what about j.d. vance in his book account for the explosion of interest in this historical moment of national political turmoil. bobble speak to this as well, that book "hillbilly elegy: a memoir of family and culture in crisis" would not be what it was without the trump phenomenon in the trump election. other pieces in the book talk about trump appalachia, it is defined as a single sort of voting block that is important to mercy. why have the ideas caused such a firestorm in the region? what can we learn about actual appalachia and the weight is perceived? as a student of the image, i think about what purpose these representations serve in politics and why is it, when i wrote my original book hillbilly 25 years ago i thought this image cannot continue to last. it has just been every other image of that timeframe, native stereo typical image has continued in the culture and yet hillbilly just keeps coming and coming and coming. what purpose is it serving the culture? what does it mean in the 21st century t

j.d. vance is the author of t"hillbilly elegy" and joins us tonight.uch for coming on. i think you and i agree, i know you do because we talk a lot, that this is a very serious illness that we should be afraid of and take firm steps to protect the population from, so i think we can start there. are you concerned, however, by the way that some politicians have interpreted that mandate that politics are getting involved. a bunch of states have banned procedures like joint replacements but allow abortions. what does that tell us? >> tells us a couple things. it's pretty sad that things favor like abortion and the abortion lobby is deemed essential care about things's le heart surgeries, joint replacements are not deemed essential surgeries. obviously, that means a lot of people frankly are suffering.me and they are suffering iny, a context where most hospitals outside of new york city are not overrun, so you have a a lot of needless human suffering. that is really, really terrible. but the second piece of this is, like you said, this is a serious problem

j.d. vance's mother? >> he does not. >> what about your biological father? do you have contact with him? >> i get a text message, dad and i are still close. he is doing pretty well, he is a great guy, he and i most often talk about his grandson, it is true of a lot of grandparents. you grew up largely with your sister. what is she doing now? >> my sister has three kids back home, married for 20 years or so it is doing well. what lindsay and i wanted to accomplish, what we thought of as success in our lives was giving our kids the stability and comfort and sense of security we didn't have, she has done that for 20 years. oldest kid is 18. i have done that for three months. i am hopeful i get there too. >> you find your friends from high school laugh at your jokes more than they did before or treat you differently? how do people treat you now that you are so famous and wealthy? do people ask you for money? >> sometimes people ask for money but that is not a common occurrence but there are definitely some people who laugh louder at my jokes but my real friends don't. one of the really good

certainly j.d. vance makes no attempt to define its political power. that word 50 times without any sort of interpretation. so i don't think it has the single origin just like redneck doesn't have a single origin when it comes about that it has a political purpose which is how it explains what existed. >> i am not a political organizer, and i'm helping groups to preview these new deals and i would love to hear your thoughts on how it is seen in the light of federal politics i would love to hear your thoughts about the federal issues and politics and what we are seeing now. >> you know, i think first of all the economic downturn that is happening right now really started 50 or 60 years ago when the coal mines became mechanized and surface mining happened and it is a finite resource so you take the top of a mountain and to take all the col call. because it is so sharp and something people feel like this is a new saying there's organizations like 50-years-old this year they are trying to figure out the new economy. the places that they are talking about s

j.d. vance's book. >> i don't have a story anywhere near that. mine started at ten or 12 years ago i was trying to understand american capitalism and wanted to write about people losing their land as an essential element of how capitalism develops and grows and what is essential to it. i could have written a book about american indians were about the greatest dispossession in the history of north america. i went looking for a story people don't often think about an hour considered to think about capitalism and something i myself did not understand there were the southern mountains and a complicated story about how the white settler. it's considered heroic and lost its land, so i set out to write a painted case study and it took over my life as i dedicated years to try to understand it as very much an outsider. my book is about capitalism. i am an environmental historian at the political economy, so i was putting those two things together and so i hope you like the results. [applause] ibook was born out of kindness. there's one that shall remain n

our special guest is j.d. vance. i'm going to ask him to come up now. [applause] but we get people who may not know your background a little introduction. he is a native of middletown ohio and graduate of the middletown high school. he then went into the marines for four years, served in iraq and came back, went to ohio state and finished it in. then went to yale law school. he's now in the investment world and based in part in washington, d.c. peace here somewhere. maybe on the way with bringing his two -month-old son. [laughter] [applause] if you see him somewhere that is his son. so let's start. when you started to write this book in your wildest imagination, you couldn't have thought that they were going to write a bestseller. >> i certainly didn't think that i would. >> where did the idea come from? >> it actually started in law school and really the genesis was interested in some of the concepts and the ideas i wrote about in the book. most specifically. at yale we had to write a basically a thesis to graduate and i wanted to write about the polic