All righty. Welcome, everyone. Welcome to powerhouse arena. Thank you all for coming. We. Were very excited for tonights event. What a great turn out. Yeah, so excited. Were 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, well do q a. So ill 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 cant cant 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. Youre not getting sick. I appreciate you. Im 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 weve got patrick here, its the occasion to do a dramatic dialog was irresistible to me. And so were going to do this pretty quick because were 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. Theres 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 its also really great. Ive got some amazing sections and so in this section theres presley, who is the socialist poet, sort of author, stand in a naive guy whos written this poem called the toilers, and he goes to see shel grim, played by patrick. Obviously, whos 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. Hes 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 dont make the best seller list, its because of that guy right there, not because we didnt 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 weve got to make them good guys right . Its just getting this opportunity right . Well, first of all, i feel like were being haunted by the ghost of the demon stanford. We cant stop it. No, we cant. We cant stop the dream like literally cannot stop the dream. I dont 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 theres a whole sort of kind of pat like, oh, mark zuckerberg. Hes 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 lelands stanford as sort of i dont 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 hes not the smartest one out of the four of them. In fact, hes 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 didnt 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 hes elevated into this grand robber baron character that were familiar with as an archetype. And then we met in this in this story and thats the Leland Stanford we know. But its because hes 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 coops 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 hes 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 hes 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 mens party would show up outside of his house and yell at him and threaten him all the time. And so he did what youre supposed to do when youre living in the city as a rich guy and youre of all the working people around, you which is moved to the suburbs, except that in 1870s the suburbs dont 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 thats the foundation of, this story and the railroad is what creates the west as we know it. And hes the guy whos responsible for it, right . Youre 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 youre 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 . Its 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 were 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, thats what theyre 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 dont 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, its not a bubble. Its its something else. Theres some other mechanism. And these tensions between the two, between the false promises of Silicon Valley and whats actually going on goes all the way back to the sort of conflict that were 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 thats not true. Thats just false, right . Steve jobs is. Steve jobs is the guy that steve jobs is. Wow. Thats 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 hes 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 doesnt just look like Tucker Carlson he looks exactly same as Tucker Carlson. Im not joking. Im now, convinced that Tucker Carlson has based his whole look on eighties steve jobs and thats 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 dont know about apple. Nobody knows that at all about apple. Its completely been effaced in their in their history that this is their original value proposition. Wasnt 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 its 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 wasnt 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 thats a history thats not so well known and im 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 its not like scholars dont 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 thats what they called it back then, data rather than the internet or whatever is there. Theres 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 o