 Good evening, everybody. Thank you, everyone, for coming. As one of those variety show hosts used to say, you're a beautiful audience. And I think we'll have a very illuminating evening. There are probably very few folks here who aren't well aware of tonight's guest and the sensational book that he's written. Reviewers once in a while will use, words only, reviewers use like, searing. And now that I've read this book, I know what they're talking about. I think it qualifies. And you'll have your own adjectives. But I'll just say that I've been fortunate enough to strike up some modest acquaintance with our guest over the course of the last year. And he is as interesting, a person, as authentic, and insightful as the book he has written. And I know you're going to enjoy the next hour. Please welcome JD Vance. My next announcement is there aren't going to be any Trump questions, at least for a little while. There are. Actually, you can ask all you like. And I'll probably have one or two. But as has been our practice, and I think it works pretty well, I'll try to get the things going. And JD and I will converse for the first few minutes. And then after a few questions, maybe 15 minutes or so in, please feel free to approach the mics. And we'll take as many questions from you. Let you guide the discussion as we can fit in. So I would like to start. I know that many, maybe most of the audience has read the book JD, but not everyone. And even for those who did, I'd like for you to paint verbally the picture you paint so impressively on paper. Let me just try to introduce the topic by asking you a comment on a couple of searing comments you made. You said early in the book, you wrote this book to let people know why you might nearly give up on yourself and what it feels like to nearly give up on yourself and why you might do it. What made you feel that way and how close did you come to giving up? Sure. Well, first, everybody can hear me right. And thank you for having me. The way that I sort of the background with which I'll frame this is that the book is really a sort of family, a multi-generational family portrait. And it starts with my grandparents, very impoverished circumstances in Eastern Kentucky. They moved to Southwestern Ohio. My grandfather works in a steel mill. It's sort of the land of opportunity. They do very well for themselves materially, sort of stable middle-class life. But by the time that I come around all the family income, they had generated and evaporated. And we were in a pretty rough, rough, rough circumstance. And the argument that I make in the book why I almost gave up on myself is that, in a lot of ways, I didn't see a path forward that made much sense. It seemed like all of the options that were out there were either way too hard or even actively foreclosed to people like us. There was a certain sense of hopelessness that I had about my own life, about whether people who were like me were the type who made successful lives. And so I really try to unpack that in the book through my own experiences but also some data and try to explain what is it that's really going on in the mind of a kid who obviously has some external barriers but at the same time is also struggling with other things that aren't quite as easy to quantify. So when you said that you grew up in a culture that encourages social decay rather than counteracts it, what were some of the elements that you had that were most in mind? Sure, so I wanna start this by just offering a caveat on that word culture because I think a lot of times when culture is discussed in the way that we think about some of these really broad sociological problems, it comes with a certain baggage, right? And so what I mean when I talk about culture is not necessarily the sort of argument that there's something deeply pathological about the people that I grew up around. It's more that there's something, it's effectively I'm arguing that the things that you see around you, the attitudes that you see around you, they inform the attitudes that you develop, they inform the habits that you develop, they inform the expectations you have about your own life. And so I just think that that's sort of important because it colors the way that people think about what we talk about when we talk about culture. But to your question about the elements that I write about, so one is what I mentioned earlier, a certain sense of hopelessness, of low expectation. I really didn't think that success, being an emotional success in a stable family or material success in a stable job were things that belong to people like us. I saw us as sort of fundamentally disconnected from those things in a way that was very hopeless. I talk about how I had acquired certain habits from my family related especially to family relationships. I had seen a lot of trauma growing up. That trauma necessarily informed the way that I approached not just family relationships myself, but also informed I think the way that I related to other people. I had grown up in a church that was not, we're sorry, I had grown up in a religion that was not especially connected to a physical institutional church where people got together, where people offered social support, where people sort of reinforced each other. But I had acquired my religion in an incredibly sort of, I had acquired religion in a very odd and amorphous way where it was sort of passed down through conversation but it wasn't really connected to a real brick and mortar institution. So just all of these things created, I think a person who didn't have a whole lot of hope for himself, didn't see a whole lot of people succeeding around me, had a lot of emotional baggage because of the way that I grew up and on top of it had all of the standard disadvantages that people sort of associate with lower income people. So it sort of conspired into a pretty terrible mixture. You identified the, as I recall, the single most damaging or disagreeable or maybe hurtful element of all as the rotating door of men or father, you call them father figures, it doesn't clear that some of them were father figures at all. But anyway, men in your mom's life and this has been a growing pathology in America in all sorts of places. And we know empirically it's connected, especially in young men. Sure. And boys to all sorts of other problems and you got it really in the 50 caliber version of it. Yeah, that's definitely true. It is a unique factor of American life that lower income working class American children are so consistently exposed to what I call this revolving door of father figures. I mean, the number of people that were in and out of my sister's life. When I think back on it, when I really did that for the purpose of writing this book, my sister and I were sort of trying to catalog this stuff. And we were just like, my God, it's sort of amazing. There are people whose faces we remember, we don't remember their names. And even when we just remember the names, that's 15 people. Who lived with you for a time. Yeah, who lived with us, who in some cases we moved with them. And it's very easy to, I think, discount how powerful of a negative influence that can be when you grow up in a relatively stable circumstance, you don't necessarily know where you're gonna live. You sort of attach yourself emotionally to people. You start to grow fond of them and then all of a sudden they're gone. And when we sort of connect and see how the way these, you know, the sort of high number of partners shuffling in and out of our lives, we connect that to why the children who grow up in those circumstances have marital problems themselves. They tend to undergo and put their children through the same things that they went through. I think it's really sort of obvious to see why. Again, it's not that we were fundamentally deficient. It's that we saw the, you know, as a child. I just saw these things. I expected these things that developed. I began to develop expectation and norms about what family life required of me that were ultimately not incredibly helpful and things I had to sort of unlearn throughout my life. So yeah, I think, you know, it's funny. There was this really interesting study done by a team of economists led by Raj Chetty, which you may have seen came out a few years ago called the Equality of Opportunity Project. And they looked at dozens of different corollaries between this social factor and whether a kid was likely to, you know, have upward mobility, whether they were likely to experience some movement from lower-class America to upper-class America. And the two factors that he found were the two biggest drivers were, one, the prevalence of single-parent families in the neighborhood you grew up in, and two, whether you lived in a neighborhood of concentrated poverty. So basically whether you lived around primarily other poor people and whether those people had single-parent families. And I think that's just a real blindside in the way that we talk about these issues that we don't recognize. A lot of people do, but many don't recognize how important family stability is in allowing kids to prosper. Many in the audience will recall that just a few months ago, we celebrated here with a conference, the 50th anniversary of the Coleman Report, one of America's greatest sociologists, James Coleman, a Purdue engineer to start with, graduate of this school, produced a report 50 years ago in which he studied poor performing schools and came to the same conclusion. And it's just the conclusion that we continue to resist despite a Himalaya of evidence. A line that really struck me, and I bet I'm not the only one, from the early sections of the book, you wrote that we, referring to not just your family, but I think the community part of, were unaware of our own laziness. You say folks talked a lot more about working than they actually worked. And I was gonna say something about college students, but I, but as the Purdue that would be inaccurate, so I'm not. Tell us about that. Sure, well the context in which that line came up is a story where there was a tile factory I was working at for a summer, and there was a guy who was working there who was 19 years old, had a pregnant girlfriend, was just an incredibly bad employee, and I kept on talking to him, trying to understand, you know, what is it that's going on with you? Why are you always disappearing? You have some kind of health problem, what's going on? It was clear he was just not, was just not a super driven guy, didn't think he'd ever be fired, and eventually he was fired, and he got really upset about it. And the point of that story, which I think is sometimes misunderstood, is not to say that everybody who can't find work in these communities is lazy. I think that would be an absurd argument, and that's not one that I make. It's to try to sort of tease out the fact that there's both a problem with not enough jobs, but there's also a problem where there are good jobs for some people, and they're still not quite willing to work at them. And I think that what this, you know, one of the really important parts of this story, and again this is something I think you see in the research, is that there's a difference between a habit that is formed based on what you see and internalized expectations, and a value that is explicitly stated. There's a difference, in other words, between talking about work and really internalizing industriousness as something that motivates you and drives your behavior. And that's something that's often missed when we had this conversation because if you pull different people of, you know, all different groups, they basically all say 100% of the time we value hard work, and that's often taken as evidence of, oh look, everybody values hard work. There's clearly not a problem with any sort of non-economic factor in these communities. And I think that that's just not a well-supported proposition. In your really thrilling journey from the place you, the hand that you got dealt in life to where you are today, graduate of two of the finest schools in the country and a very successful business person and investor and course author, you identify various causal factors. So your three stops between Middletown and San Francisco were the United States Marine Corps, or I've missed the most obvious, Mamaw, the United States Marine Corps. I know a high estate doesn't belong on the list, so I'm gonna go straight to Yale Law School. Among those three, rank them and talk about their different contributions. Sure, well, Mamaw was obviously important because she gave me a lot of the things that I didn't have when I was a very young kid. She gave me a stable family. She gave me certain high expectations. She gave me, you know, a certain perceptiveness about all of the things that were going wrong in our community. And she had, you know, she just had this unbelievable ability to sort of understand what was going on in my head and to translate it into something that was very real world and useful to sort of allow me to empathize with me in a way that allowed me to sort of understand some of the things that were going on in my community, but at the same time to really push me against giving into the worst impulses. You know, she also was just, there's no other way to say it, very powerful. You know, she was not a well-educated woman. She did not graduate from high school, but she just had this force of personality that was incredibly hard for me to resist. And she also had this real appreciation for education that when paired with the fact that she didn't have any money, really stood out in my mind. I mean, I remember when I was going through a math class and we were encouraged to get one of those fancy graphing calculators. And Mamma was one of these people who, you know, would buy every article of clothing that she had from Goodwill, but she bought me one of these graphic calculators with money that she didn't really have. And I remember when she told me, look, have I got to afford this frigging graphing calculator? You damn well better listen to that, Mr. Selby. She didn't say frigging either, did she? No, she did not say frigging. That was not a word in her vocabulary. Yeah. So she definitely gets a ton of credit, and I think the most credit, because she really gave me the foundation on which to do anything. The Marine Corps, I would rank next, because I talk about this sense of hopelessness, this sense of feeling like there was no real connection between the effort that I put into something and the outcome. I just didn't think that I really had much of a chance. And the Marine Corps is this place where, obviously it provides America's war fighters, it is primarily a military institution, but it also is constantly giving you challenges, letting you fail at those challenges, and then giving you new challenges and sort of coaching you how not to fail next time. It's this really impressive organization, I think like the entire US military, that really is designed in some ways to build character and to build willfulness. And I really needed that. The other thing the Marine Corps did, which I really think goes underappreciated, is that it teaches you a lot of these sort of non-cognitive or soft skills that you don't even realize you need until you get there, right? So things like how to iron a uniform, how to prepare yourself for work in the morning, how to shave properly, little things like that that really do matter if you wanna be a successful adult. And things that are a little bit more obvious like how to shop for a car loan, how to not go to the dealer and get a 20% interest rate BMW, but how to go to a local credit union and get an 8% interest rate Honda, right? That was sort of, that was a lesson that I needed and the Marine Corps made sure that I had it. And then Ohio State, which despite your pretty simple there. Before you leave the Marine Corps, you skipped one. Yeah. I gotta ask, how chubby were you when you went in there? Well, I've unfortunately put on a fair amount of the weight that I lost in the Marine Corps. I probably was maybe 20, 30 pounds heavier than I am now. So I was a big kid. Yeah, but it turned you into whatever Marine has to be. Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And then Ohio State gave me a lot of educational opportunities, a couple of really good mentors that helped me through. And the last thing I'll say there is that the thing about my book that I think is definitely not true is that it's not a pull yourself up by your bootstrap story. Because the way that I see it is that not just those three things but 20 different things had to go right in order for me to have much of a chance. And it was Mamal, but it was also Papal. That's my grandma and grandpa. It was my aunt and uncle. It was my sister who was only six years older than me but really stood in and did things for us when she was a teenager that I think most 30 year olds probably are expected to do for their families. There was really this sense that when I look back at my life, so many things had to go right. And that's one of the reasons I wrote the book is because I wanted to give people a sense that there are a lot of non-obvious things that have to go right in the life of a low-income person for them to have the right opportunities. And that's, I think, important to appreciate. Yeah, I said to JD earlier that I don't know, those of you who've read the book felt like this, but if Mamal had been a fictional character she'd have been a fabulous one. I mean, just complex and sometimes contradictory but just very fascinating. I used to love those, you could be a redneck jokes that Jeff Foxworthy used to tell. And there was one that was, if your mother or your grandmother doesn't take the cigarette out of her mouth when she tells a state trooper to kiss her behind, you could be, you know, that sounds, I think that was Mamal. Yeah, yeah, that's what they had been like. I remember when I first enlisted in Marine Corps and the Marine Corps recruiters like to make these home visits just to so that the families are prepared for what comes next and they have a good sense of what their young kids about to go through. And the Marine Corps recruiter was not popular with Mamal. I mean, this is right after the Iraq war had started and she did not want me to go to the Marines. Very protective, very defensive, very patriotic woman but just was not happy about the idea of me deploying. And the Marine Corps recruiter, he came, it was the summertime and he walked up to our porch and Mamal said, if you set one foot on my porch, I will blow it off. And I remember they had a 20 minute conversation where he stood in the grass and she was looking down on him from the porch. And he later told me, I asked him how tough is Marine Corps boot camp? Pretty nervous, 18, 19 year old kid. And he said, well, those drill instructors are mean but not like that grandma. Yeah, I had exactly the same thought. At least you already heard the same vocabulary. That's right. I want to ask you about, I mean, so J.D.'s book came out well over a year ago. I don't know exactly what publication date was, but I first- About six months ago, actually. The whole book, no, because I was, I've talked to you before then. Anyway, people- You may have gotten an advance copy. Somebody may have because people started calling and asked, I'd seen it. And it was obvious to me at the time that it's become so much more obvious since. That one reason for the fascination with it is that it opened up a world that many of our, I'm gonna use the worn out word now, elite people in society did not know existed as huge as massive. We're talking about millions and millions of people spread across, you know, what we think of as the heartland of the country. And then it was as though this was a giant revelation that there were people like you and in large, large numbers. And I'm just wondering why you think that blind spot was there and what's it like now to travel the country as more or less the ambassador from Appalachia and meet folks who only recently discovered there is such a place? Yeah. Well, I think that the answer to the first question is just how else would they know in some ways, right? You know, I think that after the election there was a lot of self-reflection on this idea of data journalism and how different it was from traditional journalism. Cause you have all these people who live in D.C. or New York or San Francisco, they crunch numbers, they're very good at reading studies, they're very good at connecting those dots, but they're not actually in the places that they're very often reporting on. And I think a big part of it is just that we live such different lives in different geographic segments of the country that it's very hard if you grow up in a certain area to understand what it's like to grow up in Middletown, Ohio or Eastern Kentucky. And frankly, if you grow up in Eastern Kentucky it's very hard to know what it's like to grow up in San Francisco. I don't think that the bubble just moves in one direction. How, you know, this question of feeling like an ambassador on behalf of the white working class, whatever you wanna call it, somebody in the media dubbed me the Trump Whisperer. Oh. Don't get me started. Yeah, yeah. One, honestly, it bothers me a little bit. The idea that a single person could represent a region that I know has incredible complexity. Even, you know, I don't feel like I could be a good, very good spokesperson for my own family, much less this entire broad community. So I try to just, one, recognize that and recognize that I need to be a little bit careful in the words that I choose when somebody asks, what does the white working class feel about this to sort of appreciate that I shouldn't try to substitute my view too much for what an entire group of people thinks. But, you know, I also think that it's not good, but it's better than if there was no one there. So I at least try to represent folks as well as I can because I do think that it's a voice. It's too bad there's only one voice, but it's better than zero. It's much better than zero. The, you know, I, those who haven't, today, I think, probably today's most insightful social scientist, Charles Murray, wrote a book a few years ago called Coming Apart. It's entirely devoted to white America. To some extent, it presages your book. It's not nearly as dramatic. It's more scholarly, but those who haven't, there's a test in there, about 20 questions, which I predict that JD probably got the highest score ever, but it has to do with the, it measures really the sense of social distance. Sure. And it has questions like, have you ever had a job where you're backward at the end of the day? Have you ever worn a uniform since you left college? Did you ever live in a town with fewer than X people? That sort of thing. And it goes, I think, to this really serious problem that we have of the distance where people don't, not only don't empathize with each other, they didn't even know they were there. Right. So there's been, as you say, there have been a lot of reflection since the recent events of November I'm talking about and in which people have said, folks who are very unhappy about it, like you said, well, I wish we had been a little more, we'd listened a little better. Frank Bruni was one of your predecessors in this series, very tremendous talent at the New York Times. He wrote about, he talked about the smugness and sanctimony that he felt without meaning to. He had expressed, and many of his colleagues, I wrote down a quote from another one in the Huffington Post, a woman named Johnston Houston, wrote, somewhere along the way, we, speaking of folks who see the world as she does, we stopped fighting for the little guy, became the party of the smug, educated elites who looked down on such people and think that they are no longer worthy, they're not worthy of being able to make personal decisions for themselves. Have you run into some of that on your trip? Yes. Yeah, this is to me a very significant problem in our country right now, and I wish that I could say that it's gotten better since November, and I don't know that it has, it may have even gotten worse. There was this article that ran not too long after Trump was elected before he became the president, where effectively, there was some reporting that people who had voted for Trump were now worried that they were gonna lose their health insurance, they weren't nearly as ideological maybe as certain voters, they just wanted some sort of change, one form or another, and the article basically was almost saying, good, these people should lose their health insurance, let them die, they were stupid to have voted for Trump in the first place, and I think that that level of smugness is something that is really, really destructive to our political culture, and it's something that, frankly, you see it all the time, right? I mean, I remember when I was, I don't believe this story is in the book, but I was a second or third year law student, and one of the senior, if not the senior, Marine Corps JAG officer was in town, I believe he was a full bird colonel, so pretty high ranking Marine Corps officer, he was there to talk just about military justice, and the professor that day who was hosting and moderating the conversation, this pretty small group of students, asked this guy, this well-educated lawyer, full bird colonel, what it was like to have to advise young, uneducated, stupid enlisted Marines about their rights, and he called them unintelligent, and this colonel was just absolutely aghast, and I think that anyone with even a hint of cultural IQ was also aghast, and I really, it was everything I could do not to speak up and say, excuse me, I'm a former enlisted Marine, and I don't think that I'm uneducated or stupid, but it just goes to show that, not that he would make that remark, but that he would make that remark in a public place and not even notice how smug it was is just really bothersome. I feel like a lot of biases and like a lot of stereotypes, it's unconscious, people, you know, and I firmly believe, and there's all kinds of evidence that this was a very close election, and this was a very critical factor, that it wasn't just economic frustration as very real and big as that is in places that sort of put Trump over, but this cultural disdain which people expressing it like your professor don't even hear themselves saying, but it just drips off and the folks on the other end are smart enough to know when they're being looked down on. Okay, so I've got a couple last questions and those who have their own can start mustering the courage to come forward, but to me, you know, what makes me so excited about your book, a lot of things, JD, but most of all, it is all about social mobility. It's all about what has been the heart of this country. It's not only been the engine that drove the greatest prosperity in human history, but it's the glue that has kept us together as a functioning republic, as a functioning government by consent of the government, and so it's the most important topic in the country. And you have some very, I think, pointed things that you've said to folks in situations much like yours. Now, Mamaw, as always, may have said it best when she said to you, never be like one of those blanking losers who think the deck is stacked against them all the time. But you talk about the, you say social mobility isn't about money or economics, it's about a lifestyle change. And yet you said you didn't do it all by yourself, so where do we look? You told us we're not to look. Government at the fringes, where do we look? If we would love to see in America millions of JDs. Well, I definitely think government has a role and an important role to play in this. I wouldn't say that I'm a complete skeptic. I just, my fear is that we tend to think in very technocratic terms about this stuff. And if we presume that the entire solution is gonna come from government, I think we're gonna be disappointed because a lot of the things that went right in my life, those 20 factors I mentioned, aren't totally amenable to being created by a public policy solution. And I also think it's important, I say this in the very beginning of the book, that there is a strong economic element to this, right? I mean, I don't think that we should ignore that, look, if we were a little bit better at training a modern workforce, if there were better jobs available in some of these areas, that would obviously help. Again, I just don't think that's a whole solution. So, my sense is that if we're looking to create answers or we're looking to really figure this stuff out, we've gotta one think about the space in our society that exists between the individual and the state. I think folks on the left are really good at talking about the state, and folks on the right are very good at talking about the individual and the self. But there are so many things that exist in the middle, churches, unions, civic institutions, things that are really important at creating social cohesion, at creating values, at creating support that are very, very important, often get neglected in our conversation, I think partially because it's overly technocratic, like I mentioned. But I think that it really starts with a recognition of what is the real nature of the challenge, right? If the problem, if the biggest driver is concentrated poverty, the biggest driver is too many single-parent families. The biggest driver is low social capital, which is another big thing that came out of that study, something I certainly believe when I see, how do we build social capital? How do we create more stable families in our country? Or when families break down, how do we put kids in more stable backup situations? How do we break that cycle of concentrated poverty? I'm not a pessimist about this. I don't think that there's nothing that we can do, and there's no solution to that problem. I just think we have to really appreciate the scale of what's happening if we're gonna design solutions at the policy level or at every other level that are actually gonna work. Well, among its many, many contributions, you have helped us all understand the scale of what's happening, so thank you for that. And I think that I have completed my rounds and kept my resolution, did not mention the name of the new president. So I'm leaving that to the audience. I'll bet it comes up somewhere. Let's start over here, and we'll toggle from our left to our right. Yeah, thank you for coming here. My name is Jack Gander. I'm a Purdue faculty retiree. I grew up in a small town along the Ohio River in West by God, Virginia. And read your book with great personal interest. I was especially intrigued with the chapters describing the culture shock and alienation you experienced at Ohio State in Yale. They reminded me of the saying, you can take the boy out of the country, but not the country out of the boy. And now you've reached the pinnacle of literary success. Number one, New York Times best sellers list. So my question, and now, where is that country boy? Well, I guess he, you know, he's sitting right up here. Yeah, you know, this, my mom always said you can take the boy out of Kentucky, but you can't take the Kentucky out of the boy. So I've heard a very similar statement. I have always thought to myself that in the past couple of years especially, that there is, you know, I occupy these two different worlds very uneasily, right? So when I'm an investor in Silicon Valley, it doesn't quite make sense to me. My life doesn't quite make sense to me. Certainly when I'm up here with all you people listening to me and I wonder, you know, what the hell is it that I had to say that would cost so many people to sit here and listen to me? It's very weird. It's sort of, you know, there's a little bit of just a culture shock that comes with that. I do think that where I came from and some of the things that I saw growing up are some of the, you know, really, I thought of myself when I was 14 or 15 as a kid who had the Dext Act against them as a kid who was very disadvantaged. And of course, objectively, that was true. But now when I think about my life, I really just think it was an incredible blessing to have so many of those experiences because it's given me a perspective that, frankly, a lot of the people that I spend my time around these days don't have. So I really appreciate that fact that I'm still a country boy. I still have those roots because I just think I'd be a totally different person without them. Thank you. Good friend of mine has always said, like me from Eastern Tennessee, as I was originally, said, when you stop talking like where you grew up, you have a problem. So we're glad you're, he's still in there. Sorry, that sounds good. My name is Eric Myers. I'm from Little Town of Frankfurt right over here. I wanted to ask you some public policy question. I jotted down three short ones. Okay. How do you fight the, it's your fault mentality, you know, the blaming of people, you know, for their circumstance? And do you see any benefits in the charter school system or is the answer in some type of family support units? And thirdly and finally, what's your opinion of Citizens United and the ability of elite, you know, to essentially purchase elections? And I would refer to Mr. Robert Mercer who's a high-frequency trader who's developed a philanthropy program and is bankrolled some people. Thank you. Well, thank you for the question. So to the very first question, how do you fight that attitude? I think part of it just comes from public leaders taking the right approach to these conversations. I think part of it comes from actually giving people more opportunities. One of the big problems and one of the areas where I think policy really could help is to enable there to be more bridges between high school and a decent middle class dignified job. I think we're very bad at providing kids options. We effectively say, go work in a service sector job, making minimum wage, or go get a four-year degree. And it's a real indictment on our society that we don't provide more pathways. The second question, sorry, the third one was, yeah, yeah, sorry, about the sort of family and community aspect. One policy idea, and I have very few policy prescriptions in the book, but one policy idea that I do have is that in the United States, I think we look at the sort of breakdown of families as primarily through a nuclear family lens. So a kid goes to the foster care system and we're looking for a licensed foster care agent to place them with. We've improved on this a little bit, but we have a lot of room to go to actually thinking about what if we put them with aunt or uncle? What if we put them with a grandparent? That could be a really, the data suggests that would actually help a lot when families break down to sort of rely on the extended network as opposed to the nuclear family. That's one answer there, but I also think this question of family breakdown is sort of what civic institutions, charters, or so forth, replace. That family breakdown is tough. It's not necessarily an easy answer. And the question on Citizens United, I'd probably as qualified as the least qualified person in the world to answer this question. I will only offer one answer to that for that reason, for the fact that I'm not an expert. There's something I heard really interesting from a guy who helped run Jeb Bush's Super PAC in the most recent election. And one of the things he told me is he thought that the way that we did campaign finance reform followed by the way that the Supreme Court reacted to it had really weakened parties as institutions and had really elevated these sort of role of Super PACs as institutions. And you can make a good argument if you look at American politics the past couple of years that we actually want parties to be a little bit more powerful and we want these Super PACs to be a little bit less powerful. And I do wonder if we should be thinking through that lens as we think about how to reform our campaign finance system. But no, I mean my intuition is that I'm not the world's biggest fan of multi-billion dollar contributions or multi-million dollar contributions, but my expertise really stops there. All our expertise stops. The guy who spent almost nothing won the election. He was outspent thousands to one. That's right. Request, let's try to be concise in our questions and if we can keep it to one to a customer we'll get to every customer, thank you. So there's a quote on your Wiki page talking about hillbilly culture leading to social rot. So not in any instance of the conversation tonight have you looked at or addressed mental health as being an issue amongst redneck culture, which I'm a member of. Nor have you addressed the debilitating aspects it has on someone trying to provide for their family when they're making seven bucks an hour, 10 bucks an hour, tramping hillsides with a big ass chainsaw or framing a house or whatever, or you look up in the northern parts of the state. We're waiting for a question, Mark, so try to get there. So the question is why don't you address those two very core basic issues which lead to the degradation of families, which lead to kids not seeing their parents because they're in jail for drugs or whatever. Those are core issues, not the family's gone. Why is the family gone now? Well, first I disagree that I don't think of mental health or I haven't talked about mental health up here. I mean, one of the things that I talked about is the multi-generational enduring effects of childhood trauma. So we can sort of argue the causal element where did the childhood trauma come from? And I think the answer is complicated. It comes from multiple different places. But once it's there, we know that it has long term and enduring effects. So I would disagree that I don't think that mental health is a factor here or an important factor. I think the question that you asked to me presumes that sort of all of these social ills necessarily come from some core structural starting point. And I think that I'm agnostic about where these social ills came from. I think that you can make an argument that a lot of sociologists have made that the sort of the poverty came first and these social ills came afterwards. But even if that's true, the social ills become self-perpetuating on their own. We know that childhood trauma, independent of any economic factor, continues to have negative externalities. We know that the attitudes and habits that people form when they grow up in incredibly unstable families continue to have negative effects. So I would just disagree with the premise because I think I'm a little more agnostic about this question of where these problems came from. I just think that they're there now and they have long-term and enduring consequences and we've got to deal with those and understand them. Great question. Great answer. Hello, Mr. Vance. So after the election, you wrote an interesting article about the bubbles that we place ourselves in. Sure. And at the end of the article, you wrote about your own bubble when you were kind of surprised when a friend told you about the younger brother getting these racial attacks. And we've actually had a recent issue of hate speech posters on our campus and many individuals view that the response by Purdue's administration wasn't quite adequate enough or they did one thing or another. How do you think that Purdue's administration can help pull our own community out of their bubble and understand the effects of this sort of thing? Sure. Well, thanks for the question. I won't comment on Purdue's administrative response to something in the past just because I don't know. And I'll give Mitch the benefit of the doubt. But I will say this. I mean, my sense of this, and I think because I live a life where I am constantly uncomfortable wherever I am, especially in Silicon Valley, it's given me a certain appreciation for the fact that there are probably other people who are also uncomfortable where they are. And I think it's incredibly important, especially now that the people that I wrote about in the book are sort of politically triumphant, to not assume again that this sort of bubble or vacuum mentality goes in one direction. There are people who are very worried about Donald Trump being president of the United States. And whether you agree with the substance of the worry, I just think that it's important to recognize that people are pretty smart and they tend to act in pretty good faith. So if they're expressing something, whether it's a Trump voter who feels left behind is upset about the heroin epidemic and is just gonna vote for a change no matter what form it takes, whether it's a black student who is incredibly concerned about some of the rhetoric that comes, if not from the president and from sort of supporters of the president, then it's probably rooted in something real and we should be cognizant of it and listen a little bit more than we do. I mean, I just think that we sort of instinctively go to defensiveness about these issues. And I think that's just a terrible posture to take. And I say that as someone who, like I said, is pretty uncomfortable most of the time, which goes back to this question of, I think that discomfort is a benefit in my life now, not so much a problem. Over here. Hi there. Hi. So your story really touched me a lot because I grew up in, as I mentioned before, in the Poconos, in a very depressed area, so Wolfsbury's Granton area. I kind of wanted to ask you this question, kind of related to education. Since you called for personal responsibility in your book, was producing campus body mainly comprised of people with no exposure to the world outside of Indiana, like myself, before I moved out of Pennsylvania, how can we assist the university students to become personally more responsible, especially when it comes to education and how the system is stacked against minorities? Yeah, that's an interesting question. It's always easier to diagnose problems than design solutions for these problems. So I'm going to caveat that by saying that what I'm about to say is probably not going to be super satisfactory. But I think one thing that was incredibly powerful to me was recognizing that people who were successful were not fundamentally different from me. And I remember, it was actually the morning that I proposed, or the morning I asked my now wife when I asked her parents whether I could propose to her, I just wanted their blessings, sort of an old fashioned thing. And I remember telling her dad that I thought they had raised two very successful daughters, two very smart daughters. And he pushed back and he said, they're not very smart, they're just hardworking. And I think there's something incredibly valuable to recognizing that there is not something fundamentally different about you and people who are successful. Maybe they've had a few more legs up, maybe you've just sold yourself short. And I hear this a lot from teachers where they talk about their students and how their students assume that those who achieve great things are just smarter, they're just so much more different from them. And I think to the degree that you can dispel people of that notion, that's a good thing. The last thing I'll say, and this is advice that I took from my mamaw, and the president said something about this that he would never be like those people who think the deck has stacked against you. But the other thing that she often told me is life is unfair for people like us, but never let people think that, or never convince yourself that the deck has stacked against you. She recognized that there was sort of this unfairness about certain things, but that that wasn't an excuse to sell yourself short. And I think that balance is obviously very hard to strike, but people from whatever background, from whatever disadvantage they've had, and I certainly think that there's a lot of disadvantage to go around in our country. You mentioned minority students. I'm not one of these people who say that minority students aren't disadvantaged. But what I do think is there's something very powerful about continuing to believe that you still have some control. And again, I think if you look at the data, that's true. And when people believe that it's true, they actually do a little bit better. Great. Over here. Mr. Vance, it was good to meet you today. Yes, ma'am. And I wanted to just say that I am so encouraged by your humility, right? So I grew up in North Carolina at Fort Bragg. I'm a military brat. My father was in the Air Force. I believe in 82nd, you're born, right? That's right. That's how I grew up. And Second Amendment, all of those things, but you wouldn't know it, right? Just to see me. I'm a university professor, right? But I know about what it means to work second shift. I work for ROTC in the summer. So one of the things that I value about your conversation here today, and that I'd like you to comment on, is we can talk a lot about divisions and divides and flyover states. But what I hear, I signed your book in my course and my students read it, and I asked them to think about how are their lives like or different what they read about in your memoir. And one of the things that is encouraging about your conversation here is how the lives of people, white working class America or flyover states, they're not so different than how we talk about urban areas or urban poverty or places where institutions have crumbled. And that one of the solutions is actually to figure out how to come more together. And there's some room there, right? There's a space there. And I'd like for you maybe to comment on that, the bridges that can connect us rather than only the divides. Thank you, sure. Thank you. And it was good to meet you too. And I appreciate talking to you. You know, I think one of the reasons that I wrote the book and there are a lot of reasons I wrote the book, but one is that I wanted people who grew up in my community to read it and to sort of recognize that maybe we weren't quite as good as we thought we were, that it is very often, you know, I sort of mentioned how fraught this conversation about culture is. And I think one of the reasons that it's fraught is the way that it's been deployed against certain groups of people, but not deployed against other groups of people. And so I think that there's something very useful in recognizing that a lot of the problems that are typically I think associated in our collective mind with the urban poor, even the black poor, are actually really true among the white poor. And just recognizing that fact, I find has torn down a lot of barriers in the way that I've seen people talk about this issue. So thank you. And I hope to sort of continue on that theme because I do think it's really important. Thank you, Professor. And this is Charles Murray's point too. And you'd get a very high grade on his test, I can tell. Because you get it. I'm honoring it. Yeah, that's fine. Over here. Hi, my name is Mike Pinto. I'm an elementary principal locally here in Tipkinoo County, Purdue grad. And we spent a lot of time in our school on the soft skills that you spoke about. What resonated with your book was the idea of a thumb on a scale to tip in favor of maybe doing something different. And so we spent a lot of time in my school talking about those pieces. I firmly believe students should leave high school with an identified adult non-family mentor. Can you talk just a little bit about your mentors and what that means and am I off base? And what can I do as a principal to continue this fight? Because you're absolutely right. In this county, we have many of the same students who don't even know that Purdue is something besides a building because they don't cross the river. So anything you can share with me would be great because tomorrow they're going to be in my door and I'll be hugging them and hoping to get them off on the right step. So thank you. Well, thank you. And thank you for the work that you do. I will say this, that every single kid, every friend that I had growing up who came from similar circumstances but ended up achieving some measure of success, achieving some measure of opportunity for themselves, they all had a very significant mentor in our public high school. I think for me, there are two people who really stand out. One who was just really demanding. One who was a little bit more empathetic, an English teacher and a math teacher. That's true when I think of my friend, Nate, when I think of my friends just across the board. I think the math teacher was the demanding one. Yeah, that's right. OK. That's right. The math teacher was the demanding one. And I keep in touch with both of them. And the thing I'll say about that is it can be often very thankless work. I probably never said, I appreciate what you did until the past year or so to either of those two guys. But it really does make a huge difference. And we know from various studies on resilience and the way that people really depend on adults that it's just incredibly important work. So the only thing I'll say is encourage you to keep on doing it and looking for ways to really insert yourself into these kids' lives because it does make a difference. We're short on time. And I'm counting at least. No, it's not my fault. It's six questions, I guess. So let's do our best. All right. We'll do rapid fire here. Lightning round, as they say. So I want to talk about this liberal elite smugness. And so I come from a similar family background that you do. Very poor, broken family. But I have had upward mobility. And finishing my PhD, I've lived all over the world. But there seems to be resentment from the white working class towards the professional class. Now when I go home, there's space between my family and I and between my husband and my family. And we don't know what to do. How do we bridge this space? Because we're not being elite, we're not being smug. It's just based on the fact that we have educations and that we've traveled and had these opportunities. It doesn't make us smug, but there's a resentment. And we don't know how to fix it. That's a very good and a very tough question. I know we're in lightning round, so I'll try to be quick. But this one really strikes at me, so I may ramble here a little bit. But look, one, try as hard as you can. One of the things I try to think about is that because I've had a lot of opportunities, I owe it to my family, especially, to try to be a little bit more patient and understanding. I've certainly felt that distance before. I will say that there was a point when my mom had just had a heroin overdose. I was a second year law student at Yale. I felt like I couldn't talk to anybody there and I felt like I couldn't talk to my family back home because they just didn't understand sort of what it was like to be in these twin environments. And I gave my sister a chance and really opened up to her in a way that I hadn't done because I assumed that there was that space. And it was one of the best conversations that I have ever had. I remember it to this day. And I haven't since really felt that space at least between my sister and me. So I think a lot can be done with just trying. I'm not saying it's not there. It's just there are ways to overcome it. The second thing I'll say is that I was talking to a professor of mine in Ohio State a couple of weeks ago and he said he was increasingly worried that his university in Ohio State served a sociological function of sort of yanking talented, smart kids from their homes, bringing them into an institutions and then four years, spitting them back out in a way that they were culturally condescending to the people that they came from. And so I think that it's not totally the case that that space is created by the people there. I think it is very often created by a perception, sometimes real, that our universities are not quite as involved in understanding of the communities where they often collect students from. And so I think that's not something you can solve, but it's something I try to be mindful of as I talk to universities. It is a very delicate and powerful thing, especially a land-grant university like Purdue, what it does to this state. It really is amazing if you think about the responsibility that it has. And I think that approaching that with a fair amount of caution and humility would go a long ways. Thank you. I had prepared a very eloquent question regarding public policy, but you have already answered that as eloquently as I had prepared it. So I'll ask you a softball question. Do you plan to run for public office? And if so, for what and when? That's a softball question. Well, I'd like to declare my candidacy for president in 2020. No, the politician's answer to this question is I'm not actively considering it. The real answer to the question is I've always thought public service would be something fun and valuable. It's really astonishing for, if I ever did it, it would be on a timescale that is far in the future. But certainly, I've thought about doing it. And I think if there's a time where it makes sense for me, financially and for all those personal reasons, and I think I gotta actually contribute something, maybe I'll do it. Thank you. Yeah. Hi, JD, I just wanted to say, coming directly from the Hatfield and McCoy, both sides of the fence, myself, I am very honored and humbled to be here, and I'm so proud of you. Thank you. I'm so proud of you. And I want to tell you that your book resonated very deeply with me, because I used to have the phrase, I fit in everywhere, but I fit in nowhere and I can never figure out why. But I know now a lot more, and your book really helped. And I also wanna say the rich and the poor have one thing in common, God is the maker of us all. And the reason that we probably have issues in this country and this world is because we don't have enough love going around. I think it'll do a lot of good for us to love each other a little bit more this year. And with my question, did you have fallout with your family and your area that you grew up with, et cetera, that you wrote about? And how did you overcome without being accused of being better then? And just one last thing is my heart is heavy for helping people with addictions of different various economics, and maybe we can all work together and help start an organization with you all. And thank you. Thank you for the question, and I appreciate your comments. There wasn't fallout with my family, I think, partially because I really made them part of the writing process. I interviewed them, I let them see manuscripts. I wasn't just sort of conjuring this stuff from my own memory, but I asked them to participate. So there wasn't a whole lot of fallout for my family. Not so much from my home, but a little bit more. And the way that it's happened is, people are defensive about their home, and so when I write about some of the problems in Middletown, a few folks have expressed a worry that I've painted it in too negative of a light, but I think most people appreciate that I'm not talking about, this is the life of every single person in Middletown. This is just a life of a very big minority and maybe even a majority in Middletown and a much broader community. So even there, I've been relatively spared from criticism, so thanks. And the last two are over here. Earlier I had asked you, since you grew up in both cultures, what solutions you might have to bring them together, and since I've been here for the last hour, you've answered a lot of that. So I wondered if you have anything you'd like to add to it. You had started out saying the geographic divide was a factor, but then I didn't get to hear anymore and I wondered if you have any to add. Sure, so there's this question about whether we just need to be more empathetic to each other as a country. And my sense is that empathy or the lack of empathy is more a symptom than a cause of the problem. I think it's very hard to be truly understanding to people you don't know and you don't see. It's very easy to caricature somebody that you only see on a TV show or through an article in The New Yorker or an article on Fox News. It's just hard to really have any sort of empathy with people that you don't know. And so even though it's not a satisfactory answer to me because I don't know how we're gonna bring these people together geographically, I do think we have to really think about the fact that we have incredibly strong, and we see this in our politics, cultural divides between people who live in certain areas of the country and the people who live elsewhere. And I really don't see a way out of this unless those people spend more time with each other. And again, that's not a satisfactory answer to me, but it's the only definite thing that I know that would be helpful is if people actually hung out a little bit more. I mean, one other thing I'll say, I know we're short on time, but I was in DC after the inauguration or for the inauguration and after and I was in an Einstein bagels. I think right at the train station there in DC. And I just listened to this beautiful conversation between these two young women who were there for the Women's March and this older woman who was there for the inauguration the day earlier but was getting ready to take a train home. And it just sort of encapsulated everything that was right but everything that was wrong about our country in some ways because these people were just having a really substantive conversation about Trump and about women's issues. And I was like, my God, how often does this really happen anymore in a society where we're so segregated by geography? Thank you. Thank you. And you, sir, the last word. Hello. Thank you for coming here today. Unfortunately, you just talked about what I was gonna ask. But to extend that a little further and I hope we get this paraphrase right in a different interview, you talked about how sympathy without moral judgment is a kind of pity. And I hope I got that right but I was hoping you could extend on that because you just talked about how what we need to do is empathize and get to know each other better. But how does that not, how do we judge people and have a moral judgment about them while trying to empathize with them? And how should we feel? Yeah, well, I don't know if that quote is exactly right but I agree with the sentiment and so I probably said it or something like it at some point. My sense here, and this is especially in the context of the way that we think about how do we offer compassion to poor Americans. And I think that real compassion has to be a little hard edged. It has to be open-eyed about some of these problems. And so the point that I try to make is if we're gonna have compassion for people we have to treat them as moral agents. It's not compassion to children who can't control anything about their lives. It's compassion in a much more mature way where we recognize maybe that life has been unfair but we also recognize that there are, within that group, moral agents, some who are overcoming the odds, some who aren't, some who are doing very well, some who aren't. And that necessarily requires, I think, sometimes a certain judgment that people are uncomfortable with. And that's gonna be true. I mean, look, if you are a Hillary Clinton supporter and you think that every single Donald Trump voter is just a bigot, or if you're a Donald Trump voter and you think that every Hillary Clinton supporter is just a sort of out-of-touch elite who doesn't care about you, you are going to learn a lot about each other, I think, by spending more time and I think you may have a more substantive conversation. That doesn't mean you're gonna agree on everything and it doesn't even mean that you have to agree with the moral values all the time. It just means approaching it in a way that I think is, again, much more empathetic, much more compassionate, and that's something that we don't have a whole lot of in our country right now. Thank you. Yep. Thank you for a great set of questions. Tell them you're good news, or should I skip that, though? Is that fine with you? We can skip that, huh? We can skip that. You'll all have your own reasons for loving this book and admiring the person who wrote it. I'll just say that, mind start with, first of all, the joy of seeing that a book can really matter. A book can really matter, more than those people who drive or would like to drive events in our country. Now and then a work like yours comes along and opens eyes and introduces people to each other and introduces new thoughts and that all by itself. For me, at least, we should be thankful to you for JD. And then finally, you end the message you bring, go straight to, not to of, but to my way of thinking thee to, problems that should compel our attention as Americans. And you've talked so gracefully about them both tonight, increasing social distance. In every commencement speech I give here, I tell our kids don't wander into the status of a new aristocracy. You've got to go bowling, get in the softball leg, join a church across town, something so that you don't inadvertently separate as society will invite. And then closely related what you've got to save to us all about upward mobility and how we preserve it, the heart as it is of this country. And it's really, it's future success depends on maintaining it or recovering it if we have to. So all that in one package is the reason why, I bet I'm not the only person who thinks we just heard from one of the most important figures in America today and thank you for coming. Thank you.