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

0:00Thanks for listening to The Restless Politics, sign up to The Restless Politics Plus to enjoy ad -free listening and receive a weekly newsletter. Join our members' chat room again early access to live show tickets. Just go to TheRestlessPolitics .com. That's TheRestlessPolitics .com. A lot of very, very powerful right -wing people did not want JD Vance on the Trump ticket. Peter Till and Elon Musk did. Peter Till 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, Tiel and Yavin, are people who actually don't really believe in politics.

0:34They 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 startup guy, a visionary leader, like Napoleon or Lenin, who should have absolute power, dismantle the old regime and build something new. Vance combines the Hilbertale's story with the tech -bray story And in doing so, crosses the cast into a whole new vision of the world at the central which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian. The Monarch

1:13Hi there, Rory here. As you might be aware, we're currently running out our first ever series. the real JD Vance exclusively for the rest of politics plus, it charts the remarkable rise of JD Vance from Hillbilly Never Trump to Donald J Trump's vice president. In the first episode we re -loved this very very early life, or we're now delving into how his rise was fueled and accelerated by a very... 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 vans as their political leader.

1:55And in particular, a guy called Peter Till you may have heard about, he sees him not as a future president, he sees him as a future monarch of America. Yeah, I mean, I think back on it that the thing I still can't get over is the fact that advance 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 at how you get from those moral and intellectual views to becoming the most obsequious follower and flatterer of Trump. Yeah, and I think the other thing that I've sort of beginning to develop as we go along this journey of looking into JD events is There's a real kind of viciousness and anger in there that 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 join me and Alistair as we try to answer questions like Will JD events be America's next president or its first king?

3:01What explains his journey from vehement never trumpeter Trump's vice president and heir apparent? And just how far will he go in his pursuit of unfettered power? 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.

3:39So let's take up your invitation to Luke Pax Peter Teal. Yeah 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. I don't think he knows he's going to be his mentor. He just goes to a talk by Peter Teal which is at Yale. And this is Peter Till, 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, with genius to the world, and we should be allowed to run things as we please, government stay off our back, let us do with our money, what we will, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

4:20Now, 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 the modern economy should be, because this guy was very, very clear about the importance of his Christian views, and he said he never, he always felt, vans thought that people were very bit embarrassed about talking about their religious views. And I'm sure you went to of all sorts of impressive people talking at Oxford. And I can remember going to the auditor by sort of outside as coming in, being sort of moderately impressed. But what I didn't do is do what Vance did.

5:01It's 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 Till clearly saw something in Vance. This is at a point where he's not thinking being a politician, but it's interesting that two of his big backers intellectually, Teal 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.

5:40This is the moment where I intersect with Peter Till, who I met before I met fans. And oddly, and embarrassingly given the nature of the thing we're doing, it's Till that I remember much more clearly. I met Till at exactly the moment where he's making this speech in fact for about a year before. And Peter Till 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, so they disagreed politically, they'd been incredibly close. And also, of course, Elon Musk. And that was pure fluke.

6:17Elon Musk just happened to be developing his company in the same building. Peter Till 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 Till was planning and that's how they came together. They think. The line apparently that really impacted upon Vance in the speech. was if technological innovation were actually driving a 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 scrambling over there to sort of be this and be that, but actually we're the ones that are driving this stuff.

7:00So the teal story that one of recent I think gets straight, 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 bands and probably to a lot of students I just heard Teal just actually gave a speech in Oxford very recently and I just heard somebody went and have been very impressed and it's the same stick ten years later, right? 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 who are applying for a 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 your losers, your life is going to be pathetic 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.

7:50Right. So obviously for a student that's quite appealing, right? Because everybody else is turning up, telling them you're the future. Obviously it's not really optimistic though, is it? Not really. So the optimistic story that T .L. develops is that commercial wisdom is complete wrong. Instead of being incremental, you need to be really, really bold. Instead of being flexible, you need a plan. And a bad plan is better than no plan at all. And most interesting thing at all, instead of focusing on product, you've got to focus on sales. The product doesn't actually matter much. What matters is the marketing and the sales.

8:26Now, why is that interesting? Because right at the heart of this, and we'll get onto this with Vance's politics, but right at the hand of the problem with Teals intellectual view, is sometimes he sounds like what he's talking about is being virtuous, genius, you know, technologies that are going to change your world's safe world, and other times 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 Rinny Zhehad, who talks about mimetic rivalry, which is about the fact we all want to have what other people have.

8:59And Peter Till exploits this enormously. 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 140 characters. Yeah. 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 the inner things like Facebook, social, 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.

9:36And whether he's really going to say so you've got to gain the world. He's very, the thing you might know is a sort of figure in this. So you talk about in there, I'm bad at the others, picking what's going to work and I gain more, or they just do about failure in some enterprises. But he also takes a very, very, very big mess on Trump. Yeah, back him. Yeah, giving him money. Yeah, including after the access Hollywood tapes. Yeah, grabbing by the pussy. He's got a support. So you can't go supporting them partly because he thinks he's going to win. 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.

10:17People are Elon Musk are still supporting the Democratic Party at that point. So Teal is the first of these tech to really come out for Trump. When Trump wins, Trump partly at Teal's instigation has a meeting with all the tape pros, 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, he does that thing where he sort of talks about people publicly while they're there. He talks about Teal, like this guy as a genius, because he saw something in me that other people didn't, you know, classics all about me.

10:51And then the guy from Palantir who isn't really at that level of some of these take -broad, the bees or the guys who were there, but Palantir are there. And Peter Teal, 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. Well, interestingly, he clearly likes spending quite a lot of time going to deliver quite Portentist lecture. Yeah, he does a lot, 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.

11:26He's collecting people and putting them around JD Vance He's one of his people. I think it's possible to make the case that JD Vance wouldn't have been what he's become without Peach Teele, but Teele's been 15 million. Yeah, well to Teele. He's his first job. I mean, he creates completely creates So Vance comes out meets Teal at the end of this speech. Teal keeps is obsessed with the 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 a JD Vance, is called Mithril, which is the type of raw fish armour in the Lord of the Rings.

12:03So yes, he gives the money, he lets JD Vance launches his business career. and he's the guy that then convinces his Trump to endorse JD Vance when he runs the Senate. So absolutely, Vance does not exist really without Teal either financially or politically. So I said I knew Peter Teal a bit and even in 2012, he was a figure that people were like, worry what are you doing, meeting Peter Teal. So it was already a little bit of a sort of intake of breath this before Trump, right? But he was very charming for Intention. 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 answer to somebody who's capable of being very charming Very intelligent.

12:46You'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 You're gonna so what what what have you picked up? What's your beliefs about the world? I tell you first of the 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 T .L. 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.

13:18That's true of almost all the tech roles. All the tech roles that have this thing about sort of their own mortality and I think that they they they they they but it's also that they don't want constraint. They're children. Exactly. They're children. I mean they they they weren't except they might have to die. They weren't Except they are human beings amongst other human beings who should pay some tax as an equal member of society and they don't accept their mortality.

13:42So I hope you enjoyed that extra from episode two. If you'd like to hear the first two episodes in full right now, just head to therestaspolitics .com to join the Restas Politics Plus with a free trial. New episodes the series are dropping every Friday morning on the restas politics plus. Plus that's theRestlessPolitics .com for the full trip plus experience.