all righty. welcome, everyone. welcome to powerhouse arena. thank you all for coming. we. were very excited for tonight's event. what a great turn out. yeah, so excited. we're obviously here for malcolm harris as palo alto. so yes, we are. so to start off, malcolm and patrick harrison, who is the audiobook narrator, are going to be doing a reading and then he will be joined by melissa, jared grant and ed. so junior for a little discussion. and then after that, we'll do q&a. so i'll pop back up here after that. so yeah, thank you all for masking up. so yeah. anyway, enjoy. all right. thank you all so much for coming

out. this has been a very successful release as you can see from all the people here. i can't can't believe it. my heart is bursting with thanks and also for wearing masks. i know their pain. i appreciate you all so much for doing that allows me to sit up here without a mask, which makes a huge difference. reading. so thank you all for me. thank you. from everyone else in the room. you're not getting sick. i appreciate you. i'm going to be reading and with patrick harrison and the audiobook narrator who many of you will be getting the book from instead of for me are going to be reading not from my book, per say, but a section from. the 1901 novel, the octopus, a california story by frank norris, which is quoted extensively the book. but because we've got patrick here, it's the occasion to do a dramatic dialog was irresistible to me. and so we're going to do this

pretty quick because we're going to try and keep this whole thing kind of quick so we can get down to signing books for all of the many people here. um, a little bit about this book, this book is written in 1901 about a conflict over the settlement of california. the settlers come in and are offered land at a certain price by the railroad as long as they settle and build its value. there's a real set of occurrences. uh, the owner of the land who happens to be leland stanford, the founder of palo alto in the real story, uh, then changes this mind. they change their mind and say, oh no, no, that improved land now belongs to us. so you can buy it back from us at this price instead. and this triggers insurrectionary battle with these settlers who want to claim their land. and this story is fictionalized by frank norris in the octopus, which is a noted work of early california novelistic history. uh, and it's also really great. i've got some amazing sections

and so in this section there's presley, who is the socialist poet, sort of author, stand in a naive guy who's written this poem called the toilers, and he goes to see shel grim, played by patrick. obviously, who's an amalgamation of the railroad barons, fictionalized and presley talks his way in this sort of surreal scene, talks his way into the back office. and not only will shel grimm talk to him, shel grimm has read his poem the toilers. he's got it like a critical take on this socialist poet poem and this naive socialist poet finds himself in conversation directly with the face of capital. and so that is the converse nation we are going to be having right now. as soon as i text with water. i suppose you believe i am a

grand old rascal. i believe, answered pressley. i am persuaded. he hesitated, searching for his words. i believe this young man, exclaimed shel grimm, laying a thick, powerful forefinger on the table to emphasize words. try to believe this, to begin with. that real roads, build them selves where there is a demand sooner or later there will be a supply. mr. derek does he grow his wheat? the wheat grows itself. what does he count for? does he supply the force? what do i count for? do i build the railroad?

you are dealing with forces, young man. when you speak of wheat and the railroads, not with men. there is the wheat, the supply. it must be carried to feed the people. there is the demand. the wheat is one force. the railroad to another, and there is the law that governs them. supply and demand. men have only little to do in the whole business. complicated nations may arise conditions that bear a heart on the individual crush him may be, but the will be carried to feed the people as inevitably as it

will grow. if you want to fasten the blame of the affair at los muertos on any one person, you will make a mistake and blame condition and not men, but but, faltered pressly you are the head. you control the road. you are a very young man. control the road. can i stop it? i can go into bankruptcy if you like, but otherwise, please, if i run my road as a business proposition, i can do nothing. i can not control it. it is a force borne out of certain conditions, and i know man can stop it or control it.

can your mr. derek stop the wheat growing? he can burn his or he can give it away or he can sell it for a cent on a bushel, just as i could go into bankruptcy. but otherwise his wheat must grow. can anyone stop the wheat? well, then, no more. can i stop the road? presently regained the street, stupefied his brain in a whirl. this new idea, this new conception dumbfounded him. somehow he could not deny it. it rang with the clear reverberation of truth. was no one then to blame for the horror of the irrigation ditch forces conditions, laws of supply and demand? were these then the enemies after all, not enemies. there was no malevolence in nature, colossal indifference only a vast trend toward a

pointed goals. nature was then a gigantic engine, a vast psychopathy side copy in power. huge, terrible. a leviathan with a heart of steel, knowing no compunction, no forgiveness, no tolerance, crushing out the human atom, standing in its way with nirvana, calm the agony of destruction, sending never ajar, never the faintest tremor through all that prodigious mechanism of wheels and cogs. he went to his club and ate his supper alone in gloomy agitation. thank you. and you can you can see why people have buying the audio rights, digging into those sales. if i don't make the best seller list, it's because of that guy right there, not because we didn't sign. all right, now, can you put your hands together for melissa and ed as they come up and join me.

all right. so are you going to keep it to a couple of questions just because we want to get you all involved, too? so we've got to make them good guys right? it's just getting this opportunity right? well, first of all, i feel like we're being haunted by the ghost of the demon stanford. we can't stop it. no, we can't. we can't stop the dream like literally cannot stop the dream. i don't know. maybe we should start with him, because i feel like. there are two roads in the book and wanted them to converge and perhaps they have still yet to fully converge as metaphors. we have the railroad itself and then we have the internet, which i feel like there's a whole sort of kind of pat like, oh, mark zuckerberg. he's like the robber baron of today, right? you go into a much and more materialist, understand ending of what that is. so wondering if you could talk a little bit about leland's

stanford as sort of i don't know an avatar of what silicon valley became. yeah. so leland is not as smart as shell grim. shell grim is more based on like huntington and a couple of the other guys in leland stanford who is the most prominent of these railroad building capitalists in the west, really gets that job because he's not the smartest one out of the four of them. in fact, he's sort of the like airhead out of the four of them. and so at a time of national class, confer international class conflict as well as tighter government observation of contractors like these associates. and these four guys were building the railroad aggregated in the man we just met that patrick was playing were making their money illicitly off the construction of the railroad as land developers or rail contractors. et cetera. and they didn't want the government to look too close.

and if the government did look too close, they wanted them to find leland stanford, and they wanted people to blame leland stanford. this guy was an opening for leland stanford, who is most of his life kind of a bum is like a really lucky guy who happens to be born at the right time, in the right place, sort of in the part. and he ends up this petty capitalist in california, which is a really an oversight colony of the united states. and there he's elevated into this grand robber baron character that we're familiar with as an archetype. and then we met in this in this story and that's the leland stanford we know. but it's because he's kind of a goofball that he gets this job and he has all these, like, weird ideas throughout his life. he, like, is a capitalist who nominally supports co-ops as like, you know, in the same way that we see silicon valley billionaires have some like advanced social ideas or whatever that seem to have nothing to do with what they actually do all day. and he's the man this is the the

concentration of forces, right? forces, not men. then ends up being instantiated in his body and then yields palo alto, which he founds to escape. the class conflict that his buddies have subjected to him to. so he's living on nob hill, which is a hill on the top of that biggest hill in san francisco, and a nice place to live, except everyone knows where you live. so the working men's party would show up outside of his house and yell at him and threaten him all the time. and so he did what you're supposed to do when you're living in the city as a rich guy and you're of all the working people around, you which is moved to the suburbs, except that in 1870s the suburbs don't exist yet. and so he has to create a suburb in order to find a suburb to escape the city to and the suburb he founds to escape. these class tensions. is he names palo alto. and so that's the foundation of,

this story and the railroad is what creates the west as we know it. and he's the guy who's responsible for it, right? you're the head of the railroad. at the same time, throughout the book, i try to make this point that frank norris makes. i think very well that you're dealing with forces, not men, that even the character of leland for leland stanford is this amalgamation of forces that gets turned into palo alto. i just want to read one bit that i feel like is perfect a perfect line from you that could apply leland stand stanford but it could also apply to all of the other founders that we eventually meet in the book which is given the amount of financial chicanery going on not so far behind the scenes, the others may have made the considered decision to let the big oaf stand in front for the cameras so they could receive into the background so he could take the blame. but become the great man. well, he gets away with it right? it's a smart move by the other three associates.

hopkins and huntington, whose names you might recognize, but not prominent as stanford, up being because he basically dies before the government starts really investigating how these contracts shook out. and so he more or less gets away with he does have this conflict at muscle slow, which is what the octopus is based on where he goes in and tries to negotiate with these confederate veterans who are the settlers. and then takes off to europe when they start like shooting up the place. you know, for a lot of the book, you you hone in and unfurl a lot of these industrialists or invest orders or founders who are hailed for, you know, in a creating technological innovations that have made the modern world and made us all more prosperous and have, you know, a better, more connected, more productive, but also constantly plugging in how lot of the technologies that they

developed, primarily extractive, militaristic or imperialistic machines, and that those, you know, those those consequences or those more productive, helpful outcomes are secondary to their to their intention. you know, at the time was also same sort of was there was the same sort of discussion or argument or, you know, discourse that we're seeing today where some people may push back and insist, well, you know, palo alto has been a not good for humanity or for america because it has yielded so many, you know, bounties to us as opposed to the, you know, the missiles or the military tech or, the, you know, the the poisoning of the land, the air and the water that has come out of all that stuff. yeah. you know, that's what they're called externalities. okay uh, yeah. we and we see these cycles and silicon valley is as a whole

story of cycles and loops and spiral. and they usually talk about, but i don't think it makes sense to talk about bubbles unless we talk about the bubble machine under the bubbles because it keeps happening and. so at that point, it's not a bubble. it's it's something else. there's some other mechanism. and these tensions between the two, between the false promises of silicon valley and what's actually going on goes all the way back to the sort of conflict that we're talking about in frank norris norris. the problem with seeing these guys as like the inventors instead of the the amalgamation of social is that you end up thinking that the world is a product of like rich guys, personalities. and so like, you know, we live in the world that we live in because steve jobs is the guy that steve jobs is. and that's not true. that's just false, right? steve jobs is. steve jobs is the guy that steve

jobs is. wow. that's a tongue twister was r.i.p. steve jobs. because the social situation called him into being in the same way that it called someone like leland stanford into being. and there have been critiques of these people the whole way through. so when i talk about in the book is mike malone is that classic of silicon valley a classic columnist in silicon valley, a really great writer, underrated, i think in some ways compared to some of his peers. but he talks about early apple and he's got this great critique of early apple where he says, like behind all this doody, steve jobs -- is a network of filipino housewife wives who are creeps wiring these boards together in their kitchens and this is the real apple is, you know, the truck that unloads those and picks them up. at the end of the day, not the the clean circuits that.

someone like steve jobs would have you believe. and when people think of steve jobs, they think of like black turtleneck. steve jobs and holding the ipod, which by the he did not invent. but when i think of steve jobs after doing this research. i think of 80 steve jobs. and if you google 80 steve jobs, it looks like in in that doesn't just look like tucker carlson he looks exactly same as tucker carlson. i'm not joking. i'm now, convinced that tucker carlson has based his whole look on eighties steve jobs and that's who he was he was like know conservative businessman who was taking of the new efficiencies that globalization allowed right which is code for the new world order that was established in the postwar situation where america had all these production enclaves, including domestically with immigrants, been driven out of their countries and into low

wage labor in the tech industry. and so these critiques existed the whole time. but people don't know about apple. nobody knows that at all about apple. it's completely been effaced in their in their history that this is their original value proposition. wasn't that they had the best computer, the best thinkers or any of that. it was this manufacturing network and that has continued to be the basis for apple the entire. and yet we have to rediscover this critique every ten years or so because silicon valley is really good at selling forgetfulness. i appreciate how many times you remind us that steve jobs smells throughout the book, if you the history everyone is very clear it's not not not good smelling guy r.i.p. . i think maybe like starting with jobs and going back a little you do this really interesting interplay between maybe what people think the kind of counterculture of the 1960s was in the bay area.

you talk a lot about the history of the oakland chapter of the black panther party, and you run that along side. sorry to do the parallel thing again. you run that alongside the tech of the time that also gets sort of swept up or mythologized as does part of the counterculture, you know, imagining steve jobs, though, he wasn't there yet dropping acid and you know, up with the apple computer. yeah like he did not happen but in reality we have people including people inside the stanford machine who are resist all of that. and i think that's a history that's not so well known and i'm wondering if you could say a bit about that moment when, you know, 1969, 1970, people are shooting up the computers. yeah, this was one of the most exciting parts of the research was discovering because a lot of the i want to say discovering because it's not like scholars don't work on these questions, but a lot of recently a lot of early computer publications have been digitized and put online.

and so i got to go through those and look at these history of bomb attacks, attacks on u.s. data process infrastructure. and that's what they called it back then, data rather than the internet or whatever is there. there's a data processing infrastructure and student around the country, mostly student radicals. most of these computer systems and computer labs were at universities blowing up computers. they tried to the new left tried to blow up every computer in the country like pretty straight up and. the most famous one is the army math research center in wisconsin because. a person was killed in the explosion and that was the only person killed in this wave of attacks. but the the new left blew up computers around the country and especially in california, where like and bank computers. right. bank of america suffers a bombing every month for two years attacks on their data

processing and this really flies in the face of i think, the standard history of this time and place, which is i think you get two versions of it and i call them like the john markoff version. and the california ideology version. and the first one is the hippies invented the computer. and that's cool. and the second one is the hippies invented the computer and that's bad. and both sides kind of associate counterculture, new left. and they conflate the counterculture and the new left with these emerging individual technologies and their critique of conformism and largeness and the state, and that this ends up, depending on who you ask, the wonders of the personal computer age or the terrors of the neo liberal age. and it's kind of i mean, because it so it really blames these these new left people and says you were too stupid to know what you were doing.

and on accent you did exactly the opposite of what you were trying to do. but when you go through the history that's not at all what happened. it's just not that these people had a very then on the new left had a very, very tight understanding of what these technologies, what they were used for, where they were located, and the important role they were playing in u.s. state. and what that us state policy was. and they intervened on the side of the north vietnamese army. right. it's not like they were trying to stop the war like we were to stop the iraq war. they were trying to win the war. and did win the war. and i think it's interesting that we talk about the yippies trying to levitate the pentagon every people know that story. like the abc tried to levitate pentagon. this is a classic story of new left like goofiness and hubris, and it's supposed to be like archetypal gist script of anecdote. but we don't talk about when sds bombed the pentagon taking out

the computers, did air targeting over vietnam for two weeks. and this is the most profound ethical act that any americans take during this whole period dramat thickly successful. they end up evades prosecution and getting away with it as well. and so the question of why do we why do we tell the story about the like goofy trying levitate the pentagon and we don't tell the story at all about bombing the pentagon. some people are interested in that first history than the second one. but i'm not one of them. i'm much more in that second history. i think we'll do one more question from and then we'll do the audience. why do you think that sort of historiography persists? because i feel you see strains it also in marriage like you know last year and the year before. um, you know when books about blowing up or you know the history of nonviolence and you know sabotage with how to blow a pipeline and then defensive

looting came out there was a lot of argument and pushback against the idea that property damage was a viable tactic. then leftist organizing. and even though both of these books were history showing how successful it was and how important it was, there was a lot of pushback from some people that the only way to, you know, achieve the answer. we want is working towards reform. so those slow paced reforms inside of the system, which you also talk about in the book, like those those come up against limits pretty quickly. right. you know what what is attractive about this idea of only doing nonviolence and that attacking things property attacking infrastructure also some form of violence as well. yeah, i just saw that they had a blow up pipeline fictional movie is coming out and i saw that some like tagline is like nonviolence is not an option or something and i was like on one hand that, that's like really cool to see. i agree.

on the other hand, like blowing up a pipeline is not violent necessarily drilling, right? like extracting oil from the ground is just as violent as blowing up a pipeline. and the situation i'm talking about in the book about the new left right, they were sabotaging computers that were doing bombing targeting, right. they were bombing the computer that were used for bombing. and inspired the world. right. so old regan meinhof and in germany, they're watching this stuff happen and looking at the americans run up against the barriers of reform and resist stance and thinking through what do next. this is globally important important activities. there's something very appealing. obviously for the powers that be in ruling out any sort of disorderly conduct. and that's ultimately how they stop these activities in the sixties. that was their solution at the time, was just raw, really hard

line around like, all right, this like democratic participation in which you can riot if you don't like what's going on is longer acceptable. and if you step out of the line, we're going to get rid of you. and they start really. pursuing a strategy of separating out radicals, radicals and purging them. and they do it very, very successfully for decades. and we're still, i think living in the wake of that counterrevolution and i talk about the new left's experience of limited victories and defeat. and i think the story of the book is, really the story of how capital handles things. it can no longer have a handle, right when it hits limits. how does it work around those limits? and palo alto, i think, is a name of one of those strategies that is working around those

limits. and palo alto is really tasked with separating out the new left, the fences that will exclude these people from society going forward in a way that they were created before. so i think it's funny that and i went and talked about this in palo alto and talked about it kqed and there are a number of people who upset that i didn't credit the countercultural history of palo alto more because there's a countercultural history of palo alto, sure. but i was more interested in the new left and writing what i thought as they see is this historical wrong. and so maybe i come out a little harsh against the counterculture, separating it from the new left. but if that needs to be done, that needs to be done. the important thing is to see, to understand that the grateful dead, the band, the grateful dead was not the most important thing that was happening in the world at the time. they are not mentioned the book. i'm sorry if there are any grateful dead. the most important thing in the

world was the cold war was the struggle over u.s. imperialism. that's what the air as a product of. that's what this book is about. now we're going to have some questions. we're going to take some questions. we're you do mention the grateful dead in the book. you credit them with having. yes, you do. you credit me in the galley anyway. i don't know, guys, sorry. you credit with having the forethought to not go on stage at altamont. that's right they were they saw the stones altamont and were like nah huh. well thank you all for that great conversation. john, thank you for the reading as. well, yeah, i'm going to do passing around now, so i'll just start looking for hands. obviously, if i see hands in the back might take me a second to get back there. but firstly, okay, that maybe i'll make my way over there. yeah, i'll start you over here. did you guys really see. oh yeah. so similarly to the way that people that violence is not.

sorry. oh okay similarly to the way that people argue that violence is not like an effective means of disorder as effective a means of dissent as reform probably 40 years after, 50 years after sds is bombing data centers in california. people will also argue, you know, getting around and ahead, what technology people capabilities bank of america, for example, has is no longer possible with the way technology has advanced. you know, you can't just bomb data centers because the cloud, etc. . what do you think about that? do you think that's another deflection or do you think they're don't know are more bigger, practical questions to ask. yeah they're you know cloud data doesn't live up that those are just data centers that are connected data centers in our infrastructure like not to get

myself in trouble here aren't the infrastructure thanks thanks david. ruin class infrastructure is very fragile and we saw that during the pandemic for sure. right. there are any number of points where this system can break down. i don't think the left has really tasked itself understanding those points in particular at least the left has such, although i think we can draw a lot of inspiration and lessons from the water protection movement and how it has responded to pipelines. i think we can draw lessons from the 2020 uprising as vicki does in her book. so it's not a coincidence that this book that i wrote this book at the time that i do, and it's definitely in the shadow of those political events. so no, but to answer your question directly, no, i don't think there are any safer than they were in the sixties. in fact, they might be less safe

now because i they've gotten kind of complacent. all right. who next see here. okay. hi. so you describe yourself as a marxist. and, you know, you were described as a marxist in among other words, the new york times review of the book. and i guess i'm curious as to whether how you situate this work and approach to history in terms of i'm not asking you describe yourself as a maoist or a mill or whatever, but if there are any particular thinkers that you draw inspiration from, when approaching the task of sort of compiling a history like this or yeah, just your approach to history generally? yeah, it's a great question methodologically. i mean, the book starts with marx obviously it starts with i marx epigraph. i'm a marxist, i draw my methodology logical inspiration primarily from the works of karl

marx. guilty guilty, which means that i'm also writing this history as a history of class conflict. right. and that's what it means primarily for me, writing this history is as a history of class conflict in terms of a more specific theoretical lineage. i ended up sort of, i think. finding one in the practice of this book because so many of the people, the thinkers that i'm relying on theoretically are also characters in, the story. and so by the end of it, by the time i was done with writing this, i had always been just myself as a straight up communist for a long time. and by the time i got to the end of it, i came to understand that really i'm a california communist, that this is a theoretical tradition and that i really identify with where the iww is playing this whole big role, its inner it's poly lingual, it's gender integral aided in ways that the left isn't in other places in the

united states racially integrated in the ways that the left not other in the united states very like ad hoc and kind of like ultra lefty for the communist party in the us in the thirties and and like so some of the brightest points communist history in the us come in california and i think it's not a coincidence that a lot of our great american communist thinkers come out of california and not just california but the struggle of california. so paul baran is a big character, the book, but he's also a huge influence. cedric robinson character in the book, huge theoretical influence. roxann dunbar tease that. i know that she was important historian when i was writing this book and i reading back her stuff. i didn't know she was working on the line at fairchild semiconductor and like organizing labor actions as a like tech worker in the bay area and so locating history of that tradition has ended up being a really important part of the

project for me. and i definitely found myself within it and reflected in it, and i hope to do more with it in the future right. i think we could use a california communist reader that lays out this history all great. let's see here else and the other questions back here. i'm trying to figure out how i can get it down here. yeah, exactly. toss it back and forth if you can come. right over here. i have quite a long arm. i hope the phenomenal question. that'd be good. so what are one of the sort of cycles that comes right as you're pretty consistent describing leland stanford is not a super bright guy and then at the end of the book, you

multiple occasions describe the current of silicon valley overlords as not that impressive specifically compared to the earlier two or three generations right like the world one world war two immediately after those guys technically sharp and i'm just kind of curious what the significance or if you think there is anything difficult to that sort of reversion to the mean like why is it that have people who are just kind of like eyes can get so far ahead whereas it seemed like in that sort of middle period they at least had to have sun like the people are called for also had some skills behind. they weren't just some guy who happened to be there. yeah, fdr right.

that's that's what you're describing is roosevelt ism. and so there's this period where and this is the period when you talk to people about silicon valley, they're imagining of them, imagine the sixties and the fairchild guys wearing their suits and these guys were brilliant. these were like extremely sophisticated physicists who were coming up with like new ideas and chemists and dealing with very complex scientific thought and pushing the bounds of human knowledge. and they were selected for spots not sort of impersonally by the forces of but really by state agencies. and this is at a time where the i describe it as shuffling deck of the country's white men in terms of i mean, it was it's a real thing that happened, right, that this a consequence of the roosevelt years and you see in fairchild's semiconductor which is this very important company with these led these eight guys

who are recruited by guy bill shockley from around the country and some of them even in europe, brilliant dudes. and they were selected for spots by a government bureaucracy that was interested in winning world war two and knew that they had to find the best scientists in order to do that. and they weren't just the best scientists, obviously, or they wouldn't all be white guys, they were the ones who fit a particular mold. and so these guys were not smart. they were also really well liked and. they were like, you know, homecoming king types. i think a really good example is david packard, who in addition to being the of hewlett packard and an advanced, you know, radio engineering student was a six foot five football player and, you know, handsome dude and the school picked very intentionally to start this firm, not necessarily because he was the best mind who was probably hewlett packard had to pull along with him. but because he was this golden

boy and something changes and the historian charles peterson i don't think he's in the audience, but some people might know charles talks about the shift from bureaucrat to nerd masculinity that happens. and i think it's a it's a great line. and i included in the book because that's what instead of being picked by, uh, professors by generals right in your, in the military for your job within scientific industrial complex, it's guys who went to the right private school at the right time and that's bill gates, paul allen in particular. that's how microsoft ends up coming. and they're not learning to use computers on government machines. they're not going into the military, no one's picking them except for their parents who happen to have the resources to put them into a school that had an unusual amount of access to computer time. and that's how they get picked. and so you talk about the different kind of guy that gets

selected and recognize we're talking about guys in the first place and the selection of guys, right? so none of this is meritocratic per say. the mode changes and we've seen like further farcical of that change. so like steve jobs was not a particularly sophisticated technical guy that was wozniak famously. he was the the guy who was good at yelling at everybody to work faster, which a very important job at the time and continues to be but the guys now if you look at someone like uh i'm going to say names on tv, whatever i'm angered the techno lords. elon musk right. like no one pretend no one in tech has to pretend this guy is a brilliant technical mind for coding. never mind that he could, like, win a nobel prize in physics or chemistry or something. like they might imagine that to themselves. he's really rich, but no one, they're not having those guys, the companies anymore.

like that's not how it works now. now you get the guys who the third level fast school version of steve jobs right get the guy dressing up like the way they think jobs dressed up his whole life. but it's structural, right? it's not just some guys came along and that's what the book tries to investigate is what is behind these structural changes? great. great. i think have time for one more question. yeah. okay. so. hey, i also have kind of a methodological question, sweep and you know, something that i really admire about the whole project is that you're doing the work of a historian outside of academy. and so i guess i'm curious if you can reflect that and maybe if you could give us some insight into your process like how you're doing all of this outside the walls, what kind

setting your work is done in, if not institutional, communal or relational, something else. and do you have any insight into how that kind of independent scholarship could flourish in the future that's great question. i wish i had a better answers for it. so i wrote this book starting in like march 2020. so like the pandemic hit hit. and so all the plans that i to interview people and go to archives. got screwed up immediately. right. but i still to write this book and in fact i had to write it times as long as i had sold it on the same deadline because i'm a smart guy. so i did most of the actual writing between my room locked in philadelphia and like the park down the street where i would sit with a stack of books all day for months at a time, which is great.

it was wonderful. i feel so privileged to have done it because not that many people get to do that kind of work. not being a trained historian, not having taken a history class since i was 16 years old, made parts of it kind of challenging. and i relied on historians friends that helped point me towards parts of the california history canon. i was also aided by the fact that the california history canon is like in california history itself is, way shorter than other parts of american history. so i couldn't have written a book boston like this because there hundreds of years more history that you'd have to handle and i just didn't have to handle those periods whole centuries that i didn't deal with. this starts in the 1870s, which is not that long ago in terms of the history and also western history itself, people argue people better informed than i do argue it's thin even within american history, it's under-discussed and underwritten.

and so i could write this book at a comprehensive history of palo alto and say, no one else has tried to write this book because. no one else has tried to write this book, which is surprising and was surprising me and invited the project. but i think the real advantage to me about not being trained and not having like professors in my head i was writing this book for is i could work between disciplines and there are certain periods of history that certain disciplinary techniques are i think more useful for and others. i really couldn't have written this book without the studies that come out of the ethnic studies revolt at san francisco state i write about in the book. and then put the work of that revolt to work in the book because there have been a lot of really important studies of the bay and of palo alto specifically within chicano studies, native studies, black studies ethnic studies, in a wider sense, and so feeling like i could go into these different and engage with those authors,

read that stuff without worrying that i was crossing some boundary or someone's going to get mad at me. made that part easier. i think i didn't get to work as many people as i would have liked when. i was writing it just because i was like quite literally quarantined quarantined. but my dear friend max fox, who is not here but is a brilliant intellectual, the editor of sexual hegemony and that it or pinko magazine was my neighbor and sometimes roommate this process and so he thank you max for listening to me rant after i'd been reading for 7 hours about herbert hoover i i really owe him a lot so thanks max. but yeah, i think that's that's the story i was definitely relying on a lot of recently digitized archival stuff. palo alto, really good at digitizing stuff, not so good at reading stuff. and so there's a lot of great

material that digitized and then like left alone and not used for these histories, even though they end up repeating the same historical material from the same five interviews in book after book after book, or they'll go interview the guy and ask him to repeat the story from that other books he can put in this book. and so finding of that history, oral histories that been recorded that like cal has a really great stock of oral from the tech industry. um, so i really got to like play around with sources and this is the product. i hope you all like it. great. let's have him around the books, stuff. and a second round for the conversation. the object