Tech Billionaires & the Rural Poor: Two Sides of Trump’s MAGA Populism

I said, you're either going to have to do something about income inequality or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla. Those are your two choices.

And I got the distinct impression they wanted to armor plate their Tesla.

Hi, everyone, from New York Magazine and the Vox Media Podcast Network. This is on with Kara Swisher, and I'm Kara Swisher.

I've been talking all year about the authoritarian right-wing Trumpian shift in American politics.

My guests today are two journalists who've been writing about that shift from very different corners of the MAGA world.

Beth Macy was a newspaper reporter for three decades and is the author of five nonfiction books, including the New York Times bestseller, Dope Sick, about the opioid epidemic, and her most recent called Paper Girl, a memoir of home and family in a fractured America.

It's a personal look at how rural America has gone through what's known as downward social mobility and become more politically divided, not just from the coasts, but internally as well.

Jacob Silverman is an independent journalist with a focus on tech, political corruption, and illicit finance.

He's written three books, one about cryptocurrency and one about social media, and now his most recent, Gilded Rage, Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

It's about how tech billionaires, not just Elon Musk, are using populism to fashion the world in their their own image. And that's a problem, as I talk about all the time.

These are disparate groups they're writing about, one urban, rich, upper class, and the other rural, poor, and working class, but both have been radicalized under the MAGA umbrella.

I wanted to talk to Beth and Jake about how each of these groups is faring in Trump's America and how they explain the overlap in their viewpoints on education, journalism, and more.

But before we get to it, I'm interviewing Dara Khosrashahi, the CEO of Uber, and Chris Urmson, the CEO of Aurora, live on stage at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

on Monday, December 15th. These are going to be two really sharp conversations about applied AI and autonomous vehicles.
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Beth and Jacob, thanks for coming on on. Thanks for having me.
Pleasure. I love both your books.
I think they're both amazing.

And I know this seems like an unlikely pairing, but it's actually not in many ways. So, Beth, in Papergirl, you show how divisive politics have fractured your poor rural hometown.

Jacob and Gilderage, you reveal how political division has been fueled and funded by tech billionaires in Silicon Valley.

So, I want to start by crossing that class divide, because I think it's a lot closer than people realize. And those billionaires themselves have been radicalized in many ways.

So, Beth, how do you think

Trump supporters in Urbana, Ohio see the impact of tech on their lives? Because a lot of what you talk about is radicalization from online sources. Yeah, I think

what I noticed was

just almost no local news. And we know now that Trump won 90% of the counties that were living in news deserts, basically.

And they mostly get their news from Facebook and national sites.

Members of my family are not going to buy the New York Times or the Washington Post

because it costs a lot, but they are happy to watch Newsmax and Fox, which comes with their cable package.

And so, what I saw as I started going home to see my mom more as she was diagnosed with dementia in 2015 is just politics, national politics intruding in our family gatherings in a way I had never seen before.

And, you know, my brother unfriended me on Facebook because of, quote, all the liberal shit you post.

And I'm like, I post fact-check articles from the New York Times and Washington Post, some of which I wrote. And it really put a damper on our family relationships.

And then I started also noticing in my hometown that was once heralded as an important stop on the Underground Railroad that there were Confederate flags flying. This is a Union stronghold in Ohio.

And so the idea was just to go back home. I spent two years.
I spent about a week each month to try to figure out what had happened. And a lot of it really was the media environment as well as

sort of the decline of public education. So, Jacob, how did tech billions think about best former classmates and family in Middle America? Do they think of themselves as news purveyors?

How do you think they think of their role there?

I don't know if they they necessarily recognize their own power and influence in terms of setting the news agenda. I mean, maybe they do by now.

Certainly, someone like Musk is pretty much unrivaled except by Trump and being able to set the news cycle.

But I think there is something interesting in how they are mingling in these same spaces that we're talking about, you know,

especially on X, of course.

And they are sharing in the same, sometimes conspiracy theories or false narratives or just wrong information as the kind of people in Ohio that Beth is talking talking about and in dialogue with them.

And sometimes these people

are overt Nazis or right-wingers that we see Musk or others talking to on X.

Or sometimes they're people who are just gladly receiving that kind of information. But I think that that's...

a strange kind of flattening that's occurred actually is that the paranoid billionaires and you know your paranoid cousin are now uh kind of operating in the same epistemological and media space right absolutely it's interesting.

Oxford University Press named Ragebait the word of the year, which of course is really apt.

And one of the things, I've written about this for decades, this problem that they were sort of moving in and trying to abrogate their responsibility for media.

And at the same time, you know, saying they're just platforms. That was always their excuse.

When you think about this, Beth, with your brother unfriending you and things like that happening, Could you stop it in any way? Was there any, you know, way to get through when you were in person?

I know, I have the same experience with my mother.

I was, she's more of a Fox News person because she's elderly, but one of the issues I had is I've told this story, an interview with Hillary Clinton, and she called me and said, Hillary's at us again.

And she was talking about her, whatever tribe she happens to be part of, right-wing tribe. And I said, what did she say? And she started to repeat things that were actually my interview.

actually badly mangled in the in the right-wing media space. And I said, no, no, that's not what she said.

And then one of the things that was really astonishing, and she listened to it and she called me back, she she goes, okay, that's not what she said, but, you know, the emails.

And I was like, it moved on to the next media engagement. But what I was trying to get is, do they think, do they understand that they're being manipulated or not at all? I don't think so.

I really don't. With my brother, I mean, he's not a huge consumer of news, but he lives in this rural, very red district.
And

When this happened with us, he had missed an invitation I had sent him on Facebook to come come see our kid in their senior musical.

They were the lead, Nathan Detroit and Guys and Dolls, and their girlfriend was Adelaide. I was like, how can you miss this? Because he always came.

And then he said that thing about, you know, all the liberal crap I post. And then we kind of didn't talk for a while.
We never made a decision. We just didn't do it.
And then

as I started going home to work on this book a couple years ago, we just started spending time together. And

we very carefully, because I interviewed a lot of experts about how to have these interviews and how to try to reconnect. And they all said, you have to go to who you are as people.

What are the things in your family that you're proud of and spend time without politics? And so I didn't tell him like I had done all this research.

I just tried to do, I invited him to teach me how to fish again because that was something we used to do together as kids. And we had just

an incredible visit. And then at one point, he said, well, what about Sasha? That's my non-binary child who's a musician and an activist.
Does he still date girls?

And I said, and I'm thinking, and he said it in such a kind tone. And I'm thinking,

well, I didn't really think. I just reflexively mirrored back his tone.
And I said,

yes, they are dating a young woman now. And I mess up the pronouns too.
And he was, hmm. And he didn't know anybody that

there was no one in his world other than Sasha who lives five states away. And then he started showing up for Sasha's performances.
They're in a band now and, you know, driving eight hours.

And by the end of this two-year homegoing project, I mean, he was supposed to come today because they have a concert here tomorrow and the weather canceled it. But, you know,

they're a Palmyra Super fan now.

And when he brings politics up, I just...

I just don't go there. You don't go there.
Anymore. I don't even try.

And Jake, when you think about the responsibility of being a media person, there is a certain responsibility that each of us understands, having been in the media, in terms of getting it right, in terms of correcting mistakes.

When you talk to these, because especially Musk, who I think does understand it, I always thought he was trying to be the next Rupert Murdoch, which I said to him.

Do you feel they have any sense of responsibility as you are doing this?

Or just as they're moving, especially into the media space so aggressively?

Now it's, of course, it's the Ellisons trying to get control of CBS and CNN, etc.

Yeah, I don't think there's a strong sense of responsibility because partly because among most tech elites there's such an intolerance for critique or for admitting any mistake.

I mean someone like Mark Andreessen who blocks me and probably and most other journalists at the drop of a hat does not think that journalists or anyone who's kind of a non-technical expert has any authority at all.

And they're also coming in, I think, with such contempt for existing institutions, especially existing media institutions and the broad bulk of us journalists that their conception of what's getting it right is a little bit different than ours, I think.

Whenever you might point out some of these things, I think, to some of these people or people in tech in general,

it's sort of like the conversation you're having with your mom.

There's always another talking point to jump to rather than take responsibility for one's own actions or saying like, oh, I was wrong there.

You know, know, it always becomes a what about something else. I even had a similar conversation with um I was at a book event in in Wyoming in Jackson Hole.

So it was a bit of like a mixed crowd politically. And I was on this panel where we were talking about the need to have sort of a shared set of facts that we at least all agree on like what is true.

You know, we can disagree politically, but as long as we acknowledge some basis of reality. And then afterwards, someone comes up to me and she says, well,

you're talking about so much Trump corruption, but

Obama has been just just as bad or Biden. I said, well, they didn't accept billions of dollars worth of crypto when they were president.
Like, it's not the same.

And we had, and it just was clear this person was coming at me with a different set of facts. They didn't believe the things that I was saying.

And I don't know, as long as people can kind of retreat into that different set of facts, it's a huge problem. Yeah, it is.
Absolutely.

Just so you're aware, Mark Andreessen was the most thirsty journalist hanging out person in the very beginning of the internet. I couldn't, I would be like, I can't have lunch with you today.

Stop calling me. Stop texting me.
And they're all like that. You saw the example of when there was just a mild criticism of David Sachs, the New York Times.

They all jumped on, like as if you had just told them they were all pedophiles or something like that. Yeah, it's an incredible sensitivity.
Yeah, it's an odd thing.

So, Beth, your book is a memoir and reported, which I think works really well. You grew up in relative poverty.
You were a paper girl.

Then you got the Pell Grant, which allowed you to go to college and eventually become a journalist and writer.

My partner on my other podcast, Scott Galloway, got a similar kind of thing out of poverty. The trajectory is not an option for as many in Urbana, and it definitely doesn't pay the same amount.

You were pointing out, it paid for your entire college, and now it's 30% or some smaller amount. Talk about how the path to escaping poverty has changed since you were a kid.

Urbana, when I was growing up, it wasn't idyllic, but it had a thriving working and middle class, and then a professional class. The schools were very good.
I had great teachers.

I was, you know, president of the band and I got a lot of experience.

But I also had people, because my family often didn't have a reliable car or couldn't come and get me from practice, I relied on the kindness of my friend's parents a lot.

I was like the original Eddie Haskell, you know, like

I had one friend who would make me lunch every single day in high school. Her mom would.
And

that's what's missing today with the hollowing out of the middle class. There are no people

for a poor kid like me to sort of look up to.

So one of the things I did when I started researching the book was I cast about for a young me, a promising poor kid, to write about, you know, the decline in upward mobility.

And so I profiled this young man named Silas James, who was every bit as smart as me. He was also the leader of the band, and I loved that because that was such an important role for him.

But he was homeless for his junior and senior year. His dad had died of an overdose.
His mom had been in and out of prison on drug charges.

You got to remember, we're in the second and third generations of the opioid crisis now, something I've been writing about for 10 years. And he just had so many more strikes against him than I did.

And so he gets not a Pell Grant, but he gets a full scholarship to a community college to become a welder.

But he doesn't have a way to get there. And it ends up being an hour away from it where he's then living at the time.

And so during the course of this 10-month welding program, you watch him go through five clunker cars, four full-time jobs. He has to work full-time.
I didn't. You know, I had work-study jobs and

so much family drama and trauma bringing him down that he just barely makes it, but he does.

And

he's now raising his younger siblings who got removed from his mother's care. And I just don't think that's a situation I could have handled.

I think you have to be really, really special to make it in this day and age. Right.
It's a downward social mobility rather than an upward one or one that's pulling you back, right?

Where there's no aid

to do so.

Jabe, in your book, you write about the trajectory of tech. Let's talk about them, the tech billionaires, Peter Thiel, David Sachs, Elon Musk, for example, three members of the so-called PayPal mafia.

They all are from South Africa.

Talk about their backgrounds and what influenced them,

influenced especially the authoritarian vision that Thiel, I think, has been promoting since he was in college and he founded the Stanford Review.

And he and Sachs, you know, were so mobbed up there during that time period. And so it was a really, it's an unusual developmental pair, for example.

But talk about their background and how that formed them. Sure.

I mean, well, all three of these people, Musk, Sachs, and Thial, came, of course, from either apartheid South Africa, or Teal spent time in southwestern Africa, which became Namibia, dominated by apartheid South Africa at the time, but, you know, patriarchal, officially racist, hierarchical societies where white men were the designated elites.

And I think Teal and Sachs's activities at Stanford show that they were dyed-in-the-wool political animals from early on.

I mean, to this day, I think Teal still hires people who come up through the Stanford Review, which he founded, of course.

And for someone who complains a lot about universities and as sort of places of corruption, he spends a lot of time there and sort of engaging with them and still hiring people, like I said, from Stanford.

So I think

the kind of place that we see them occupying now

is certainly one of immense power and influence, but it's one in some sense that they've been preparing for since they were in college.

Musk feels in some ways more like

an instrument or if not quite, someone they've been able to direct a little bit, or with his more recent radicalization and discovery of electoral politics. But he is certainly not someone.

I mean, I think he's someone who felt like an elite like they did, but who didn't feel as interested in getting involved in the muck of politics until maybe politics started affecting him, especially during the pandemic.

That's right when he got radicalized, actually, I would say.

One of the things they talk about as you reference education, it's one of those areas where Urbana and Silicon Valley seem to agree, maybe for different reasons.

Beth, you wrote about homeschooling and no-schooling trend in Urbana, which I think was

really critical. I was sort of struck by what was happening there, speaking of different realities, right?

You're talking about, and Jacob, you talked about the tech billionaires' disdain for public schools and about their lobbying for charter schools. It's not just K through 12.

Both MAGA and Tech Bros are also pushing the idea that college isn't worth it.

Beth, talk a little bit about the public and higher education has become one of the scapegoats of the movement and who is benefiting versus being hurt by this because schooling is what brought you to where you are obviously it's not well regarded now correct in these areas absolutely one of the most disturbing trends i found was absenteeism both in the workplace and in schools, particularly after COVID.

So one of the people I checked in with, every time I went in, I'd spend a day shadowing the school truancy officer who put like 115,000 miles on her car driving kids from all ends of the county to the schools.

And as the public schools have deteriorated in Urbana,

the state legislature became increasingly red and they deregulated homeschooling. So as of

year and a half ago, a parent who wants to homeschool no longer has to have their curriculum signed off by a retired teacher or an education expert. So people started homeschooling at a bigger rate.

And of course, the public schools left suffer because the money doesn't go to the school.

The parents who are maybe a little more switched on educationally started open enrolling their kids elsewhere to even more rural schools, which had higher test scores.

But the unintended consequence of the deregulation of homeschooling was this shocking thing that always came up when I was with the truancy officer.

And that was the number of people who weren't sending their kids to school because they weren't mentally well enough to get up in the morning, go to work, send their kids to school, and when the truancy officer began to knock at their door and threaten charges, they would then pull them out and say they were homeschooling.

So no school. No school.
And one woman even handed her a slip. It had gone from this big portfolio you had to show of how well you were teaching your kid to a simple one-pager.

And one person even handed her a note on a post-it note saying, I'm homeschooling now.

There was a girl girl that showed up dead in West Virginia because of that. And that's, of course, the fear

that with no eyes on what's happening with these children,

what's going to happen to them? And where does that come from, the idea that school is not both K through 12 and college? That has happened rather quickly because college was the reach, right?

Right, right.

And there's this idea that if you do send your kid to college, they're just going to get liberal and they're not going to come home and live in Urbana anymore and you're not going to be able to do Thanksgiving anymore and all that kind of stuff.

And I think one of the places for genuine reform would be to start

underscoring the need for trades and

community college certifications. I think that's a really important thing that we should be focusing on now because it was just so hard for Silas to get there.
And he needed those social supports.

He needed transportation.

Yeah, he needed everything. And he did it by the skin of his teeth.

But, you know, he could have done that welding program in high school, but there weren't enough slots at the trade technical school that was in the county for him to do that.

So I think we sort of made trades a stepchild. At the same time, we told people that, you know, college education is absolutely necessary with technology happening.

But we made it so unaffordable for everybody. So, Jacob, where does the disdain for college come from? You know, they were all, they're all incredibly well colleged, I would say.

They each of them operate in those systems, but are astonishingly disdainful.

Yeah,

they use the line perhaps that college is too expensive, but the money doesn't really matter to them or the fact that a lot of people are being put into debt.

I think it's more that a lot of them see them as these kind of left-wing, woke institutions.

You've heard people like Bill Ackman or Elon Musk talk about how basically they think schools are turning their kids into left-wingers who hate them

or communists in the case I think of Bill Ackman's daughter.

Trans. Yeah.
And the idea that

gender fluidity and sort of what they would call trans ideology somehow emanates from these kinds of institutions.

I think that's what also makes them partners with MAGA politically is that they share a lot of the same reactionary and culture warrior impulses.

And that can be manifested in colleges and institutions.

And of course, we're seeing things like not only just the Teal Fellowship, which has been around for a while, but now Palantir advertising at colleges and encouraging kids to basically drop out and sign up with Palantir.

Many of the people who've gotten most radicalized have trans kids, which is really, you know,

I'm like, one of them I was so surprised by. And then I saw him posting about his trans kid.
And I wrote him, I said, you're a terrible parent. Like, you're a terrible, horrible to do this publicly.

You know, he's just mimicking Musk. But yes, well, he's, well, it's not even, I mean, he's just the worst.

So one of the things, Jacob, you called Dems a feckless opponent, right, that Trump had an easy time presenting himself as a, quote, populist savior for a benighted working class abandoned by the Democratic elites.

And that was partially because he was backed by allies in tech and media that he had. Beth writes, quote, the consummate showman connected most voters into thinking he cared.

I blame Trump and his billionaire enablers, not them. Playing devil's advocate here, you both seem to portray the working class as having little agency,

perhaps as being morally ignorant. Is there some way to call out the tech influence in MAG without falling into that trap? Beth, you start, and then Jacob.

Or you might disagree with me.

Well,

I think

they owe the nation something for what they've done. And I would love to hear Jacob's points on what he thinks the PayPal mafia, et cetera, actually owes us.
You know,

for

my editor doesn't like me to use the word brainwashing, but I think that's exactly what's happened to a lot of people in this. When I see people turn from

normal, educated people who maybe were on the left to spending four to seven hours a day watching Russian propaganda and being so eat up with anger.

I spent time with an ex-boyfriend I hadn't seen in 38 years. It was kind of a reporting stunt at the beginning, the idea, like who does that, who interviews their ex-boyfriend.

But to watch him go into somebody I didn't even recognize was stunning. And that at the end of the book, because of his beliefs, he didn't have health insurance.
He was okay with that.

He said, oh, if I die at 76, okay, whatever. Something's going to get me.
But

he gets pneumonia and waits too long to go to the hospital and then he dies.

And when I interviewed his daughter several weeks, it's not in the book, but I interviewed her several weeks after his death. She said, the internet killed my dad.
And she's heartbroken.

She's now lost both of her parents. She's 30 years old, has a child.
And like, what?

What do the PayPal mafia, and I'd love to ask Jacob this question, what do they owe people like Bill's daughter?

Jacob radicalizing him.

Yeah, I think individuals are responsible for their own behavior, whether we're talking about everyday people in Ohio or MAGA voters, but that also means that

class differences are real and that the people I'm talking about, like the billionaire platform owners, exert massive influence and often massive unacknowledged influence.

So one must tweet something like that COVID will be gone by the end of April of 2020, or basically a lot of these people will repeatedly engage in some form of COVID denialism, that has a huge effect, and that one that they refuse to recognize.

And

I see it also a lot with Musk and his...

basically his taking up of the great replacement theory and essentially promoting or potentially inciting violence against migrants. I mean, he's now doing this internationally.

He gave a speech at a Tommy Robinson rally via video into September where he said, violence is coming to your door whether you like it or not, and said it was coming from migrants and told people to get ready.

And, you know, this is stuff that I think if it were on the front page of papers decades ago, or, you know, I think we were talking about Musk as sort of a William Randolph Hearst type, perhaps, you know, it would be considered incitement to violence.

You know, if a media mogul were portraying this on TV or on a newspaper headline many years ago, but now it's just part of their everyday behavior.

And I think it is very disturbing that there isn't even a conversation about some kind of accountability there or the fact that they are repeatedly and daily engaging in this kind of behavior with massive unacknowledged effects.

Right now, I'm obsessed with chat bots and the effect on young people. I was talking to one of them, and I've been interviewing all the parents whose kids have committed suicide.

And they said, when are you going to stop? And I said, how about never? I said, I'm going to show people what you're doing.

Because, and the point I was making to one of them was, Tylenol killed six people and they pulled all the drugs off the shelf, and you're up to seven now, just like a month into this kind of thing.

And so I feel like I'm not going to stop. But one of the things that's,

to me, is

where the agency is. I think that's what I was trying to get at, Beth.
And when you think about that and the agency that people have, it is propaganda, and you do see people's minds

warped in that regard.

Again, getting back to it, when you were interviewing all these people, did they feel manipulated or did they understand what propaganda was doing, given there was such a shift, say, of your boyfriend, for example?

Did he,

here's someone who you write about is educated. By the way, I have you beat one of my ex-boyfriends became a neo-Nazi, but go ahead.
Go ahead. Well, Bill was on his way there.

The last thing he posted on X before he died was about the great replacement theory. But I'm thinking more along the lines of my friend Joy, who is my first friend in kindergarten.
She's black.

She and our friend Betty, we were like the great trio. We still hang out.
She's a Christian radio host. And I interviewed her several times.
I took notes. I recorded with her permission.

And, you know, she believes children are identifying as cats and taking litter boxes to school. She doesn't think, even though she's black, she doesn't think George Floyd was killed by Derek Chauvin.

And when I roll my eyes. in conversation with my dear friend who I've just made dinner for and you know she she presided over my mom's funeral that's That's how close we are.

She says, I know, but how do we love each other beyond what we can't understand or agree with?

And I thought that was a really profound question that I'm still grasping with, but she was very disappointed when the book came out. And she said, I didn't, I feel like you threw me under the bus.

I didn't expect it to be in a national book, a national platform. I said, well, Joy, you know that's what I write.

And I know I hurt her feelings and I feel bad about that, but at some point, you have to be responsible for the things you have consumed and what you're putting out there.

I mean, she's a media figure herself in her world.

And

that was news to her. Like,

it's almost like we need to go back and deprogram some of these folks.

We'll be back in a minute.

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Now, Jacob, the tech oligarchy seems to be fully in charge now. They bought their way into this particular coin-operated president and recognized the need for involvement in politics.

They had been politics averse for a long time, the tech industry in general, but figured it out pretty quickly, largely through teal and musk, I would say, and Sachs.

There was Doj, of course, but one of the Starfickers' example recently was a Saudi crown prince Mohammed bin Salman's visit. Jacob, you wrote in the nation after the dinner with the tech bros.

The authoritarian rulers of both the United States and Saudi Arabia were clearly relishing the media-friendly spectacle, distracting their home constituencies from the

parless conditions they're facing.

Conservative pundit Scott Jennings told me that Trump was just trying to get the Saudis to sign a Middle East peace deal. I'm guessing you don't buy that.
Neither did I.

What do you think is really at stake in what's happening here? Obviously, the Trump family has benefited enormously from the Saudis, and the Silicon Valley people also went there looking for money.

Talk a little bit about this sort of iron triangle of investment, you know, repression and an access situation.

Well, it is certainly an iron triangle with with Saudi at the head of it, but also involves

the UAE and Qatar and basically all these authoritarian countries from the Middle East dictatorships and their sovereign wealth funds funding Silicon Valley for years and being this essential source of cash now, especially in the AI bubble and for people like Musk whenever he needs a new round for XAI to raise billions and billions of dollars.

And that is something that I think changed during the sort of zero interest rate era when you started having companies like Uber raise multi-billion dollar rounds from Saudi Arabia.

It really changed the financing of tech in a way that perhaps hadn't existed before.

And there's a quote in my book that I mentioned from Ben Horowitz, the venture capitalist, where he was at one of these Saudi business summits a few years ago, and he said, Saudi Arabia also has a founder, but you call him Your Highness.

And it was just sort of acknowledging this kinship, founder being the most hallowed word probably in Silicon Valley culture.

But I think it also reflects that increasingly these are authoritarians on both sides, people who aren't very fond of democracy, CEOs or founders or venture capitalists who kind of rule by fiat, just like their funders in Saudi Arabia do.

And I think it reflects a style of doing business.

I also think it reflects the fact that tech companies are increasingly important geopolitical and even national security actors in ways that aren't always regulated or recognized.

So Beth, I was looking at some old drawings, Thomas Nash and others, like the fat cat idea, which I think was very popular among working class, right?

This idea that there's these fat cats taking things. Do they see it that way or not making the links at all?

Among the people I talked to in Urbana, some did. I mean,

there is a stable, a small stable of Democrats there that, you know, really work hard to search out fact-based news.

The state's newsroom has a really great operation called Ohio Capital Journal and things of that nature.

But for the most part, the people I saw who were deeply down the rabbit holes were looking for community where their community no longer existed.

And so, like, for instance, our high school reunion planner, sweet woman, you know, she was just...

dying to convince me that, you know, the vaccine was bad, bad move that you got one, that then President Biden was dead, and that was an actor actor playing him with a mask and she would send me proof and she said you've been red pilled now i've educated you and like she was just breathless and i couldn't get a word in and that just blew me away and Some weeks I would run an Airbnb for a week and some weeks by day four, I would be so exhausted because it was so different than the blue bubble I live in here in Virginia that I would go home a couple days early because it was also just painful.

Like, what has happened?

The community is crumbling. The kids aren't being taken care of.

There was a smear campaign for the director of the youth center who was helping the kids that dropped out because he was gay. And,

you know, his funding got taken away. And he was standing up to the power structure.
And

it was just a really painful thing to see.

They don't see that linkage when you were interviewing anybody, that the power structure is in it for themselves and not like, which is a sort of an old American trope, right? The idea of fat cats.

And, you know, exactly. When the mayor said,

I don't think everybody needs to go to college. I was showing him how Urbana's college going rate is only 16%, whereas in the nation, it's 37.
And among more rural towns, it's 21.

And he said, well, I went to college and got a religion degree, but I didn't need it. Did I need it? And I said, well, no, you inherited your dad's insurance business.
And I just,

the idea of

a factory town that was sort of, you know, bad and good run by a single old man Grimes who owned the dominant airplane light factory. But he would give like

the best students that were graduating scholarships to Ohio State University and employees got free haircuts. I just didn't see any of that looking out for the people who had been left behind.

And among the professional class that's there and the leadership class, they weren't even willing to look at it. And none of it was ever in the news,

in the newspaper. And

at the end, as somebody says in the book, what you have left is the country club set and the ghetto set. Those were his words.
And neither knows what's going on with the other.

Not that that was really true. But the bottom set doesn't seem to be liking the ruling class, correct? Which is a shift.

Or just not paying any attention to it because they're struggling so hard to just survive. Right, right.

And it's clear that real estates are facing a brain drain that creates more anger and more class resentment.

The thing that really shocked me was the number of people who weren't showing up for work.

And so I went to one job fair and I interviewed everyone, I just went around, it was at the fairgrounds building and I went around talking to every manager. And

finally, I asked, because they were all hard up for employees, and I said, because Urbana is rare and that has retained

a good stable of manufacturing. It's not all Grimes now.
It's pretty diversified, which is cool. But not one single employer can get people to show up for work.

And I asked one, I said, well, if you were to hire 10 people today, how many would still be there in six months? And he said, one.

And we'd still probably have an attendance issue with that person.

And

that's just a story that's not being told. Right, of people not showing up.
So the political divide is not just internally fracturing communities.

As you're talking about, people are self-segregating, right? Moving to places that match their politics. And tech bros are proposing self-contained alternative communities.

Jacob, you wrote about this. I'm thinking of Balaji Srinivasan's network state idea, the project

California Forever is trying to launch in Solano County, California. And speaking of factory towns, Elon's company town outside of Austin, he's not quite as kind as Mr.
Grimes.

There's also attempts to offshore some less than legal stuff in places like Honduras. There's also that happening.

And of course, the ultimate, I'm going to Mars, you know, and I'm always like, please leave soon. That would be great.
Fantastic. We'll pay for the gas.
We'll pay for the gas, whatever you need.

But talk about these exit efforts to try to then create their own towns. Yeah.

What's so astonishing about some of this stuff is that they are so coddled and do live in their own, you know, gated off worlds, but that has become not enough for some of them.

And people like Peter Thiel or some of the other folks we're talking about in recent years seem to pursue two avenues, which is one is electoral politics or pouring their money behind Trump and Republicans, but also simultaneously pursuing exit, which is a specific word that Thiel has used.

And it's about exiting society.

It's about exiting your money to places where it can't be governed, whether it's Switzerland or some Caribbean destination or now new countries, charter cities, especially.

Thiel famously funded the seasteading project that never really got off the ground to create these floating cities. And

he wrote an essay saying he wanted to fund the technology that enables freedom. And so for them,

they think that somehow true freedom, which they have not yet acquired, can only be found by exiting the normal strictures of society.

And that might be in a little corporate charter city-state in Honduras, on the island of Roton, as they have now in Prospera, or it might be in Solano County or in Greenland

if Trump succeeds in acquiring that, or indeed off-planet.

But this is something that a lot of money, you know, hundreds of millions of dollars in some cases is being devoted to these kinds of projects.

And I think it also reflects the kind of the politics we see at home.

And what we see, for example, in San Francisco, which I've written about a bit too, is just that they no longer are interested in improving or rescuing urban spaces. They see them as just gone.

And they have real contempt for average people and especially down and out people who are living rough on San Francisco streets.

And that only contributes to this idea that, you know, they want to flee, they want to exit and have total kind of corporate control over where they live. Right.

So when you think about that, Beth, the idea of escape and getting out,

how do you create a town where if you can't, like the people of your town can't exit. There is no exit.
No. And the people left behind have been brainwashed.
And

so, I mean, I want to flip this back to you guys. Like, what do the Zuckerbuns and Andreessens owe the nation?

What could we do that might ameliorate their power and this never before seen ability to stifle, if not shut down, our democracy entirely?

I mean, I write a bit about the Communications Decency Act in the book. And, you know, people like Rokana have tried to

had a federal policy to tax digital corporations,

but that didn't go anywhere.

And, you know, I write about this fifth-generation newspaper owner in Iowa who actually gets a meeting with a Facebook executive and he's trying to start this nonprofit in Iowa that would help keep the papers alive, to help keep democracy, you know,

which was once newspapers were once the democracy's immune system. And so he's begging them for a grant and they say no initially.

And he says, look, when the revolution starts and we have a civil war in this country and someone's dragging you and your family out of your Silicon Valley homes before the knife goes into you, you're going to think, maybe I could have stopped this, which is such a trenching quote, right?

Yeah, yeah, so eventually Facebook gives him $150,000, but it's not enough. His 90-year-old mother remortgages the home and they still have to sell the business at a huge loss.

So, what are some things like Connest trying to do that you think could actually work to help us build back these healthier information ecosystems?

one phrase I keep thinking about, especially when you're talking about

people being brainwashed, essentially, is false populism. I mean, I think that is kind of one of the scourges of our age, and it's what brought us Trump.

And it's what brings us, you know, Elon Musk is somehow a savior of the people or someone who's maybe not motivated by money and wants to help people via doge or whatever else.

You know, it's all nonsense. It's BS.
But part of the problem is we don't have a genuine populism.

You know, and this is where I do critique the Democratic Party, that there isn't a genuine populist alternative to,

I mean, there are individual figures who might be part of such a movement,

but there's not a populist alternative that seeks to put a check on billionaire power, that seeks to really tax them, break up companies, and actually

say that this is about class and this is about

the billionaires eating our lunch and not wanting to give people health care or...

not wanting people like the folks who were time out in Ohio to be able to get to work because they just don't care about them.

And in the absence of that alternative, which could be articulated through a better

media ecosystem, among other means, in the absence of that, that's where Trump and the right-wing billionaires really flourish is because while they're not necessarily offering a better solution, they are giving voice to that anger,

to that rage and that confusion that I think a lot of people feel and that draws them to the right.

So there needs to be some liberal left challenge to that that really gives people a positive program, I think.

Well, one of the issues, I'm just going to say say briefly, is you imagine they care, Beth. They don't.
Like I've tried to get this message through.

You imagine, like, Andreessen's possibly the worst person I know in Silicon Valley as a person, a broken, angry,

troubled person in desperate need of mental health. Help.
Same thing with Elon, broken. Using drugs.
Using drugs. If they were poor, they'd be on the streets.

Let's just, you know what I mean, this kind of thing. And so I think one of the problems is that we imagine they care, right? Like, and you have to get that out of your head.

You know, who was delivering a gold statue to Trump? Tim Cook, the last person I thought would do that.

Not the last, but, you know, when they were standing there at the inauguration, one after the next, in front of the elected officials, in front of the cabinet officials, that was, it was game over.

And Trump knew it, right? That's to me, they were standing there because they wanted things. And were it a Kamala Harris administration, they would pretend to be Democrat.
You know what I I mean?

They don't have any values whatsoever, and they really don't like people. I think that's ultimately at the heart of it.

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Let me talk about the overlap between your two books is Ohio itself. Jacob, your former boss, Vivek Ramaswamy, is running for governor there.

And of course, there's an Ohio native and Silicon Valley insider, Vice President J.D. Vance.
I actually like to use Rachel Maddows' term. He's Peter Thiel's failed intern.
He was terrible at tech.

Let me just tell you, a squirrel could have made money during the period he was in tech and he lost money. That's all I'm going to say.
I spent time with him during that period when he hated Trump.

But do you think either one of them can bridge the gap between the two worlds poor and middle-class American tech billionaires the way Donald Trump has been able to?

And is there an alternative on the Democratic side?

Beth, you go first and then talk a little bit about Vance and then Jacob, talk a little bit about Vivek. Yeah, Vance grew up an hour south of me.

You know, he's 20 years younger than me and had it really rough and wrote this book that upon first read, I thought was a decent story of

a first-generation college student. I related to some of it.
And, you know, he was helped by the GI Bill and all this kind of stuff. And at one point calls Trump cultural heroine.

And we've seen him flip. Now in Hillbilly Elegy, I was reading that as I was starting to report on Appalachian what had happened with the opioid crisis and going down there and interviewing activists.

And they just completely called him out on the fact that there's no

systemic analysis of what happened with centuries of out-of-state coal companies going in and taking advantage and then the jobs going away and the pills coming in, the pill mills coming into the exact same places that the jobs went away.

He's blaming the poor for their poverty and saying, well, I got out. Everybody should be able to get out.
And then to see him emerge in Springfield, Ohio,

calling out the cats and the dogs with the Haitians, to then see people like my ex-boyfriend emerge as the leader of this anti-Haitian influx and just to be totally under the spell of this guy, Vance, who was, I mean, wasn't one of his jobs when he went back to Ohio, he was going to fix the opioid crisis?

He was. He didn't do anything.
He did zip and is still doing zip and still trying to pull the ladder that helped him climb out of poverty for the rest of us.

What about Vivek, Jacob?

Yeah, so I worked for what ended up being a pretty short stint at Vivek's company called Roy Vant

as a ghostwriter, essentially. And, you know,

this is someone who at the time was not very overtly political necessarily.

I mean, he did not strike me as a liberal or a leftist, but he hadn't started going on Fox News or Tucker Carlos's show when it was on Fox News still or writing op-eds for the Wall Street Journal.

But what he clearly was was massively ambitious. I mean, it just radiated from him.

And this was sort of interesting for me as a writer and journalist and somebody interested in this world of tech and finance elites to kind of observe that up close.

So, you know, when he eventually came out as this basically frothing right-winger, I think it was actually a surprise to some people around him.

You know, I talked a little bit, I never ended up publishing anything about this, but I talked to someone who worked at one of his companies who was trans, and she transitioned and received

gender-affirming care via health insurance from Vivek's company. And at the same time, he's talking about how there are only two genders.

And I think one thing that showed to me was incredible opportunism, opportunism, you know, that maybe he does actually believe that, but this is someone who is very power hungry and very determined to get it.

And like a lot of successful politicians of our age, which I think he will be in one form or another, he's going to be around for a long time. He'll kind of say anything to get there.

And he's trending left again, to be noticed. Yeah, I don't know if he'll win in Ohio, but

he is malleable. He is very smart.
We'll be dealing with him for decades. Really? I don't know.
I think he's repellent to voters, as I think Vance is.

I mean, actually, He does have the sort of annoying debate kid affect, as I say. Yeah, I've had a lot of rounds with him.

But Beth, speaking of power, you recently announced you're running for Congress in Virginia.

A local reporter from the Cardinal News described your campaign launch as the most direct assault on an incumbent he'd heard in a long time. So talk about why you're doing this.

I think, you know, I had thought about running for office at one point because I was like, I'm tired of just saying they suck.

Come on, let's do it.

No, they have a good mayor in San Francisco, and I was from mayor of San Francisco, But I was tired of the tech bros beating up on a city I love, right, and having no solutions.

That was one of the impetuses. So talk about why you've done this

and what your goal is as a politician. Yeah, I'm running for Congress in the sixth district, which is an R plus 15 Cook report.
It's a very red district. There is a

strong chance that we we will be redistricted. You know, the Virginia legislature is taking that up now in response to what's happened in Texas and elsewhere.
And so that might change.

It might become a more dumb-leaning district. But the decision to run really grew out of the end of my book.

Now, I swear to God, when I finished this book, I had no intention ever of running for office. Not on my bingo card.
I thought I would write maybe one or two more books.

I was going to become a master gardener with my buddy Lon and be very happy. And at the end of the book, Geraldine Brooks called it, it's more than a memoir, it's a manifesto.

And I guess I sort of like take a tonal change at the end because it's right after the election.

I just watched, you know, the ex-boyfriend die, all these things happening, all these people I love, their services being cut. I mean, my own child is on Medicaid, my professional musician kid.

I say in the book that we should run better people for office. And I start participating in these rallies outside of our incumbent Republican congressman's office every Monday.

And people start asking me to run. It's very flattering, of course, but they're pointing out that you have to do this for your kids.
And, you know, I took the bait and I'm doing it.

I'm not a politician. I'm not a politician.
I'm not a politician. And what I said in my lunch was that I'm not going to be like automatically for any party or any people.

I want to go out and I want to listen to people. I want to find out what their concerns are.
This, what's happening to Medicaid and what's happening to healthcare is just so wrong.

I mean, I've spent over a decade reporting on the opioid crisis. We are going to go back 20 years if these Medicaid cuts really take place.
350,000 Virginians alone are going to lose their Medicaid.

And that has been the main way that men who are disproportionately dying of deaths of despair have been able to finally get treatment just in recent years. So I'm really stressing that.

I'm out listening in these rural communities, not in Ohio, but in Virginia. I'm going up and down the Shenandoah and Roanoke valleys, talking to people, and they're really upset.

There is a lot of rage on both sides and a lot of concerns about affordability.

You know, my husband and I, we were a school teacher and a newspaper reporter, and we managed to buy our first house at the age of 30. Kids today can't buy their first house until they're 40.

They're not even kids.

The price of groceries. Wow, you do sound like a politician.
Well, I'm worked up about it.

And, you know, and I'm, it's a lot harder than being somebody out talking about a book. I will tell you that.
I'm not getting like rave reviews and please sign your book for me.

It's, it's, it's like a combat experience. Right.
But I'm willing to meet with people, unlike our congressmen, to really learn what's happening.

And, you know, I think Bernie and the economic populism way is, you know, that's what worked. I mean, Abigail Spanberger was more centrist than Bernie, but focusing on affordability and then

getting

these kleptocrats, these billionaires to pay their fair share.

We've got to figure out a way to do that. I mean, it's just criminal and we just accept it like it's just business as usual.
Well, not everyone does. And we have no guardrails.

Congress has no guardrails, no checks on the president now. We've got to take back the House.
Okay. So, Jacob, at the end of your book, I like your, I like your spiel.
It's excellent. It's excellent.

I'm working on it. Okay.
At the end of your book, you say we're living in Elon's world, though, this speaking of kleptocrats.

But his influence seems to have declined, although he seems to be back again in some fashion. Who do you think will step into that role and a likelihood to undo damage?

If you had to go out five years, what would the landscape look for these billionaires? And I say this because I think they're in quite a bit of trouble. I think there's a lot of anger towards them.

It's building.

Years ago, when when I was worried about income inequality, I said, you're either going to have to do something about income inequality or you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla.

Those are your two choices. And I got the distinct impression they wanted to armor plate their Tesla.
That was kind of cool. They could shoot.
Or go to Mars. Or go to Mars.

They could shoot poor people, right? What could change here? Or nothing at all.

They'll continue their pay-to-play for the next couple of years and get the shit they want and then solidify themselves by being trillionaires.

I think they've chosen the latter of those choices as you described. I mean, in a sense, even if you want kind of unfettered capitalism, you have to make society safe for it.

And they've chosen kind of repression of the masses in one form or another rather than, you know, providing for their basic needs. And I don't see this improving in any way.

I mean, I think we're on the road to kleptocracy, if not already there.

I don't see the Democrats as really unite enough to, I mean, I think a lot of them understand that some populist economic response is what's necessary and actually restricting restricting these guys' power.

I don't think there are any virtuous billionaires out there, really.

I mean, I think there are some who sponsor sort of democracy-building programs that sound nice, but I don't think that's where our savior is coming from.

I think the Democrats have to realign themselves really around labor and working people and understanding that Silicon Valley and especially parts of the industry like crypto are their adversary and not someone who's worth befriending or trying to get some money from because ultimately they're going to undermine you and your constituents.

Aaron Ross Powell, yeah, I think it's difficult because I think

we have an idolatry of innovators and money in this country. And I think it's gone to the extreme at this point.

I do think there are several that are better people than others, but even relying on them is a problem, right? Because it doesn't really matter who it is. One of the problems that you have is that

the money in politics is so massive it's hard to battle.

But you look at something like Elon in Wisconsin losing despite spending the money, or you look at Zoran Mandami, which all the billionaires sort of put themselves against him, and he still won.

But I have a last question. I want to read you a quote, both of you, from James Baldwin.
The world changes according to the way people see it.

And if you alter, even by a millimeter, the way a person looks or people look at reality, then you can change it.

Each of you, do you think we can alter how people look at reality right now, given the forces from above that Jacob writes about and the forces from below that Beth writes about.

First, Jacob and then Beth? I do, actually. And I'm thinking of something you said in a question just a couple of minutes ago, which is that

these people that I write about, the tech elites and their allies in politics, in some sense, aren't that popular, especially when people discover who they are and what they're about. And

they're not our friends. They don't have the mass of people's best interests and hearts.
A lot of them are kind of sociopathic or xenophobic.

And I think that's something that a lot of people are capable of understanding. It's just sort of a message and a reality that needs to be spread.

And if that's a direction we can nudge people in, I think that can make a huge difference because, you know, as the sort of hokey old phrase goes, you know, there's ultimately more of us than them.

And when people understand what they're about,

it's not what they want. Right.
Yeah. That's why your book is so important because you're shining a light on that.
You know who's really ticked off about this? is moms.

And when I go out on these listening tours, they are just so fed up.

They've seen that these guys have made us more divided, less educated, and their kids addicted to porn and gambling and things like chat bots.

I mean, that's where my groundswell of support has come for this idea to run.

I think if we can somehow galvanize the moms to get more active and really make this a grassroots campaign to point out how self-dealing these folks are and how they're not paying their fair share.

They are not paying their fair share. Right.
That's exactly right. So give me each of you one last hopeful idea.
These are very dire books. They really are.

But if you don't mind, indulge me on that, Beth and then Jacob. Yeah, I mean, I think the fact that

if we can reach out, start with our families.

I know sometimes it's easier to deal with somebody else's crazy cousin than your own, but I think that's a, I show a couple of examples in my own family where we spend time and we talk about politics and we point things out and we do it gently and with respect and we try to mirror back the best version of what they just said without going zero to 60 or rolling my eyes like I did sometimes.

I think that's a technique that works. And I do think we have to have hope.
We have to have these hard conversations because people are really suffering out there.

And they're starting to get the message. We saw that in Virginia a couple of weeks ago.
And you saw every county move a little bit to the left. And people are starting to see.

And that's why I think like shows like yours and books like Jacob's and mine are helping people understand how they got there.

One of the best things I heard about the book was from my very centrist friend Betty, who I've known since we were four, who read the book. And she's on the bank board.

She runs a very successful business. And she said,

Well, people aren't going to like it here, but I think I need to change my media diet.

And I thought, that's a perfect answer. Millimeter.
Millimeter. Jacob, you get the last word.

Well, I think one

sort of silver lining perhaps is that the people we're talking about are not really able to follow through on their rhetoric and provide that better utopian world that they once talked about or improve people's lives.

I mean, I think that's what's created some of the reactionary sentiment, but we've had 10 or 15 years where a lot of supposed tech innovations haven't really taken off.

And I think the AI bubble that's inevitably going to collapse, I think will hurt people, but at least perhaps produce some positive kind of political anger and sentiment where people realize, like, hey, these guys poured unbelievable resources into something that's not really helping people, that's just gouging labor.

And look what we could have done with this money. Like, why are these people in charge? That's sort of a kind of a realization that I hope plays out for a lot of people, and I think can.

All right, great. Thank you so much.
I really appreciate it. Two wonderful books and really important.
And I really enjoyed reading them together, actually. Oddly.
Thank you, Kara.

Anyway, thank you so much, both of you. Thank you.

Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Roussel, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Aloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts.

Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Aruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics.
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Thanks for listening to On with Carrou Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us. We'll be back on Monday with more.

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