They were told throughout this era of the 2010s that they deserved all this money and that they were brilliant and that the decisions and bets that they were making were the right ones.

And that's, I think, where our worldviews start diverging, perhaps, between this kind of business overclass and most people, frankly.

Hello and welcome to Tech Won't Save Us,

made in partnership with The Nation magazine.

I'm your host, Paris Marks, and this week my guest is Jacob Silverman.

Jacob is an independent journalist based in New York and the author of Gilded Rage,

Elon Musk, and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley.

Now, this is a book that I have been looking forward to for quite some time. So I was really happy to have Jacob

back on the show to dig into it, to discuss different aspects of what he reported on and what he

laid out in this book, because I think it is a really good encapsulation of the moment that we are

in. And at a time where there is so much happening, seeing it all laid out, I think is really helpful

because there's probably pieces of this story that we have forgotten about or maybe that we just

missed because there is so much information flooding out there at the moment.

But Jacob really pulls it all together and creates a narrative through lines through it.

So we can really understand how we got

to this moment, you know, and maybe how we start to change it as well. So obviously, you know,

we're talking about Donald Trump. We're talking about some of the tech billionaires who are

shaping so much of our lives at the moment. But we're also going back and looking at how we got to

where we are today.

Some of the events and moments in time that really set us on this course to this alliance

between the extreme right and the billionaires of Silicon Valley, and then also the ways that

they have worked to kind of cement that power over time. So it's a fascinating conversation, you know, exactly the

...