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- [00:01]
Alistair Campbell
Thanks for listening to the Rest is Politics. Sign up to the Rest is Politics plus to enjoy ad free listening, receive a weekly newsletter, join our members chat room and gain early access to live show tickets. Just go to therestispolitics.com that's therestispolitics.com 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, Teal and Yavin, are Peter. People 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 startup guy, a visionary leader like Napoleon or Lenin who should have absolute power, dismantle the old regime and build something new.
- [00:49]
Rory Stewart
Vance combines the hillbilly elegy story with the tech bro story and in doing so crosses the Cusp into a whole new vision of the world, at the center of which is not democracy, but the CEO, the authoritarian, the monarch. Hi there, Rory here. As you might be aware, we're currently rolling out our first ever series, the Real JD Vance, exclusively for the Rest Is Politics. Plus it charts the remarkable rise of JD Vance from hillbilly never Trumper to Donald J. Trump's vice president.
- [01:33]
Alistair Campbell
In the first episode, we relooked at his very, very early life and we're now delving into how his rise was fueled and accelerated by a very what I would see as a very shady network of tech pro multi billionaires who don't really like democracy and who basically think they should be masters of the universe. And they see Vance as, 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.
- [02:03]
Rory Stewart
Yeah, I mean, thinking back on it, 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.
- [02:35]
Alistair 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 JD 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.
- [02:53]
Rory Stewart
Join me and Alistair as we try to answer questions like Will J.D. 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?
- [03:12]
Alistair Campbell
So if you want to hear what we've done so far, you just go to the restispolitics, 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.
- [03:40]
Rory Stewart
So let's take up your invitation to Loot packed Peter Thiel 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.
- [03:52]
Alistair 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 genius 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, etc. Etc. Etc. 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 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 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, 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.
- [05:41]
Rory 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.
- [06:16]
Alistair Campbell
And that was a 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.
- [06:34]
Rory Stewart
Amazing.
- [06:34]
Alistair 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.
- [07:01]
Rory Stewart
So the teal story that. One of the reasons I think it. I'll come back in a second to his big strategic conclusion. But I think one of the reasons it's so appealing to Vance and probably to a lot of students. I just heard Thiel just actually gave a speech in Oxford very recently, and I just heard someone who went and had been very impressed. And it's the same shtick, 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 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. 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.
- [07:57]
Alistair Campbell
Obviously, it's interesting. Yeah.
- [07:59]
Rory Stewart
So that's.
- [08:00]
Alistair Campbell
Obviously, it's not very optimistic, though, is it?
- [08:01]
Rory Stewart
Not very optimistic, 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. Instead of being flexible, you need a plan. And a bad plan is better than no plan at all. And most interestingly, at 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 onto 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 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 mimetic rivalry, which is about the fact we all want to have what other people have. And Peter Thiel exploits this enormously. And sometimes when he's not saying that stuff, that we haven't achieved anything. We thought technology was going to change the world, but it just gave us 140 characters. 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 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. And whether he's really got to say is you've got to game the world.
- [09:40]
Alistair Campbell
The thing about him though, as a sort of figure in this. So you talk about him there sort of I'm better than the others at 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 backing him, giving him money, including after the Access Hollywood tapes, grabbing by the pussy.
- [10:06]
Rory Stewart
He sort of supports them after he.
- [10:07]
Alistair Campbell
Carries on supporting them, partly because he thinks he's going to win and he's.
- [10:11]
Rory Stewart
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 Thiel is the first of these tech to really come out for Trump.
- [10:25]
Alistair Campbell
But he then, when Trump wins, Trump, partly at Teal's instigation, has a meeting with all the tape bros. And this may actually be the first time that Trump properly meets Musk because Musk is in the room and Thiel 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.
- [11:00]
Rory Stewart
Yep.
- [11:01]
Alistair Campbell
And Peter Thiel, he's somebody who seems to me quite enjoys the fact that people like us talk about him, are interested in people, write books about him, but he's not somebody who's putting himself out there the whole time.
- [11:11]
Rory Stewart
Rather interestingly, he clearly likes spending quite a lot of time going to to deliver quite portentous lectures.
- [11:17]
Alistair Campbell
Yeah, he does all that. 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 collecting people and putting them out. 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 been what he's become without Peter. Thiel gave him 15 million. Yeah, well, to Thiel gave his first job.
- [11:39]
Rory Stewart
I mean he completely creates Vance, doesn't he? So Vance comes out, meets Teal at the end of this speech, Thiel 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 for J.D. vance is called Mithril, which is a type of dwarfish armor in the Lord of the Rings. So yes, he gives the money, he lets JD Vance, launches his business career, and he's the guy that then convinces Trump to endorse J.D. vance when he runs for the Senate. So absolutely, Vance does not exist really without Thiel, either financially or politically. 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 is before Trump, 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 ants too. 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 your beliefs about the world.
- [12:58]
Alistair Campbell
I'll 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.
- [13:18]
Rory Stewart
That's true of almost all the Tebros.
- [13:20]
Alistair Campbell
All the Tebros that have this thing about sort of their own mortality and they think that they.
- [13:24]
Rory Stewart
But it's also that they don't want constraint their children.
- [13:26]
Alistair Campbell
Exactly.
- [13:27]
Rory Stewart
Their children. I mean, they won't accept they might have to die. They won't accept 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. So I hope you enjoyed that extract from episode episode two. If you'd like to hear the first two episodes in full right now, just head to therestispolitics.com to join the Restless Politics. Plus with a free trial, new episodes of the series are dropping every Friday morning on the restless politics. Plus, that's thereesterspolitics.com for the full trip experience.