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

25:21Kara Swisher: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, etc., 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.

26:11When 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.

26:53but he gets pneumonia and waits too long to go to the hospital and then he dies right 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? Well, radicalizing him. Yeah.

27:27Kara Swisher:Yeah. I think, you know, individuals are responsible for their own behavior, whether we're talking about, you know, everyday people in Ohio or MAGA voters. But that also means that, you know, 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 when Musk tweets something like that COVID will be gone by the end of April of 2020, or basically a lot of these people repeatedly engage in some form of COVID denialism, that has a huge effect, one that they refuse to recognize. And, you know, 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.

28:14Kara Swisher:I mean, he's now doing this internationally. He gave a speech at a Tommy Robinson rally via video in 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 Moscow 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.

28:49Kara Swisher: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. And the point I was making to one of them was Tylenol killed six people, and they pulled all the drugs off the shelf.

29:24Kara Swisher: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 hear someone who you write about is educated.

30:03Kara Swisher:By the way, I have you beat one of my ex-boyfriends became a neo-Nazi, but 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 was 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.

30:43And when I roll my eyes in conversation with my dear friend, who I've just made dinner for, and, you know, she presided over my mom's funeral. 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 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.

31:20But 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.

31:43Kara Swisher:We'll be back in a minute.

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34:19Kara Swisher:Support for this show comes from The Guardian. Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack these days. Social media feeds, cable news, and subscription-based news outlets might be able to give you one version of the news, but not in the way that you need. You want news fast, but slow enough to actually absorb the information. Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman is here to do just that. The podcast tries to slow down the news and wrestle with the questions regarding the world at large at your own pace. Three times a week, hosts Kai Wright and Carter Sherman bring their expertise together to showcase different and engaging perspectives regarding the world today.

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35:24Kara Swisher:Now, Jacob, the tech oligarchy seems to be fully in charge now. They've bought their way into this particular coin-operated president and recognize 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 Thiel and Musk, I would say, and Sachs. There was Doge, of course, but one of the Starfuckers 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 parlous conditions they're facing.

36:05Kara Swisher: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 do 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 Saudi at the head of it, but also involves the UAE and Qatar and basically all these authoritarian countries from the Middle East, these dictatorships and their sovereign wealth funds funding Silicon Valley for years.

36:50Kara Swisher: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.

37:30Kara Swisher: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?

38:13Kara Swisher: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 small stable of Democrats there that, you know, really work hard to search out fact-based news. There's 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.

39:04Then President Biden was dead, and that was an 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 rent 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.

39:44There 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.

40:02Kara Swisher: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 bad and good run by a single old man Grimes who owned the dominant airplane light factory.

40:50But he would give like the best students that were graduating scholarships to Ohio State University. 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.

41:27Kara Swisher:right that that was really true but the the bottom set doesn't seems to be liking the ruling class correct which is a shift or just not paying any attention to it right 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 every, 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.

42:01And I said, because Urbana is rare and that has retained, it's 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.

42:32Kara Swisher:Right, of people not showing up. So the political divide is not just internally fracturing communities. 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.

43:06Kara Swisher: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 for time out in recent years seem to pursue two avenues, which is one is electoral politics are pouring their money behind Trump and Republicans, but also simultaneously pursuing exit, which is a specific word that Thiel has used.

43:49Kara Swisher: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, you know, 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 Roatan, 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.

44:41Kara Swisher: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 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're they no longer 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.

45:16Kara Swisher:Right. So when you think about that, 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 Zuckerbans and Andreessens owe the nation? What can we do that might ameliorate the 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 people like O 'Connor have tried to had a federal policy to tax digital corporations, but that didn't go anywhere.

46:08And, 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 trenchant quote, right?

46:47So 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 Connus trying to do that you think could actually work to help us build back these healthier information ecosystems?

47:07Kara Swisher:One phrase I keep thinking about, especially when you're talking about people bringing brainwash 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 retire in Ohio to be able to get to work because they just don't care about them.

48:05Kara Swisher: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, you know, 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. 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 that really gives people a positive program, with it. Well, one of the issues, I'm just going to say briefly, is you imagine they care, Beth, they don't.

48:41Kara Swisher: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?

49:29Kara Swisher: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 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. We'll be back in a minute.

49:59Kara Swisher:When I got a new car, I thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account. Like if Fetween won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With the helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies. But switching to Geico saved me hundreds, so my bank account is safe. It feels good to save some hard-earned cash. It feels good to Geico. Support for this show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

50:39Kara Swisher:Introducing Odoo. It's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part? Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost. That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O dot com. When you finally find your thing, you want the whole world to know about that thing. So you use a thing called Canva to make it an even bigger and better thing. Whether you want to create flyers for that thing, make presentations for that thing, or design merch for that thing, you can do anything.

51:28Kara Swisher:So people can see your thing, feel your thing, love your thing. The next thing you know, it's a thing. Canva, the thing that makes anything a thing. 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 like to use Rachel Maddow's 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.

52:06Kara Swisher: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 America and 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.

52:45I 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 is no systemic analysis of what happened with centuries of out-of-state coal companies going in and taking advantage. And then the job's going away and the pills coming in, the pill mills coming into the exact same places that the jobs went away.

53:26He'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, it 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.

54:09Kara Swisher:What about Vivek, Jacob? So I worked for what ended up being a pretty short stint at Vivek's company called Royvent 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 Carlson'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 someone interested in this world of tech and finance elites to kind of observe that up close.

54:53Kara Swisher: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, you know, that maybe he does actually believe that. But this is someone who is very power hungry and very determined to get it.

55:32Kara Swisher: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. Yeah, he's trending left again, to be noticed. Yeah, I don't know if he'll win in Ohio, but, you know, 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, 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.

56:06Kara Swisher: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. I know. They have a good mayor in San Francisco. I was from mayor of San Francisco. But I was tired of the tech pros 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.

56:37Yeah, I'm running for Congress in the 6th District, which is an R-plus-15 Cook Report. It's a very red district. There is a strong chance that 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.

57:20And 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. And 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.

57:56It'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 health care 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.

58:36350 ,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.

59:15Kids today can't buy their first house until they're 40. They're not even kids. The price of grocery.

59:22Kara Swisher:Oh, you do sound like a politician. Well, I'm worked up about it. And, you know, 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 like a combat experience. 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.

1:00:07We'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.

1:00:24Kara Swisher:So Jacob, at the end of your book, 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, 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 the 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 I was worried about income inequality, I said, you're either going to have to do something about income inequality, you're going to have to armor plate your Tesla.

1:01:02Kara Swisher:Those are your two choices. And I got the distinct impression they wanted to armor plate their Tesla. That was kind of cool. 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.

1:01:40Kara Swisher: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 united enough to, I mean, I think a lot of them understand that some populist economic response is what's necessary and actually 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.

1:02:26Kara Swisher:Yeah, I think it's difficult because I think we have a, you know, we have an idolatry of innovators and money, you know, 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.

1:03:01Kara Swisher: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. 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.

1:03:43Kara Swisher: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.

1:04:16You 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 chatbots. 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.

1:04:53Kara Swisher: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.

1:05:35I 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 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 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.

1:06:11She 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.

1:06:22Kara Swisher: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.

1:07:04Kara Swisher:And look what we could have done with this money. Like, why are these people in charge? That's sort of a kind of realization I hope plays out for a lot of people and I think can. All right. Great. Thank you so much. I really appreciate two wonderful books and really important. And I really enjoyed reading them together, actually. Thank you, Kara. Anyway, thank you so much, both of you. Thank you.

1:07:29Kara Swisher:Today's show was produced by Christian Castro-Russell, Kateri Yoakum, Michelle Alloy, Megan Burney, and Kaylin Lynch. Nishat Kirwa is Vox Media's executive producer of podcasts. Special thanks to Bradley Sylvester. Our engineers are Fernando Arruda and Rick Kwan, and our theme music is by Trackademics. If you're already following the show, you're willing to move a millimeter. If not, stop rolling your eyes. Go wherever you listen to podcasts, search for On with Kara Swisher, and hit follow. Thanks for listening to On with Kara Swisher from Podium Media, New York Magazine, the Vox Media Podcast Network, and us.

1:08:04Kara Swisher:We'll be back on Monday with more.

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