I said you're either going to have to do something about income inequality, 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 guest 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

dopesick 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 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 Kosra Shahi, the CEO of Uber and Chris Ermson,

the CEO of Aurora, live on stage at the Hopkins Bloomberg Center in Washington, D.C.

on Monday, December 15th.

...