The Forrest Gump of Silicon Valley - EP 27 Leslie Berlin

I think that was an important part of what drove him in that whole early era of Silicon Valley was these were truly technologists who were in it because they wanted to make— they saw the possibility of making something incredible and they couldn't do it inside any existing structures. And the money was just sort of a side effect, you know, of what they really saw as the, essential work, which was making this stuff and then finding a way to get it to market.

So excited. We have Leslie Berlin with us. She's one of my favorite authors and a fellow Silicon Valley history geek, although you do it on a much higher level than, than I've done. Um, but yeah, I'm so thrilled. We, over the years, we've gotten to know each other a little bit and we talk off and on about, about things that have happened in Silicon Valley's past. We're definitely going to talk about The Man Behind the Microchip and your other books. Um, The Man Behind the Microchip was one about Robert Noyce, was just, I think it's like as good as biographies get, and I'm, I'm not even being hyperbolic or saying this just because you're there. I mean, it was— it's, it's, it's got this rare mix of such in-depth research, but then the writing that brings it to life. And I just remember reading that book, I think, in one sitting and just being like, I wish I could do that. So, um, it's such a pleasure to have you.

Thank you. I've had the same thoughts about what you do. I mean, what I think a lot about this, about the difference between what I do, which has interviews, of course, but is a lot of like sitting quietly in an archive with documents that no one's ever looked at or thought about looking at, uh, when— or when they wrote them, they had no idea anyone would be looking at them 50 years later. And the difference between that and what you do, which is being there in the room, you know, hoping no one is paying too much attention, but your ears and eyes wide open, I don't, I don't think I could do that. It's a really different skill set. And so it's cool that we both admire each other's work so much.

It is. And I think we've talked about this a little before, but yeah, so I just have the, the 180. The, before I did my last book on the rockets, I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna go to the Silicon Valley Archives, which you, you were running, um, at Stanford for, for quite a while. And, and I was like, I'm gonna do, I'm gonna dig into these archives and I'm gonna do this book on like the, it's kind of been done, but never to my satisfaction, like the Cold war history of, of the valley, the, the military history. And I remember I was driving there and I'm like, I don't think I could do this for a couple years. And I had, and I had just come from a rocket factory and I was like, nope, I gotta, gotta be in the spot. Although it's a horrible way to live because you never know when to, I guess authors always have trouble knowing when to put the pen down anyway. But when this stuff's happening in real time, you're like, uh, what is the, When do I stop reporting? When is this— and the story keeps evolving after you finish.

So, um, yeah, we get that too. It's called research ecstasy and you just never want to leave that sort of moment of, you know, like continual discovery and connecting ideas and sort of figuring out how do I tell this to somebody.

Yeah.

So I think it's very similar. And typically, I mean, we just make up an arbitrary date and say that's where we're stopping.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yep. Okay. All right. Let me do a proper introduction. That was just me gushing for a second. Um, You know, you're, as I mentioned, you're an author, a historian, or the project historian for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. I don't think you're not double-dooting. You're not still doing that.

No, I chair the advisory group for the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford. Now, you'll, you'll never pry me fully out of Stanford.

And now you're the executive director of the Steve Jobs Archive. And that, that would be considered your day job.

Yeah, it's my day and night job. Um, I co-founded the archive, uh, with Laurene Powell Jobs. Um, and yeah, it's been a great thing.

And you wrote The Man Behind the Microchip, you wrote Troublemakers, which is this fascinating look at different figures, um, throughout a defined part of Silicon Valley history. And then we have this book here as well, which is Making Something Wonderful: Steve Jobs in His Own Words. But I don't think people can buy this. This is a treat.

That was a gift to you, but everyone can see it online at our website, which is stevejobsarchive.com. And that book I really consider myself to have edited, but basically he wrote it. It's him in his own words. Yeah.

Okay. Well, we're going to get into the other works in quite a bit of detail, I think. And then, um, super quick, this podcast is sponsored by E1 Ventures. Go to E1 Ventures for all your venture capital needs. They have been really kind supporters of the podcast. Um, okay, here we go. Well, there's a question I was thinking about that I don't think I actually know the answer to, which is, is how you get— you— I mean, I know you went to Stanford, but how you ended up in Silicon Valley and interested in Silicon Valley history to begin with.

Yeah, so I grew up in Oklahoma. And went to college on the East Coast and while there discovered that I really had an interest in sort of understanding, I think what you could basically define as power, for lack of a better word. But I actually applied to grad school at Stanford to study 19th century race relations. Got to Stanford and took a course with the man who became my dissertation advisor, David Kennedy. Who's a 20th century economic historian, and was completely swung into this way of understanding how business and power related to each other. And then I've always had this thing about technology. I'm not trained in any way as a sort of STEM person, but even in college, I, I one summer got funded to put on a— I made a pink lab coat put glitter on it, made myself a conical hat out of a piece of poster board and called myself Ms. Wiz and went all around Tulsa, Oklahoma, running these little hands-on science shows. So that, that had always interested me.

That sounds like you should bring this back on Netflix or something. That's a great title. Ms. Wiz.

Yeah, that could be it. It was, it was a good one., and I had one elective I was allowed to take in grad school that first year, and I took a history of Silicon Valley course. So that combined with David Kennedy kind of set me on the road. I was just so interested, how does business and technology play together? And then even, so this was the mid-'90s, even then, early mid-'90s, it was becoming clear to me that the technology coming out of Silicon Valley was going to actually lead to a, if not a concentration of power, at least a locus of power. And I was super interested in, okay, how'd we even get to where we are now? Um, and if I'm being completely honest, I also, um, decided to have a child and I needed local archives. So those things together all, um, kind of worked to make me decide to study the history of Silicon Valley. And at the time, it was not really considered a legitimate field of study. I remember talking to people and defending this choice by explaining Silicon Valley was older than what we think of as the civil rights movement, but no one seemed to say, oh, that's, you know, for its time not worthy of study because it's only been around 30 years.

So that's— people just thought it was too young and, and they didn't know this goes back to the early 1900s and beyond.

And with a few kind of important exceptions, it really hadn't been the subject of academic study yet. I think it was just sort of those guys over there in the corner. Um, and I saw it as part of this sort of continuum of American innovation and American innovators and sort of the way that we laud the sort of guy tinkering away in a garage, um, going back to Edison and even behind that. Um, so I saw it in this way that I, I guess I convinced them was legitimate, uh, to study as a form of academic history. And now it's, it's a big field. And there were other people, you know, who also were right there at the beginning.

Yeah, I mean, Christophe Lecule, he's done these economic histories of Silicon Valley. Um, those are— Annalise Saxenian, is it? Yeah, at Berkeley. Um, those are two names that come to mind that have really dug in on I feel like it's more a lot of economic history and what, what sort of— everyone's always looking for the magic recipe that made this place and trying to define that in some way.

That's right. Margaret O'Meara, of course, who's at University of Washington. Um, there's, they're just— yeah, there was a group of us.

Yeah. And okay, when I first became a cub reporter and was trying to learn, I knew nothing about technology, so I spent the first few years trying to actually learn what I was writing about, and then I got pretty into Silicon Valley history. But, um, you know, Intel was a powerhouse when I first began as a reporter, and it was this, this iconic company of Silicon Valley, maybe the iconic company in a lot of ways, that everybody knew. The— if they knew the tech industry, they knew either Microsoft Windows or the Intel Inside, you know, jingle from the ads. And, and then obviously just had such a central place. But I was always getting bombarded because this is like right after the dot-com boom by Gordon Moore because of Moore's Law. And then Andy Grove, who was CEO of Intel for a while, and he was such an iconic figure that those were the names I associated. And I'd missed like the Robert Noyce era. And when I ran across your book, I mean, that's— this was— it was a revelation in a lot of ways. But one was, was he was really alongside Gordon Moore and the other co-founders of Fairchild and Intel that brought this to life. But I mean, he was kind of the, the charismatic, um, that the one of these figures that we think of today as someone like a Steve Jobs or, you know, with all his, uh, pros and cons and Elon Musk. But, but Noyce had that, that figurehead, um, charisma, or at least that's my interpretation. And so, but when I read your book, it was like, just my eyes being opened to this place and this era and these figures. How did you— Thomas Wolfe, I believe, wrote this pretty famous piece for— was it Rolling Stone?

Esquire.

Esquire on Robert Noyce, where he paints this picture of this boy from Iowa who is a nerd for all intents and purposes and comes out, and it's a wonderful, wonderful story. But what was it, something like that, that drew you to Noyce in particular as a figure? As you're studying all this stuff, how does he rise up as the one you're going to— you're going to pick?

Noyce was like Forrest Gump. I mean, everywhere you looked, any— any important thing happening, there was Bob Noyce, you know, off in the corner somehow involved with it because Noyce co-founded Fairchild Semiconductor, which was the first successful silicon company in Silicon Valley., and he was at Shockley Labs even before that. So really kind of bringing what we'd call microelectronics to Silicon Valley. And then of course, he co-founds Intel with Gordon Moore and Andy Grove as their second employee. Les Vadez would be very eager to tell you that he was the first. And then Noyce just— he kept expanding the sort of world that he was part of. So first, he was very much a technologist, head of R&D, co-invented the microchip, which is a very important thing that he did that I think is different from a lot of what we think of as sort of celebrity CEO types, which he was a very early version of.

Like did the actual, on the integrated circuit, you know, the engineering on the—

That's right.

To make it happen.

Yeah. And, you know, has, Patents to prove it, you know. And then he goes on and founds these companies. So he's sort of expanding from just straight tech into this sort of management and then this executive role. And then he gets very involved in starting the Semiconductor Industry Association, which is one of the very earliest lobbying organizations in Silicon Valley. So he starts sort of sticking his toe into essentially politics. And then at the end of his life, he's running Sematech, which is this like straight-on government-industry cooperative, which was a really interesting road for him to take because he was someone who, uh, he loved to say that the best thing the government can do for, for semiconductors is get out of the way, even though, you know, that obviously wasn't true. And he knew it from the beginning since Nearly every microchip bought in the beginning was bought by the Department of Defense. But there were a couple things that really drew me to Noyce. One was this charisma that you're talking about. He was so different from what anyone would have at the time imagined a nerd to be. I mean, there was this concept that even in the '90s, you know, Like the kind of person who really cared about science and engineering was the classic sort of Revenge of the Nerds, white tape holding your glasses together, pocket protector where the pens have leaked all over it kind of guy. And Noyce was a champion diver. He was this daredevil skier. He was incredibly handsome, remarkably charismatic, and yet completely had the tech chops. So that was interesting to me. And to see Noyce was also, basically, um, chosen in part for those characteristics to be kind of the face of Silicon Valley, the face of tech, um, which was a very deliberate decision. Um, Regis McKenna, who was one of the early PR guys here, really understood— and it's hard for people to understand this now when technology is so integrated into our lives. But back in the day, people had no idea that even a transistor was working in the brakes of their car. All of this seemed so foreign and so hard to understand. And so they had to find a person to represent it. And that was Noyce. He was the person who did all the interviews. He did all the congressional testimony. He was just the man out front.

And to re— I mean, just to emphasize a couple of points, I mean, he, the, this image of the pocket protector nerd, and I mean, he was, he, he was that person in a sense because he was incredibly smart. I mean, and we're talking early days of semiconductors, pushing the limits of chemistry, of physics, like no, nobody knows how to make these things. And, and he's figuring out, I mean, he was a, he was a —my take was always, I mean, a genius. Absolutely.

I mean, it's pretty clear that he would have won at least one Nobel Prize, but they aren't awarded posthumously. And then one of my favorite parts of the whole Noyce story was he had said, as an aside, in one interview that he had invented the Esaki diode, or had the idea for. He was a very modest man, so he never would have said he invented it, but he said he had an idea for what became the Esaki diode. Um, but that Bill Shockley had told him to abandon the idea. And then a couple years later, Leo Esaki invented it, um, and won the Nobel Prize. And one of the things that was very exciting for me was I found, uh, two sheets of paper in Noyce's lab notebook, which at that time was in a drawer at National Semiconductor, where I'd sort of gone and they'd let me look at them. They're now all at the Computer History Museum. And I was like, what, what are these two random pieces of paper doing in this notebook? It was a very straightforward lab notebook, and the format was— everything was weird about it. And then we at Stanford had some of the lab notebooks from Shockley's lab, so I was able to compare that. We didn't have noises, I don't think. I don't remember. And I was able to compare this Xerox to sort of the pages of the Shockley notebooks, and then go and find out, okay, would it have been possible for him to do a Xerox at that time? Like, when was this invented? It was so exciting. And it turned out, yeah, in fact, that's what it was. It wasn't labeled, obviously, Isaki diode. No one called it that. But that's the kind of treasure hunt that I love about the kind of research that I get to do. Yeah. And what I'm sure you get a whole different set of really fun discoveries and you get the— you get to actually see it happen live, those sort of aha moments and those agonizing sort of like, ah, moments, you know, that's the best part when something incredible happens.

Yeah. And or somebody. Yeah. Is saying something just extraordinary in the moment. But yeah, it must be fantastic to find these, these gems.

Well, it's different. I mean, because you're recreating it. Out of like words on a page. I mean, now there's a lot more video. There's also a lot more that just gets destroyed for legal reasons and such. So it's a lot harder to find the more current things now to really understand, which is a loss for history. But it's— yeah, being able to kind of figure out, okay, how do I express the excitement that's coming through these couple pieces of paper? And not make it up. Because, of course, it has to be true. The other thing, though, that I really learned about Noyce that I think was super important for everything I did later was realizing that he didn't do any of this work by himself. And that was something that I think was surprising to me because I'd sort of bought the concept of the lone genius, you know, in his little lair. And with Noyce, even with something like the invention of the integrated circuit, it built on the work of other people in the lab at Fairchild, especially Jean Ernie, who invented the planar process. And so seeing how everything he did, he never co— he never founded a company alone. There were 8 of them at Fairchild, there were 2 of them at Intel, and realizing that I mean, I think I'm comfortable saying this. You can't really do it alone. You— no matter how much you put yourself out front, fundamentally you have to have people around you, um, who are able to do all the stuff you can't do. And you have to have the humility and self-awareness to understand what you can't do. And that— Noyce was a great object lesson in that because he was very clear I like getting things started. I like working with small teams. I like being in deep on the tech until even by Intel, he was aware that he was no longer— he was too removed from the day to day. But that was really important understanding because I think we so valorize this notion of kind of like the superhero founder, you know, when in reality it's just— that's just not the way it works.

I feel like the story of Fairchild and Shockley Labs has been covered. There might be people listening who don't know these stories, but I, I'm gonna fast forward a little bit for those people. But, but, you know, I, I thought— I always loved the way in your book, especially with Fairchild, I, I always got the sense that it was this team, you know. There's, there's the traitorous 8 who are at Shockley and break off to start Fairchild. And it seemed like each one of them played these different roles and they really were going at this together as a, as a team. I mean, it was a— we always talk about the two founders in Silicon Valley, but I love the model that they kind of set up, which was this group going off on this adventure together. And they all really seemed to like help each other out. So I always felt like that really came through.

And they, and they signed their contract on a dollar bill, which is just incredible. When they all decided to, to start the company, they, they signed a $1 bill with their venture capitalists. And this might be—

maybe this is like too complicated of a question, but if you think of these moments of Hewlett and Packard starting in a generation before the semiconductor people show up, you've got Shockley bringing the idea of transistors and semiconductors to Silicon Valley and setting up the first kind of attempt to commercialize transistors. And then, and then Fairchild really taking things to the next level. And I always think of Fairchild as being pretty key in this role of venture capital. Arthur Rock comes in to back these 8 nerds, you know, in their capitalist quests. Do you Sorry, it's a cruel question. I mean, do you have any sort of stack ranking on where you see either noise or, you know, those three moments as being any more important than the other as far as like propelling Silicon Valley forward? Oh, that's an interesting question.

You know, Steve Jobs talks about there being sedimentary layers in Silicon Valley, and I think that's actually the right way to think about it, because I think part of the reason Silicon Valley has been so hard to reproduce is that it's so complicated. Yeah. And so if you look at each of these sorts of moments as a layer that kind of adds something to the picture— so like Hewlett-Packard really set up the university-industry partnership, which remains strong. It, you know, it's not everything, but, you know, it, it's important, and it's certainly important to getting people out here. And into the jobs. And then you have Shockley and Fairchild who are sort of laying the kind of— the way I've always described it is like the grain of sand in that becomes a pearl, you know? And they're sort of that core grain of sand. And they also bring in outside capital, which is an important innovation. They aren't the first ones to do it, but they're the first ones to really, really hit it out of the park. And then with Intel, it becomes even bigger. The other key thing that Fairchild did was legitimize spinoffs and startups. The idea had always been you stick with a company for 50 years and you get your gold watch at the end and you leave. And they legitimize the notion of, no, if the place you're working won't build what you think needs to happen, go find a way to build it yourself. Yeah. Which was blasphemy. I mean, they were told when they left Shockley, you'll never work in this town again. I mean, it was a big deal. So they sort of added that in. And then you sort of get beyond that. That becomes the core of basically consumer electronics. So you can't rake them. They're there, but they're— I don't think it could have happened without each of them in place.

Yeah. And again, I mean, you make the best point, which is my entire career as a journalist, I just remember, you know, everyone's always trying to mimic Silicon Valley. They're going to create the thing, they're going to put a couple universities, buy some money, and, and we're gonna, we're gonna build this in Europe, we're gonna build it in Asia, we're gonna build it wherever, even in the United States in different pockets. And it's, it's, it's an impossible mix of things to replicate, obviously, or somebody actually would have figured this out after.

Yeah, and I mean, also the It's just, you know, as a historian, I'm obligated to say it was a very specific time and place, right? It's— it starts at the height of the Cold War. And so you've got all this defense money pouring in. You have Lockheed as the biggest employer in Silicon Valley. I mean, so much so that they had— they were requested to stagger when they dismissed their employees, their shifts, so that they— because the traffic was getting too bad.. And so you also had incredibly cheap land out here, which is kind of impossible to imagine, and huge swaths of it because these were all orchards. And so when you— back then you needed a place to actually build fabs and build factories. And so there was plenty of space to do that for cheap compared to kind of big congested East Coast cities. So there were so many pieces that came together. That just were sort of a combination of occasional insight and a lot of luck and serendipity.

And then there's so many fascinating things to Robert Noyce. I want to talk to you about other areas, but I still have a couple of Noyce, couple of— gotta love Bob Noyce. I mean, the— let's talk a little bit more about this, this playboy lifestyle that he had. I mean, he was, he was pretty hard drinking. He was smoking. He was doing all these daredevil antics. He was driving sports cars. I think he had a thing for— he was a bit of a womanizer. Is that fair? That's fair. And, and then, and then something of like a, a father figure. I mean, Steve Jobs, who— I mean, there's an incredible overlap now in your career because Steve Jobs used to come sleep on Bob Noyce's couch, I think, and look for advice and Have we seen— I mean, is there anyone— to me, he seems unique. Even the, like, iconic figures that people associate with the tech industry in Silicon Valley. I mean, maybe these days Elon's so eccentric and getting into all these things, but I always think of Noiz as living this, like, James Bond meets nerd kind of lifestyle. It's hard for me to, like, find a comparison. From the modern era?

Well, I mean, Noyce was very much a man of his times, and I'll stress man, you know, I mean, he was a married man who, along with other married men, would go on dates with their, quote, girlfriends. It was a time when, like, the company newsletters would talk about how the men were going to miss the beautiful smiles of the girls on the assembly lines. I mean, in— well, we'll talk about in my next book how that gets even crazier. Um, and so I think that Noyce basically embodied that Mad Men era. He also was the son of—

that's kind of it, right? Yeah, it's like—

it's like— but he was the son of a preacher. Yeah. And, um, was deeply conflicted and and felt guilty about, about this, um, some of this that was happening. But again, a lot of it was much more socially acceptable at the time. I think the thing about Noyce was he had, um, aside from the women, which wouldn't fit with what we describe as a a very true moral compass, um, today. He had an— he was an incredibly moral, thoughtful, upstanding man who really was, um, trying to kind of— he had this idea that everyone should be able to share in the benefits of Intel as it grew, and You know, he wanted to give stock options to everyone from like the minute they showed up, and Arthur Rock and others managed to kind of calm him down a little bit. And he— so he was a true idealist on the one hand, and on the other hand, he just wanted to do science in the beginning. And I think that was an important part of what drove him in that whole early era of Silicon Valley. These were truly technologists who were in it because they wanted to make— they, they saw the possibility of making something incredible, and they couldn't do it inside any existing structures. And the money was just sort of a side effect, you know, of, of what they really saw as the essential work, which was making this stuff and then finding a way to get it to market. I mean, they, they obviously wanted to do that, right? They weren't working inside academic science labs or research labs of any sort at that point. In part, that was because they were very tired by the bureaucracy and the difficulty of kind of getting funding, having to constantly apply for funding, etc., inside a university lab. But they, they loved the competition of it all. And it was very much a sense, at least for Neuss, of may the best product win.

Yeah, my sense is that the tech industry for the mainstream public, at least if we're almost trying to get back to this era, is defined in the public's head by Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. And if there's something close to an Edison-type figure who's well-known enough to roll off some people's tongues, it would be those two. Do you think— do you think that's, that's fair to someone like Noyce or Gordon Moore? Like, I feel like they're not going to— you know, it's funny because if you even— the transistor, which Shockley shared with two other people from Bell Labs, the Nobel Prize for, and probably like didn't play as much of a role in the invention of it maybe as the other two. You know, I think the average person on the street would be hard pressed to name the people, whether it's the transistor or the integrated circuit, who were these Edison-like figures of the probably the most important invention ever to come across. And so this is a very long-winded way of maybe asking if you think, you know, Bob Noyce gets his due or maybe we're just too close to it now. And then 200 years, he will.

Yeah, it's an interesting question. I definitely remember being surprised to realize that I had sort of brought him back, um, because when you study history, you very often— at least I do— I totally lose myself in that time. So when I kind of looked up and realized, uh, I think the book came out in 2001, so he'd only been gone 11 years. But he was completely unknown. Maybe it came out in 2007. Whenever it was, it was not— he was not a person who was on anyone's lips. And I, I think that's the nature of history. And I think one of the things that is incredibly humbling, terrifying, and if you open yourself up to it, um, sort of freeing and uplifting about the job of a historian is this recognition that no one remembers you when you're gone. I mean, you have a generation or two of your own family if you're lucky to be a nice person who they love. But it's so few people who get remembered. Do I think Noyce should be one of those people who gets remembered? Absolutely. Um, do I think what he would care most about is that the microchip— that people recognize the importance of the microchip and maybe of Intel, though? I mean, who knows? There's so many huge companies that mean nothing to anyone anymore. Um, I think those are the things that probably would have mattered more to him. But he died quite young. He didn't really spend a lot of time thinking about his legacy necessarily. But that's my sense. He was not an ego guy. I don't think he would have felt like, remember, remember the name Noyce. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know how much you pay attention these days to the comings and goings of the semiconductor industry and NVIDIA's rise. And although I'm sure you see it, for most of my career, or at least the first half of my career, it, like I was, we were talking about earlier. I mean, Intel was, of course, Microsoft maybe was more front and center, but I mean, Intel, especially in Silicon Valley, was like the iconic company for a lot of the reasons we outlined, whether it's employee stock ownership, just being the central piece of, of all the technology running on top of these Intel chips, the, um, it was like the engine, you know, that everything else played off of. The thought that Intel would be— it seemed, it seemed impossible to ever unseat them, to challenge them. NVIDIA was a tiny pipsqueak. AMD was a pipsqueak. Arm was a pipsqueak. Anytime Intel wanted to like crush them, it seemed like it could do it at will. Um, are you— I just feel like Intel has— I mean, well, it clearly has sort of fallen on different times. And is this— I don't know, how do I have trouble? Like I have like an emotional— I don't know why I care so much about a company, but I kind of do. And I get, I get sad. I mean, it's great, I guess, for NVIDIA and nobody else cares. Maybe it's doing fine. But yeah, I mean, I, I just always thought of Intel as that one super special Silicon Valley company. How do you, how do you, do you think about this stuff? Do you care? How do you think about this?

I mean, I almost had a car accident when I saw that the Hewlett-Packard building was now Tesla. Yeah, I really remember, like, um, uh, yeah, good.

Because HP was, was in—

shares a lot of similar things. It was the iconic Silicon Valley company. I think it represented, I think, in a lot of ways the idealized version of Silicon Valley. You know, they were notorious or famous for treating their employees so well. You know, it was just a very different time. I think the lesson with all of this is that, you know, I mean, the problem is these are all clichés, but nothing lasts forever. And I think about Andy Grove, who you mentioned earlier. So Andy was CEO of Intel. First it was Noyce, then it was Gordon Moore, then it was Andy, who they had brought over from Fairchild with them as a chemical engineer who quickly, as Gordon liked to say, outgrew his PhD and became a brilliant CEO. And, you know, he published a book, Only the Paranoid Survive. And I think, you know, Andy was always about like, what's right behind us? What's, what's coming to get us? And I think, you know, from what seems like a moment where they sort of missed cell phones, things started going in a really hard way for Intel. And I think it's just— I mean, it's— I don't know specifically how things fell apart at Intel, but I do know that I'm a I think Clay Christensen's idea of the innovator's dilemma and sort of these smaller companies being much more able to make changes quickly and move into your markets is— it's a real thing.

Yeah. Yeah. I just think there was that mystique with Intel because of Grove's book and because of his mentality that if anyone could see something coming, it would always be Intel because they were so focused on unseeing the next thing and clearly missed a lot, actually, you know, missed cell phones, the, were aware of the rise of TSMC, but, but sort of helpless against it and, and the rise of ARM and, and, um, and then obviously didn't have the right product when, when AI, the AI boom took off. So yeah, I mean, I just think it's always seemed like the one, the one that, um, maybe would survive all this. But yeah, I don't know, I get emotional.

No, I definitely hear you. It's like when someone truly saintly dies. I mean, I really remember when Archbishop Tutu died and I thought, that guy too? Yeah. Like this had to happen to him too? And there's a way in which, yeah, your heroes, you want them to be impervious, you know.

I feel bad because Pat Gelsinger shares the office next to mine. So we'll change subjects now. Okay, why— God, I don't know if I'm allowed to ask this or not. Why has this not been made into a movie? And can we make this into a movie? I mean, you've got a production company, don't you? Yeah, yeah. Where are we? Are the rights available? The rights are available. There's the book for people to see. I think I'm like shocked that nobody has ever tried. I mean, he really is like the, like I said, sort of the James Bond of Silicon Valley. I mean, so much drama in the story.

I mean, there's a lot you could put into a movie that I didn't really go into in the book, but, you know, there was all this spying going on in Silicon Valley around that time, so we could have a good time.

Yeah. Oh, yeah, yeah. Um, yes. Okay. All right, we're gonna— let's, let's work on that. Let's see what we can do. Um, okay, your next most recent book was Troublemakers, and, and this is a series of profiles on— was it 5 or 7? 7 people. Um, I would say 4 of whom I knew of previously and kind of 3 I didn't. Um, what was your— I mean, I, I have a sense of your thinking by the different— by the stories you picked because they tell different elements of the, the Silicon Valley story. But, but yeah, what was your— how did you end up on that book? And I always think it's a hard thing as an author to do There's something so beautiful about having one central character to pull you through a story. Um, you know, and, and I always had on my last book, I mean, I think we talked about this is like, I just couldn't not tell these other stories. And it was a curse and a blessing because you, you know, um, that you're coming with some baggage and that you're going to have to do, it's like doing 7 times the work as well. You know, you can't, I know you and the amount of research you do, you probably did 7 biographies worth of of digging. So, um, yeah, what made you want to do this, and, and, and what was your approach?

Uh, so when I was ready to write the next book, I, I'm— I believe that chronology is like everyone's secret weapon. And, you know, the reason it— with the Noyce book or any biography works so beautifully is you know when to start, you know when to stop, and you know the order to go in, unless you're a very creative and talented person. So I made a timeline of Silicon Valley history up to that point. And what were the different innovations hitting? And when I got to the '70s, I like— the timeline looked insane because you had, you had the first personal computer, first video games, you had biotech, you had really the beginning of venture capital companies. Arthur Rock was a lone operator and you— Still alive, I think. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And you had so many things. You had the first time that basically a university licensed intellectual property, you know, the first time you had one of these IP offices and that, that was really, really hit it. And, and I wanted to know sort of like did these stories intersect at all? You know, what, what was happening? Um, and because I do think that with few exceptions, people want to hear the stories of people and not the stories of technology, I wanted to find individuals, um, that I could use to tell those different stories. Uh, you're giving me— I, I would have lost my mind if I'd written 7 biographies. I, I bounded it in time. Um, it was basically the '70s. It starts in '68 because so much happens in '68 in the world, you know, um, and goes a wee bit into the '80s. Um, and also I wrote not as much, very little actually, about people outside of their work. Yeah. Um, and that, that was how I didn't completely, you know, fall apart And it was, it was amazing to just to see some of those overlaps and to see like the biotech industry trying to figure out, can we use the same sorts of venture approaches that semiconductors had used or that PCs had used? Or watching something that I had never been aware of was how much Apple owed in its origins to Fairchild and, and the microchip companies. I had no idea. I mean, it was something like 7 of the 9 VPs and Apple's third co-founder, which— who was Mike Markkula. Ron Wayne was very briefly a co-founder, but Markkula owned a third of Apple. With Jobs and Wozniak, all of those VPs and Markkula and all of the funding from Rockefeller, from Arthur Rock, from Don Valentine at Sequoia, all of those people knew each other through the semiconductor industry. And I had no idea that there had been that direct connection back. And it was just super interesting to kind of look at how did all these things come together. And a person who I'm sure you didn't know in that book was a young woman named Fawn Alvarez.

Okay, wait, no, you're cheating. You're cheating.

Am I? Okay, go ahead.

Yes. All right. So because you have these 7 different figures, right? We could, we could, and maybe we should sit here for hours and go through each of them. I think people should buy the book, read these stories. But there were 2 people that I wanted to call out, and she was one of them. Okay, go for it. Just because I had to make decisions on how to do this. Well, you're not alone.

I was sitting in a lecture at Stanford, completely unrelated, and at the end of it, I hear these students behind me and they're talking about Fawn Alvarez, Fawn Alvarez. And I finally turned my head. I was like, are you talking about Fawn Alvarez from Troublemakers? And they said, yes. And I explained, you know, I wrote this book and I guess they were reading it in a class at Stanford. And later the professor came up and said, Fawn Alvarez is always one of the people who really jumps out at these students. So yeah, you're not alone.

Okay, well, let's do her first. I was going to go in a different order, but let's— let's— she was— she was one of the two that I really wanted to call out. I mean, you talked about Mike Markkula, who's fascinating, but yeah, tell us the story of— I mean, definitely a figure I had not heard about before.

Yeah, I mean, I've— I've found— so Fawn Alvarez worked at this company called Rolm, where the four letters were for the last names of the four founders. And when we first meet her, she's very young. She's a child, and she's picking fruit in an orchard. And that's how she made her money.

Which, in just context for people who don't know, I mean, before this was Silicon Valley, it was the Valley of Heart's Delights. These were all fruit orchards, nuts. What did we have? We had peaches and— Yeah. And prunes. Plums. Yeah. When I bought my house, I remember the— I forget, I think it was like an electrician or something like that. He came by. I live in Mountain View. He's like, oh, I grew up here. This used to be a tomato, um, you know, people used to grow tomatoes right here. I mean, this isn't that long ago that all this stuff changed. So she's kind of growing up on one of these orchards, right? Yeah.

And this is, um, the very late '60s, early '70s. I mean, this is the, the fruit. It was such fertile land that people would put hoses on their trees to try to just stop the fruit, you know, it'd start blossoming and they'd kill all the blossoms with water. And her mom had come over here from Southern California to work in a defense factory, you know, in one of the defense companies, I think Hughes. And she was, she was a master at a very specific task of, you know, sort of building boards. And, uh, she, the mom, who got hired away to go to this company, Roam. And, uh, Fawn, when she graduated high school, started working there on the assembly line and said that she wanted someday to land behind a desk. And that's what she managed to end up doing. Through a lot of hard work. And watching what she did was super interesting because she was doing work that was considered women's work, you know, sort of converting various engineers' drawings and such into diagrams that people would be able to follow on the assembly line because she'd come out of the assembly line and very quickly that work— excuse me, I said it backwards— that had been the work of engineers. She started to do it, and suddenly it stopped being valuable work. It became the work that, you know, these ladies could do. But eventually she ended up as an assistant to, like, a chief of staff to one of the key executives at Rome. And what I loved about Fawn's story was a couple things. One is This was an actual factory worker in Silicon Valley. And I think that's something that people just don't understand. There were factories here, and there were people with middle-class incomes who were able— her mom was able to buy a home. Fawn was able to buy a home. And I wanted to be able to tell that story. And also, it's a really important story about immigration in the Valley. Fawn was born here. But the women working on the assembly lines around her came from all over the world. And I thought that was another important story to be able to tell. And also just Fawn didn't go to college and there was a lot there. She just had such incredible pluck. I don't want to sound condescending, but that's the only word I can think of. Just the, the motivation. That she brought to her work was incredible. And the just the raw brainpower she had as well.

How did you— real quick on the factors. Yes. I mean, this is one thing I wanted to highlight. I mean, the even when I started as a reporter, I mean, we still made server motherboards in Silicon Valley. Intel had a fab right next to its headquarters. And then going back further, there's all these pictures of the early semiconductor days, core memory being woven by women on these assembly lines. Lines, and, and women played such a key role in the rise of the first, the semiconductor industry, and then these factories. I, I'm sure— I feel like you know this way better than I do, but I mean, yeah, it's like this lost era in people's heads, I think.

Yeah, that's right. And they, they were hired, um, it was believed their small hands made them better, better suited, um, for this work. Yeah. And then, uh, Troublemakers also talks about another woman in a very different role who the first woman to bring a software company public, Sandy Kurtzig. And so I also wanted to be sure to highlight that, that there were, there were women here in all sorts of roles.

Yeah. You know, and how did you find the story of Fawn? Was she like a— well, was this a decently well-known story in some circles? No, no.

I was talking to, I think, Kathy Maxfield, whose husband Bob was the M in ROLM. And she started— I was telling her how much I would love to find someone who'd worked on the line. And she started telling me about Fawn's mom, Nita. And then I ended up calling Fawn.

And yeah, it was really, really lucky. How did she— did she take some pleasure in you telling her story?

I hope so. I mean, Yeah, I, I think so, because it's— I think she recognized that she'd done a lot. Yeah, you know, in my mind, she certainly is someone who more than deserves to be in that book and known as a person who did something important in Silicon Valley.

Um, okay, the next choice is completely arbitrary, only because we're going to talk about Bob Taylor, because I I just, I've always loved reading about Bob Taylor. I mean, what an extraordinary figure who overlaps. I don't know if it's like Forrest Gump, but it's like these, these, um, just monumental shifts in, in the world, um, helps, helps build the internet, get it from the ARPANET, um, the very earliest days of, of this thing that we all rely on. And then it goes to Xerox PARC, which there is a wonderful book about PARC, Dealers of Lightning. Um, it was a fantastic place, but I think people The story of PARC is always like, oh, they— Xerox wasn't smart enough to capitalize on its inventions and they had the office of the future. I still don't think most people know they made this computer called the Alto, which was— this was just like so far ahead of its time. And we're still, um, like basically kind of using Alto-like machines all these decades later on our desktops.

Um, yeah, they were networked. Graphical user interface based, um, like with Ethernet. Yeah, yeah, Ethernet was invented there. The printer was invented there. Um, basically everything that made early Adobe possible was, you know, WYSIWYG was there. Um, it's just incredible, like every single piece of the puzzle was there. Now, not all that, um, Alan Kay's Dynabook came out of there. Uh, not all of that was precisely in the lab that Bob Taylor ran, but a huge portion of it was. Um, yeah, so Bob Taylor started out at ARPA and, um, was the person who managed to get— I mean, more or less get the funding for ARPANET kind of set and, and went off. And then worked at the University of Utah and a couple other places very briefly where they were sort of the earliest nodes on the ARPANET that became the internet, and then went to Xerox PARC and, and ran this lab. The thing that's super interesting about Taylor was that he was not a tech person at all. He was a psychology, I think, degree— I think a master's degree. I was certainly not a PhD, who ran this lab full of, I mean, just hands-down incredible genius technologists who he kind of plucked from all over the country and, and sort of started this notion of like, whenever you think of beanbag chairs or like the slide that's here at your office and you think about, well, where'd this idea that people needed to kind of have some space to relax a little bit and interact with each other in different ways. I mean, that was pioneered at Taylor's lab. He just had this incredible way of bringing out and, and a sense of discernment of who to listen to in his labs. And so he was this wonderful man to work for, and if he liked you, and a nightmare to have work for you. Um, because all he cared about was protecting his people and his lab.

Like, like, very good with the eccentric engineer. Brilliant. Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. Which is, is, I think, a lot of the lifeblood of this place. And, and when you think about the traditional East Coast companies and things like that versus Silicon Valley, whether it's right or wrong, at least in my head, it's this acceptance out here of the weirdos and giving them that space to go chase their strange ideas. And he, at least in my readings, he always seemed uniquely in tune with that.

I think also just the breadth of what they did there speaks to sort of even when maybe he wasn't able to understand everything that was going on at the most sort of foundational inner core level, he technically, he saw the big picture in a way that I think was essential for keeping that lab going. Yeah.

And then I, I think near the end of his career, he ends up at Sun Microsystems. And then I thought maybe he had a stint at Sun, or, um, you mentioned the University of Utah. I think he overlapped with the Sutherland brothers.

Oh yeah, these, these were all— they were all there together, you know. Or, um, it's just, it's just amazing. Again, this is something that I love about Silicon Valley history, which is these these nodes. Now, University of Utah obviously is not in Silicon Valley, but like Ed Catmull comes out of there who, who, you know, starts Pixar. And Alan Kay comes out of there. And Nolan Bushnell of Atari was there. And all these people.

And Ivan Sutherland. Yeah, Ivan Sutherland does VR. And I, I think, didn't John Warnock, didn't the Adobe founders come out of the University of Utah?

So I mean, it's like, it's like it's another spot like Park or like Fairchild, um, you know. And when people talk about the PayPal Mafia, I think they're sort of hinting at a, you know, a similar kind of concept of these sort of deeply, um, concentrated loci of power, right, of into the brain power and, and tech, uh, thinking that at some point it's, it's just like the— there's so much going on there and it's just— sometimes people talk about them exploding, you know, like a supernova. I've, I've heard the analogy of like a sunflower scattering its seeds, but whatever it is, it's, it's remarkable.

I wanted to do a book about the University of Utah for a while, and then I wanted to do Ivan Sutherland. And when I was a young journalist, I had this meeting with Ivan and, uh, I went to him. He was at Sun Microsystems at the time. For people who don't know, I mean, this guy's like, he's gotta be one of the smartest people of the century. Um, was doing this virtual reality work before anybody even knew what that was. Had built a whole crazy helmet. There's amazing images on the internet. Ends up doing semiconductors, all kinds of stuff. And, and, uh, I think I was like 25, 26. I went to Ivan, we had lunch, and, uh, I said, I'm gonna I'm going to do a book about you, you know. And he's like, no, you're not. He goes, you know, I really value my privacy. And he said, I will do everything in my power not to. I was like, Ivan, I don't think my book's going to be that successful. I don't think people are going to be busting down your door. I'm just really into, you know, your life. And he had this brother Bert, who was an equal genius. It was like this incredible family. And he just wouldn't have it. It made it quite clear later in life. I mean, it's all— I mean, Elon would give me the same speech and I still went and did it anyway. But I didn't have— I didn't have the pluck and the courage back then. So he sort of shut me down. And on the way out, you know, I was like, well, I have to pay for lunch. I mean, that's what the journalist always supposed to do, at least in the United States. And he said— he said, no, you're a poor journalist and I am a titan of industry. I will pay for your lunch. It was one of the more memorable loach encounters I had. But yeah, just incredible times. The University of Utah stuff just blows my mind. You can spend a long time on Wikipedia and the internet if you start clicking all the names that were there in this period.

Yeah, yeah. I just remembered Eric Schmidt was also at PARC. And every year they throw this Tomato Fest. It's happening again this year in in honor of Bob Taylor. It used to be in Bob's backyard, Tomatoes and Oysters. And the first year or two I went, it was crazy. You would just walk in and be like, well, you know, this guy basically invented the graphical user interface. And I really remember there were people there who were deep inside Google Translate. And so I think that you've got still that those sort of roots are spread all through the valley. Yeah, yeah.

I don't want to give away all my ideas, but I would— and I don't think anyone would do them anyway because I don't think they think enough people would watch. But I always think there'd be such a cool sort of series, almost maybe like Halt and Catch Fire ruined this, but, um, doing Park, doing University of Utah, these different stories. Can you tell us, just before I forget, the, the Bob Noyce, Steve Jobs interaction when they were— when Jobs was a youngster?

Yeah, well, Steve was very used— he, he had a habit of calling people up and just asking for help. In this case, he had a special connection because Ann Bowers, who ran HR early on at Apple, was Bob Noyce's second wife. And I feel obligated to say that all the womanizing we talked about was pre-Ann. I don't know why I feel obligated to say that. But so Steve had a connection more directly to Bob. And he would just— the way he described it, because I— when I interviewed Steve Jobs for "Man Behind the Microchip," I was specifically asking him, I was desperately hoping for a, he's gonna give me this business problem that he couldn't crack and he went to Bob Noyce and Noyce cracked it for him. And he said, no, it wasn't like that at all. That it, he said that Bob just gave him a sense of what the Valley had been. And I was asking him, well, how did that come about? And some of it came about through, they would ski together, I guess, Bob largely taught him how to ski. There's a picture in Man Behind the Microchip of them together at a dinner at Regis McKenna's house. There's a story I tell in Man Behind the Microchip of— Noyce was a pilot. We forgot to mention in all his daredevil things that he also flew his own airplanes. And it's a story about Noyce taking off and Jobs in the passenger seat.. And this was an airplane that could land on water or on land. And Noyce didn't set— he was a very good pilot, but for the final landing, he had it still in gear to land on water. And, you know, they just, they hit the ground so hard and they're like sparks flying. And Steve Jobs described, you know, thinking this plane's going to go. And the headline— and this tells you something about priority order at that time— the headline was going to be, "Bob Noyce and Steve Jobs die in fiery plane crash," you know. And so there was very much a sense of— well, I mean, in his commencement address, Steve Jobs talks about when he got fired from Apple. And how the first thing he did— that was in 1985— first thing he did was call Bob Noyce and call David Packard and, in his words, apologize for dropping the baton. And so I think that in his perspective, this, this was a way that he really learned what the Valley was like and actually the the little quote at the— that opens The Man Behind the Microchip is a quote from Schopenhauer, that when I interviewed, um, Steve, he actually said, oh, you know this quote from Schopenhauer, which is classic. Of course, I don't know what this quote from Schopenhauer— he ran upstairs and got this book and then came down and, and read it. And it was about how you see the Conjurer's— I mean, I could read it to you if you want. Yeah, if you want. Yeah. But it's basically what he said Noyce did for him.

You can see that it's well read.

Yes. It's got many earmarked pages. God, this was published before I was impossible to see without my glasses. Let me see here. Well, this is a treat.

We get a reading.

Yeah. It says, "He who lives To see 2 or 3 generations is like a man who sits some time in the conjurer's booth at a fair and witnesses the performance twice or thrice in succession. The tricks were meant to be seen only once, and when they're no longer a novelty and cease to deceive, their effect is gone. And he was saying, Noyce basically enabled him to sit in the conjurer's booth multiple times and kind of see, okay, these are the things that might be coming down the pike for you. Without being able to live them himself. And I think that's just, you know, it's a smart person who goes and talks to the people who came before to understand what sort of challenges they faced and how they kind of overcame them and what the thinking was that enabled them to sort of succeed and, you know, where that thinking failed. I think there's one other thing that I want to be sure to mention, um, about Troublemakers, which is after writing this book about Bob Noyce, which was all about this one guy and all about this one really famous guy, I was very interested because I had seen how much the people around him made his success happen. I was very, very interested in writing about the people who aren't in the spotlight. I remember once I was at an event that a venture capital firm had put on, and there was someone there who was sort of like the number 2 to a very famous founder. And at some point he had a little bit too much to drink and he was singing this little song that went, "I did all the work, he got all the credit," over and over. He was just singing this song. And that And I, I thought a lot about that because of course that's overly simplistic, but I do think, and I've used this analogy before, that, you know, the way we talk about founders, um, successful, uh, ones is the way that we talk about a pitcher who's thrown a perfect game, where if you're at the game, you see that the first baseman like steps on the bag at exactly the right time. And the catcher, you know, like made the perfect sort of signs for the call and for the pitch, and the, the person in the outfield's like, oh my God, you know, and catches these incredible balls. But the only thing that goes into the books is that the pitcher threw a perfect game. And so I was very interested in the rest of the team. And that's what, you know, I, I wrote about Apple in Troublemakers, but I wrote about Mike Markkula, not Jobs or Wozniak. And I wrote about Atari, but I wrote about the engineer Al Alcorn rather than about Nolan Bushnell, who was the really famous founder. And I think it enabled us to, to get a different read on these companies and these experiences that in no way diminished what the more famous people did, but kind of rounded out what it takes to succeed for a company to succeed, or an idea like the Office of Technology Licensing at Stanford to succeed.

It's such a hard thing to do because the publishers want the big names and everybody wants to read that story. My last book, I forget how many pages it is, like 500 or something. And it was even, it was even bigger because I had, I had wanted to do something similar where I'd spent so much time at this rocket company Astra hanging out with the engineers doing all the work that I had written for about 8 of them their life story, um, sort of like in an oral history, um, because I wanted I wanted it for a bunch of reasons. One was very much what you were talking about, that it's, it's this group of people that come together to do these things. They had also each come from such different backgrounds that I wanted the public, and I guess maybe like young people, to see that there is— yes, you can go to MIT and get your PhD and maybe things will be easier for you, but there is many paths to, to getting into these things if you wanted to. I mean, I had so many Dropouts, people from Iowa, people from all over in, in these different ways they'd gotten in. But the book got so big and then, yeah, it's one of my biggest regrets is I guess I should put all this online. I already spent all the efforts to, to do all this, but, um, it's such a hard call to make because you don't want to, you don't want to glorify this individual. Um, it does make for a neater, um, I guess flashier story in some ways. And, and, you know, there is that one part where, you know, the public, this is what they want to read, right? Is about, um, it was about this, this person going on a hero's journey or something like that. So, well, I'm—

yes, you could put them online. You also, um, this is why things like the Silicon Valley Archives at Stanford exist, where you can put them there, they'll be safe, and at some point someone will find them, come back and use them. I mean, the things that I drew on in my research and like Bob Taylor's papers are there now. We have tons and tons of stuff from the semiconductor industry and from Apple and from much more recent stuff. It's there for when people are ready to kind of get the deeper and more nuanced story. Although it's incredible because, you know, what you put together is extremely deep and nuanced as well.

No, but that's actually great to know. I have all my Elon tapes, which include extensive off-the-record conversations that I've always wondered what to do with. Um, can you— is there— there must be— there's like a process for putting these things in a vault until we—

let's, let's talk. Okay. Yeah. Um, yeah.

Um, okay. So the— I've taken up a ton of your time. Are you okay for just a few more minutes? You are? Um, since we were talking about Steve Jobs, I mean, let's— what happens at the Steve Jobs archive? What, what, what do you do?

Yeah, it's, it's the Steve Jobs archive for me is especially neat and exciting for two reasons. One is I get to work with a team, and two is that it is both a traditional archive where we have a collection of materials with everything you would expect in a historical archive, but it also looks to the future I mean, he always was looking to sort of what's coming next. And, um, we've developed a number of programs to sort of support young people who are working at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, which really was important to Steve. Um, and also we think of ourselves as an archive of ideas where we're trying to talk about some of these ideas that I was saying earlier. If you're a smart person, you kind of go back to people who came before you and look at sort of what were the ideas that really drove this person. And for him, it's things that I think won't surprise people, but also I can tell you were genuinely held, like the importance of really considering your user and considering— he would never have used the word user, he would, you know, the people And thinking about the work you do as a way to show how your, your love for the rest of humanity. He saw himself very much as in this stream or in that baton pass that you're talking about earlier with in his commencement address where he in, in the Make Something Wonderful book that people can read online, there's this incredible email that he sends to himself about a year before he dies where he talks about all the things that he uses in the world—the mathematics and the food and the clothes and the medical interventions—and that he's fully dependent on humanity to sort of—for everything he does. And he saw his work as a way to put something back. And I think trying to promote ideas like that that beauty actually matters, that thinking about the humanity of the people who will be using these things, you know, them as people is what I mean, that matters. Um, and those are ideas that we're really trying to put forward even as we're also telling his story.

Well, I've taken up a bunch of your time. It's, it's like fantastic that you're the person, um, that's doing that job because it couldn't be in better hands. Um, I've got one last, possibly too sweeping question for you. Um, I just think about it a lot because you, the, is the Silicon Valley that you see now, and I'm going to have a little windup on this one. My question is like, is it recognizable? I think about the Valley used to have these ties to the Defense Department. This was sort of like how things got going. And then you had a counterculture movement against that that also produced a bunch of things. But then we had this long period where the Valley tried to be kind of like separate from Washington, D.C. and to keep politics and all this stuff that comes with it out of tech. Today we're obviously quite involved. We talked a lot about this lineage of people, you know, there was there's this very direct connection between Hewlett and Packard and Fred Terman and Gordon Moore and Bob Noyce in the jobs and even Gates. And there is still like hints of that that go on, but it's maybe a little less clear to me. The tech industry has become so powerful that it isn't now this place that the rest of the world doesn't understand. The microscope is here. Yeah. So, you know, when you think back on this, history of this place. You know it as well as anyone, if not better, far better. Yeah, I don't know, is this place recognizable? Is all this inevitable? Is this industry just grew and grew? Are you distraught, happy, neither about what has become of Silicon Valley?

Yeah, I mean, I guess I have a couple thoughts on that in no particular order. First of all, I think that, as is so often the case, there's a lot going on that doesn't get the headlines that is very admirable. It's making a really important difference. Um, I'm not trying to be a Pollyanna, but I do think it's important, you know, to recognize that as well. I think that when I look at some of this, sometimes I'm really struck by how circular it all feels, where you just pointed out we start with sort of the DOD and Lockheed and being these— this huge employer, and then we've circled all the way, you know, back around. Yeah. Think about something even like timesharing, you know, was this— this idea that seemed where everyone would be able to share sort of time on one computer. And then it was like, no, no, no, we're going— everything is going to be just on the individual desktop. Now everything's in the cloud, which is its own, you know, version of timesharing. So in a lot of ways, some of it feels very familiar. And in a lot of ways, of course, it feels very different. The, the money, the pace, the impression that the Valley has in the world. Yeah, it is. People hate it. It's very different.

Lots of people hate it, you know.

Yeah, yeah. So I don't know, maybe it's like the way you feel— felt about Intel, or when I drove past the Hewlett-Packard sign, you know. And, and I'm— and that's real. And I guess that I believe that there are very good people and intentions here and work that's happening, that's genuinely happening, that's aided by some of the very things that are so scary. I mean, when you look at what AI has done in just, you know, medicine alone, I mean, there's— so I'm, I'm concerned for sure. Um, I also know that not a lot is accomplished through nostalgia, and I think thinking about, okay, where's the good and how do we amplify that, is the most important thing we can be doing.

Yeah, the Valley is not a terribly nostalgic place. You know, the companies just move right into the old ones' headquarters. Uh, you know, SGI, whoever gets taken over by Google, nobody thinks twice, Meta takes over Sun Microsystems. Like hardly anyone remembers Sun anyway. This is just the nature of things here. It is strange to me though. I, the one part I wonder about the most sometimes, and maybe this is just like now that I'm older or something like that speaking, um, it did seem like, like this region had such a cool interplay between, between capitalism and the counterculture vibes of San Francisco and that, that, and, and And again, this might be like a 47-year-old talking, you know, when I visit San Francisco quite often, um, it just, it's, ah, it feels like some of that's gone away because the wealth has just pushed so many people with who are not in a tech job out of the city. And, and, you know, that repeats even through the peninsula. And, um, I always felt like to some of the things you were talking about, about these qualities, these things that Steve Jobs cared about, some of these other qualities that we've, we've discussed, it feels like that has to have its roots in this interplay between, between the idealist and the artist and the entrepreneurs and the capitalist. And, and things came out of that, that, um, I think there's still bits of that, but I don't know if it's as, as rich as it used to be.

Yeah, I mean, I— so first of all, I think nostalgia is dangerous. I think respect for what was valuable is like, in a very specific way, is, is important, you know, sort of saying what can we take from that, what, what actually mattered and what was sort of peripheral and just happened to happen. Um, and yeah, so I think Sometimes it just feels to me like, um, the nerds have been kicked out by the cool kids. And, um, and I understand how that can hurt. As a nerd, I understand, um, how that can hurt. And I, I, I hear what you're saying, um, for sure. I mean, there's a definite— there's a definite loss there. And I guess I just have my fingers crossed, and just knowing some young people who are working on things, I, I don't feel— think I'm being totally idiotic— that, um, that there's also new good that's coming in, you know, and it's gonna be different from what was good in the past. Um, it may seem more off to the side rather than in the direct spotlight, but I think it'll have influence. And so, yeah, I'm— it fundamentally comes down to the people, and it comes down to, you know, what kind of guardrails are we willing to put on ourselves? What kind of guardrails are we willing to put on AI? And are we able, you know, to do. What are we capable of doing given various constraints that are being put on the companies and the individuals by outside forces? But I do think that our best bet is kind of betting on the people here to do what they can to make sure it's right.

Well, I appreciate this, the upbeat note, um, and, and, uh, and the hopefulness. Um, I could have, like, tried not to, but I, I could have gotten Lex Fridman on you and done 8 hours on, uh, just Bob Noizet then, and then all the characters from your other books. Um, so I tried to restrain myself. Um, for better or worse, thank you for being generous with your time. I I cannot— it's like podcast host has to be generous, but I, you know, I cannot express enough that people should read your work. It's like my favorite stuff to read. And so, so, um, this is all coming from a very genuine place. Where's the best place? I know people can buy your books just anywhere, but is there anywhere you want to point people to in particular? To look at all the things you do?

Um, I, I have a website, it's leslieberlinauthor.com. I've weaned myself from all social media, um, so I may have some vestigial presences, but they aren't, they aren't maintained. Um, and I, I am really proud of what we're doing at the Steve Jobs Archive, so I'd love for people, um, to visit that site or go to our YouTube channel. Um, we We just released a sort of re— it's not fully remastered, but a much improved version of Steve's commencement address. The 20th anniversary was just amazing. Yeah. So I would love for people to get to see that, see some of what we're doing, share any memories they have.

Yeah. Okay, fantastic. Well, thank you so much for coming. It's a true honor. I'm so glad this happened. And thank you.

Thank you. I had a great time.

Core Memory is hosted by me, Ashlee Vance. The show is produced by David Nicholson and me. Our theme music is by James Mercer and John Sortland, and the show is edited by the John Sortland. Thank you all for listening. As mentioned, the show is sponsored by Yuan Ventures. Thanks.