421. The Real JD Vance: The Power Behind The Man (Part 2)

What do we know about the billionaire tech bros backing Vance who hate democracy? Is Vance the political face of a revolution for the super rich? Is he a voice for the Rust Belt, or an avatar for Silicon Valley? Join Rory and Alastair as they answer all these questions and more in Part 2 of their first ever miniseries, The Real JD Vance, exclusively for members of The Rest Is Politics Plus. Claim your FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com. The Rest Is Politics Plus: Join with a FREE TRIAL at therestispolitics.com, for exclusive bonus content including Rory and Alastair’s first ever miniseries The Real JD Vance, early access to Question Time episodes and live show tickets, ad free listening for both TRIP and Leading, our exclusive newsletter, discount book prices on titles mentioned on the pod, and our members’ chatroom on Discord. The Rest Is Politics is powered by Fuse Energy. Fuse are giving away FREE TRIP+ membership for all of 2025 to new sign ups 🎉 TRIP+ gets you ad-free listening, discounts, and early access to episodes and pre-sale tickets for live shows! To sign up and for terms and conditions, visit GetFuse.com/Politics ⚡ Get our exclusive NordVPN deal here ➼ nordvpn.com/restispolitics It's risk-free with Nord's 30 day money back guarantee ✅ For more Goalhanger Podcasts, head to www.goalhanger.com Instagram: @restispolitics Twitter: @restispolitics Email: [email protected] Writers: Callum Hill, Evan Green Social Producer: Celine Charles Video Editor: Josh Smith Assistant Producers: Evan Green, India Dunkley Producers: Nicole Maslen, Fiona Douglas Senior Producer: Dom Johnson Head of Content: Tom Whiter Exec Producers: Tony Pastor, Jack Davenport Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Alastair Campbell?

  A lot of very, very powerful right wing people did not want J D Vance on the Trump ticket. Peter Thiel and Elon Musk did. Peter Thiel clearly saw something in Vance. He basically doesn't see Trump as the monarch, he sees Vance as the monarch. He thinks Vance is a more impressive character intellectually. Two of his big backers, Thiel and Yavin, are people who actually don't really believe in politics. They want to get rid of politicians, they want them out of their hair. Yavin wants one politician to run the country and we need a start up guy, a visionary leader like Napoleon or Lenin, who should have absolute power, dismantle the old regime and build something new.

• 0:35Rory Stewart?

  Vance combines the hillbilly energy story with the tech bro story. And in doing so, crosses the cusp into a whole new vision of the world, at the centre of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch.

• 1:01Rory Stewart?

  Hi there, Rory here. As you might be aware, we're currently rolling out our first ever series, The Real J D Vance, exclusively for The Rest Is Politics Plus. It charts the remarkable rise of J D Vance from hillbilly never Trumper to Donald J Trump's vice president.

• 1:19Alastair Campbell?

  In the first episode, we really looked at his very, very early life and we're now delving into how his rise was fuelled and accelerated by a very, what I would see as a very shady network of tech bro, multi billionaires who don't really like democracy and who basically think they should be masters of the universe. And they see Vance as their political leader. And in particular, a guy called Peter Thiel, you may have heard about, he sees him not just as a future president, he sees him as a future monarch of America.

• 1:50Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, I mean, I, thinking back on it, the, the thing I still can't get over is the fact that Vance says, as a conservative and as a Christian in 2016, that Trump is Hitler and represents everything that he despises as a Christian and a conservative. And I still can't quite work out how you get from those moral and intellectual views to becoming the most obsequious follower and flatterer of Trump.

• 2:21Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, and I think the other thing that I've sort of beginning to develop as we go along this journey of looking into J D Vance is There's a real kind of viciousness and anger in there that you need a bit of that because you need a bit of fight in politics. But I think that we're talking about depths of that that is pretty alarming.

• 2:39Rory Stewart?

  Join me and Alistair as we try to answer questions like, will JD Vance be America's next president or its first king? What explains his journey from vehement never Trumper to Trump's vice president and heir apparent? And just how far will he go in his pursuit of unfettered power?

• 2:59Alastair Campbell?

  So if you want to hear what we've done so far, you just go to therestispolitics.com. You sign up as a member and away you go. You'll get all sorts of special material that we put out only for you and you won't have to listen to all those wonderful ads. So to hear the first two episodes in full right now, go to therestispolitics.com and you get a free trial to see if you want to stick with us. Here's a clip. Hope you enjoy it.

• 3:26Rory Stewart?

  So let's take up your invitation to Luke Pax's Peter Thiel.

• 3:30Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 3:30Rory Stewart?

  And tell us a little bit about this moment, which appears to be so important to Vance, where he meets and hears his mentor on stage.

• 3:39Alastair Campbell?

  I don't think he knows he's going to be his mentor. He just goes to a talk by Peter Thiel, which is at Yale. And this is Peter Thiel, the guy who said two years earlier, I no longer believe that freedom and democracy are compatible. So this is a guy who's absolutely on the kind of sovereign individual, tech is more powerful, should be more powerful than politics. And frankly, we're the geniuses of the world and we should be allowed to run things as we please. Governments stay off our back. Let us do with our money what we will, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. Now, Vance was impressed by lots of things, partly the clarity with which he spoke, partly, as you said earlier, because of the vision that he was putting out as to what a modern economy should be. Because this guy was very, very clear about the importance of his Christian views. And he

• 4:24Alastair Campbell?

  said he never, he always felt Vance thought that people were always very bit embarrassed about talking about their religious views. And I'm sure you went to all sorts of impressive people talking at Oxford and I can remember going to the odd talk by sort of outsiders coming in being sort of moderately impressed and but what I didn't do is do what Vance did is is sort of immediately kind of clearly go up and impress him and form a relationship with him and this relationship I think has been absolutely fundamental to his rise. Peter Thiel clearly saw something in Vance. This is at a point where he's not thinking of being a politician, but it's interesting that two of his big backers intellectually,

• 5:07Alastair Campbell?

  Thiel and Yavin are people who actually don't really believe in politics. They want to get rid of politicians. They want them out of their hair. Well, Yavin wants one politician to run the country and he's got this line that, you know, you look at any CEO of any top company in America, they could do a better job than any president we've had by running it like a business.

• 5:27Rory Stewart?

  This is the moment where I intersect with Peter Thiel, who I met before I met Vance. And oddly and embarrassingly, given the nature of the thing we're doing, it's Thiel that I remember much more clearly. I met Thiel at exactly the moment where he's making this speech, in fact, for about a year before. And Peter Thiel had been the founder of PayPal, which he'd set up with, of course, Reid Hoffman, who we've interviewed on the podcast and who was his best friend, best friend at Stanford. Though they disagreed politically, they'd been incredibly close. And also, of course, Elon Musk, right?

• 6:02Alastair Campbell?

  And that was just pure fluke. Elon Musk just happened to be developing his company in the same building. Peter Thiel was a bit paranoid about what Musk was up to and they went out and discovered by going through the garbage bins that Musk was planning a business very similar to the one that Thiel was planning and that's how they came together.

• 6:20Rory Stewart?

  Amazing.

• 6:20Alastair Campbell?

  The line apparently that really impacted upon Vance in the speech was if technological innovation were actually driving real prosperity, our elites wouldn't feel increasingly competitive with one another over a dwindling number of prestigious outcomes. So I think that's him basically saying all these sort of. Politicians scrabbling over there to sort of, you know, be this and be that. But actually, we're the ones that are driving this stuff.

• 6:47Rory Stewart?

  So the Thiel story there, one of the reasons I think it strikes, I'll come back in a second to his big strategic conclusion, but I think is one of the reasons it's so appealing to Vance and probably to a lot of students. I just heard, um, Thiel just actually gave a speech in Oxford very recently, and I just heard somebody went and had been very impressed. And it's the same shtick 10 years later, right? He, he turns up and he says to all these bright young things who are working hard, everything you're doing is a complete waste of time. The exam results you're going to get don't matter. The law firms you're applying for are relevant. You're all good people who think if you work hard, get all the right exams and join all the fancy firms and get all the right ticks in the box, life's going to be great and it's not. You're losers, your life is going to be pathetic.

• 7:31Rory Stewart?

  And even more, not only are you going to be miserable in your job, but you're going to make the world a worse place, right? So obviously for a student, that's quite appealing, right? Because everybody else is turning up telling them, you're the future.

• 7:43Alastair Campbell?

  Obviously, it's interesting. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 7:45Rory Stewart?

  So that's, that's obviously.

• 7:46Alastair Campbell?

  It's not very optimistic though, is it?

• 7:48Rory Stewart?

  Not, not very optimistic, no. No, but anyway, the optimistic story that Thiel develops is that conventional wisdom is completely wrong. Instead of being incremental, you need to be really, really bold.

• 7:58Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 7:59Rory Stewart?

  Instead of being flexible, you need a plan and a bad plan is better than no plan at all. And most interestingly of all, instead of focusing on product, you've got to focus on sales. The product doesn't actually matter very much. What matters is the marketing and the sales. Now, why is that interesting? Because right at the heart of this, and we'll get on to this with Vance's politics, but right at the heart of the problem with Thiel's intellectual worldview is sometimes he sounds like what he's talking about is being virtuous, genius, you know, technologies that are going to change the world, save the world. And other times of the world, he's saying what really matters is just selling shit to gullible people. And he's actually got an intellectual, he's got an intellectual guru called Rene Girard, who taught him at Stanford, who talks about memetic rivalry,

• 8:43Rory Stewart?

  which is about the fact we all want to have what other people have. And Peter Thiel exploits this enormity and sometimes when he's. Not saying that stuff that, you know, we haven't achieved anything. You know, we thought technology was going to change the world, but it just gave us a hundred and forty characters.

• 8:57Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 8:57Rory Stewart?

  In other moods, he's to be found saying, I'm a really smart investor because all these idiots went around investing in real stuff like green technology, solar, wind turbines, and they lost a lot of money, but I was really smart. I punted my money on, you know, things like Facebook, social media, kind of marketing platforms, and I made a fortune. So he's never quite clear whether what he's saying is you need to be more real and make a difference in the world, or whether he's really got to say is you've got to game the world.

• 9:26Alastair Campbell?

  He's very, the, the thing about him though, as, as a sort of figure in this. So you talk about him there, sort of, I'm betting the others are picking what's going to work and I get involved, or they just talk about failure in some, some enterprises. But he also takes a very, very, very big bet on Trump.

• 9:42Rory Stewart?

  Yeah.

• 9:43Alastair Campbell?

  Backing him.

• 9:44Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:45Alastair Campbell?

  Giving him money.

• 9:46Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:47Alastair Campbell?

  Including after the Access Hollywood.

• 9:50Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:50Alastair Campbell?

  Tapes.

• 9:51Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 9:51Alastair Campbell?

  Grabbing by the pussy.

• 9:52Rory Stewart?

  He sort of supports him after.

• 9:53Alastair Campbell?

  He carries on supporting them partly because he thinks he's going to win.

• 9:57Rory Stewart?

  And he's the first person to break. So at that period, it's not just that Reid Hoffman, who is very anti-Trump, breaks with him at that period. People like Elon Musk are still supporting the Democratic Party at that point. So Teal is the first of these tech bros to really come out.

• 10:11Alastair Campbell?

  Go for Trump. But he then, when Trump wins, Trump, partly at Teal's instigation, has a meeting with all the tech bros. And this may actually be the first time that Trump properly meets Musk, because Musk is in the room. And Teal is sitting at Trump's right hand. And Trump, you know how he does that thing where he sort of talks about people publicly while they're there? He talks about Teal like this guy is a genius. Because he saw something in me that other people didn't. You know, classics, all about me. And then the guy from Palantir, who isn't really at that level of some of these tech bros, the Bezos, these guys who were there. But Palantir are there.

• 10:46Rory Stewart?

  Yep.

• 10:47Alastair Campbell?

  And Peter Thiel, who's, who's somebody who seems to me quite enjoys the fact that people like us talk about him or interested in people write books about him. But he's not somebody who's putting himself out there the whole time.

• 10:57Rory Stewart?

  Well, interestingly, he clearly likes spending quite a lot of time going to deliver quite portentous lectures.

• 11:04Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah, he does all that, but, but what he's doing is the long game. So what he did from that first day on, he's getting people into the Pentagon, he's getting people into the Health Department. He's, he's collecting people and putting them around. And J D Vance is one of his people. I think it's possible to make the case that J D Vance wouldn't have. Being what he's become without Peter Thiel.

• 11:21Rory Stewart?

  But Thiel.

• 11:22Alastair Campbell?

  Fifteen million.

• 11:23Rory Stewart?

  Yeah, well, to Thiel.

• 11:24Alastair Campbell?

  His first job.

• 11:25Rory Stewart?

  I mean, he creates, completely creates fans, doesn't he? So Vance comes out, meets Thiel at the end of this speech. Thiel keeps, is obsessed with Lord of the Rings, like a lot of these tech bros. So he keeps producing tech companies named after Lord of the Rings. So Palantir is the globe which people look into in the Lord of the Rings. And the venture capital firm he sets up, J D Vance, is called Mithril, which is a type of dwarfish armour in the Lord of the Rings. So, yes, he gives the money, he lets J D Vance, launches his business career. And he's the guy that then convinces Trump to endorse J D Vance when he runs for Senate. So absolutely, Vance does not exist really without Thiel, either financially or politically.

• 12:07Rory Stewart?

  So I said I knew Peter Thiel a bit and even in 2012, he was a figure that people were like, Rory, what are you doing, meeting Peter Thiel? So it was already a little bit of a sort of intake of breath, this before Trump, right? But he was very charming, very intelligent. I know him because he's friends with people I'm friends with. I got a sense of, and maybe this is actually a little bit true of Vance, to somebody who's capable of being very charming, very intelligent. You're aware in the background that they have some pretty wild views, but they know how to keep them under wraps if it helps them get through a conversation. So what have you picked up from what Thiel believes about the world?

• 12:44Alastair Campbell?

  I tell you what, first of all, this morning, as I was sort of, you know, rereading the book and looking at a few things online, I found this quite recent thing from Peter Thiel, where he talked about the Soviet Union had ideas about bringing the dead back to life. He's obsessed with taxes and death. He doesn't think he should pay taxes and he doesn't think he should die.

• 13:05Rory Stewart?

  That's true of almost all the tech.

• 13:06Alastair Campbell?

  All the tech bros that have this thing about sort of their own mortality and they think that they.

• 13:10Rory Stewart?

  But it's also that they don't want constraint, their children.

• 13:13Alastair Campbell?

  Exactly.

• 13:13Rory Stewart?

  Their children, I mean, they won't accept.

• 13:16Alastair Campbell?

  They might have to die.

• 13:17Rory Stewart?

  They won't accept they are human beings amongst other human beings who should pay some tax as an equal member of society.

• 13:22Alastair Campbell?

  Yeah.

• 13:23Rory Stewart?

  And they don't accept their mortality.

• 13:29Rory Stewart?

  So I hope you enjoyed that extract from episode two. If you'd like to hear the first two episodes in full right now, just head to therestispolitics.com to join The Rest is Politics Plus with a free trial. New episodes of the series are dropping every Friday morning on The Rest is Politics Plus. That's therestispolitics.com for the full trip plus experience.