mom no longer working in nursing, you know, were pretty tough for for our family economically. and i think more important, they were more importantly, they were they were tough socially. there were a lot of issues. so your mother as you write in your book, was married or had male relationships with people who living with her by four or five or six different times. so wasn't that kind of disconnect hurting to you to see a different man in the house all the time or. yeah, it definitely an unstable childhood. it from the perspective of people who were who were coming in and out of her. and i think that, you know, i didn't realize until i was older what effect that was having on me? i didn't like it when i was a kid i certainly didn't like that you know, i'd befriend this guy or i feel like this guy was starting to become a bit of a father and then all of a sudden he was out of our lives. so i knew that was common. i knew a lot of my friends from back home were going through the

same thing and that none of them liked it either. i didn't quite appreciate effect that maybe it was having on me until i was older and sort of look back on these things. at some point. as you write in your book, you develop, you redevelop the relationship, your biological father, you went and actually live with him for a while, but that was not as pleasant experience as you had thought it would be. is that correct? well, it was pleasant in the sense that, you know, he really had his life together. he was living with my stepmom. they had they had a really, i think, a happy home life. and in some ways, i was looking for that. i was searching for that family stability. i think it was in the eighth grade or so when this happened. but i also realized that that i had become incredibly attached to my grandma. right. because even i was living with mom as a kid, even when my sister and i were living with mom as kids and we spent a ton of time with our grandparents and his mom sort of struggled with problems. we more we spent more and more time with our grandparent. and so there was this real weird moment where i living with my dad and i recognized that he a sort of a normal home as people

understood it, but i just felt desperate to get back to my grandma's house and to live with her. and that's eventually what i did. you know, i don't think i realized until that moment that in my own mind and in my own heart, mama would of become my my chief caretaker. so you live with your biological father for a while? wasn't as happy as an experience you had hoped. you then moved in with your maternal grandmother and grandfather right? and then when you were very capable was he had passed away. it passed away. now talk about that. he was very close to you. so the shock of his passing away. how did that affect you? well, i mean it affected me, i think, in all the ways that death of a parent affects young kid. you know, people of the situation growing up because of the revolving door of father figures and so forth. you, papa was the closest thing that i had to a dad during those formative years know he was the person who took care of things. he was the person who made sure that we had all the things that kids need and also, you know, he

was just an emotional support for me and my sister and my grandmother. so, you know, i always had this sense that if papa was around, things would be taken care of. you know, he was always the person who was calmest when family drama was happening. he was the person who never lost his temper, who never flew off the handle, even mama as much. i loved her. she. she had a temper and people didn't. so i think that it affected me in a number of different and negative ways, but the way that it affected me most of all is really what came after. you know, i understood as a kid very instinctively that papa was, the glue that held the family together and, i realized it in a non instinctive and very obvious way when he there just what, you know, just what would happen. so you lived with your mother for a while but then at one point she. as violent and with you and very difficult to deal with and she had a drug problem as you were writing the book and what was it

you recount in the book? an experience where in fact, the police came and saved you from your mother? is that fair? yeah. you know, i think about this story a lot because, you know, i wonder you know, i was 12 or 13 when this happened. i always wonder if if maybe it wasn't quite as dangerous as i remember. i think in part that's because i'm a lot closer to mom now. and i think in some ways people, you know, they try to remember things in a way that that, you know, reflect on on people that they love. and i certainly love my mom and we're doing pretty well in our relationship now. but, you know, yeah, you know, i was terrified. i mean, i thought that we were going to die and i thought that mom was going to try to kill us and so and this was in a car. the car was traveling fast. and she was certainly didn't seem especially stable. and so i got out of the car and ran and eventually found this woman who called the police. and the police came and arrested

mom. and she was yeah, she was charged with domestic violence. so, you know, that was obviously a pretty traumatic moment. know there's there's no other way to cut it after that happened, did you go live with your grandmother or did go back and live with your mother after that incident? well, for a time, i lived with my grandmother. you know, again, i was always living mama for weeks or months at a time even when things were going really well. and so it wasn't that different of. it wasn't that much of a departure from our normal routine. but yeah, it wouldn't live with mama for a little while and then eventually wouldn't move back in with mom. but again, that was sort of the way that things went with us. right? and when you were growing up? you know, when i was growing up, i didn't have the experiences that you did. but i wouldn't have the ability to totally recall what happened when i was 12 or ten or nine, i a how do you recall that? and did you have documents or how did how did you know these so well. yeah, well, i think this is where, you know, being able to rely on your family really

helps, right? so, you know, a lot of this stuff i tried to cross-reference as much as possible with my aunt or my sister or my my dad. you know what, happened here. this is sort of you know, here's the draft, here's the manuscript of particular story. you know, what am i out? what am i missing? whatever. i quite remember correctly and i do think, you know, going back to how the family reacted to the book, that's one of the reasons they reacted pretty well, was because i tried to make them part of the writing process. this wasn't just sort of from my memory onto the page. i really tried to make it a family memoir in that sense. but but as i as i said in the introduction, you know, i'm sure that that that things aren't perfect, but they're certainly, you know, how i how i remember them. and i think that they're there are pretty, pretty well documented, at least as much as you can with what is primarily a memoir. now, as you go through in the book, you point out, obviously, that your grandmother died as well, must have been fairly traumatic. you were where you were living with her at the time that she died or. no, i was in the marine corps at the time.

so this is just a few months before i left for iraq in 2005. and, you know, you were with her when you were getting ready when. you graduated high school. you were living with her. that's right. no. so i lived with her for almost all of high school and left for the marines from, you know, from her house. so you were filling out applications. you write in your book for her, for college and then either you thought you couldn't afford the college or you weren't sure you were ready for it. what was the reason you didn't go to college right out of high school? well, it was both definitely i didn't feel ready for it. i thought, you know, i had at least enough maturity at the time to recognize that this maybe was my one real opportunity to have, you know, any anything in, the way of of a good job or a good career that if i screwed this college up, that would be pretty much it. that would be me, my one chance. and so, you know, because of that, i didn't want to take it for granted. and i thought that i was in this position just as a person, where if i went to college, i felt like i would have would have taken advantage of it. you know, the cost part of it was definitely a significant as

well. you know, it wasn't just the cost. i mean, obviously, you know, i knew that have to take out all these loans and we sort of knew that there were these, you know, pell grants and things like that that i'd be able to take advantage of. but even with that, i knew that it would be a pretty significant amount of debt to it incur, but it was more actually the logistical side of it that made college seem imposing. you know, if you think about like filling out the financial aid paperwork, you know, what is what is your dad's annual income? what is your address? i mean, at that time, i hadn't spoken to my legal father six or seven years going. finding that information would have required a certain amount of detective work. you know, there were sort of pages to sign off on these massive loans. and it was my grandma who graduated from high school with me. and it just seemed to really imposing and in some ways a little terrifying to go through this entire administrative process that no one really in my family had gone through and. you know, i didn't feel comfortable doing it myself. so you just said, i'll walk down

the street and go to the marine recruiter. is that what happened there? well, yeah, that's i think, a similar version of of what happened. i mean, at that point. so there are six, six kids in my generation, grandchildren, my two older cousins, my sister and my two younger cousins. and of the six of us, three of us enlist in the marine corps. and both of the older cousins had. so i, i, i, i was encouraged pretty strongly. my cousin rachel, who was in the marine corps, she said, you know, if you're worried about how you're going to pay school and more importantly, you're worried about whether you're ready for college, you should just go join the marine corps like be great for you. you're you know, you'll get get out of town. you'll see some stuff. you'll gain some financial independence. and you should you should really go and think about doing that. okay. so you signed up for the marine corps. did your family tell you that was a good idea? your mother, your. well, you know, it's definitely a patrick stick community and a patriotic family. so people were proud of me, but they were not especially happy

that i had chosen, you know, remember, this is this is i guess, signed up at 23. we had just invaded iraq. we had been involved in afghanistan for a little while. there was definitely some really apprehension, justifiably so, about what joined marine corps meant, what i was getting myself into. and mama especially reacted very negatively. you know, i think in some ways she framed my decision to go to the marine corps instead of college, you know, almost as a betrayal. you're going off and leaving me. you're leaving me to take care of myself. you could hurt. and i think was obviously, you know, very hard. ultimately, she understood why i needed to do it. all right. so you went to basic training and. what was that like? did you have any fear you couldn't get through basic training? no, i was never afraid that i couldn't get through. i maybe when i was in high school, i was a little bit afraid of the physical demands and so forth, you know. but a drill instructor told me, actually, you know, if you think those drill instructors are going to be mean, there'll be nothing like that grandma of yours. right. and i really thought that that

so long as i could physically cut it, the psychological part would be fine and i'd be able to make it. and and that was true. you know, marine corps boot camp is definitely but also, you know, in a weird way, it's kind of fun. it's, you know, stockholm syndrome. but know a lot of marines who actually enjoyed their marine corps boot camp experience and was no different in that grandmother by way, recounting your book, she has colorful language that that rubbed off on you how did you avoid or did she never was embarrassed to use those words around you or you didn't say anything about it? yeah well, my i think my son is too young show evidence of how foul my my language is. you know, i definitely try to cut back on the language relative to my grandma just because i mean, she really she loved a dramatic and well-placed f word and i you know, you go from mama's to the us marine corps, you know the phrase curse like a sailor doesn't from nowhere.

but in the marine courts, part of the department of the navy. and i think that i definitely have had to scale back my language just to like operate in civilized city. but but but it's it's like ingrained in me and. i definitely don't always succeed. so you're in the marine corps, you get through basic training and then you go over to iraq. yeah. and where were afraid you would come back in one piece or you weren't sure you would survive or i think anybody when they're about to deploy to iraq is is worried about whether they'll they'll come back in one piece. and the thing to remember is that i had mo asked me a military occupation specialty where, you know, we lost some people in my almost to to combat deaths in combat injuries but it wasn't quite you. i wasn't thinking quite as much about the danger as maybe i would would been if i was working in the infantry example. so i was worried about it. but i also tried to try to talk myself up and recognize that, you know, it'll be dangerous. it'll certainly be more dangerous than driving down the

street. but i'll probably end up you know, most marines ain't coming back. okay. all so after four years, you leave the military, right? yeah. and then you decide you want to go to college. sure. you felt you were then ready for it. yeah, but you were then four years older than many of your college contemporaries, right? sure. so why did you decide to go to ohio state? not that it's not a great place to go, but did you consider any other place? yeah. oh, so you fans out there go bucks. well, you know, i think it's possible to sort of make these decisions seem more rational than they were. i mean, honestly, the reason i wanted to go to ohio state is because i grew up rooting and loving ohio state and a lot of my friends had gone there. but i was i was not nearly as thoughtful about my college decision as i should have been. i had a great there, and i'm really glad that i went there. but it was basically luck that i found myself at ohio state. i wasn't sort thinking as as

smartly about it as i should have been so normally people go to college for four years. yeah. and you seem to get through ohio state in two years. how did you get ohio state in two years? well, you take a lot of classes, go during the summer, and you credits that you gained in the marine corps over to ohio state. those three things were able to a lot were enough to enable me to cut a couple of years off. so how did you support yourself? where would the money come from for ohio state? did you have grants, standard marine corps salary? it was enough to supplement, you know, so it's a combination of things. so i was no longer in the marine corps. so wasn't getting a salary would save any more? sure. so, you know, a little bit of savings and a little bit of of of debt that i incurred, you know, i borrowed some, you know, some of the subsidized loans had some pell grants at osu. you had had the gi bill, which i was trying to save for law school. but i used some of the gi bill during during college. and then i, you know, i worked jobs during during college. so it's sort of those multiple

different sources of income were enough to get me through. okay. so you graduate in two years and then you decide you want to go to law school. yeah, but as you point out in your book, there aren't as many people going to, let's say, yale or harvard hospitals from ohio state, though there obviously are some. but how did you happen? decide to go to yale law school, which is a great law school, as opposed to ohio state law school or or some other school in the midwest. yes. so this is another thing where i wasn't thinking super strategic about it. you know, i applied to a few law schools. i got into them and sort of was thinking about just, you know, going one of those schools and, my friend, you know, one of my best friends, he was the best man at my wedding, actually, who himself was a lawyer. you know, look, if you you know, if you've got good grades and you think you could get into a good place and this is 2009. this is right after the great recession, he's like, i've got friends from law school who are struggling to find work. so you should try to get into the best school you can. that'll be your best insurance

policy against unemployment. and so then i ended up taking off a little bit of time and then reapplying. and that's when i applied to yale. but were an average high student. but in college you did much better. how did you change from a mediocre average student to a great student? yeah, i think ephron's is probably putting it charitably in high school, you know a couple of things, right? i mean, so one, i was just a more mature person. this goes back to me being ready for college in a psychological way. i sort of appreciated that it was this opportunity as opposed to just a responsibility that somebody had foisted upon me. and so i tried harder, i think, you know, paying for it. and sort of seeing that debt bill go up and up and up maybe gave me some sense of the fact that it was i was lucky be able to go there, you know but i also thought a lot about my grandma when i was in college you know this is a woman who to left i think when she was 14 years old to come north to ohio. she had not had many educational opportunities. she was super, super smart.

and i just thought to myself that, you know, if mama could sacrifice all those things to get me to a place like this, i should actually take advantage of it. and i should actually try hard. okay, so you go to yale law school now. yale law school is about the hardest law school to get into the united states. very small law school. many people go there from harvard, yale, princeton, kind of colleges. did you feel little out of place when you got the yale law school? there weren't that many people in your class. as i recall from ohio state. yeah, i think my year i was the only ohio state grad at yale. so you know, it was it was weird to me because i realized that there were high schools, you know, repertory schools where there were more from that high school at yale law school than there were my university, which struck me as a little bit weird. but but yeah, it was definitely a culture shock. it was it was more of a culture shock, frankly, than any place i had ever been. it was more of a culture shock than the marine corps, more than ohio state. you know, it was sort of

astonishing just how different the expectations and the backgrounds were from some of my classmates relative to where i came from. now, another person who went to yale law school, bill clinton, came from arkansas and he used to apparently a lot of pride and say, i'm from arkansas. it's a great state and so forth. did you say i'm a hillbilly from kentucky and ohio and? and, you know, i'm really different, but really as good as you guys are. how did you fit? i don't know that i ever introduced myself and said i'm a hillbilly from ohio. how are you? but i think that definitely came through in the way that i conducted myself. i mean, i was definitely a pretty strong ohio partizan even. and undergrad i think everyone or evening in law school, i think everyone knew where i was. but, but yeah, i don't i don't know if i use that precise phrase. okay. so how did you do it? how did you do it? yeah. law school. were you academically the top or in the middle or the bottom or where you. i did. okay. you know, i don't think i was at top by any means. i think my wife was at the top is why she's clerked for the chief justice. i definitely didn't do as well

as her. i know that the weird thing about yale for for those of you who sort of know some of these law schools, is that they don't give traditional. so it's actually really hard to sort of know where you rank relative to your peers. my sense is that i was doing i wasn't at the bottom of the pack, but i was certainly wasn't at the top either. and i was sort of i was comfortable with that. so you wrote your way on to the yale law journal, which is usually one of the most prestigious things you can do at the yale law school. and then did you decide wanted to practice law clerk or what did you decide you wanted to do? yeah so so my wife and i had this opportunity to go to the eastern district of kentucky. you met the wife and she had the same class as was the same. you see, here is where she oh, she probably wife here somewhere and i'll see her here but i thought she was coming from she. there she is. okay. okay. okay. okay. so sorry. who's all right. so you met her and then you were in the same class. yeah. so we were the same class. so we had an opportunity to clerk on the eastern district,

kentucky, which both our judges we worked for separate judges, but they were both in covington, which is just over the river from cincinnati. and so sort of this perfect opportunity to go and, you know, clerked for a federal judge but be close to home and work things that were were both really interesting to us. you spent most of your life trying to escape kentucky and then you went back to kentucky. well, i don't know that i was trying to escape kentucky so much as the chaotic home that i grew up in. and i've always sort of loved, you know, loved the place that i came from and always wanted to go back. but, yeah you know, it definitely was a really exciting and in a really good year, we both worked for like really good people. you know, sometimes people get stuck with with bad judges. so we both worked great people and had had a great year. okay. so as i said at the beginning, there were three reasons why i think the book is very successful, at least in my view. one is it's very well written, very precise and very good read. secondly, the life story is almost like a novel, so it's very interesting.

but the third is, i think one of the reasons the book has become so popular, because as you point out yourself, the world has changed a fair bit since you conceived of writing the book and now what you wrote about is seen as one of the problems of our country, which we have a lot of drug abuse, opioid abuse, unemployment particularly it's say in the midwest and a lot of the kind of people that you come from, that roots where you come from have these problems. so let's talk about that for a while here. let's talk about the opioid problem for example, when you were growing up, you point out in your book that drug abuse was a problem in your area and you think it's gotten worse. and why do you think it's so bad? well, yeah, it was definitely something i saw growing up. and i remember when, you know, addiction hit our family. and i found out that mom was was to prescription pain pills as. we called them back then. i just didn't understand it. right. and understand why anybody would be addicted. pain pills. it wasn't especially common. this is back in the mid-nineties. so the problem had not gone mainstream. it has now.

now, of course, you in 2017, we sit here and we talk about the opioid epidemic which is now really a nationwide crisis. and so i did feel in some ways like i got an early insight into what would later become a significant crisis? why is it gotten worse? there are a ton of different reasons and a ton of different explanations, right? so you know, one is, i think, you know, to be honest, a lot of these drugs were marketed as non addictive and they were addictive. and so people got hooked on them and it caused a lot of problems. i think that you have a significant overprescription problem in some of these areas where, you know, i just in southeastern ohio, a few months ago talking to some folks who were dealing with this and they tell me that you know when high school kids used to hang out and get into their parent's liquor cabinet or get in their parents beer, now they will get into grandma's medicine cabinet and pass around drugs. well, that's a different kind problem. and i also think that you know, it is in some ways, it consequence of some really negative social problems that

exist in these communities. you know, if you have domestic violence, you have a lot of family, if you have a lot of unemployment, then people do eventually get they find some way to deal with it. maybe 50 years ago, they dealt with it with alcohol and now they're dealing with it through a substance that's much more addictive. you largely seem to have avoided, you know, the opioid problem you write about. right, as i recall maybe some use of marijuana or something, but not really anything that was addictive. so how did you avoid that in the environment which you grew up. well mama was very cognizant of the problems of addiction and was really really about this stuff. i mean if she out that we were smoking a cigaret or that we had anything to drink mama would fly off the handle. and i think i think she she appreciates did just how bad could be and that it clearly had this role in our family. you know this is the thing that really ruined her life for the first 30 years of her marriage was alcoholism and then it was

ruining the life of one of her kids. and so i was very much on guard. i mean, almost so. right. i'm one of these people who doesn't like to take ibuprofen a headache because i'm, like, really uncomfortable with the idea of putting foreign substances in my body. i've seen addiction trap a lot of people, you know, i got really sick when i was at ohio state. i had mono and they gave me this this synthetic opioid called dilaudid because i had to, you know, take some medicine. anyway, i had this dilaudid. i was in the hospital at ohio state, and i remember calling everyone in my family saying, i know why mama didn't like us to take this stuff because it is fanta tastic. so i, i just think being guard about that stuff about alcohol is good. avoided alcohol? no, i haven't avoided alcohol. i, i certainly never felt that i've been addicted to alcohol. you know, i'm sort of when they ask the doctor, i'm one of these, you know, one once or twice a week type people.

but, but no, i've never felt especially addicted to anything except for chocolate chip cookies and ice cream. okay, now let's talk about unemployment, as you point out, in the book, many people left kentucky and places like that go north to look for jobs. those jobs are now been hollowed out. so you see a lot of unemployment in, that kind of background that you have. can you describe whether it's getting better or worse and what's being done to better can be done about it? is it getting it's certainly getting better in the past couple of years just because the economy's picked up a little bit. but i don't think i don't think that it's improved significantly over, you know, where was 30 or 40 years ago and what i mean is that the number of people that the coal industry or the steel mill industry employed, let's say the 1950s and sixties, that hasn't in the past couple of years. it's not, you know, maybe as bad as it was. but i do think that seeing a really long term significant economic shift in some of these areas and, you know, it's something honestly, i think

policymakers were a little blind to. i think that everybody thought that the economy would adjust, folks would get different jobs, that they would skill up and move into different professions. but what's actually happened is that you've seen a lot of communities get really significantly decimated. and that's obviously one of the undercurrent of the book. you know, what is there to do about it? there are, i think, a lot of different things that we could do about it. the first is that i think we have a pretty problem with the fact that you're effectively given a choice when you graduate from high school between going and working in a fast food job or going and getting a four year college education. and i think that we should provide more pathways than that. i think it's not surprising when those are the two pathways that you see people going in those two directions. but but i also think but i also think we have to think a little bit more constructive really about regional economic development. you know the way that this has gone for the past ten or 20 years is that i'm a local municipality i offer somebody

tax credit to set up a restaurant in my hometown. that's that's great. new restaurants are fantastic. but that's not the sort of long term redevelopment that has to happen in some of areas. and i think that it's something that, you know, basically all levels of policymakers have to be thinking differently than they are right now. now, if somebody writes a book that says successful is yours and about the subjects that you deal with, at some point, somebody from, the democratic national committee or the republican national committee or some political entity will say, you a great candidate to be a member of congress, governor or senator, and maybe something even higher. so have you ever thought about and have you been importuning to run for something? i think we're out of time to time. right. thank you. i appreciate that. all right. so so it's so would say, yeah, you preclude anything from happen? no, certainly not. you know. yeah, certainly when that when that progression is exactly right, when you have a book, the

successful people from various political parties come to you and ask if you'd be interested in these things. and not any people who have these jobs who actually like these jobs, though i actually don't think that i have you know, i've talked to a couple of members of congress not you know, not about me running, but just certainly about, you know, in this environment, you actually enjoy what you do and. they say, yeah, you know, i really like working on policy. the problem is we don't do any of that. so so now so but leaving whether you would run for something because platform you now have is so you can be a spokesman about alcoholism unemployed and opioid addiction and are you going to kind make it part of your career talking about these issues or do you want to not be seen as a spokesman for these issues? yeah, i don't know that i want to be seen as a spokesman for these issues, but i certainly think that, you know, now that i have this platform form, it's you know, i might as well do

something with it productive other than just, you know, go and talk about the book there. there are other issues that are that are worth talking about. so, you know, i've tried to be a constructive participant in some of these policy debates. you know, during the health care reform debate of a few months ago, i went on to capitol and i tried to talk to folks about you know this is how this might affect the opioid crisis. this how this might affect some of the people from back home. so i try to be constructive as much as possible. but, you know, we live in an especially non constructive time. i think that you have to be careful and you have to be smart and you have to you know, you have to recognize that sometimes even when you try to careful and smart, you're not actually being careful. what's so when you go to talk to members of congress or get involved with congressional staff, people do they just want a picture with you or your autograph, their book, or do they actually listen to what you say. well, it depends. it depends on it depends on the member and it depends on on of the staff members. but no, i found generally speaking, you know, i've become

maybe more cynical, our political process writ large since the book came out just from talking to folks and spending some time in these areas, i do feel more optimistic about individual members their staff. i think that by and large people actually want to make a difference and care about the policy and care about what effect it's going to have. it's just we happen to live in a political period in a political time where it's really hard to translate interest in policy to constructive accomplishments, people who might be called not pejoratively, but people might call themselves hillbillies or hillbilly culture. are they proud of your book for having exposed some of the challenges they have, or are they upset for having exposed some of the challenges they have? i think opinions differ right. i mean, there are people out there who think i'm basically a traitor and who hate guts. there are people there who think that i have shed a light on really important issues and they appreciate. i think the thing that i most from people back home when, you know, when i go and talk about

the book or just when i hear, you know, people when they run into me on the street is that they appreciate that the book as has talked about these problems in a way that they feel like wasn't talked about before, that nobody really wrote the story from the inside. nobody really talked about, you know, what is it like to grow up in a household with a lot of instability, lot of addiction? what's it like to grow up in a household where you you're really worried about whether you can pay for college or even pay more fundamental things? that is the part that's been the most to me. but i also think that, you know, it's a region that's really and really diverse. and so you have that are probably as diverse as any large population. so what is the most frequent question get asked you? because you are in the speaking a little bit and you're on tv at cnn you're a contributor to cnn. what is question you get most frequently asked audiences about your book or about your background? the the question i get most frequently asked. i mean it's probably how family

reacted to the book. i think that's definitely something that people are curious about. i get asked a lot how my mom's well, how is she? and the answer, she's doing really well, so she's living. she's not married now. she's living. yes. while yes, she's living back home. she's doing well. she's been clean for a very long time. and i think in some ways, you know, while while mom may not ready to to play this role and. so i'm not i'm not going to foisted upon her. i think she's a really good example of what can happen when even after five or six times you get knocked off horse of addiction and back into relapse that that it's still possible to sort of climb back out to find the right supports and to make another go at it and that you know that's something i really admire about mom she's incredibly tenacious so does she now have like a the business card that says j.d. vance's mother? she doesn't have that on her business card. she does not. and what about your your your biological father? is to see you have contact with

him and. yeah, yeah, i actually just got a text message from her right before i went up here. yeah. so so dad and i are still, still close and still talk quite a bit. you know, he's doing pretty well. he you know, he's, he's he's a great guy and. i think that he, you know, he and i most most often talk about his grandson and that's what he's most interested in. and i think that's true of a lot of grand grandparents. so you talk about in the book you grew up largely what does sister now, what is she doing? so my sister has kids back back home and in middletown has been married for 20 years or so and and is doing well, you know i think that what lindsey and i wanted to really accomplish like what we thought of as success in our lives was being able to give our kids the stability and the comfort and the sense of security that we didn't have as kids know, she has successfully done that for almost 20 years.

her kid is 18. i done that for three months. so i'm i'm hopeful i get there too. and today do you find that your friends from high school, they they laugh at your jokes more than did before or they treat you differently. how do the people you grow up with that treat you now that you're so famous and wealthy people ask you for money, you sometimes ask me for money, but that's you know not not a common occurrence but yeah, there are definitely some people who laugh laugh louder at my jokes, but my real friends not laugh louder. and again, it's one of the one of the really good things about having a successful book or what a successful book can do is. you definitely realize that people who are loyal to you no matter what and, don't let you get too big for your britches. as we say back home. those are the people that i really onto. okay, so leaving aside your potential political career right now, you're not practicing law, but you are in what i would call the highest calling of mankind,

private equity and investing. so why did you choose to go into what i call the venture capital space? you're in an area, a narrow niche of private equity, venture capital. why did you choose go into that area and you're doing it from a firm that's based here and you're also living in ohio, right? sure. well, so that is. right. and what i find so interesting about what i'm doing right now is that if it's done well, it could actually help create amazing new products and amazing new companies and amazing new jobs that didn't exist before. right. and one of the things i realized in law school and i think, i came into this with sort of this veil behind eyes that was lifted is that, you know what the people who i think really, frankly, call the shots in our economic system are those who are figuring out, you know, where goes. and i think that when i realized that, i thought to myself, i'd like to be a guy who is trying

figure out how to get capital to into good places, where it's going to do lot of good and where it's going to create a lot of value not just for investors, but for people on the receiving end to now some people who write first books. some people write a book, you know. margaret mitchell, ralph, their first book is so successful that they have a hard time writing a second book. they get writer's block because. they think nothing could be as good as the first book. you don't worry about problem. well i don't know. i that i know that my first book was that good so i don't know that any follow up will be measured well or poorly compared it it certainly was very successful and i think that i'd be an idiot if i expected other book to be as successful. but i'll let people decide whether it's good or not. so what you want to do with your life and what you'd like to be would be, let's say, a role model for people who came out of the kind of background that you came out of. and now, rightly or wrongly whether you want it or not, you're a bit of a role model for. people who come out of your kind of background as a role model,

do you feel more responsibility to live a life, a certain do you feel you should give back to your community a certain way? what? how has your life changed as a result of this book? well, yeah. i mean, definitely feel a certain responsibility when i go on tv, not to make my entire community seem like an idiot. right. because i think one of the things that i have not appreciated but i just have accepted is reality is that a lot of people see me as sort of a spokesperson for the white class. a lot of times asked to go on tv and say, you know, what is the trump feel about this or that issue? i think that's unfair. i don't think that any person could possibly speak for that many people or for the trump voter writ large. but what i what i try to do is recognize that some people see me as that representative. and so i try not to sound like a total buffoon when. i go on tv, that's one way that i think things have really. but i mean, you know, it's it's crazy right. i mean, a year and a half ago, i was not sitting here in an auditorium in front of hundreds

of people. so it's kind of impossible to describe how my life has changed. it's changed in the way that, you know, any person's changes when they go from, you know, sitting home, eating pints of ice cream and watching netflix to sitting here in front of hundreds of people like those people, the president, united states called you and said, i read your book and you really typify the kind of voter i appeal to or you haven't heard that kind of reaction yet. i've never heard that from from from president trump. i have heard, you know, people work at the white house who said something similar to that. so but no, i've never gotten the phone call. president trump still still waiting. so today you would say you're a very happy person. you've got a child, a wife, your mother, father are doing well. so you're a very happy person. and and the experience, the book has made your life even better. yeah. yeah. i mean, think things are really going great. book has changed my life in a very weird way. but, but in a in definitely a positive way. well, i read the book as i said, i thought it was a great book. i highly it to those who haven't read it yet and those who've

read it once read it again. i do think it's very instructive, well-written and i want to thank you for a very interesting conversation. thanks, david. thank youjonathan.

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