Margaret O'Mara: What We Can Learn From History

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I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable, people. I'm on a mission to make you remarkable. In this episode, Professor Margaret o' Mara is going to help me. She is the Howard and Frances Keller Endowed professor of History at the University of Washington. She received her BA in English and History from Northwestern University and she received her MA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to her academic career, she was a staff member for President Bill Clinton and Vice President Al Gore. She functioned as a policy analyst working on urban economic development, healthcare and welfare reform. Margaret is the author of a great book about Silicon Valley called the Silicon Valley and the Remaking of America. It was a Financial Times and Publisher's Weekly best book of 2019. She's also the author of Cities of Knowledge, Pivotal Tuesdays and co author of the college history textbook the American Pageant. She is a frequent contributor to the Opinion page of the New York Times and she has appeared on cnn, msnbc, BBC World News, and PBS Frontline. You should follow her on Twitter because she has one of the most intentional and intellectual collection of retweets that I have ever encountered. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. And now here is the remarkable Margaret o'.

Me.

I'm gonna start you off with a softball. Are we headed for a civil war?

That's a softball.

That's a softball.

That's a softball question. Are we headed for a civil war? I don't know. One of the things you you learn from studying history is that bold predictions made can often be wrong. But I think that this moment in American history does have a lot of anxiety. Invoking parallels to the 1850s, we have longstanding unresolved divisions that were not properly reckoned with. In the case of the 1850s, you had a system of human enslavement that was one part of the country was economically reliant on and actually one very politically powerful segment of that part of the country. The planters, the planter class, the enslaving Class who had a very high level of representation in Congress and the Senate were very invested in keeping that going. And quite honestly, the industrial economy of the north was. The textile mills of Massachusetts needed southern cotton. So everyone was implicated in this broader system that was at odds with the democratic principles on which the country was built. There also were political parties that were dominated by older people who had been around for a while and younger generation was trying to get into to it. There had been a big wave of immigration, particularly from Ireland, of people that were seen as less than the European Americans who were already here. They were Catholic, they were poor, they were viewed as subhuman in many cases. So there was a lot of anti immigrant sentiment. And there were real as the, as the US was expanding westward. The real fight was, are the territories going to be slave or free? You know, that's all prelude. That's some of the prelude to what happens in the 1860s. I think now we have, you know, there are tremendous divisions in some dimensions not quite as high stakes. You have a more solidly established democracy. The Constitution's now a couple centuries old rather than just a few decades old. But I think that what we have now that we didn't have then is we have a highly accelerated media culture that is amplifying and allowing really fringe speech to gain traction at a scale and a speed that hasn't happened before. You have again really long standing divisions that haven't properly been papered over in terms of racial divisions. For example, you know, the generations of school children have hearing Martin Luther King's I have a Dream speech and then being told that fixed it effectively, we've seen pretty vividly in the last 10 years that's far from being fixed. And in fact not really reckoning with the structural racism, with the inequity, with the very different economic trajectories that Americans have depending on where they're from, who they are. Those haven't been fully acknowledged and reckoned with. And that's part of what we're looking.

At if a civil war were to occur. It seems to me it's not between states, it may be within states. Isn't that very different?

That is really different. You know, in the Civil War you had a whole section of the country where the people controlling it just opted out. And now it's much more bumpy. We talk about red states and blue states or different shades of purple. I'm here, I'm talking to you from Seattle. Very, very, very blue Seattle. But you go across the Cascade Mountains and you get to a pretty red rest of Washington state. It's not as predictable. You know, one of the things about this moment in American history is there's been an incredible geographic and economic sorting, right? So people grow up in a small town in eastern Washington or South Dakota, or you name it, and they go to college, maybe somewhere else, and they see that there's a whole range of jobs I could take with this college degree and if I stayed in the city like Seattle, than if I went back to my hometown. So you see this incredible emptying out a population from parts of the country that were already pretty lightly populated to begin with. You also see really just dramatically different economic trajectories and opportunities presented to people, whether you're a kid growing up in Dayton, Ohio, or my hometown of Little Rock, Arkansas, or you're growing a kid growing up in one of the big affluent coastal metros. Now, that doesn't mean that you've got it made. There's incredible amount of income inequality in some of the richest cities in America. But that separation, sort of geographic, very different world, the world of a small town even two hours east of where I am in Seattle, in terms of the church, you go to the media, you listen to the economic opportunities presented to you.

Second softball question.

Oh, God.

Are we at the end of democracy?

We don't know. We don't know. I think that we are, I hope, freshly aware of its fragility and not presuming that it's all going to be cool, cool, cool, Right? Look, there have been incredible stress tests that American democracy have undergone. I often compare the founding fathers to startup founders in that they were like, did American democracy itself. Yeah, no, here's my comp. Here's my comp. Bear with me here. First of all, a lot of guys, very male, very white, a kind of very demographically specific and an elite group in, in terms of maybe being relatively young, but super, super deeply have kind of immersed themselves and become expert in one certain thing. Like you have Mark Zuckerberg as a teenager who's building Zucknet in his parents basement and name your other name, any number of Silicon Valley big names. And they had that focus at a really early age. Same thing with some of the guys who were at the Constitutional convention. They were like, one got into Princeton when he was 14 and finished in two and a half years, and another one spent eight hours a day reading the classics. And as much as some founders or startups founders are into hacking, these guys were into hacking Tacitus. They were just going deep in Greco Roman history and philosophy and all that stuff. Deepen the Enlightenment. And they pivoted. So here we have United States. The revolution itself is this total disruption. There's been no democracy for millennia. The only way that you run things is through a hereditary monarchy. And so the United States is premised on this entirely new model, totally disruptive, and becomes hugely influential. Right? But even then, they have to pivot. They start with these Articles of Confederation that are not so much, and then they go to the Constitution a decade later, that's or less than a decade later that has a president and a little more there. But they still say, you know what, we need to iterate. So we're going to make it, this Constitution, amendable, and we're going to rely on amendments to make this thing actually work. And it still was a pretty iffy proposition. So this is all going to your question of is democracy? Is this the end? It's been more touch and go than we would like to realize. And when you start digging into 19th century history, you see the fragility as well as the remarkable durability of this crazy startup that is the United States. And you have the stress test of the Civil War. You have this stress test of after the Gilded Age and industrialization and amassing great fortunes and incredible inequality. The stress test of world wars, stress test of Vietnam, of Watergate, which was an extraordinary constitutional stress test. And so here we are here now. So it could go a lot of different directions. I think one, you know, again, I think a lot about where are the continuities and where do things start, set this moment apart that set historians habit of mind. You know, you do have partisan divisions, regional divisions, economic divisions, failures of leadership. Both parties really to deliver on their economic promises to certain electorally significant segments of white America, of racial change or America of every class. But I think that this is accompanied with demographic change and positive social change that has been seen by some as threatening when it is accompanied with a shrinking economic pie. You're like, all these people have access to the jobs that used to be just mine, that only I could have. And so there's a threat there. So it's a perfect storm of things. But there's a lot of possibility. I try to find a lot of hope in history. Where are the things? Where do we see progress? So here I am. I'm a tenured college professor at a major research university. I'm a woman. I couldn't have had this job a couple generations back, my gender would have excluded me from even being considered. We're also using technologies that are allowing us to communicate in ways and connect in ways that when we sit back and just appreciate it, it's kind of remarkable. And that is something that also was aided, as a lot of my work focuses on, by this sort of broader political economy and choice by a society to invest in people and technologies to allow innovation to happen and give them Runway to create things. There's a lot of hope. I think it's awareness of the history and an awareness that you can't just let this thing run on autopilot, that. Why have so many voting rights been curtailed in the last several years? Because the Voting Rights act was deemed by the Supreme Court to no longer be something that needed to be enforced. And the Voting Rights act of 1965 was something that dismantled Jim Crow, segregation and voting restrictions in the south that prevented black people from voting for decades. So you have to actively work at democracy. You can't just be like, it's going to work. Don't worry, we're going to wave the flag and we're American. It's going to be okay.

Historically, when a democracy ends, is it a dramatic, violent siege of the palace, or is it by a thousand cuts, where local school boards or local state governments are now changing voting rights? How does it happen?

Yeah, history happens suddenly or it happens. It happens slowly, then it happens all at once. Right. It can take many forms, and there can be dramatic moments that aren't seen at the time as pivotal and critical. I think one of the open questions is, how is January 6, 2021, going to be understood a century from now as the prelude to something or something that was, in and of itself, standalone? And the American system, it can be slow and imperceptible, in part because of our system of federalism. You have many levels of government. You have real variety and variegation in terms of the lived experience of what's happening and who has rights and who has opportunity, depending on where they live in the country. But I go back to those decades, fateful decades right before the Civil War. Over the course of the 1850s, there were plenty of people in power that would readily acknowledge that it was incredibly fractious, incredibly partisan, incredibly an unsettled time. The stakes were high. At the same time, they were like, but it's not going to come to a civil war. It's not going to come to disintegration of the Union. It's not going to come to that, because that's not going to happen. And part of that was because they'd been fighting with each other since about 1789, like people were having knife fights and caneying each other on the floor of Congress. There was never a Kumbaya moment in American democracy. Lynme Randa captured it when Alexander Hamilton was this guy that everyone just drove everyone crazy. He did. And most of them, you know, these were really strong personalities.

And somewhere in the room and somewhere.

In the room, but you don't see it. And 1930s Germany, hard to see. These things are hard to see until you can't not see them anymore. You know, you have to be very eyes wide open. And the remarkable thing about American democracy is that there are so many levers that can be pushed where you can get engaged, including in places that seem kind of, why is this important? We tend to have political conversations that focus relentlessly on the presidency and relentlessly on the Congress and national politics, as if that's what matters. And as you point out, there are battles being waged at the level of the school board that involve a lot of boring meetings. To be someone who's going to get involved at that level of local politics, you have to be willing to put in the time and effort and put up with a lot of stuff that you're like, I could be binge watching something so much better, or I could be doing my job or something like that. I think the other thing that we're grappling with right now in 2022 is 50 years of across the political spectrum, from left to right, devaluing government institutions and politicians and bureaucrats and feeling like institutions are in the way of innovation and change and individual expression and freedom. And they're not places where you can do cool new things. And politicians, either they're all jerks or they're all crooks, or they're trying to be too big, or they're doing things the wrong way. Like, everyone's got their opinions, but no one really likes the status quo. And that has really caused this sort of pullback from civic engagement and a willingness to invest in making government work well and work in a democratic way across all levels.

Jesus.

All right, let's get some to happy stuff.

No, I'm speaking to a historian. I want a historical perspective here. Which is typically a bigger threat to democracy. Voter fraud or voter suppression?

Voter suppression. We see this throughout American history. Accusations of voter fraud have been something that has been perennial throughout American history. It often has been leveled against groups of voters that are relatively disempowered or newer to the system or where their participation would change or challenge the status quo. In the 19th century it was immigrants or children of immigrants, Roman Catholics, southern Eastern Europeans, Irish, where they're starting to get considerable political power. They have political machines who are just to make everything a little more spicy themselves, a little pretty corrupt, not always, but you know, things that by our modern standards would be like, that's not the right way to do it. You, you vote for me, you get a turkey at Thanksgiving kind of stuff. But at the same time that these accus of voter fraud, actual fraudulent voting for false ballots being stuffed and the process itself being corrupted is something that accompanies these groups of voters voting. And whereas there might have been plenty of bribery and patronage and all sorts of stuff on the side, even when the process of voting was relatively clean, you would get accusations and it often was new groups of voters that might threaten the status quo. And so the same thing has followed and the black vote ever since. Black people have been given the vote first, black men and the black women. There have been these accusations in the post reconstruction south white southerners saying we need to have these restrictions on voting so that there isn't voter fraud. And those effectively become voter suppression. So cases of actual fraud and much less fraud that has changed electoral outcomes are minimal throughout American history. And it is remarkable how rare it is, quite honestly and certainly in the modern period, meaning like the last several decades. But it has been, it is a very, very obviously an argument that has legs and one that was not taken seriously enough by people who didn't agree with those accusations when say some Republican lawmakers and Republican party operatives were accusing, saying voter fraud was at work. Democrats dismissed that as like that's, that's, there's no basis in fact, because there wasn't. But I think by dismissing it, this has really become an entrenched belief among many people, particularly in the last two years with the rise of mail in voting.

One of the hotspots of voter fraud is a retirement community in Florida, let's face it. But let's not go down that path here. Is it not a reasonable conclusion that basically conservatives and Republicans do not want black and brown people to vote? Is that an overstatement?

I don't think it's an overstatement. Given the leadership, sort of those with the most power and influence in the Republican Party right now and sort of shaping the direction of the Republican Party. I think there are many Republican voters and including Republican lawmakers, former and some present who do not agree with that. And in fact, after Obama's victory in 2008, the Republican Party did this postmortem saying, part of our problem is that we need to broaden our appeal to black and brown voters. So now, that being said, one really important and surprising to many data point that came out of the 2020 election was the growth in some groups of Hispanic voters for and support for Donald Trump in ways that pushed against the Democrats presumption. And something that voters of color constantly remind the Democratic Party that we get taken for granted. We assume that we're going to be on your side. But what we're really seeing in a lot of these current efforts, if we really dig into sort of particular efforts happening at the state level to make sure that the vote is whether through districting or redistricting or more importantly, through who the Secretary of State is. And validating votes is something that it's very clear to see. There's a correlation. The Republican Party has a serious demographics problem. And it has been advantaged certainly in presidential cycles by the electoral college system that skews and turns out privileges at present states that are more rural, that have heavier percentage of the white base of the Republican Party. But playing with that system even further in a way that the Republican Party knows that if voting was easily accessible that its electoral advantage would diminish in its current trajectory. It would have to really change the way that it's appealing and its electoral strategy. And the problem is that the base now is so solid. The Republican Party has the same problem that the Democratic Party had in the middle part of the 20th century. Was that secret to the Democrats national success in winning the presidency, in dominating Congress, Having majorities in Congress was because it was this marriage of northern liberals and increasingly after the 1930s, black voters and southern racist Democrats. And walking that line and keeping that coalition together was a constant problem. And it was one reason that from Roosevelt to Truman, it took until Kennedy and Johnson to have meaningful civil rights legislation. Because that was, as Lyndon Johnson prophetically said, the Democrats will lose the south for a decade because of this. Turns out they lost it for longer.

Wait, you said something that I just did not grasp. You're saying that the Northern liberals, black people and Democratic racists of the south were aligned.

Well, they were all part of the same Democratic Party. They did not agree the one place. So here's the interesting thing. If we go back to the New Deal. So there have been a lot of comps about why can't Joe Biden do what Franklin Roosevelt did? Get her done. Franklin Roosevelt had not just Democratic majorities both houses, but massive ones, huge Democratic majorities. But those Democratic majorities were made up of senators from Southern states, some of the most racist, pro segregationist guys you're gonna ever encounter. Like, they were committed to Jim Crow and they would do what it took, but they also were really committed to the economic recovery of the United States from the Great Depression and to the principle of using the government as a force to revive that economy, to have the government grow larger and do more than it ever had done in terms of economic development and creating jobs. They cared a lot about that. That was where they had common ground with the Northern Democrats, including liberals that were pro civil rights, who also wanted to see economic recovery and grow the government to do that. They were all Keynesians together effectively, and black voters that had been allied with the Republicans. But the crisis of the Great Depression and Herbert Hoover's failure to do anything, not just do anything for people in economic distress, but do anything for black people in economic and political distress brought them over to the Democratic side. It was an economic union. It was this support of, you know, we need to. We see the future. The only way we get out of this shared economic crisis is through this new approach. And so that's where you find comm ground in the Democratic Party. But it was a devil's bargain. That's why Social Security in its earliest iteration, did not cover farm workers and household workers, because that's were the jobs that almost all southern black people held, men and women. And they weren't getting Social Security benefits for those jobs, even though they were employees. They were working just like everyone else.

Wow. So let's say it's 100 years from now and Margaret O' Meara 2.0 is opining to Guy Kawasaki 2.0. Will that Margaret say to Guy January 6th and the whole QAnon thing, all that stuff, that was the last desperate acts of the white males. The trend was not their friend demographically. They were bound to lose it. And finally it happened. And this is how you should look at history. Or. Well. Or what I mean.

Or what? Or what I mean, it's a really challenging thought exercise because we don't know. And so it's going to be. It's going to depend. I think the demographics is destiny idea is something that too many people, particularly on the Democratic side of American politics, have counted on for too long because the structures of American governance set in place. But our buddies, the founding fathers, those original startup dudes, really work against that. They work against it on a number of levels. One has to do simply with representation. You know, the fact we have a Senate every. All 50 states get two senators, even if you're a Dakota, as opposed to California. You know, it really is such skewed representation. And we see there's incredible stasis now in kind of these institutions are very slow to change. On the Electoral College, which don't get me started, that thing's a piece of. It is highly problematic. The motivations for it are archaic. If the Constitutional Convention saw what the Electoral College has wrought, they would be. First of all, they'd be freaked out that you and I were having this conversation, that we even had a full autonomy and that we had electronics. But once they got over that, they would be like, this is not the point. The Electoral College is screwing things up. So I say that even though demographics will. We are seeing a trend line away. It's making our political institutions even more minoritarian, where you have a kind of power retained at the national level by groups and by geographies that are not the drivers of the American economy, nor are they the place where the most people are. And we've seen this pretty dramatically in the last two presidential cycles. And we think about the GDP of the Bay Area versus the GDP of other parts of the. The, the interior. And I think part of this geographic sorting is a problem. It is bad that so much wealth and so much activity, economic activity, is concentrated on the two coasts. It's super, super bad. It should be much more egalitarian. Like kids growing up in a small town in Arkansas should have more futures easily geographically accessible to them than they do. But that being the status quo, the forces are arrayed against progress and against social and political change, positive social and political change and egalitarianism and equity. It allows them to hold on for longer than they otherwise would.

And do you have any thoughts about how you're supposed to fix this fact that you're good if you're on the two coasts, but not in the middle?

Yeah, we saw that the US did engage in a big, massive economic development, economic geography experiment in the 1940s and 1950s with World War II and the Cold War and the military industrial complex. Now, I'm not saying, oh, just more defense spending, because we got plenty of that, but we do have examples of government again partnering with private industry. That's one really critical thing about the American. The hallmark of the way the US does this is often through the private sector. So much so that we don't always recognize how much the government plays a role in fueling our market economy because it's tax breaks, it's things that are not like, here's a check or here's I'm going to, you know, have this state sponsored project. It's more indirect. So you, you don't quite recognize this, but that's been super important in allowing private enterprise to grow and thrive as well. But we have examples of how the, the, the public sector can fuel and it put its thumb on the scale and say, you know what, you're way more likely to get this contract for this cloud computing, whatever, if you're located in Daytona. Like they could do that. And there are moves, you know, Congress and the Endless Frontier act, which is this big high tech investment act that's been lumbering its way through Congress. But there is a threat of Chinese technological dominance is something that has animated leaders of both parties to get off the stick and say, yeah, let's throw some billions to these places that are undervalued because you kind of can't let the market, the market is going to alter geography. There is private sector behavior, but the public sector kind of creates incentives for private sector behavior. That's pretty critical. And we don't fully acknowledge how much that's ever present, even at times where you think, oh, the government's small and it's letting us do our own thing.

If the concept of consent of the loser were a patient, would you say that patient is in intensive care or is in triage or is in Kaiser Medical foundation just getting a checkup? Where is the consent of the loser?

The consent of the loser? Help me, help me understand what you mean by consent.

In other words, you lost the election. Step aside.

Oh, it depends on who the loser is. So what was really remarkable, like standout, you know, this is something historians will be commenting on for a while, is that after the 2020 election, Donald Trump did not go quietly. There was a peaceful transfer of power in that there wasn't a coup or there wasn't active. You know that Joe Biden did get inaugurated on January 20th of 2021. But that kind of contesting the election, we haven't seen that before. Like we've had kind of drawn out 2000, Bush v. Gore. There was a long back and forth. Remember counting those hanging chads in Florida that like went on forever. But Gore, like the Supreme Court said, you got to stop counting. And Gore was like, cool, I'm going to go and I'm giving you speech and I'm going to concede. So there's always been a concession speech. I think it depends. Donald Trump was and is such an outlier in American politics. And even though he's very much a product of American politics, like he was able to run and win and govern because of these broader changes in particularly in the Republican Party and its base over the past 50 years, quite frankly, like didn't come out of nowhere. That being said, he is this kind of singular personality, this celebrity. You're not going to find even these other sort of mini Trump, these other politicians who very much are kind of styling themselves as Trumpist, they're still not him. And so this willingness to just sort of buck all of convention is something that makes me more optimistic about the patient. But the thing that's worrisome is now we have these kind of playing with the levers of democracy that is happening, particularly where Republican parties at the state level are playing with the machinery of elections in a way that could set up something where if you do get to 2024 and Trump or some other Republican wins, the Democrats could be like, I'm not accepting that because you gamed the system. So that's what's really worrisome about what's going on now and the need to kind of shore up the system faith in the system. Having a bunch of secretaries of state who are the most boring nonpartisan people you've never heard of that is the system working. Like, we don't want to know the names of the secretaries of state. We want them to be people who. So here's a great example here in Washington state, it's all like Democrats up and down and sideways, like you're a very sad, lonely person if you're in western Washington and trying to hang out and you're a Republican. But our one state level elected official until recently was the Secretary of state who's a Republican, Kim Wyman. And she ran the election and ran it in a very fair way. And obviously this isn't a red enough state for her to have played with things, but she was really a great example of a public servant. Like she it's a partisan office. She has a party identification that she runs. But she was not working in the interest of her party, she was working in the interest of the process. She actually just left to take a political appointment in the Biden administration as a Republican. So you know those people, those sort of Kim Wyman types and I think too you see, you know, secretaries of state of both parties, you want them to be these kind of country over party people and you need those people in the system. To not be making headlines, just to be making sure it works.

So when you look at the current status of cyber ninjas and all the work they did to uncover nothing, two historians go into a bar right after that happened. Are you just drinking and laughing about the situation, or do you think, oh, my God, this is the zombie apocalypse happening in real time?

Yeah. Well, you know what I'm grateful for? I'm super grateful that remember back in the 90s when everyone's like, forget paper ballots. Everything needs to be electronic. Remember that mania? Thank God we did not replace every paper ballot in America with a snazzy digital voting machine. Thank the Lord. Because not only have we seen the vulnerabilities in those systems, but you know how they can be exploited in so many different ways. And also the tangibility of a paper ballot. I think the credibility of a paper ballot from the perspective of the voter who's filling in the little bubble to the people who are counting it and being able to say, this is what this is. So that was the biggest thing running through my head. I was like, at least we have the paper ballots. Yes, you do these interrogations into alleged voter fraud when there isn't voter fraud, and you don't find voter fraud like, there you go. You just spent lots of money and time and airtime for the outcome. That would have been obvious because you just have to have faith that it's remarkable how well the American electoral system runs. It's remarkable how well American democracy runs. This is like temp. It is again, amazing what these dudes who read all that Plato, like, they figured out they wrote this document. And look, the amendments are a big deal, like the fact that you can iterate on it. So in terms of fixes, amending the Constitution should not be something that's this sort of rare. We haven't been doing that very often. I think there's plenty of room for amendment. And there also is constitutional originalism. Give me strength. Like, dudes, it's not 1787 anymore and you're not there to look at the language 17 ways and be like, well, in 1787, when they said this word, they meant this. They weren't quite that careful and they were super divided. A lot of these things were compromises. The Electoral College was a compromise. All these things were like, we're just trying to keep this together because we got 13 states and they all have very, very different stakes in it. I just imagine in these processes where you're trying to build consensus and get all these different perspectives to agree on something so you can move forward with whatever you're building. Something's got to give.

We can't even agree what happened a year ago. We can't agree that it was an insurrection, it was a coup. Oh, it was just a bunch of white people going on tour of the Capitol. What's the big deal? We cannot even agree on that. How are we looking back in history? Or take an extreme example, how are we interpreting the Bible 2000 years later? We can't even figure out what happened a year ago. I don't want to throw history under.

The bus, but, yeah, look, if you take the tax of the historian, let's go to the raw data. Let's go to the. The primary source material, which January 6th for just this incredible superabundance of everyone taking selfies, everyone livestreaming it, like, oh, my God, what a record. What a record for historians to. To mine. And so you have an incredible amount of information of primary source information on unmediated. It's mediated because. But the actors themselves are creating it, which makes it a primary source. And it's audio and video. It's something that's very clear cut that anyone can see and make their own judgment. What's remarkable despite all of that and despite the immediate aftermath during and after you see Republican allies of the president and leaders of the party distancing themselves from it and being rightfully horrified by all of it. And what is quite honestly surprising to me, but I've been. I spent the last six years being constantly surprised. There was a really great meme that was running around a couple years ago that had the Muppets, Sam the Eagle, like Sam the Eagle, the Muppet, who's like the sort of stern patriot. And then animal, like crazy drummer animal. So there was this great sort of side by side that had a picture of Sam the Eagle and had a picture of Animal. And then above, it was like, historians five years ago versus historians today. So five years ago we were all Sam the Eagle. They like, let me tell you about history. And now we're like, it's on fire. Like, so much has happened that's just blown our minds and contested our presumptions about how institutions will revert to the norm. And they were false assumptions. So we can't agree on January 6, in part because it's a live political grenade. It is still very much tied to the historical assessment of the current existence of a future political career of Donald Trump, who very much wants to stay in the game. Donald Trump cares deeply, deeply, deeply about what history thinks of him. I was actually a contributor to a book that's coming out that's a collection that's a historian's first assessment of the Trump presidency. I wrote a chapter about Silicon Valley and the relationship with the president, and I actually was participated in. The former president had a zoom call with us. He requested that he chat with us. And so about 12 of US contributors last summer did a zoom call with former President Trump, which was very interesting historical research. And among other things, in the course of that call, he did not take on any culpability for January 6th presidents. Usually when they leave office, they become more reflective, especially if they're talking to historians like, we're not that exciting. We're writing history books. We're not like, gotcha journalists. We don't have podcasts with many scores of listeners. Like, we're just. We're history books.

This is your chance, Margaret.

I know, I know, but he said these things in public, too. And this was an on the record conversation. But he said this subsequently. Like the rally that preceded the insurrection. First checked about the crowd size and how many people were there, because he cares a lot about that. He thought it was quite big. And he said it was such a great rally. There was so much love there. There was so much love for him. And then he's, you know, sort of acknowledged some people got out of hand, but really was not saying, oh, I should have said things differently, I shouldn't have read. And, and, and I don't think that was tactical. It was coming from a place of firm and unwavering belief. So there's different realities. And this, again, relates to the tech world that both of us are part of or study, which is the other thing that's a factor, is just this information overload that we all live in, where it's very hard to distinguish the signal from the noise, where it's really easy for incredibly untrue or highly inflammatory messages to get a lot of airtime. And if you repeat a lie enough, this was Donald Trump's tactic. You say it enough and then people start to believe it. That coupled with this real distrust and this. This incredible social fracture that we're undergoing because of the coronavirus pandemic, I just don't think you can separate that out. We're all so alienated from the normal, and we're so reliant on these electronic blips that are coming into our consciousness and mediated through. And in this incredible part as an environment where people just are so angry at each other all Those things make January 6th a real. A real wild card and hard to hard to fix.

Up next on Remarkable People.

But that's what I love about studying these people in the past, is their bumpy, funky personalities and their quirks and their things that they did wrong and their failures and appreciating them and as human beings, appreciating these figures from the past, not as people on a pedestal, but as human beings. Hello, I'm Jane Goodall and I just want to tell you that I've been on Guy's podcast twice now and had a great time. And I really hope that you'll listen to it. Of course. Especially the one when I'm on, but the other great too.

Welcome back to Remarkable People with Guy Kawasaki. So one more sort of non tech thread and then we'll go tick. Okay.

Okay. All right.

So as a historian, what is your interpretation of this movement to suppress black history in America?

This has to go with the threat that that poses. Humans love storytelling. You know that. We love stories, we love heroes, we love villains. And there are a set of stories that have been told about the United States as a better place than everywhere else. A place that's exceptional, a place whose founders are heroes. George Washington. I could never tell a lie. George Washington owned other human beings. And when given the opportunity to free them, he didn't. They were his business model. They were his bread and butter. He needed that. He couldn't have freed his slaves and stayed solvent. That doesn't excuse it. This is a system that five of our seven first presidents owned other human beings. And they were also extraordinarily eloquent and consequential. Their ideas and the institutions that were the product of those ideas are ideas that have not only created a democracy, but expanded it over time. So we have to hold these two contradictory ideas together once. And that's really hard. We want heroes. We want villains. You don't want gray areas. Who's been these narratives, these heroic narratives of America's democratic beacon. If you know from the perspective of a black person, perspective of most people of color, or anyone who has been some way discriminated against because of who they are, they will say, well, that's not my America. That's not the experience I've seen. We talk about. Homeownership is the American dream. If you're a person of color, you're like, that's not my experience. I was discriminated against in buying and renting, and so was my parent and so is my grandparent. And I have Friends who are white who got a little boost when they sold grandma's house and they all split the profits and someone used that money to bootstrap a company. I can't do that. My grandma didn't have a house or her house isn't a neighborhood where it makes much sense to sell it. I want my children and I want my student. I have kids who are high school age, middle school age. Now. I want them to know and understand this as white kids. I want my students of all races and all backgrounds to understand this and understand. Because this isn't about saying America's terrible place, it's holy cow, look at all the stuff that's done despite all of these things. And also, let's have a super clear eyed view about who the builders were, how it evolved, where the missteps have been, where the progress has been. And let's identify these places where individuals, individually and collectively made history. How'd they make a difference? How do you make a difference? How do you move the needle? Because the American history is full of that. There have been classroom wars for more than a century. This pushback on curriculum that is saying, oh, maybe, you know, let's, let's look at this differently. There's been just pushback on anything that is taking people off their pedestal because those stories fuel us. We idolize certain people, whether they be business leaders or politicians. You need those heroes to give you inspiration, but I don't think you need heroes to be inspired. And the teaching of not just black history, but the teaching of American history and actually centering black history is part of American history. It's not Black History Month, it's American History Year and many years. And thinking about America as a place of many experiences and trajectories in an imperfect democracy, you can acknowledge the imperfections and still aspire for perfection. But if you just paper them over and are like, it's all cool, cool, cool, you're still stuck in neutral. You're not going to ultimately, you're not going to get anywhere with that.

You think in Germany there's a movement that wants to, no pun intended, whitewash the Nazi experience and say, oh, Hitler wasn't such a bad guy. Let's just change critical Nazi theory.

Well, look, I mean, Germany, you know, is sort of a counterexample to sort of thinking about what happens. Reckoning and reconciliation, which is truth and reconciliation. This happens in Germany, Germany after World War II, you have severe restrictions on Nazi regalia, Nazi speech, there's censorship, There are real restrictions that has been successful in. Until. It's not like these neo Nazi movements have been squashed. There's. They're pro Aryan, neo Nazi movements that have remained alive and well in Europe, but they are marginalized. And for a very long time, those movements in the United States were marginalized here, too. Not because of censorship, but because there weren't people in power that were saying, it's okay to feel this way. And we're gonna wink, wink, nudge, nudge. It's cool. You're. We're on your side. Which is what we saw pretty vividly with Donald Trump from Charlottesville forward. This is also being a nation that has been through a crisis. Reckoning, having a moment of accountability and reckoning. This is about the, you know, this is January 6th commission and what's ongoing, where Congress is trying to create a reckoning and we are not, not doing it. Look at South Africa, post apartheid South Africa, where there's this reckoning. One of the most moving museum experiences I've had was when I visited the apartheid museum in Johannesburg, which is just a very unvarnished and very powerful journey through South Africa's apartheid past. And with the material evidence of extraordinary racism and oppression, and recognizing that makes one appreciate and value more where it has come since 1994. Things are possible, we see in these other places around the world, including the United States. We had a civil war, and getting over it took a long time. We still aren't over it. But having a moment of truth and reconciliation and accountability and like you did wrong, and we're gonna. You're gonna pay for it. That's a critical step that we have not yet fully accomplished.

We should have a January 6th museum.

Yeah, I would agree. It's such a moment in the history of American politics. I'm still processing it. To be clear, I, you know, the dust has not settled. And again, as your. Your questions are rightly pointing out, the story is not done. So that's why it's really hard to say what's the meaning of this. We don't know if it's act one or it's the finale.

Let's go to tech for a while.

Sure. Okay.

A much brighter story here. So.

Yeah.

The reason why you came on my radar, although we had known each other for years.

Yeah.

Was because you were so extensively quoted in the New York Times about our friend Elizabeth Holmes.

Yeah.

So as a historian, what's your take on that whole situation? What happened there?

What happened there? It's such an interesting story. Guy, you're a Silicon Valley Guy, you are the Silicon Valley guy. It's like a Silicon Valley story and not right. So look, let's first very clearly outline the not. Theranos was a medical device company located in Palo Alto. It was not a software company, it was not a computer hardware company. It wasn't even a biotech company in the way that Silicon Valley biotech. It was not. But let's just be clear, the totally different business regulated, slower moving. Part of the problem was that she was promising SaaS style returns on medical devices. You cannot make the ROI in the timescale. This doesn't work. So that's that. And you don't have to travel far along Sandhill Road to find people who are very quick to say, I passed on that they didn't have audit reports. As soon as you started to do any minimal due diligence, it became pretty clear that this was maybe not a good. That being said, you had some pretty good bold faced names from the Valley putting money in, notably Tim Draper, who's still very great supporter of Holmes even after a conviction. You have Larry Ellison, you have other people who took a bet and her board, which was the weirdest and modern Silicon Valley. But to be clear, they had no business being on the board of a company, this company, healthcare company. They didn't have expertise, but they were, they were like, they are kind of of Silicon Valley, like, like Bill Perry Again, these 80 and 90 year old foreign policy people. But this is the longer history of Silicon Valley, right? Bill Perry came out to the valley in the 50s to work for one of the electronics companies that was here in the defense industry. Like his whole career in electronics and defense underscores that that's part of the Valley story. George Schultz, he kind of got the Reagan administration to take the Valley seriously in the 80s. He's been this incredible ambassador and this kind of promoter of the tech industry generally. So it wasn't like this was out of nowhere. But she was an outlier in that. She was kind of in what I called the charm circle of people. The way it usually works is you might have a college dropout, but they've got someone who's like their mentor, the guy that the person who takes them to bucks and they chat over breakfast and dispense wisdom, right. So let's contrast her with Mark Zuckerberg, another famous college dropout. He's from Harvard, but he quickly comes to Palo Alto. He's got Sean Parker, he's got Mark Andreessen, like taking him to breakfast. They went to Hobe's like, here, little guy, I'm going to dispense all my wisdom. And that mentorship as well as the money is that's obviously the Valley VC model that works. And so she was kind of outside all that. So all that being said, there's so many ways in which the people who are like, she's not one of us totally, right? It's not like what she was doing, the fraud. This is not your typical startup hustle. This is not part of what Steve Blank teaches at Stanford. This is not part of the model. Right. There's a difference between someone like Steve Jobs, when, you know, sort of talking about a computer, like by School for the Mind, he was talking about that, telling a really amazing story. He also had a product that worked that was kind of amazing, that he was also obsessed with and cared about making sure it was right before he's going out and talking evangelizing about it. And she didn't. And even Bill Gates, who's the guy who gave vaporware, made that a term of art. Like even Microsoft eventually had a product that was catching up with the reality. So there's a real difference there. Now, all that being said, why does she rise so high? She is a figure as a personality is very much a Silicon Valley culture story and why she fell so hard as a Silicon Valley culture story. And this is why. So let's dial back to. I think this is probably around the first time you and I met each other, like 2013, 2014. That's when Theranos is like moving into its fancy new page Mill Road headquarters. And she's on cover Fortune and all this stuff. And this is right at the same time, this is right after Ellen Powell case, remember the sex discrimination case against Kleiner Perkins. So this is the first time that like gender imbalance in Silicon Valley is becoming part of the public conversation. Where are the women? And here's Elizabeth Holmes giving lie to that. Like, all right, here's a female Steve Jobs, like woohoo. Got one. And she really leans in hard to it. Like there's a lot of really embarrassing girlboss hashtag girlboss stuff around. You know, she really is playing that up big time and, and presenting herself like, I never change my outfit. I'm wearing, you know, a black turtleneck every day. Appropriating these masculine founder characteristics. It's really super interesting and the deep voice and all that stuff. So that there's. That she's not fixing the woman problem, but she's in a way a response to it. So that's part of the fascination. And then the other thing she's doing that the Valley's getting heat for. Back then you remember, like it's the, where are the flying cars guys? You're building apps. Like how many app laundry delivery services does the Valley need? Like you're building for the needs of a 25 year old dude in San Francisco. So this critique of you say you change the world, but where's the world changing? So here comes Theranos and Holmes. Like I'm changing the world and that's pretty cool idea.

And I'm a woman, and I'm a.

Woman, so bam, bam. So these two things are. So she's really riding this wave. She's riding the wave of that is a Silicon Valley. Like that Silicon Valley and its success enables this founder focused culture of put immense faith and money into a young untested person. And they're going to do extraordinary things because they can think bigger and they're the innovators. She's writing this media fascination with Silicon Valley and the innovation generally, that's still pretty unadulterated and there's not a tech clash by then. And she's also answering the two things that tech is getting heat for, which is not doing big stuff and it's all dudes and she's incredibly charismatic and she's really good at telling stories and she's good at your TED Talk and all that stuff. Right. One little problem is the product didn't work, but she's allowed to continue this grift. I mean, I think she really believed, fully believed, but she's also a product of Silicon Valley because she has the same dilemma that I every venture backed founder has, which is they want their money, they want to see their returns. So they want to move fast. They want you to go, go, go, go, go. They want you to deliver incredible pressure to like go to market, move fast, scale. It's the whole philosophy like 0 to 1, get there, go fast, damn the torpedoes. So she's doing that and she's doing that with a product that's way more complicated and way more regulated than anything else that this model is fostering. And she doesn't have the expertise, she's not a product person. She doesn't have the knowledge to really be the person who's the decider on this stuff. The other thing that is making everything just bonkers and that sets apart. I'm really interested what you think about this because this is a, particularly since the Great Recession, this is a kind of a New Silicon Valley.

I can't wait to hear what this is. Okay.

It's all the freaking money guy. There's so much venture, global venture capital. So vc, high tech, VC used to be this little pool of. First of all, it's just a few guys. And then they're like the other rich people they could persuade to let them play around with their money. But here's a stat for you. So 1999 tight of the dot com boom that year, $48.3 billion in venture investing, venture capital invested that year, which is about 80 billion today. Guess what that figure is in 2021? $643 billion.

So it's up six and a half times.

Yeah. From the height of the dot com boom. There's just so much money, not that.

Many companies to invest in.

That's right. And so first you have companies that are given a huge Runway, a really long time to go private. Right. So IPOs have slowed so much. Even companies that are sort of marquee companies of the last decade, like Uber, for example. Like Uber got to like G round of. I don't know if you even call it venture investing. But before we used to have it's a seed round and an A round and a B round and then IPO, like Netscape, you know, IPO'd after like B round, I think. And that IPO, by the way, was like $3 billion, maybe 5 or 6 billion in 20, $21. Like Rivian was what, like 10 times that?

Her car is about a hundred million bucks.

Right? It's crazy town. It is crazy town. Go to Pitchbook and look at all of the venture rounds that the companies of the last 10 years have had before they've gone public. It's unbelievable. And they're coming from all corners. It's not just the Vision fund. It's not just this sovereign. It's anyone with money. It's coming in. And so Theranos was an excessive example of this. And one of the things I thought so interesting in the trial was it made abundantly clear how little these investors were paying attention to anything. And you know what? Because they got so much freaking money, like the Waltons and the DeVos, they have so much money that it's a rounding error for the Walton family to put whatever they put into their nose. So it's just so much money sloshing around the system. And the global financial system is like just all roads seem to be funneling to the tech sector. There are other sectors. After the Great Recession, housing's Not a good investment. Like you have other places to put your money. And quantitative easing, like what the central banks are doing are creating an environment that is fueling this and it's not going to go on forever. You've been around long enough. It's a boom and bust economy. But that makes Theranos and unfortunately very much a Silicon Valley story because there are a lot of other companies out there that are still riding that wave of a lot of money. And it's being thrown at companies that don't necessarily have a viable product. It's being thrown at companies that are awesome and are doing really cool stuff, to be clear. But I would expect that maybe not Therano style stuff, but there's things that just. There's no there there. And they still have the capital to do a lot play around with that. They don't have to show their cards.

Oh my God. Listen, I've already have you for an hour and eight minutes and 41 seconds. But I have one more kind of topic here, and that topic is, first of all, why don't people learn from history? What's wrong with us?

What's wrong with us?

Yeah, what's wrong with us?

Here's the thing. Historians are the most annoying people to have on cable news networks. Or maybe it's just me, because our answer to everything is it's complicated, right? When you want to sound bite and you're like, this is why, like when I'm writing something, you know, I'm writing an op ed or something and I'll send my first draft to my editor and I'll be like, we have too many points here. I was like, but there's complex causality. We don't care about that. They do, but you know what I mean? It's so why we don't learn from history is usually because the reasons things happen, it's multivalent. There's not a single because of this, this other thing happened. It's usually really conditional and contingent. So first of all, that's one reason history doesn't repeat itself cleanly. You don't have. This exact same thing happens again. Like, look at the valley in the 50s. The Cold War sort of funnels this exceptional moment that's just, let's just spend Buku public dollars on electronics. And turns out Stanford is like, and the little companies there are all like, we do small electronics, communications devices and, and military is like, we need some of those for missiles and rockets. And you know, it's just this like perfect storm. So this is my, you know, this is why I'm. Why I've like sacrificed my multi million dollar consulting career going around the world saying this is how you build Silicon Valley. Because my answer is like, well, you kind of have to have like Dwight Eisenhower. Like I start going on about, yeah, yeah, it's like, well, it has to do with like Apollo program. And that's not the answer we want. But I mean, there are, there actually are. I do have a simple answer of how to, you know, what, what you do need to do. But there's this. So this is. So learning from history is hard because first of all, it's a lot bumpier than we want. We don't have clean narratives. It's not point A to point B clean. It's messy. It depends on a lot of things. When we do know about history, we often distill it into really simple narratives of heroes and villains. This goes back to what we were talking about earlier about how do you teach American history in a way that's more realistic and also empowering, both inclusive and also gives people something to hope for and work towards. That's super important. So history, the history that is easiest to make you hopeful and make you work towards something is usually the simple history where it's, you know what? We have this amazing inventor, Thomas Edison, and he was just such a genius and he created this light bulb. And so when you back up and you're like, yes, genius, got that check. But also there was, you know, enough urbanization and industrialization and there was sort of capacity for society to scale it. There was some place to plug in the damn light bulb. So those things are harder. And then also being like Thomas Edderson, like he had other people in his lab and then he did this wrong. And you know, like, that's hard, that's harder.

And then there's Tesla. They'll have heard of Tesla because of the car, not because of, because of Nikola Tesla.

But that's what I love about studying these people in the past, is their bumpy, funky personalities and their quirks and their things that they did wrong and their failures and depreciating them. And as human beings, appreciating these figures from the past, not as people on a pedestal, but as human beings. And I think even contemporary leaders appreciating them as human beings. It isn't like all these tech people are evil surveillance capitalists that are just out to steal your soul or they're awesome, they're innovators, they're human beings just like us. They're trying to do the best thing they can do. They're working within context that shapes what their sense of the possible or the impossible. They're being pushed and pulled by externalities. They're C suite executives of publicly traded companies that are there to serve shareholders. Like, Facebook's not going to change its business model if it's going to mean less money's coming to me. But that's how you learn from history. Okay, it just had to be a little more, you know, it's more stuff.

So as a mom and as a history professor, how do you think history should be taught?

History teachers, the first step is to make teaching generally and history teaching a profession that super smart, motivated, excited people both want to do and feel like they can make a really great career doing and like their economic future will be solid if they do it and that they will also be respected, venerated and given some autonomy. So I think part of it is the front end. It's the pipeline and it's a sort of societal saying, we care about this, we want to pay these people well, we want to value them. I want my kids, 10th grade history teacher to be, you know, valued and respected and empowered and, and that, then that flowing from that where you have people who are really well prepared and motivated and empowered, that you give them some flexibility and autonomy over how they design a classroom that is right for their students, where whoever their students are and where they're at and the most fortunate students in the independent schools or the well funded public schools, One of the things that makes their education quote unquote good is not only the economic advantages that they come in with because they have families that aren't worrying about putting food on the table, but also because these classrooms are often designing around experiential learning or they're giving them experiences with, hey, I'm going to give you a primary document and I'm going to tell you how to read it really smartly and analyze it on your own and make your own analysis rather than being told this is what it means. And so it's a matter of resources. So I don't think there's a single, like here's how you, here's the curriculum, because that's dangerous. But I also think whatever the curriculum is, it needs to be done in the spirit of thinking more expansively about the who of American history, who the players are, who's getting to write the history, who's written out of it, and how you can try and bring those voices back in some of the really exciting work that's been done by my colleagues who work in US History, has been done on work on American slavery and finding the voices of enslaved people who, of course, didn't. Weren't leaving a written record. They were usually written about by the people who own them. But trying to find the agency and seeing the resistance and seeing how they're fighting for their families and fighting for their own freedom and fighting for some autonomy within a system that doesn't give them any of that. And humanity for a system, finding those voices and those stories, you can do it. But really actively thinking about who's in the story and who's left out and how do we write them back in, as well as recognizing the people who got to write the history and why their actions and their choices were very consequential.

But as a mom, if your kids came home and said, mom, we need to memorize this timeline.

Oh, God, I don't know.

Did Alexander the Great come before or after Genghis Khan and what happened in Mesopotamia and the Alexander library? And it seems to me that a hundred years from, not even 120 years from now, our kids right now are living through one of the most interesting times ever in American history. So aren't they in school studying ancient world history? Shouldn't they be studying what's happening now? Or do you think you need a foundation of world history before you can analyze? Because we're in the test tube right now. We're in matrix right now. Why aren't we studying it now?

For two reasons. One, you study the past, it helps you understand the now, how you get here, and you contextualize. So what really sets historians off is when someone says, it's never been like this before. And usually we're like, oh, but actually, let me tell you about the Germany 1930. Yeah. Like. Like, you know, there have been some parallels. There's some continuities and patterns. We're more polarized and partisan than we've ever been before. Or let me tell you, the many times we've been incredibly partisan and violent against one another. But at the same time, there is that learning about the past. It instills a cultural literacy that's useful in navigating the world. I'm not a names and dates memorization person, and I really emphasize that in my classes I teach and also with my children. But dates are super helpful anchors because it matters what happened before when. Right. The order of things, especially if there's causality or correlation. You want to see the sedimentary layers of things building on one Another, because events are never happening in the vacuum. They're happening as a consequence of what happened before. There's a certain amount of past dependence, or the realm of the possible is often constrained or determined by what happened before. And when people push against the realm of the possible, you get more friction and then they enlarge it and it contracts all those things. So there's relevance to dates. But that is, isn't the point. The point is the process.

So that would have been my last question, but you opened a little door that I have to now drive through. And that little door that you opened was about five minutes ago. You said something to the effect of I could explain to you what's necessary to make a tech company successful. And I heard that, I said, okay, I gotta ask that now. I mean, from a historical perspective. All right, so give us the gist. You and Steve Blank go into a bar and Steve Blank says, you gotta iterate, you gotta pivot, you gotta get out to the customer, get feedback.

Yeah.

And then Margaret says, well, Steve, let.

Me tell you, yeah, let me say, I'm saying the yin to Steve's yang, or that there's a question of business, how you build a business and basic internal, you know, processes and habits and learning from successful companies and the case studies and building on those and also keeping an eye on the ball and having the certain amount of flexibility. And I'm not going to profess to be the organizational management expert, but I think that, that what I have, my perspective is it's the context that nestles around the organization that's really important. So when I think about what sets companies apart, the ones that are successful, the ones that not again with the recognition that it's always a risky business. As any VC knows, there are things that you think are going to work and they don't for various reasons. But it seems like what the historical record shows is that first it's a matter of timing. There is a right time, right place. And that doesn't mean that if you have something and the market's not ready for it, it's a hopeless. Well, you might need to pivot. That might be an indication either ahead your time or it's just off the track. But where we see success is where bottom up action meets top down opportunity. And this is something that is a business lesson and a societal lesson. So you see a company, let's take Fairchild Semiconductor, let's go with a legend. 1957, this is the company founded by the traitorous aid that split off from Shockley because he's the worst boss ever. As well as being a eugenicist and all other sorts of stuff. So here they are. So these guys is clear. These eight people are rock stars. They are all there at Shockley's lab because they're awesome. They have already taken the leap to move to California. With the exception of Gordon Moore. They were all from somewhere else. Part of it is because they weren't guys with connections or wealth. One thing that really set them apart is that they were from relatively humble backgrounds and that made them maybe hungrier. They also were advantaged by a mid century America that created amazing educational opportunities for white men like them from humble backgrounds. You could have this upper mobility that you didn't have a century before. So clearly these people are extraordinary. They're extraordinary on many different metrics. They also happen to informally incorporate their company two and a half weeks before Sputnik goes into space, into orbit, the Russian satellite. And that prompts the US government to go absolutely bonkers in terms of aerospace spending and including spending on small light electronic devices that happen to be just like what they're making. So they have this amazing, so there's this amazing symbiosis between the silicon semiconductors and then the ICs that they're making and this very deep pocketed customer that comes online. They're not a defense contractor or a government contractor in the way that like Lockheed is. But that is the launching pad for the valley semiconductor businesses. It's the space program in particular, but also the military and are able to commercialize, drive down the price and create a commercial market for these things because they have this scaling up that happens. So how does this fit to like 2022 when someone's starting up a company? I think part of it is like looking, having a really robust sense of the bigger world and the macroeconomics and the political economy around and what the trend lines are being really open and recognizing that these things are not orthogonal to your business business. And sometimes you've got to focus and be heads down and work on product or work on whatever you're working on. You need to have people around you. So I think the other thing that's the key to all these successful companies from Fairchild to Apple to Facebook to any Rockstar company that's just knocked it out of the park. They are, they are surrounded by mentors from an earlier generation, people who, with more experience who are, you know, their VCs, who are, you know, the operators, they're former operators themselves and they're giving mentorship and money. And they are, you know, they're both kind of linking these, these young inexperienced founders into bigger networks and they're, they're promoting them and they're, and they're helping them kind of, kind of build a sustainable organization. This is a great, I mean, you know, this is an Apple story, right? You know, the, the less Mike Merkula, like that was, that's what the Steves did that set them apart from all these other guys in garages. Like there were plenty of, there are plenty of personal computer startups and garages there in the Bay Area and elsewhere at that time. What sets them apart? First of all, Woz makes the most amazing motherboard from the jankiest chip. That was awesome. So you have a technique, you have a basic sort of set apart tech, but it wasn't like the very, very best, like we've never seen like the soul. There were other desks, there were other microcomputers. Pretty darn cool technologically. But what they did is they got Mike Markula agreed to come on and be the ops guy and turn it from a garage into an actual. Yeah, so you have like, you have not quite adult supervision because I get, you know, Marco is what, like 30, mid-30s? Like, it wasn't that he was still relatively young, but, but still he, like he'd been at intel, he knew. And then you have, and you have the VC money coming from Valentine, but you also. Jobs persuaded Regis McKenna to, to take him on. And like they got rid of that, that their first logo, which is so cute and hippie. And then they get the rainbow apple. Right. Like, but these things are, you know, this kind of recognizing that to scale you have to, you can't just be. I'm disrupting everything and I'm doing it on my own. Like, this is never a solo act, that every genius is surrounded by people. They're surrounded by Guy Kawasaki, you know, they've got people. I don't know well, but you know what I mean? I mean we love the story of the rugged individualist cowboy capitalist. Like, I'm doing it. You know, we have the heroes, we have the people, whether it be George Washington or Mark Zuckerberg or Steve Jobs, whoever it is.

Or Elizabeth Holmes.

Or Elizabeth Holmes. But the way that it works is, involves lots of other people. And I think going back to Holmes, that was part of the, the great, the, the great thing. She didn't, the things she did not have. She didn't have good mentors. She didn't have. She, her mentors were not the people with the subject expertise, nor the pushing, pushing back on her, nor the oversight and to guide her. And she seemed very lonely. She was this unusual, singular person. She didn't have that community. And that community is part of the story of entrepreneurial success that we don't acknowledge and value enough in the way that we think about what makes for a successful startup.

I interviewed Marc Benioff a few weeks ago and he had Henry Singleton and Larry Ellison. That helps.

It helps. It totally helps. You kind of get this. And that's the amazing. What's the secret of Silicon Valley? I mean, what's why, why have other places not achieved what it's achieved? Part of it is, is this multi generational handing of the baton from one generation to the next, where you have the mentors and the success. People who've made successful, built successful companies of one generation, then in turn become the funders and mentors of the next. And they're picking the winners of the next. Now this contributes to Silicon Valley's homogeneity problem. There tends to be a little too much pattern recognition going on. Right. You're like, I want someone. You know, I like you and you look like, yeah, yeah, yeah. Everyone's down in San Jose state going, what about us? You know, so there's a double edged sword here. This is not to say rah, rah, go network, but part of the secret of success is also part of what makes it a challenge.

We have one hour and 29 minutes.

Holy cow. If anyone is still hanging on here. Thank you. You're my favorite. Buy my book. Buy Guy's books. You are awesome. Them.

I, I could not resist the opportunity to talk to a historian about politics. I'm sorry, you thought this was just going to be about tech and Elizabeth Holmes, but see, there you go.

I can go there with you.

Yeah. You said entrepreneurs need to take advantage of opportunities, so. So do podcasters. Seriously, isn't it great to listen to a professor of history explain stuff? My thanks to Margaret o' Meara for shedding light on so many subjects. I'm Guy Kawasaki. This is remarkable people. I hope that Margaret and I made you a little more remarkable. My thanks to Jeff C. Pegg Fitzpatrick, Shannon Hernandez, Drop in Queen Madison Nismer, Luis Walk to the nose Magana and Alexis Prom Queen Nishimura. Until next time. Be safe, be healthy. Take care. Bye. Aloha, mahalo. All the good stuff. This is remarkable, people.