TRASHFUTURE - Palo Alto Uber Alles feat. Malcolm Harris

Episode Date: February 14, 2023

Malcolm Harris (@bigmeaninternet), author of the forthcoming Palo Alto, joins the gang to talk about the history of capitalism, empire, America, California, Palo Alto, and the one very special University that may not have invented racism, but it sure did perfect it. Get PALO ALTO here: https://www.littlebrown.com/titles/malcolm-harris/palo-alto/9780316592031/ If you want access to our Patreon bonus episodes, early releases of free episodes, and powerful Discord server, sign up here: https://www.patreon.com/trashfuture *LONDON LIVE SHOW ALERT* See Trashfuture live in London on February 20 featuring special guest Nish Kumar! Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-podcast-with-nish-kumar-tickets-528472574697 *BERLIN LIVE SHOW ALERT* We're also doing a show on March 11 in Berlin! Get tickets here: https://www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/trashfuture-live-in-berlin-tickets-525728156067 *WEB DESIGN ALERT* Tom Allen is a friend of the show (and the designer behind our website). If you need web design help, reach out to him here:  https://www.tomallen.media/ *MILO ALERT* Check out Milo’s upcoming live shows here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/live-shows Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and Alice (@AliceAvizandum)

Hello everyone and welcome to this hang on doing the sums in my head nope nope it's a free episode actually it's the free one oh because we're doing too all right yeah it's the free one it's it is a free one thank you Milo well the thing is when you're doing both on one day of the week that's gonna confuse me again because also logically we're recording this one first so this should be the bonus chronologically speaking but you've also done it out of order to doubly fuck with my sort of inner ear yes voice yeah to get to some sort of like weird like superposition we are like it's the bonus one that's correct we

are wrong we're in the podcasting vomit comet we are we are screwing with Milo we're doing CrossFit stuff to him but it is a full house of all of your favorite regular on camera person on camera nope not yet on Mike personalities of TF it's myself Riley I've got who's saying I've got Milo I've got Alice and we are very Cam girling very lucky to be joined by by author of Palo Alto and journalist Malcolm Harris Malcolm what's up and thank you for coming on hello thanks for having me now I offer you a formal what's up oh that's like when the first time is your majesty and the second time is

what's up and when the priest when the priest says what's popping you say and what's popping with you father no Malcolm has written a really fantastic book that I must recommend what popeth that I have I have read and what I really enjoy is that it's a really good change of pace from reading like terrible taught sexy thrillers written by MPs hmm it's it's amazing to read a good book I forgot what it was like Malcolm I don't know if you ever read any like really classic literature like the devil's tune by Syrian Duncan Smith but I'd recommend it I've read an American equivalent as bad I'm sure I read like Ben Stass is a now

is no longer like he was I reviewed his book that was it was bad yeah Ben Stass the inventor of cell cast them that's right yeah look and so we're going to talk all about Palo Alto today and the story that it tells as the history of Silicon Valley is I think a very interesting one and one that is to be honest I think under told because the usual history of Silicon Valley is basically just there was Arpanette and then we did the Internet for military reasons and then a bunch of companies started there because of Hewlett Packard and what you've done is you've told a much much longer term story that starts

a lot earlier and looks at quite a few of the larger social forces in California in the United States and in the world that have sort of shaped what Silicon Valley became however before we get into that I did find something courtesy of friend of the show Rory blank that I wanted to run by everyone first it's just based on Rory blank I feel like this is going to be good so South by Southwest is happening once again this year and I have a list of three titles of different South by Southwest events and I just want all of you to have a guess as to which one is not featured which one is not featured this year which

one you have made up okay which one is not a feature this year and number one and we're gonna we're gonna wait till I've listed all of them and we're gonna let Malcolm guest first as the as is his right as the guest number one I'm dating an AI how the metaverse changes society number two be the one unlocking the 28 trillion dollar she economy with AI the she kind of we're unlocking we've done a version of her story but with economics economy and three does mind control for good really exist so Malcolm knowing what you know about the technology industry and its hangers on which of those is not a South by

Southwest event from this year I'm gonna have to say I'm dating an AI just because it sounds like the most reasonable of the three so I found it least likely to exist Hussein which is a trick question I think all three of them happened oh Riley our friend wouldn't do that to us I I went to a clown ceremony yesterday sorry for another time but now I think everyone's tricking me including you Riley is turning around with a big ladder but also but also I just think that all these three things are like completely I can completely seriously see them being real events so yeah I think all of them happened

Milo um well I'm sort of I'm torn between does mind control for good exist like is that so weird that it can only be made up or is it so weird that it can only be real like I think that's that's the question I'm trying to answer for myself I think I'm gonna pick that one okay and Alice I'm clear it's clearly the economy isn't that that's not real so okay president she kind of that's great so two of you are right it's Malcolm and Hussein all right because wait because what the first one that I'm dating an AI that's from last year so like in terms of the vibes I got that right yeah and technical terms Malcolm right okay

so yeah both right well but AI was so much worse than you're dating one of those really fucked up dolly pictures I'm dating an AI and she keeps telling me that I have to do the laundry I didn't sign up for this what's happening did you see that chatbot that 4chan made to try and get like a sort of a mommy GF and it made them not be racist oh well it's a positive outcome but they trained it to like you know supportive and gently dominant and it's like I'm legitimately disappointed that you deny the Holocaust you have to stop doing this I'm not joking so the AI looked at the guy and was like I can fix you yeah we're all

gonna make it right because the needs that you know previously the good ending was you transition your gender the bad ending was you become a Nazi but now even even they can be rescued by the mommy dumb chatbots so it goes it just goes to show I think my my thesis proven again which is if AI can take your job or affect you in that way then it's more of a statement about you and your own let's say internal complexity than AI however we have a lot to get to today at a lot about Palo Alto the the book to read the book of the century so we're going to launch into that now Malcolm one of the early lines of the book and

something that I think is a good frame for getting started with it is that you say Palo Alto is haunted can you tell me what you mean by that as we get into this yeah so it's built on a indigenous burial ground classic haunting setup if you like murder people who live in a place and then set up your own town on top of it and then try to forget about them as fast as possible you set up some weird dynamics in your core psyche right and so part of what I'm talking about is this like spectral ghost metaphor but then also you what you're haunted by is this impersonal system that's constantly making use of people

in these really awful ways and so haunting is something that lets you think about forces that make you do stuff that you wouldn't otherwise do but that you can't point at you're in the Patagonia store and blood starts coming out of the walls that seems not good or like the swamp monster so Palo Alto is also a lot of a toxic waste dumps a surprising you think it's a really like beautiful place and it is a really beautiful place but it's like native burial ground toxic waste dump all the like classic really real classic 20th century haunting tropes I'm at the native burial ground I'm at the toxic

waste dump etc etc exactly I'm at the greatest producer of wealth in the history of human history that's right so and I think that you know your your book doesn't it starts very early right starts with the birth of the birth of California with its settlement by Anglo colonizers and I think really that what I take from this right is that the one I understand is that the discovery of California also heralds kind of the death of America how it was originally designed because that's the end of the free real estate you can't just solve your problems by moving a few miles west once you hit California and so you know

it's it is no surprise don't be a pussy go live in the sea they try that's that's what seasteading that's right to like yeah exactly hmm become Dutch and so Detroit become Dutch I was androids so you talk about this right as your first chapter you say the point of is that the series of plagues visited upon California in the second half of the 19th century took the form of men and we can see the character of the tendencies that shaped the state and in turn the world reflected in the men seized by them so and as I mentioned right this they're running out of land

and the plagues inflicted by the people that came to California whether we're talking about Fremont Sutter Stanford all the people were going to talk about about this episode seems to me to be a symptom of we've run out of land we can't externalize our problems we must now scientifically manage them away yeah well I'm building up that that territory that had been seized for capital right gives them a lot more space so there's this great letter from Marx I think is to Engels where he talks about the incorporation of California and China and Australia and Japan into the capitalist system in the second half of

the 19th century and says you know with all that space capitalism's really got some some room to move like we're probably gonna lose in Europe if you think about it like in this little corner of the world we're probably gonna lose if capital still has the whole rest of the world to build up and it's just like you know some side note in a letter that like defines the whole next century and it's the rest of that lesser is like please send me 50 quid yeah and he was right about both he Marx was kind of saying look at this right well and you we do credit when we credit him with this idea of like you know progressive

there's a revolution in Europe and this is how it's gonna end and he didn't you know Marx failed to consider the rest of the world well that's wrong he knew exactly what was gonna happen and this story is sort of the story of that happening right it's and and what we're gonna see as we go through this is the is not just Palo Alto but California in general and the US so those three levels right then at the internet of four levels the international national subnational and like local we're going to see exactly that reaction play out and with this one small strange town that seems to be afraid of building any

any building higher than two stories at the center of the global technology and movement of reaction so I want to talk about some of these early men the the early the early plagues visited upon California your your frogs and locusts and stuff we're because you you write about some let's say enterprising vigilantes such as John Fremont who is a sort of a cowboy who is sent by the US government to sort of deniably start a revolution against Mexican rule in California and sets quite a bit of a tone for what comes next yeah and when you read this history it's just nuts how small scale this stuff was so like the

Fremont when he goes to seize California implicitly for the United States even though that like that happens later these are like tiny battles where no one dies basically like the Mexican presence in Alta California is really sparse and as the light for the Zorro movies for one thing well the Zorro movies are they're misplaced historically right they went back and changed the history to put it during the Spanish period when actually the original text by John Roland Ridge that it's based on is based in the American period and it's about how bad the American settlers are and so that gets that gets twisted all around

yeah we love a bit of historical revisionism don't we well and it was why it doesn't make very much sense the Zorro story right and but we also have we also have more more men who move out to California because before California fills up there is still some free real estate left it's just there's limited free real estate and a lot of what they're doing is they are they are engaged in extractive industry there's a lot of mercury mining gold panning and also early forms of agribusiness such as the temp the template for commodity wheat farming which basically gives birth to various different kinds of West

Coast aristocracy featured in such films as Chinatown or that own such image libraries as Getty and you can get into some fun stuff with like Cadillac deserts about this later on down the line sort of like destroying America's Switzerland you know this beautiful first-time valentine in order to like you know create you know greater Los Angeles County but overall I think that the the thing that I that I sort of take from this though is that you know that it's this it is this is this area that is lived in by indigenous people that is also owned by another country as well in either one of those those ways previously

stolen by someone else and we're now going to steal it again and and that the we we send in a sort of some very small amounts of shot we the US sends a very sort of small amounts of sort of shock troops if you like to take it over and then immediately begin it goes about the business of extreme intensification of extractive industry well they're really it's interesting that you say we because there was some concern amongst US policymakers at various times that like if colonization of California didn't proceed apace there was a possibility that the British like via Canada would just come down the

west coast and just like take it and you could have a Russian's yeah exactly you could have had you could have had like sort of Russian colonized California had a bit they had a fort there for one thing you could have had you could have had a Canadian California and just imagine imagine the Canadian Napa wine region canada for you I mean you could have had Japanese California you could have Chinese California you could have Indian California they're like a whole bunch of different possible histories this could go especially in the period between you know the Gold Rush famously is 49 49ers and the building of the

transcontinental in the 1860s as a consequence of the Civil War in that period like it's being colonized by America but it's not at all clear that America is going to be able to hold this territory it is functionally an overseas colony to the United States and I think seeing it that way as a mid 19th century overseas colony is really important for thinking about it in terms of its real peers which includes something like you know South Africa or Algeria more than like you know you think of California's history as just like another state but it really was this overseas colony for the United States at

I like the idea of the alternate paradox games ass universe where California was colonized by like a communist Australia in about 1870 and so we talk about it as an overseas colony we're talking about the way I see it anyways we're talking also about a place where new methods for organizing intent and intensifying extraction can be tried and then expanded and brought back to the country so actually there's a line in your book that goes to that says California engineers became the heralds of proletarianizations around the world shock troops of global global enclosure drawing the lines that so many

others were so forced to follow in their packs they carried very particular ideas gleaned from the Golden State about how society should be arranged and if you want to talk about let's say colonial methods sort of developing and then returning to the rest and expanding to the rest of the world or returning to the metropole that to me looks like a description of that tendency yeah absolutely because I mean well Palo Alto and California starts off as this last link of the chain right it isn't just away it's the far flung you know the last land to be incorporated into the capitalist globe and so but very

quickly it becomes part of this metropole right well then it's California mining engineers as a result of the research they're doing and the development they've done and especially the technological development that they done becomes the sort of the first techies right like everyone wants a California engineer even though America is not a real player in the end of the 19th century like colonial race or whatever they're not acquiring territory in China or Russia or Myanmar or whatever but they want to hire Americans and specifically Californians to come out there because they were sought thought

of as like the most advanced technological workers of the time which again was very on purpose right so something like Stanford University is intentionally focusing on mining engineering because they know this is going to be a prominent field in a world of colonial extraction and they want their guys they want Stanford alum to be the most important people in the most important fields in the world could you send some chaps have it a Kenya we're trying to build a fucked up prison so we talk about Stanford and I think this is probably a good its places any to bring in Leland Stanford for whom of course the

university was named the original evil motherfucker yeah like if you think of Robert Barron's you're either thinking of Leland Stanford or you're thinking of JP Morgan Hurst sometimes gets a look in but like by and large so like big guy in the waistcoat with a gold pocket chain and bit beard you know powerful forces of nature Mr. Beal that's all Leland Stanford and but you the interesting thing is you talk a little bit about the history the personal history of Leland Stanford and he was kind of an enormous fuck up for a while before he eventually just he was a fail son from like a sort of like decently rich family

who like followed the gold rush and as the expression goes got rich by you know selling picks and shovels and then got a hot tip about like like from a friend of a friend about a guy who was really obsessive I called if I remember this right Theodore Judah who had this idea in his head you know trans women hadn't been invented yet so you're stuck with this guy it was just like trains trains we already trains and theodore Judah thought that he had a you know route surveyed for a the western bit of a transcontinental railroad and essentially just looking at the word transcontinental for a really long time

so Leland Stanford was the money and he and like three other dudes got together in like the back room of a grocery store in Sacramento and were like yeah we will stand you the money to like you know survey and build this this this railroads which is the very beginning of it because when they were getting when they were meeting with Judah like these guys are just shop owners right like they're not big capitalists yet or they pass for like moderately sized capitalists they call themselves the associates and Leland was sort of the dumbest of the four which means that he stands up in front like they make him

the front man because he's the one who's like least capable so we do think about him and they did at the time think about him as the front man but that's because like that was his job period like all the other guys did the actual business stuff and his job was to like stand in front and have people throw stuff at him which was like in you know sort of an important job and it was also like governor of California or whatever but it's really the civil war that because it splits the country in half and splits California basically in half he goes from being this you know some schmuck who's the nominee of the

Republican Party that no one cares about to being like the most important politician in the state and an advisor to Lincoln who's saying like oh this is who you should put on the Supreme Court and then when they're building the railroad they're able to you know get the contracts and etc but at the beginning when they're investing in Judah's plan they just like built a toll road and they immediately try to sell it which is so funny it's like as soon as they get the first part of the railroad built they're like let's cash out we got it it's a bunch of like short con dumb scam guys doing a sort of like guy

Richie sort of is what we're gonna do montage and accidentally building the transcontinental railroads and then they get like super rich again never never making any particular money off the railroad itself but like starting all you know we're gonna be start a railroad track supply company that is going to sell the railroad tracks to the railroad and we're gonna own that company and we're gonna sell stock in that company and so there's like a lot of financial chicanery going on but Leland Stanford senior dies before that all like the government really comes calling so he gets off more or less easy even though

there's some gunfire with some angry settlers who want the land they were promised just imagining Jason Statham and Steven Graham like trying to tunnel into a bank vault realizing they've been tunneling for a while and suddenly they break through and there's a team of French engineers on the other side handing in the flag and they're like congratulations on the construction of the transcontinental railroad was like as dirty as you can possibly imagine you had like wars between these guys in the Santa Fe railroad which was like the people's railroad you had people getting kicked off of their land you had people

getting shot you had like all kinds of insider trading that wasn't even illegal yet because no one had thought to make it illegal like buying up all the water front in Oakland and sort of strangling the entire city with it or like deliberately extorting the city of Los Angeles for like making it the big city in Southern California instead of San Diego and then killing San Diego and the cradle like like all of this is like anything you can point about this like the map the history of California has like Leland Stanford's greasy dumb ass thumbprint over it and moreover these are tendencies like the way that like a lot

of California capitalists learned to relate to the state it is a way that a lot of capitalists everywhere relate to the state in fact especially in California where again like you know it's it's so many so much film noir for example is just completely replete with the big bad guy doing more or less exactly what we're describing this kind of Robert Barron you know fake out hijinks where you you know you buy all of the air of one foot above ground level in the cities that everyone has to pay you a rent to walk to work you know it's it's the these kinds of things are relatively common throughout California's

history I'm gonna accidentally build vital infrastructure see well I know it's a promise it was a promise for settlers to is that they could get part of that and it wasn't that you know it wasn't the human farmer tradition right it wasn't like guys went out to the West Coast thinking like oh I'm gonna start my little farm and I'm gonna like you know sell my goods to the market and I'm gonna build a nice life for myself it's like the timber workers who were also settlers would you know engage in these Indian killing campaigns be awarded territory by the territorial government in reward for their murderous

activities and then rent that land back to the timber company that they worked for for a payoff so I think more on Lee on on Stanford though right was who he becomes governor of California he becomes rich with all of this let's say extreme self-dealing which again you might remember how Adam Newman structured we work such in such a way that he made a lot of his money just renting stuff to we work yeah there's no buffing yet there's no interpol yet none of the stuff is like even illegal as we say there's no Libyan mercenaries to hire no so so this is this is what you say though about Stanford himself you say

Leland Stanford was but a historical vector albeit a robust capricious one he puffed up like a balloon anything in his orbit tended to bulge in the same way from his vineyard which is the world's biggest his wife's jewels among the world's gaudiest as a man he was notably an exceptional an embodiment of historical forces he couldn't own horses that transforming them into the world's fastest the scientific principles of control measurement and deliberate change opened a road to modernity and capital was the draft mule that pulled the whole world down that path we'll get his horse farm by

the way because he did something interesting with it he did fucking love a horse farm because he was along with pretty much all of these dudes he was heavily into his eugenics and a good way into eugenics is being like I'm gonna breed the world's fastest horse but when that didn't work out for him he turned his horse farm into a university where he tried to breed the world's fastest student yeah you know city of horse come they should rename it to that yeah so let's so what happens right how we get to Stanford University which is basically the focus more or less of the rest of this episode because it is where

the 20 20 later type of the 20th and 21st century and America and California and the high-tech economy and Stan Palo Alto and stuff are all made to a greater or lesser extent is that is that Stanford as you say he's keeps living in San Francisco where the people he has let's say promised quite a bit to and then not delivered for even if many of the people he promised quite a bit to were extremely shitty could see him living in wonderful style and kept on assembling outside of his house threateningly you want to go into that a little bit man has more horse come than any of us have ever seen in a lifetime

yeah I mean that was the problem so there's this place in San Francisco it's still called knob hill which I think in British slang means something slightly different it's actually a kind of tea castle it was short for nabob hill because that's where like the rich guys lived up on the big hill in town and so you've got the close of the 18th century or 19th century excuse me class conflict throughout the world right this is like Paris commune era workers especially workers in cities who are being proletarianized are resisting that proletarianization or resisting the terms that proletarianization I would hate

to be proletarianized right well the California settlers in particular right because they came out there thinking I'm gonna own California I'm not coming out there to work I'm coming out there to own I'm gonna you know find some gold and be a capitalist suddenly they find themselves with the completion of the railroad not only are a lot more people coming which are driving down labor costs you also have goods coming from the rest of the country so instead of you know I'm a grocer in the Leland Stanford era before the transcontinental I can charge huge amounts of money for my groceries I can charge you you know ten

bucks an egg or whatever laborers themselves can also charge a lot of money for their work because there aren't that many workers but with a completion of the transcontinental you have the undermining of Western industry as well as the undermining of Western wages and so this rapid proletarianization of these people who thought of themselves as settlers not as workers and so this leads to class conflict really traditional class conflict as well as so the railroad starts bringing in workers from China to complete the railroad because they needed a consistent workforce that was dependent upon them

in a really like proximate way in a way that the indigenous people of California were not because they could just like leave and go to the land themselves and make a life for themselves they weren't dependent on the railroad and so what happens right is that as I say they've been gathering outside of his house most threateningly and you know he's I believe he actually what one of the times this happens either him or his wife is like seen to be examining a bunch of stuff owned by Marie Antoinette yeah there's this the Severus vase because they're you know they collect things and so they collect the the

detritus of the past aristocratic cratic class that had been overthrown and since they're like the bourgeois class they're collecting you know stuff that used to be owned by kings so he not only owns the Severus vase but like buys a bunch of the Queen of Spain's jewels and just gives them to his wife and you're the Queen of Spain now spotted eating a Faberge a right Leland Stanford junior his tours you know his charm childhood is like absolutely ridiculous like eating rose petals with the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire or something you know like really like ridiculous stuff for a child to be doing or anyone to be doing

you know looking at emeralds the size of his fist in the royal jewel collection or whatever he goes and visits the Pope and then dies yes he gets personally blessed by the Pope is one of the and he's not take imagine as a child meeting the Pope and you're the one that dies I mean like really against the odds yeah maybe hey did that Pope end up living for quite a while longer he stole youth from the child I wouldn't be sending my kid to meet the Pope I think I wouldn't send my kid to meet the Pope on or off or the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire for that matter the mistreated rich child in history yeah you do six months in

Britain then you meet the Pope and then you meet the Sultan of the Ottoman Empire now my boy you'll go to Britain and then rural Afghanistan and then whether he goes on a tour of the Parthenon doesn't wear a coat McKinley style and then just dies yeah it's like very quick and he's this guy you know that his parents have been planning for him to run the world right like this is the preparation he's been sitting in these meetings with all like the greatest people in world finance and business you know he personally knows the Ross Childs knows the like everybody who's anybody in the world and then all the

sudden and it shows that's the problem with putting your all your eggs in one basket aristocratically right it's like if you're a voice to someone you kid you want to do the the air want to do the Netflix show well that's the British solution the United States solution was to create a bourgeois class so that those privileges can be transferred not through bloodlines necessarily but through a class milieu and so Herbert who Leland Stanford junior university first of all it's the university is named for the dead son not the father and the person who really like comes to take over for Leland Stanford junior in this history is

Herbert Hoover who's part of the first class at Stanford University and he's an orphan so you have this orphan coming to replace the dead son of the now childless parents to assume the burden of the like Stanford inheritance and he just takes the ball and really runs with a man who always wore a kite so so just just to connect a few of the dots here for getting from getting from the house of Nob Hill to Herbert Hoover is that specifically the Stanford's they leave San Francisco and then basically build Palo Alto as they're a town for them to live in normal then as now a sort of armed compound in defense of

the capitol says this again Mary Antoinette shit in the Palo Alto yeah well Mary Antoinette didn't go build a town for herself to live in separately to everyone else should come up with the suburbs yeah in Palo Alto the Stanford's could keep any worker who didn't work from at a distance something that wasn't possible in San Francisco compared to the perch in Nob Hill exposed the howling winds of class conflict South Bay Ranch was a placid a grassy pseudo feudal expansive lords and servants at that point them Leland Stanford Junior dies of a cold but also Stanford himself becomes completely

upset becomes totally obsessed with horse breeding and hires a bunch of guys who will go on to form a lot of his let's say early views on bi-anomics and the views of other guys on bi-anomics which becomes a real focus of Stanford University which he starts as we say at the bequest of his son in his Leland Stanford Junior Memorial University in Palo Alto his special town he built where no one is mad at him and he can just breed his horses in peace mr. Stanford so if I may would it not be more conventional to use a male horse many though but this is forwarding to a few years later because we still do have a

little time before Hoover after the 1906 earthquake Stanford was essentially refounded as the institution it is today by an ick theologist named David Starr Jordan who definitely did not assassinate Stanford's wife Stanford's wife Jane after his own death and what theologist like someone who studies fish yep okay all right fine sorry just and this and this fish guy he certainly did not assassinate Leland Stanford's wife and Craig Fishman yeah so so let's uh let's talk let's talk a little bit about the about the transition from Stanford University as Stanford himself saw it which was to train and

improve the workers of the future to Stanford as Jane Stanford saw it which was why are you coming towards me with that knife but also which was a liberal arts institution that would have like something that would be at home on the east coast that would maybe have secret societies and things that have a lot of the cult is the mold of like the American University at this point was Yale and Yale is the hell mouth in a lot of ways but what Stanford does as a university is reinvent the hell mouth in a sort of like nicer west coast way and it still is the vowels from the hell mouth with girls they got girls to stabbing

Jane Stanford to death and then crossing out the words horse come university crudely writing the word Stanford so so David Starr Jordan who again definitely did not assassinate Stanford's wife Jane after his death had a different vision for what Stanford would be other than sort of glorified vocational school or a liberal arts college in the west coast you tell me about come universe David Starr Jordan and his what his desires were for Stanford yeah so he's the comes from Indiana University so this is this is who they get when they can't get any

of the top presidents so they approach like the you know the presidents of the top universities on the east coast like hey want to move to California and University in California and they're like fuck no like no one knows any no one has any books in California like no one wants to go to California to do the life of the mind and so they are stuck with they end up stuck with this guy David Starr Jordan who's a progressive educator in that he like believes in you very strongly in eugenics and he studies fish and from his studies of fish trying to derive this fish well sort I mean honestly he's a he's a racist a very like active

racist in the world which for him turns out to be a kind of imperialism because he's like we don't want we don't want all those people in our country like if we if we you know colonize the Philippines then we've got all these Filipinos in our country and like we don't want that so we shouldn't so colonization is bad because I'm such a racist that the racist argument against imperialism is a fun bit yeah Philippines got weird fish over there got those ones at 80 feet fucking weird don't want it pull it off wait don't go in there is that the northern california accent yeah no this guy this guy's british now he's got a british energy northern california accent in the like paradox

timeline where it was all english colonization yeah yeah so well but he was also a japanophile and so he goes to japan and meets with the emperor the emperor and is like cataloging japanese fish also uh and thinks that like the japanese are like a quarter white or something he's like they're they're the whitest people of asia which is something that the japanese also thinks so that's fun it's true and so he then he be that's a good point and so he becomes uh like a close ally with the japanese government which becomes kind of interesting a little bit later on uh in that they'd like set up spies in stanford university this guy has the same like the same ideology of like an h.n. post and now yeah i was about to say he's the other way around if the h.n.

posts where do you think they got that ideology you think they made it up so i want to talk about bionomics let's talk about bionomics yeah i want this to guy disemboweling himself with a samurai sword because he couldn't make the fish coming up yeah so i want to talk a little bit about about bionomics because this was one of the first big things that made stanford distinctive um and this actually i'll before i hand back to you i'll read i'll read your own words so in a lecture on degeneration jordan took student his students on an intellectual tour of the world's downward slopes from the trophic from the tropics where life is too easy and thus people are lazy to the american south where slavery stomped out intelligence all around to the slums where poor

moral incentives led to sluggishness to declining europe which was softened by luxury without new leadership the species would surely degenerate in the fate of humanity how held in the balance the implicit goldilocks solution was white america particularly in the west where genius wasn't neurotic or tragic but unalloyed in the achievement of strong well-rounded anglo-saxon settler men great men live great lives wrote jordan and the by not by not bionomic proof is in the pudding so this is number one a um how a lot of the early learning at stanford but also i think if we want to draw a line to the present day something that you could very easily see in the let's say private diaries of um of a lot of silicon valley venture capitalists or maybe in the public

comments on some of their rationality blogs that they all like to read yeah you have to like outsource this to like a guy like mensius mold bug now but whatever that's right milken please but that was that mean yeah it was this were core ideas and we're being taught as a science at stanford and so this bionomics is taught by a few professors at stanford it's not a huge subject but among those professors were david star jordan the president of the university and others that he recruited from indiana where he used to be including this guy kelog and so they their idea was that uh hierarchy was natural right that uh evolution meant that the basis for all nature was hierarchy competition and domination and so you had to cultivate these things and that they manifested

in terms of humanity in terms of racial difference right so you have more fit people and less fit people and for him it was really this like the stanford man was his invention of an evolutionarily fit uh person and stanford woman as well right because they was a was a project right they recruited both and so he builds this university in this image of bionomics and then once you have an idea of the naturalness of hierarchy then equality strikes you as fundamentally unnatural and like it must be imposed and you associate equality with authoritarianism um and anti-liberty and this is gotta put this in the context of the bolshevik revolution which happens pretty soon after and the like anti-colonial movements that are kicking off and so it's in dialogue with this global

struggle for equality this is the the reaction right this is the scientific assertion of the naturalness of inequality of inequality we've developed a new course here at stanford university on the libidinous nature of the serbian brain pan we're going to allow women to study it to see what it does to their ovaries that's and and this is also you don't just see this in terms of international sort of counter revolution you even see it as stanford as kind of the west coast headquarters of anti-new dealism right and you know this is this is getting back into herbert hoover give me the old deal yeah that's what sort of it was yeah but we get this in herbert hoover kind of as as we said the ultimate stanford man the self-made orphan who is a we killed his parents

the orphan let's say orphan made good too many orphans that they're just born into it you know right now now hoover would of course go on to be president but uh after he studied at stanford he then sort of joined a sort of globetrotting mineral wealth extraction effort that most we mostly was done as a kind of hoover stanford joint effort and like so many of the other conservative elite uh threw out and after the depression he hated roosevelt and used stanford as a as isam mentioned before the west coast fight against new dealism so let's talk a little about hoover and stanford and sort of how that began and what how hooverism shaped what stanford would then go to become yeah and it's important to see him as this mining engineer and this history

of mining engineering it's like what does mining engineering mean at the beginning of the 20th century well it means going to what we now think of as the third world and digging up as much as their stuff as fast as you can and taking it for yourself right these are concessions and they're concessions that are acquired by great power domination and so he's the america is not a big player in this you know the world scramble at this point it's not a colonial power at least not to that degree but they still want these california technicians to come in and help and one of the things they want them to come help with is or one of the things hoover ends up doing is this racialization of labor and using race to split workers and so when hoover's a consultant

in for mines in south africa and they have labor problems he's like i know what to do i got some buddies in china they can ship us a bunch of workers real quick let me just get on the phone i don't know but you know what i mean amazing things are happening in china etc well we hey we're going to be able to call china on the phone with some stanford inventions later on but we'll get to them yeah soon enough right uh but then also brings in he brings in italian workers and he separates the italian workers and the anglo workers with the italian workers as like a second class uh of workers and then is used use this to uh leverage everyone how the italians became white and is just like no no go backwards put it back well no and that happened that happened soon in the

the bank right with the ginini and bank of america so we definitely see how the italians become white but at the beginning of stanford university it really is that the italians fall on the wrong side of the bionomic list and so you have an effort by uh a stanford psychologist to count the number of italians in the schools in the bay area and see what kind of negative impact the italians are having on other students because they're italians um textbooks splatter with marinara sauce yeah and also spaghetti extending over the globe you know and they've been they've been pushing logistics it's important to understand that whiteness is being defined both inclusively and exclusively at this period right they're telling people oh you're from japan you're not white

you're from syria you're not white we're figuring this out at the same time as they're saying oh from russia okay like from armenia borderline okay fine because of the like exigencies of agricultural production we're going to incorporate armenians two different sort of approaches to the same thing we're on the east coast this is sort of like done with a pretense of like gentility a lot a lot more of the time where it's like you know uh society whereas california this is like full ball scientific racism hey do you hear about this we're getting bumped up to white so one of the things that we have here right and this is sort of one of our bridges between race science and um high tech production is that a lot of the guys who came over for the race science

like william schochli who was one of the originators of william schochli who was surprised at what he found very very surprised the inventor of the shock jock yeah william schochli who was one of the people who was behind this like bennett jezzerit ultimate american quesats had a rack breeding program that was the university of stanford he was one of the guys who would go on to start one of the first semiconductor company oh no semi-conductor unfortunately the east coast was like beat them in the race to generate the like all american quesats has a rack and it was jfk and they had to kill him yeah that's right yeah no we're trying to build a master race of horses it never quite worked out but too skittish so schochli is one of the guys that comes over to

work in these sort of bionomics profession who is interested in creating this this sort of master race of americans and ends up in one of these early technology focused spinouts so let's talk a little bit about vacuum tubes and the first startups that sort of get spun out of the university's research labs this is like 1900 tf now there's a vacuum tube involved we're recording this onto a wax cylinder i say have you heard about the newest dervish yeah so tell us a little about that i tried to to show i mean usually that these kind of histories sort of gloss over the technical specifics and so i tried to show what a vacuum tube triode was and how it's linked to a transistor and that a transistor is basically a triode right with like it's a three-point circuit

which is also what the vacuum tubes were vacuum tubes did it like badly and they produced a bunch of heat and broke all the time it exploded a lot there was a there was an idea at the time of the early 1900s one they they thought that computers were impossible because the vacuum tube failure rate multiplied by the number of vacuum tubes that you'd need means that it could never work for any amount of time because you would just turn it on another guy running around you know turning you know replacing all the vacuum tubes and these were of course the original computer bugs were the bugs that were attracted by the heat and the light of the vacuum tubes and would fuck things up by flying into them with like oh that's good actually yeah my computer is full of bugs yeah going in

there with a big swatter i'm wearing a pistol the only the only way out of my computations you vile beasts the only way for a computer really to be made to work would be if you were like happy to accept a record number of like orphan blindings as they went around like getting vacuum tubes exploded on them they're all nepo babies anyway those orphans vacuum tubes are very useful for us radios and one thing that you're going to need one thing that you're going to need a lot of radios for is world war two and world war two happens also just down the road you have the like burgeoning american aircraft industry and i think one thing that is often overlooked in terms of like marrying up modern silicon valley sort of like long time special friends with benefits

relationship with the military industrial complex is from like before day one they were building the radios to put in the planes you know they were calling you know martin marietta and like lockheed and northrop grumman and all of these fuckers so it's just absolutely baked in and then world war two you know ends and someone happily invents an electronic vacuum tube but i just let's let's talk about let's talk about the relationship of the university to these industrial concerns because they don't just come out of nowhere it's because universities aren't spinning up companies at this rate or in this industry really anywhere else if i understand this correctly yeah i mean the so it's really this guy fredrik terman who gets the the credit for

as provost and so he's another one where he's i think maybe the the best example of the school's eugenic program so his dad is lewis terman who's the inventor of the stanford bennett iq yes yeah exactly right and he so he's the one who really pushes stanford into uh intelligence testing and the intelligence as this next level of bionomics and applying it to people and so he has a son named fredrik who grows up basically on stanford campus and is trained from the beginning to be like herbert hoover right the like next generation of stanford man and for him that means radios because we're past uh mining engineering a little bit now we're into radios and so he becomes a real what they call radio hams right he was an amateur radio guy as was uh i called them

podcast hogs these days herbert hoover jr was his playmate um on stanford campus and they together were doing uh radio stuff and termans a genius like they test him young so his dad does this statewide genius search where he's testing as many kids throughout california as he can looking for the geniuses to be put to work uh for the state basically i should also say this is helps a lot by world war one which is the big rollout of standardized intelligence testing because you do you have the first mass recruitment of troops since the civil war and everyone's trying to figure out whether or not they can read right and that's and that's chairman so that's in those the alpha and beta tests and those were again if you think about

what the eugenic concerns of those people were at the time david star jordan was hugely hugely concerned about the disgenic impacts of war like anyone can get killed by a bullet now what he said was the clown can shoot down the hero right now that we've got guns and pounds of education for it doesn't exactly just nothing disgenic if we go to if we go to war with a another country of lesser people we're just going to be throwing away our you know anglo-saxon genes into this meat grinder that is war and so they become for a while real peace activists the bionomicists so including getting into the like the right answer for the wrong reasons like anti colonialist because we're racist anti-war because we're racist guy who's so racist he's accidentally

a genius just like wrapping it all the way around so in this case though because in every event right all of these guys associated with stanford they will be against um like they will be sort of personally against war or against some of these things until the u.s. government just comes and basically says excuse me we need 30 billion vacuum tubes in order to create all of our war computers and then they kind of figure out a way to reconcile it with them to be fair it wasn't us first so what happens when i think is the real turning point for bionomics is that vernon kellogg who's one of the the main bionomicists gets detailed to yeah right the inventor of kellogg serial no he's not people are going to think that and they're going to blame me um he was actually the

honeypuff the different different weird racist yeah yeah yeah right also racist but so herbert hoover is running the food program in europe at this time and so he's recruiting a bunch of stanford people and one of the stanford people he gets to come work on this food program is vernon kellogg vernon kellogg comes and his job is to sort of liaise with the german high command uh during war during world war one who also you know know a lot about eugenics and have ideas about uh you know human superiority and stuff and he comes back and he writes this piece uh this like a short book basically about his experience with the german high command and he's like these guys are fucking psycho they're gonna they're gonna try and destroy the world like we need to be ready

for a war with germany because they don't understand this evolution stuff the way we understand it they understand it as like they're going to conquer the world and they're they're absolutely gonna try it and so we need to be ready to fight wars now like we can no longer fall back on uh peace activism because they're gonna start a war with us whether we like it or not the trouble is they've not gotten so racist that it makes you smart they've gotten just racist enough that it makes you evil we need to either make them more racist or less racist so in this case right we have um we have our our stanford intelligence testers and i've had one thing in detail i liked about your book is that you mentioned that when they the way they square the circle of needing

of needing to support the war is they decide to use intelligence testing to filter decide which people should be exposed to the most danger in uh in war like if you cannot like look at a progression of three slightly differently shaped squares your life may depend on identifying which one comes next right because that's if they're worried about the dysgenics of of war right and so they the intelligence testing is able to solve this problem for them because if they can find the smart guys and make sure they're serving not on the front lines but let's say in an air conditioned bunker or maybe doing equations at harvard and so one of the things one of the reasons you need to be thinking about it uh this way is that his son fred terman who's a genius he's already certified that

fred termans a genius turns 18 just at the time when they change the draft age to 18 and so when he's thinking about people dying you know strong iqs being sacrificed in the war and how he needs to stand between the best genetic material and like getting shot on the battlefield he's literally talking about his son right and so his son spends most of the war uh at stanford he spends um that time preparing and then world war two he's gonna spend that time in a bunker in cambridge helping to win the war effort because that's how wars are going to be one world war two on is not by you know someone shooting down someone else but by inventing the radar jammers which they did uh that are going to win you the war via intelligence and so this plan the stanford plan of we're going

to create the smartest weapons in the world and we're going to hold them back from the battlefield and they're going to win wars for us with their intelligence is extremely successful in world war two not just with fred determined but also with shock lee who's playing a key role in this war effort but again from behind the scenes and goes on to inspire one of the key scenes in the film starship troopers where the three main characters are sorted by which ones are most expendable so we have our our our sort of basic structure at this point right um we have our our university we have its focus and we have its own desire to mercenarily rent itself out more than any other university at the time it became a model for what a lot of universities do now

see the like mit media lab or whatever but it was it was path breaking in that sense and we have also our first startups which are largely to do with creating these high tech materials initially right no no let me guess let me guess about high tech materials initially such as vacuum tubes and later transistors most of which are for again military or heavy applications but and many of the systems that they built just fully did nothing you know i'm thinking about us this the sage system for tracking airlock aircraft and so on trying to basically do a flight tracker by way of punch cards awesome yeah and of course that worked right that was the that i mean that's still the technology right that was the first

computer was just flight tracking which is funny that elon when elon must got all pissy about flight tracking computers is like that was the computer um yeah and so like they've been but but then and a lot of these programs right you describe as basically i notice we're sort of coming to time here so i'm going to try to try to get through to some more of the juicy stuff that links us to the period we all know and love right um these are these boondoggles that uh that that you call um military military kanzenism where it is in the post war period we need we need to the u.s. government needs to keep funneling money into the economy and a lot of that needs and that but of course that can't be done through anything that you know is uh let's say might give

workers any ideas about unionizing or anything too bolshevik course um but in fact that preserves another another topic that you um a very let's say stickily named topic that is very easy to remember is missile suburbanism that these two ideas that we have to i mean to create our our suburbs of our permanent and well-paid uh often military relevant technologists that this again happens out around palo alto that the land values need to be kept high that it needs to be made very let's say palatable for the people who are living there who are again let's say in in match to this bionomics world yes we're doing racism again and further crazy how that keeps happening that this arrangement was basically essential for the global empire at which the u.s. was at the center

can you just sort of go into some of these topics and kind of arrange them again with respect to stanford palo alto and so on yeah you know global empire and stuff so silicon chips right you think silicon and silicon valley's story about their own silicon chips is that like oh and then we went to the moon that's what the all the chips were for in the 60s we did for no reason they all sent us to the moon just to hang out uh but in actuality the first generation of silicon chips was going in minute man one nuclear missiles and so that's what the beginning of silicon valley blow up the moon to blow up the whole world right is to put a gun to the world's head and say america's in charge or everyone dies uh and silicon we think of missiles as like these big

objects made of metal and explosions and stuff uh but by value if you look at the composition by value of these missiles they're just big dumb bodies for these smart chips and so it's silicon valley's uh key product in this time is the threat to end the whole world and not to mention then the the bombing arsenals and avionics which is the computers that you put in planes like we were talking about that's used to jump dump just like in totally insane amounts of uh explosives on south asia and this is the the hinge that basically allows the united states to maintain its role even in the face of the anti-colonial movements that have the sort of historical tempo after world war two right so Mao's taking china and it looks like everyone's screwed there's

no way you're like you know the dutch aren't going to be able to recover indonesia and so world equality looks like it's on the march and how are you going to be able to stop people from overthrowing their colonial governments and declaring themselves equal with you uh well one way to do it is you threaten to kill everyone in the entire world unless they do what you want works pretty good and palo alto yeah it does and palo alto like in this small industry that we think that likes to think of itself as this like hippie industry or whatever right like arpanet was defensive uh but they were building all the nuclear missiles for the whole world they were the ones building the offensive weapons not to mention all the tools that allowed for the so-called strategic

bombing of korea and vietnam not to mention at this great historical turning point to preserve its empire the u.s turned to creating intercontinental nuclear weapons and the dutch turned to uropop they invented the vanguard which was more dangerous yeah so between one of the other things that we get right this is the one of the last sort of technologies that was invented by stanford to let's say assist in enabling this global empire was not in fact a technology made of silicon and and tubes and glass and stuff it was a politically social technology which was the modern research institute as well as sri which which gives its name to siri by the way and also the modern right wing political think tank uh beyond beyond the rand corporation but

one directly associated with the university the hoover institution because if we are going to build all of the chips for all of these bombs we need to keep resupplying the bombs which means we need to continue writing papers as to why the bombs need to be dropped because otherwise all of the people who are living in the comfortable suburbs around palo alto are not going to be able to continue to afford their houses that's the basics of it and where are you going to get the workers to build even in silicon valley to wire the damn chips together is you have to bomb them out of their homes in vietnam so that they have to immigrate to the united states that they come to california and need a job and you can put them to work assembling microchips and so they

really you really see them like bomb the proletariat the asian proletariat in particular like into the chip foundries both in asia itself where they're exporting these these foundries but also in silicon valley itself where the lion's share of that early tech labor is done by uh refugees from the wars that silicon valley technology made possible in the first place so i think this is i want to sort of um bring it to a close here with uh another quote from your um from your book we say if we look at palo alto in santa clara county it's easy to see how rearmament funded suburbanization stanford was the conduit from the federal government to the regional economy for a disproportionate amount of this value and that meant building more than weapons as the settlers

poured into the valley of hearts delights they turned military spending into consumer spending buying newly constructed homes with the mortgages back for their stable lucrative jobs making missiles demand for this accoutrements of suburban life surge refrigerators air conditioners cars lawnmowers university at kept adding housing subdivisions and luxury shopping centers but took pains to always control the nature of development which is again another place you can see and one of these modern manias of the united states that's especially especially runs deep in california which is paranoia about the wrong sort of people moving in especially if that means anything looks a little bit bad at all if there's any housing built and so on and so on so just

just sort of by way of wrapping up i think let's bring it back local and let's talk just about how we can connect palo alto in the immediate post war period to the silicon valley that we know today not just in terms of what it produces but in terms of the whole lived experience of the place itself yeah i mean if you think about what are the origins right so you've got the stanford family moving away from the city to the suburbs founding the suburb to get away from class conflict right to get away from any the the consequences of their own action and in the 150 years since then or so there's been a real effort to preserve palo alto as that kind of safe area right that's where the value of the the land comes from is that it's safe from this kind of

conflict that means not letting too many people move there if one thing but it also means hiding the production and the industry that's going on and so palo alto is one of the first places that starts uh zoning codes which now is a very important part of american politics uh but herbert hoover who we've been talking about so much he's the one who brings the organization together the association to write those the model zoning code in the first place and so palo alto if you walk around palo alto it really looks like every anything that could be doing anything is hiding behind a bush like offices hide behind bushes they're real far set back from the street and they're low hanging and it looks like if you were hiding some sinister shit that you were doing

that's where you would hide it like in the suburbs behind these bushes in some like friendly looking building and that's where they were hiding it right that's where they were coming up with plans to do like how do you destroy a village in vietnam let's figure it out you know let's do that analysis what are the statistics of that uh and so we talk about it being haunted right and being sinister it's because of the ways that these historical dynamics persist into the present and at the same time camouflage themselves uh in that persistence so it's a creepy place and if people like are there and feel like it's creepy or creeped out william james fame the philosopher family said that famously said that palo alto like creeped him

out um they're not wrong like it is creepy and it's creepy because of this history and i feel like that's a real through line in the book is figuring out why is this place so creepy and there are very good answers walking into a back room to find two men shaving a horse so um i think ultimately right it's is you can see the modern silicon valley veneer of liberalism as another bush that these people are hiding things behind and i think that this historic this this view of history that goes beyond just arpanet that goes that actually looks in detail at how has so much of modern reaction was if not invented then perfected not just in america not just in california but specifically in palo alto and then re-exported to the rest of the world either by giving them something

to imitate or building the bomb that would be dropped or starting the institution that argues for the building of the bomb to be dropped and so on you know it's it is extremely instructive and so it is once again i book i must urge all of you listening to go and check out because there is so much more in here than we were able to talk about today um we were not able to cover everything in the time period and we were certainly not able to cover every time period covered so malcolm thank you so much for coming on today thanks for having me and out in july in the uk for all your uk listeners out in july in the uk uh so all that being said don't forget this is a free episode there is a bonus episode it will be out in just a couple short days uh on it will be

something uh you'll see then i'll know when i look at the calendar uh but also there is a live show in berlin germany on march 11 there is you can buy tickets to it there are still tickets available although i believe more than half of them are gone oh yeah way more than half so snap those up um there is also a live show in london on the 20th of february over over 60 percent of tickets for that gone as well um there uh there's there's a bunch of live shit for me on my website malhamsterkodiuk slash live dash shows exactly so there are things to do but once it is out in the uk uh or when it's out in the us for american listeners or where it's out in your own country for our international listeners buy the book it's very good buy the book buy that book buy book buy

the book buy the book i must i must concur yeah so uh once again malham thanks for coming hanging out with us thank you to our listeners for listening and we'll see you later bye everyone bye