My guest is Marisha Sharca.

Maritja Sharca is a fellow at Stanton University's Institute for Human Centered

Artificial Intelligence and the Cyber Policy Center. She's also the author of a new book, The Tech

How to Save Democracy from Silicon Valley. Welcome to the podcast, Maritia.

Thanks, Paul.

Well, you may remember, I hope you do remember, we did one of these podcast conversations just over five years ago as you were stepping down from the European Parliament, and I was inviting

you to reflect on your 10 years as an MEP. Now you've kind of started a whole new career.

I was going to ask you, as my first question, what was the inspiration for the book, which is a kind of obvious question, but maybe

linked to that, what was the inspiration for making this career move to Stanford, which is now

culminated in the publication of this book? Right. Well, I wouldn't have thought about going to a university, frankly, if they hadn't invited me to consider coming over.

But when they did, it just seemed like the perfect step to deepen my understanding of technologies writ large,

but also the whole ecosystem, the power brokers, the incentives, the

values and the politics of Silicon Valley, which is such an important hub of influence in our

world, but one that is, you know, best understood from close by. And so I went there also hoping to inspire, you know, the next Mark Zuckerberg to think more

about the rule of law and democracy through teaching. And it has been an incredible opportunity

to work with people there and to get to understand what drives various actors in Silicon Valley in their daily decisions.

Well, the title of your book is certainly dramatic, it may be intentionally provocative,

how to say democracy from Silicon Valley.

When you started the book, did you already have a pretty clear idea of what you were going to set out to demonstrate,

or did you, as you research it, and the book is extremely well researched,

did you discover things that even you didn't know about at the outset?

Well, the theme, of course, was something that accumulated for me as well,

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