Charles: We're happy to have J.D. Vance, the author of the best selling "Hillbilly Elegy,"
in the studios today.
I guess I gotta start, J.D, such a trite question, did you ever expect anything like the response
you've gotten with "Hillbilly Elegy"?
Vance: No, definitely not.
I told my wife a couple of weeks before the book came out that I just hoped that it wouldn't
be embarrassing with how few people read it.
And I think that I surpassed that so I totally feel pretty good.
Charles: How many are in print at this point?
Vance: A little over a quarter million, so it's going pretty strong.
Charles: Those are numbers that policy wonks like me only dream about.
J.D., give us a thumbnail sketch of what this book is all about.
Vance: Yeah, so the book is really a very focused view of what it's like to grow up
white working-class in America, specifically with a Scots-Irish background.
And so my grandparents went from Kentucky to Southern Ohio, had a lot of optimism about
their lives and their future, but as I write in the book, that optimism didn't necessarily
pan out.
So we've been in some cases a family that's experienced a fair amount of downward mobility
but also obviously, in my case a lot of upward mobility because I eventually went on to the
Marines and then to Yale Law School.
So it's really an exploration at a very personal level of why there aren't more kids who are
living lives like I've been able to live.
Charles: Listen, I am as Scots-Irish as you are.
I have, you know, given the mixed American heritages, I think I've got a pretty direct
lineage.
Vance: Sure.
Charles: My Scots-Irish aren't anything like your Scots-Irish.
J.D., I don't use the word hillbilly, you know?
I always talk about country people and that sort of thing and I've always felt kind of
shy about using it, and then you used it proudly.
Tell me, what is a hillbilly?
Vance: Yeah, well, so as my grandma said, "A hillbilly is something that we can use
in the family, but if somebody else calls you a hillbilly then you have to punch them
in the nose."
And the idea is that it's an insider's term of endearment and the way that we used it
in our family is one, that you had some connection to the land of Appalachia or Appalachia, depending
on where you're from, how you say it, that you really love that land and you love the
people who live there, and I do think that there's a sort of country element to it.
It's not just about Appalachia itself.
It's sort of about loving the rural lifestyle and having some connection to it, either familial
or otherwise.
Charles: You've had the book out for a while.
You've had all sorts of people do exactly what I did, tell you about how, oh yeah, they
came from a similar kind of family and the rest of it.
To what extent do you still see the hillbilly culture in which you grew up to be distinct
from other white working class environments that people have talked to you about?
Vance: Yeah, so that's a very interesting question.
I think the answer is that it's still somewhat distinct, and a lot of what we think of as
white working class culture, I still think that what we're really talking about sometimes
is sort of Scots-Irish or Appalachian rooted culture.
Obviously there's been so much assimilation that it is sometimes hard to figure out where
one stops and the other begins.
But there is this interesting argument that we ought to just call it the United States
of Appalachia because a lot of what we think of as sort of classically American values
are really rooted in Appalachia in different ways.
There's a really good book to that effect.
But I think that it's important to sort of recognize, and one thing I've tired to do
is recognize that a lot of these issues agree in the broader white working class, but I
do still think that there is a lot of connection to Appalachia.
Charles: Well, you know, in the census responses the group of people that responds to the question
of "What is your ethnicity, background, your ethnic background?" the ones who say, "I'm
American" are the Scots-Irish.
Vance: That's exactly right, yeah.
Charles: Which in my case, I've always bragged about my Scots-Irish background and I have
said, "Well, we were violent and we were drunk, but we made great pioneers."
I didn't know the half of it until I read your book, in terms of all kinds of stuff
that goes on in the culture you describe.
Question, to what extent... you're a child of the 90s, right?
Vance: That's right.
Charles: You basically were growing up then.
As you listen to your parents and your grandparents, to what extent has the hillbilly culture evolved
since 1960?
Vance: Yeah, well, I think it's definitely evolved almost because it's been forced to
evolve, right?
So one of the things my grandparents, I think, realized after they moved to southern Ohio
was that a lot of the values that they brought with them didn't necessarily translate into
sort of middle class American life.
Charles: No kidding.
Vance: I think because of that, especially among sort of upwardly mobile folks who have
some connection to Scots-Irish or Appalachia, there is definitely an impulse to sort of
discard your hilllbillyness.
There's recognition that it's maybe something to be ashamed of or maybe just something that
you don't want to highlight.
I think it's been really interesting, actually, since the publication of the book, to watch
my cousins who both grew up in very sort of middle class families, they're both in college,
one is 21, one is 19, and the way that the book has sort of brought them back in contact
with their roots, because I mean they knew my grandma very well and they didn't realize
how much she was a sort of cultural figure and how much they really are part of that
culture even though they don't necessarily see it as something that's broader than themselves.
Charles: Are these relatives of yours who are the children of the one...is it Milwaukee
he went to?
Vance: No.
So Uncle Jimmy is in Texas.
He went from Middletown to Texas to California and back to Texas.
These are children of Aunt Wee, who is sort of a very important character in the book.
Charles: And to what extent were they aware of the heritage that they had?
You said they didn't know your grandmother was the way she was?
Vance: Well, no.
They certainly knew the way that she was, and I don't know that they quite placed it
in a broader regional and cultural context.
And so one of the really interesting things that my cousin did, she wrote this really
beautiful piece about my grandma and about sort of recognizing where she came from in
the wake of the book coming out.
But she even said she sort of tried to hide her hillbillyness.
She didn't tell other people about these outrageous family stories, and I didn't either until
I got older.
I started to appreciate that they were maybe something unique and interesting and not something
to be just ashamed of.
But it was only after I graduated from high school, you know, as I said in the book, a
lot of my very good friends heard about these stories for the first time while reading them
in the book.
It's not something I really bragged about until I got older.
Charles: Okay, now tell me though, you get to Yale and you write about the ways in which
Yale is a different world.
Did you ever play the hillbilly card?
Vance: Well, I don't know how...
I don't think that I ever played the hillbilly card.
Charles: You know what I mean, where all at once you're talking with the deepest Kentucky
accent you can come up with and you're sort of luring other people into having an opinion
of you and then you smack them with some erudite comment they didn't expect.
Vance: No.
I never quite did that.
I mean I think I tried so hard to fit in and felt a little bit out of place so I tried
to sort of, you know, maybe tried to hide it at the very beginning and never played
the hillbilly card.
And one of the things I noticed is that it was at Yale that I really lost any semblance
of a Southern accent.
So it's something that people who knew me when I was a first year student, not everybody,
but they would say, you know, "You have a certain way of saying things.
Are you from the south?"
And by the third year of law school no one made those comments.
So it's interesting that maybe I played the opposite of the hillbilly card.
You know, I became, at least in the way that I spoke, a little bit more like the elites
than folks back home.
Charles: I advise you to retain those skills.
We have a friend from Macon, Georgia.
She's a female in her 30s and she is usually crisp and snappy, you know; she can pass for
a New Yorker almost.
But if she's in a situation where all at once that sweet southern accent is really effective,
it comes on in a flash and she gets great mileage out of it.
Okay, here's something that as the author of "The Bell Curve" I have to bring up.
Dick Herrnstein and I spent a lot of time documenting the relationship of IQ to impulse
control, and delayed gratification, and thinking ahead to long-term consequences, and those
correlations are real.
And your mother certainly was pretty smart.
She reported to you, I guess, that she was Salutatorian, and in that case, she was academically
successful.
You got through high school, just by not being a model student in all respects; you got through
the Marine Corp, through Ohio State, and then up to Yale Law School.
Vance: Sure.
Charles: Impulse control doesn't really describe your family's life in the book, and neither
does delayed gratification.
Vance: Sure.
Charles: What was going on, with all of the ability that was in that family, where so
many strange decisions were made?
Vance: Yeah, well, I guess impulse control maybe is all relative and relative to some
of my grandparents' ancestors, they were probably pretty good on that front.
You know, I definitely think that a lot of the people in my family were definitely really
smart but I will say that they weren't smart in a way that I found especially unique in
the broader community.
And this is one of the things I've sort of struggled with is, you know, did I just sort
of get lucky and I had a smart family?
I really don't think so.
I didn't feel growing up that I was an especially smart kid.
I didn't feel like an idiot.
I felt maybe above average relative to the people that I went to high school with.
And one of the things that seemed to drive success more than sort of hard IQ numbers
was the delayed gratification and the impulse control and also just a sense of like willfulness.
You know, a lot of people don't think in these communities that if they work hard they're
actually going to get ahead.
And that was a really important component, I think, of why so many kids didn't do that
well coming from the high school I came from.
So I'm probably not providing a very satisfactory answer, but it's definitely the case, I think,
that I benefited a lot from some of the impulses of my grandparents especially, but I also
think that what seemed to really count back home was maybe what you might call non-cognitive
skills as opposed to the more hard IQ numbers.
Charles: Could I just observe that your experience, I think, would be ones that some of your fellow
students at Yale could use, which is to say, yeah, you had a sense that you were maybe
above average, but you weren't paying too much attention to that kind of thing, and
you also did not convey that you had a sense that you were surrounded by a bunch of people
that you couldn't talk to because they weren't smart enough, no sense of that at all.
Vance: Right.
Absolutely.
Charles: And I think one of the problems we have these days is that a lot of your fellow
students at Yale have never known anybody except the same kinds of people they were.
Vance: Sure.
Charles: And they think of a person who has an average IQ or an IQ of 95, and they think,
"Oh, they must be impossible to deal with."
And you can teach a lot in that regard.
Vance: Yeah.
I think I have sort of two responses to that feeling that a lot of folks do have, and I
agree with you.
One is that common sense is really undervalued in society and a lot of folks with an IQ of
95 or 85 have a lot of common sense, even if they don't have fancy degrees, and that's
really important.
The other thing I'd say is that people maybe overstate how smart they are when they get
to Yale.
I think that there's this impulse to be a little self-congratulatory about where you
came from and one of the ways to do that is to just say, "I'm more meritocratic.
I'm smarter than the people who didn't make it.
I'm better in whatever way," however you want to measure it.
And my sense is that that's probably not true.
My general impression of the kids that I went to Yale Law School with is that they were
pretty smart, certainly above average, but what really set them apart was that they were
ambitious and very hardworking.
That was what really surprised me and seemed out of place.
Their intelligence didn't seem other-worldly to me.
Their work ethic and their ambition definitely did.
Charles: You are out in San Francisco now, right?
Vance: That's right.
Charles: Working for Peter Thiel, is that correct?
Vance: Yeah, I work at one of the venture capital funds that he co-founded.
Charles: You are in a very different world, both from Middletown and Kentucky, and different
from Yale.
You are married.
You are going to be successful.
Charles: Are you going to be encased in a bubble pretty soon, whereby you are a Silicon
Valley guy and your children won't know anything about Middletown and Kentucky unless you take
proactive steps?
Vance: Yeah, that's definitely something that I really worry about.
You know, the biggest culture shock that I've had wasn't at Yale; it was in Silicon Valley.
And what was so shocking about it is how optimistic people are.
There's just this sense of sort of boundless, the world is always going to get better, and
even we're going to be the people who help make it better.
And that's so weird and so different from the place that I grew up in.
And my answer to your question is absolutely I'm worried about it.
I'm really worried that my kids will share really nothing about my background, will have
no idea where they came from on that side of the family, will have no appreciation for
what a hillbilly is or why I might think it's a good thing and not just something to be
sneered at and pointed at.
And so, yeah, I think that I'll definitely have to take affirmative steps if I want to
prevent that from happening and it's one of the reasons why I keep on asking my wife,
"When can we move back to Ohio?"
And the other thing I'll say about that, that living in the bubble, it's not just about
not appreciating where you came from; it's also a certain failure to recognize how truly
blessed some of these people are who grew up in these Ivy League families, these Ivy
League institutions.
It's really, really easy to feel super disconnected from how the rest of the country lives and
I don't want my kids to feel like that.
I really worry about that and it's one off the things that I take as really a sort of
blessing from the way that I grew up is that I at least appreciate how other people are
living their lives and hopefully I never lose that and hopefully my family doesn't either.
Charles: I think a summer place in Kentucky is what you're going to need, where you go
there every year and you don't get in your private jet; you drive and you stay at Motel
6s.
I think the kids will work it all out.
Vance: I've forced my wife to stay at a fair number of Motel 6s and it's because they're
outdoors so you can always, we always travel with our two dogs, you can always sneak a
couple of dogs into a Motel 6, so they have their advantages.