Atari, genentech, venture firms, berlin spent six years doing research with many Unsung Heroes of this era behind landmark developments and set in motion Ripple Effects which changed the world, tonight she joins us to discuss her new book troublemakers, Silicon Valleys coming of age. The side of the stage we are pleased to present a small exhibit tonight of artifacts related to each of the Silicon Valley troublemakers featured in her book. Bob swanson and bob taylor, we are thrilled to have several of the remarkable troublemakers with us tonight so please stand and be recognized. [applause] thank you. To tell the story of these remarkable people and others, leslie is the project historian for Silicon Valley archives, a fellow at the center for advanced studies of Behavioral Sciences at Smithsonian National museum of american history. To introduce her i would like to share as our tradition five members. 35 mi. As described in her book, 14 wild years chronicles, two books published, sound of 7 valley upstarts filed in troublemakers and two children, please join me giving a warm welcome to Leslie Berlin. [applause] great to have you. Leslie, enjoyed reading the troublemakers. You have been a chronicler of the valley history for two decades and you often quote steve jobs, you cant understand what is going on unless you understand what came before, for a place focused on creating the future why is Silicon Valley history important . It is hard to out speak steve jobs on that. I do believe you cant understand what is happening without understanding what came before, but more importantly or as important is Silicon Valley has this remarkable advantage which is the history is still here, the people in this room and all over this community are here and quite accessible and i young entrepreneurs who know what is up, they come and try to talk to the people who are living here who have done this before. Bob taylor who i talk about in my book, who is the person who convinced the department of defense to start what became the internet and ran the Computer Science lab at xerox park which is one of the two labs the developed the technology that knocked steve jobss socks off in 1979, taylor told me Mark Zuckerberg came to try to understand how do you manage innovation . This is something here for us to learn, and advantage to have those mentors, people who have done it before right here. Host people are all around us, how did you choose this time. To focus on . I did something oldfashioned, took out a sheet of paper and i drew a timeline and started putting dots on it for important things that happened and there was this incredible convergence during this period of time and because in addition to everything marguerite talked about, the birth of biotech and modern Venture Capital and personal computing and video games and advanced Semi Conductor logic, at the same time this is the birth of the celebrity entrepreneur. This is the time that Silicon Valley launches two of its most important lobbying organizations that kind of set in motion what we see today with the tight connections between dc and Silicon Valley and it was just incredible, this is when stanford starts its office for Technology Licensing and 1970, when that office started in the previous 13 years stanford had made less than 3000 in the combined it of its faculty, staff and students and in Something Like three years that number was 52,000 and now that number is 2 billion. This was something happening in the same period of time as well and i just thought, what was in the water . What is going on here . It had been a place, and oversimplification to say it was just chips but certainly Silicon Valley is an obscure region, mostly spearhead engineers selling to other engineers, suddenly it explodes on the scene in all these different ways and i really wanted to tell that story of the challenge became how do you tell a story that is that complex . So many moving parts . Host we talked about your process and you have this unusual style of weaving together individuals, how did you choose that as a way to unravel what was happening at that time . Sweat and blood. The structure a lot of books like this that you would read and just to give you an overview, i look at seven individuals, did you run through the seven . I look at what they were doing during this window of time and the way that i initially imagined i would write this book is to write about person a during that time, write about person b and what became apparent was i was losing the really cool part of the story which was how all of this intersected, how you would have someone like Regis Mckenna popup, the person who introduced first the microprocessor to the world, than the personal computer and the biotech industry. If i were just telling this story you would never get at, or Don Valentine showing up in these stories. I needed to find a way to do that, if it looks at a period of time and says here is what each of these people is doing is i give a window into what is happening in terms of how Silicon Valley is seen and changing and jump to the next window in time and show what everyone is doing and that enables me to hit those nodes where things are crossing and it is interwoven. Host many people look at Silicon Valley from the outside in terms of heroic individuals, we started talking about steve jobs and you have chosen people who may not have been household names, how did you choose these people . I had three criteria and the criteria were person had to be important or teach something important about the valley. They had to have a truly interesting story. For fun i almost exclusively read fiction. I the narrative arc especially when you are talking about something as complicated as the technology and the notion of building a company, to be able to take a person and tell their story is important so i needed people with interesting stories, to have people who were not as well known. When the book opens i talk about this party i went to a long time ago. And a tech company with a very very famous celebrity ceo, and the lyrics to the song where i did all the work, he did all the credit. I think innovation is a team sport and the analogy i use is of a baseball game where the picture has thrown a perfect game because anyone who was at that game watches in our has the first baseman steps on the bag, the outfielder, making this perfectly calibrated call, the only thing that goes in the history book is the picture through a perfect game. Anyone who was honest about how they succeeded in the valley is going to tell you it was a team effort, that was true then, that is true now. Really wanted a way to tell the story of the people just outside the spotlight without whom the person in the spotlight had been there. Sorry, mike. I will tell the story of mike, always dangerous, jump up and you. A lot of people in this room know who mike is. Having gone to other places asking, not many people do which is always a surprise to me. When people know about the founding of apple and the two steves, steve jobs and Steve Wozniak in the garage in 1976 and somebody else owns a third of apple and that was mike markohliz. We got friendly after my first book which is a biography of bob noyce, a really important friend, since i do a lot of history, there were so many of these startup computer companies, they all have their brilliant engineer, not as brilliant as Steve Wozniak but a marketing guy, not as brilliant as jobs perhaps but what was it that made apple come up . The more i looked into it the more i realized, he would say there were a lot of people, one of those people was mike. When you look at apple in 1976, steve jobs was 21 years old. He had 17 months of business experience in his entire life and that was working at a tech for atari. And Steve Wozniak wanted to stay an engineer at hewlettpackard, didnt want to start a company so how did those two guys end up the youngest company ever to hit the fortune 500 and the answer is mike came in a cadre of people from the microchip industry including jean carter who is here. If you look at apples f1, when they went public, good night, the president , marketing, vp sales, cfo, several major investors like sequoia all brought in by projections to the Semi Conductor industry that is just remarkable. The importance of building, how foolish would it have been to those two guys, to feel like the same success. Your book passing the baton, intergenerational connection, can you say more about how that happened in the valley . A passing of the baton from generation to generation . That is another steve jobs term, talking about something everyone rides over but he was fired from apple, he got on the phone to bob noyce and david hacker and apologized for dropping the baton. He had this sense of the baton being passed from generation to generation and he didnt talk about it but passed it forward. Mark zuckerberg continues to mentor him, he talked with google founders, he did pay it forward and bob noyce called it restocking, something that motivates the financial incentive too, Angel Investors and Venture Capitalists, the sense of paying back into the system what you got out of it. It happened in a number of ways, formal investment through hiring people who are putting them on your board, there have been Informal Networks taking other people under their wings. One of the nicest things, passing the baton, give me the baton. And i really like that idea and it is incumbent with how we make the valleys great strength which is handing things off in a tight network and how do we make sure they are in that network, who are also able to get folded into that you focus on what became a very important network, lets talk about bob taylor. Tell us about his role and how you develop that story and its Ripple Effect in many industries. This is something i am a little ashamed to admit because anyone who knows the inside story of the valley, how does someone not know . I had not been aware how tight the ties where between the arpanet and the birth of the computer industry, that was something i didnt appreciate, so many of the same people who got their funding through our part who helped develop the arpanet who turned around and went to places like xerox park and the computer revolution. Bob taylor, an incredible way to tell the story, this gets back to my point, what he did was undeniably important. Start the arpanet, he goes on and starts, his group developed electronic books, one of his key researchers, Mike Burroughs is one of the most important people, one of the great Search Engines before google get started, and bob taylor, if there is one thing it changes his is that. What a story, bob taylor has a masters degree on psychology in the university of texas. It is responsible for cadre, is beforescience, anything anyone would want working for bob taylor. The story, described as a concert pianist without i talk to hundred people with this book, over here, i felt i should turn on the tape recorder and let these people print what they say, really captures it. It is what we call today distributing more than personal computing. He didnt do it himself, able to find the people and get that moving forward. He was an amazing people to work for, and an amazing person to have work for you and makes for an incredible story. It is important we include extraordinary women who are part of the story. The first woman to take a company public. Tell us how that weaves together with others. A lot of people say to me it is so good you included a woman but that is what i included, a software what i was interested in and i wanted to tell sandys story because she was an example of someone who made this work outside the network we are talking about. She didnt have Don Valentine helping from the beginning. Her startup story is not i was in a garage but i was at my Kitchen Table and gender is part of the story, the way i talk about sandy, she was a double outsider, she was a woman but as big a deal, she was selling software at a time when no one knew what software was. People seriously asked bob taylor how much does the software way . People had no idea. Larry ellison tells the story about getting Venture Capital for oracle. And oracle had several cofounders. Basically being shown the door as soon as the word software came out and secretaries check it back, incredibly shady operations, operating in this world, because she is a woman, they were selling lingerie. She bootstrapped her way up. That is part of the way things happen in Silicon Valley. The story extends forward. There have been reasons to look at how women are leading and have opportunities, do you see that along the way that you tell about being mistaken for a booth babe . Not for sandy. Things that were part of the culture of the time. How gender was viewed. An interesting thing to talk about, one person asked me Silicon Valley, good or evil. The gender, better or worse for women back then. You cant answer that question, a number of women for this book, sandy, another person i talk about, someone who started when the book opens, 12 years old and taking plums for pocket money in the orchards near her home in a bucolic hamlet in california. She ends up immediately after high School Getting a job on a manufacturing line at another one of these vitally important Silicon Valley companies a lot of people dont know about now so that was Something Else that was really exciting for this book, being able to talk about rome. She cant stand to be on the manufacturing line, had to lay behind a desk, she didnt care where and essentially the chief of staff to the president of ibm, rome was acquired by ibm in the 1980s. I talked to a lot of women, the story, very complex. From the inside, there were women programmers, there were women videogame designers, the biotech industry and biology in general have a lot of women and a lot of women in positions of relative power. Their colleagues, one of the boys, at the same time on the outside, they were operating in a remarkably sexist world. I means is on the level of the laws. 1974, before a woman, a married woman could get a credit card without her husbands approval and it was 1980 before the eeoc recognized Sexual Harassment in the workplace. This is an environment in which a company newsletter, the e newsletter can publish a short story, flatout pornographic about a breast enhancing machine in the pages of your company newsletter. The stories i would hear, is that these women were subjected to, to me, that is terrible sexualharassment and the perspective, this is just what happened. From the inside people were treated as equals, sandy has always pointed out she was in charge, that was a logical way for women to go at the time but on the other hand i could actually name for you these women, not like they were clusters of women all over the place and what was accepted as the norm is impossible to imagine now. Of course it is better now than it used to be for women and the way it is going to get better, because it is still not great, we need to have more women and underrepresented by minorities in positions of authority and power and the ability to hire and fire and control budgets and that is the way the change happens. [applause] host i would like to weave in atari. Tell us names you build out of the story of atari, counterculture, the rise, the change and fall of companies. Guest so the atari story, hows story opens with him hearing teargas canisters going off on telegraph avenue when he is working at a tv repair shop as a student at cow. Story starts with the whole battle over people park in the strife this area face, you know the country as a whole face in the reason i do that is its important part of the story and also very interesting and dramatic end terrifying. It is at the same time creates a vietnam war attitude here were really important for establishing the valley. Largely because a lot of the people who ended up going to Companies Like atari particularly if you are graphics expert in the late 60s early 70s the logical place for you to go was to some ford of a defense contractor or the dod itself, first work on some form of simulation or something along those lines and instead they ended up at Companies Like atari and that was important and on a cultural level you had what i think about what happened at this time i think about having this incredibly powerful technology which rich large is the silicon chip, but at this particular time in 1971, intel brings at the first microprocessor and you really see this incredibly powerful Technology Fall into the hands of people who did not trust the prevailing institutions and ways of doing things and i really think that led to this sort of the flowering of innovation around the area. Of the other thing i really like about als story is that everyone knows the story of nolan bush now and it nolan was the ideas guy in a lot of ways behind atari, but again, i mean, is concert pianist without fingers fair to say about nolan . He had some real engineering skills, but he leaned on our incredibly heavily to make all of this work and our is a very generous and talking about this because he feels like nolan needed him to actually build this stuff and he needed nolan to push him to try to do things that al thought were completely absurd, i mean, there were a couple times when al tells the story saying im going to do this for the pleasure of having a blowup in my face and telling nolan i told you you couldnt do it and then it works. Al said is like the dog puppet car, now what you do, so i like that story because so many things that happened in the valley happened in these teams that have these complementary skill sets and you really see that there. We have talked about almost all of the main figures in your book, but what we have one more to talk about and thats bob swanson. Lets introduce him and then we will talk about some other things in the book. Bob swansons story gets folded into the story of neil raymer who is the founder of the office of Technology Licensing at stanford i was telling you about and the birth of the biotech industry is very very interesting in the way the overlap happens is that the patent for recombinant dna, the whole idea to even patent that came from neil raymer who would be the first to tell you he was just a chemical engineer. He had no idea what the heck it meant to build anything in this whole universe. He talked about going on vacation like a 4pound book about like biology 101 and, so neil nonetheless fell like this technology could be the beginning of something huge. He actually drew that analogy to the semiconductor industry, and he had to really really battle and work through the question of , what is the object and the purpose of a university. I mean, how you have a place whose raison detre is into is to increase the Public Knowledge and at the same time patent some of your ideas and how do you decide whose ideas he patent and how do you make sure faculty doesnt end up being pushed in the direction of only pursuing profitable research, i mean, these are hugely important questions. So, at the same time that neil is wrangling with the sorts of questions, bob swanson has just got hired from what was then kleiner and perkins and is literally living on welfare trying to interest people. You know, he basically goes it down a list of people who had attended the sylmar conference on what we would call biotech today and starts calling them cold and saying do you think we could make any money from recombinant dna and they keep hanging up on him and tell he gets to herb boyer of you cf who is one of the two inventors along with stan cowan at stanford of the common it dna process, so thats a really interesting story because bob swanson was so persistence and really went into this without any idea of how to build a Biotech Company and they ended up building a company that in some ways was in the beginning almost like a precursor to the Virtual Corporation at a time when people didnt even think that way and that was actually largely due to calm perkins that was calms idea. Thank you so much for introducing us to all these main characters of the story and i would like to now pull back and look at the broader stage, the larger ecosystem happening. You have talked about the Important Role of Venture Capital, so could you talk about how that the catalyst that it was then and how you would compare it to how the venture world contributes to the valleys ecosystem. This is an interesting question because Silicon Valley is no longer home to just the outsiders; right . It has become a very mainstream place to pitch a money, to send your the best and brightest from various universities, people who want to make their mark on the valley excuse me, on the planet and also people who just want to make money all come here now and of course, there have always been people here who just want to make money i dont want to do taint it where there used to be this golden age with power to the people and now its not because i think that is an easy trap to fall into a nice dont want to fall into it. I think im not the first person to say theres an enormous amount of money chasing some ideas and that, you know it means that we are seeing things get funded that sometimes its not easy to understand exactly why. [laughter] very diplomatic. Another then and now question. Today Silicon Valley you can say a contentious relationship somewhat with government thinking about nsa, airbnb grade leaders and others, but that wasnt the case in the time period and what you time about. Can you talk about the role of government then and how you compare that with the valley in washington now . Sure. So, the federal governments was vitally important in launching the valley. 100 literally 100 of the early microchips went to the fence uses and the biggest employer out here was lucky, which was a major contractor. All of this this was vitally important to getting the valley started and in some sense the federal government through its basic Research Contract sort of as an early Venture Capitalist in a lot of ways except not necessarily expecting a return, which is always nice. I think that the other thing that i just want to point out on just a little bit of a tangent on the government while im talking about places i think its a misperception of the valley that what made the valley with start up and also people who say the spirit of the valley is lost today because there is some any Big Companies because time and again the way the Small Companies got started is the founders cannot to work for the companies so i just want to throw that out there is something to bear in mind, so after that first splash sort of in the 50s and 60s with the federal government acted in all the ways i just described, in the 1970s what started have been was the valley realized federal government actually has some real impact on how our lives are lived and their is two key pieces of legislation that i wont go into into great depth. One was the Capital Gains tax cut and the other was a change in the law about who could invest, what Pension Funds were allowed to invest in and those were relaxed and suddenly it was possible to invest in very high Risk Companies and that the amount of Venture Capital that rushed into the valley was enormous. The route this time throughout this time the valley really was seen as the golden child of the golden states and part of the Semi Conductor industry, for example, could make legitimate arguments about their importance not only to the economy, but to National Security that led to really significant legislation and defensive moves against japanese imports, for example, and as you keep going up even begin to see a little bit of questions, so the microsoft trials at the end of the 90s is a good example of how things start to shift. Still, by and large ea Silicon Valley is the attitude from dc, but now its really different. The valley Biggest Companies are in the crosshairs of the both the left who see them as to powerful and concentrated and the right to see them as to leftleaning and its a tough place to be and i think that some of the questions that are being raised or importance and really really really tough. So, we have a fake news problem. We clearly have a fake news problem, but who gets to decide whats fake . I mean, are we going to ask Mark Zuckerberg and Cheryl Sander what is fake news, i mean, thats not the solution. Are we going to crowd source what is fake news . Thats not going to work them as part of the problem is that we can even agree whats real or fake news right now. Everyone thinks they know, but im same there are two very different perspectives on that, so i dont know where thats going to go, but i can say that i have watched decade after decade after decade after decade people talking about whats going to kill Silicon Valley and it was going to be the oil shocks were going to kill Silicon Valley, japanese competition was going to kill Silicon Valley, y2k is going to kill Silicon Valley, but. Com. Best in the valley just kind of keeps going on. This is the first time i heard people say i wonder if we kind of want Silicon Valley to die a little bit . Is it to powerful . That is something new pic that really is categorically different from anything we have seen before and i think its a reflection of people coming to realize, you know a reflection of your phones. People have come to realize my gosh, this is my life, i mean, this thing knows where i am, who are my friends, who i love, what are places i go to. It sees my pictures, you know . It knows a lot to it knows about your work life, your bank and that i think is what is making people say wait a second, whos behind all this . I would like to go back to what you are talking about this incredible track record or reinvention, even despite pundits saying its going to die and fail. What you think is that secret sauce of the valleys regeneration . So, i would point to first of all the comcast. I think the most important thing i would point to his immigrants. In the valley even at the time im looking at in this book already the percentage of the population in the valley that was born outside the country is running at about twice the us as a whole. Now the statistics that i have seen out of actually joint venture Silicon Valley, their report on the valley shows that of the people working in the science and tech in the valley who are between the ages of 25 and 44, 66 of them, two thirds of them were born outside the us and for the women its 76 . This really speaks to one of the great secrets of the valley has been, we have been able to draw from the population of the planet, you know, sort of the best and the brightest and, i mean, when you think of the kind of person who decides to pick up and leave their country and go start someplace else, i mean, that kind of risk taking has been at the heart of the valley from the very very beginning when people looked out here and saw nothing. Why would anyone ever come here . So, right now, i mean, you have more than half of the unicorn the unicorn companies, the companies privately held with the valuation of a billion dollars or more, more than half of them have a counter or cofounder born outside of the United States in this to me has been the secret sauce like this constant refresh in the system and whenever people ask me what is the biggest threat to the valley i always say its screwing down that nozzle on immigration and if you choose to couple that with cutting public education, you know. I have no words. [applause]. With risk taking comes failure and then sometimes resilience. Tellis not everything is up and to the right and thats the nature of being on the edge. What are some of the stories you discovered during this time period not only where companies mourn and industries grow, but failure. Can you tell us about some of that . Actually, i think for every Single Person i wrote about there was a moment when they were sure that it was all going to end, i mean, sandy, what you gave yourself like x number of months and then forget it im going to be a consultant, you know . Pardon . Shes going to be a doctor and this i know i mean something that just its really important to remember because this is the book as sony books are about the people who made it. Its incredibly hard, i mean, andy grove told this story about when he went to intel from fairchild and there was i think a simon and garfunkel song called taking it, i might be faking it im not really making it and he thought that song was directed at him. [laughter] i think that having the ability to persist in the face of those sort of intense selfdoubt is a really important attributes of the people who have been successful. At the same time it does require you not to be foolish about it and to understand, okay, for me to redirect. This is it working this way and i need to do Something Different or even this is working this way , i mean, the story of a tarry where the people inside atari started saying very early, okay the 2600 which was the famous atari that you could plug the cartridges into, this was absolutely the most incredible, not just way that sort of like cultural phenomenon of the 1980s and people inside atari very loudly among them was al were saying what today we would say we need to disrupt ourselves and have the next thing right to go and they couldnt get any traction, so i think sometimes the frustration is not actually due to yourself and that is another sad fact of doing this and sometimes you have to decide okay, i need to change our making this happen. This persistency talked about and also resilience of flexibility, what are some other attributes you have seen that made this set of troublemakers or other disruptors so successful . I think its a strange combination of what i characterized as persistence and audacity because i think often times the sort of most audacious people are the ones who go jumping off a cliff and then when they land they dont truly know what to do and so what you need are the people who or to be the person who has those kinds of huge risk taking ideas, actually knows why you are doing it and what youre going to do if it works or doesnt work and i think those are actually two really important attributes. I will save another one because i know youre going to ask me about it at the end, but i do think that is quite important. Of the other thing i would really point to is, i think that right now like this book is called troublemakers and i think that its easy to mistake the means for the end sometimes. These people were making trouble , not because that was their goal in life, but because there was something they needed to do or wanted to do that they could into inside these structures that exist at the time, so any time you are pushing against the existing structures you are making trouble for everyone around you and i think that recognizing that you arent just being reckless or trying to cause disruption for the sake of doing it, which sometimes it seems like its a badge of honor that people talk about now. This was just an incidental effect of the larger purpose that people had in mind. In the book you talk about sort of missed you want to dispel, the great man approached the history that you want to counterbalance, lessons learned. What have we not talked about that you would like todays technologists to take away from your book . That we have not already talked about ourselves tonight, well, going to mention what i think is a really underappreciated aspect of people who really get things done in the valley, which is humility i think that very often the people who are truly excellent dont mistake their own egos for their products for their companies and they just sort of understand that if what they are doing is great that is what really matters and i think that that is an underappreciated important aspect to being a successful business person now so the other thing i would really point to is knowing how to be a team player. I think a venture actually she is the person that came up with the term unicorn company, she famously said no one likes to make money for a holes and actually think thats true and so i think not being a jerk, knowing how to be part of a team , remembering that most companies that you can name had two or more founders have some like fairchild had eight founders. This is something you need to learn to play with others. Lets get the audience into the conversation. Of the first question is do you see similarities between bob taylor and steve jobs . Bumper charismatic, visionaries who inspired teams of people more technical than themselves to create Technical Innovations that changed computing but the one and research in the other in products, but both could be dismissive of those that did not get it, similarities or differences . Definite similarities and they were actually both adopted and both told by their parents that they unlike most kids who came to parents who just had to take whatever showed up, they had been chosen specially by their parents and so there are some real analogies there and i do think they were both absolutely brilliant people with no time to waste. Heres a question. Had you felt fit bill gates into your story . He was from seattle, so this is actually something that my next book whatever it is i hope to address more. I keep my focus i mean as i told you this was a very complicated book and so my focus is tight, tight, tight on the valley. Obviously when you talk about the birth of ibm pc that i need to be talking about gates and of course gates comes up in the early meetings were a stack about you need to pay for software and this sort of thing, but he is very much part of this generation. I dont talk about him explicitly, but he is just right in there, i mean, a lot of these things that we just kicked through with having a cofounder, everything i talked about i think would absolutely apply there as well. Next question. How will the increasing gap between high specialized Technological Advancements such as self driving cars or growth drones and global poverty and a need for basic Services Play out . Dont ask a historian to predict the future. What i can say is that this sort of widening gap is something that people, i mean, i find a quote from john young in 1980 talking about how not just this technology, but this place is going to completely bifurcate and were going to lose the middle and, i mean, everything that was asked in that question is a valid point to make and i would also point out the roles this technology plays now in developing economies, i mean, cell phones have been absolutely essential for micro lending and all sorts of other things that are happening, i mean, i dont know how many of you ever go to the tech museum of innovation awards in sort of the social realm and doing well for the world, but they are remarkable to see how this technology is put in the service of higher ideals. I was just talking to someone who is working on a not for prophet to use Block Chain Technology to certify the validity of elections in places like columbia and so i think there is a lot you know, technology is a tool that we need to figure out all the different ways that can be used. Recently you told me you had been in a conversation with it interesting young business person and think about whats next for the valley or the threats to it. Lets talk about what you see developing now for Silicon Valley. I think some of you know we have already hit in terms of the threat that i see i mean as i said foremost among those is slowing down immigration to do that to me is the one to be most worried about and i think in terms of whats coming next, i mean, the valley has had this incredible ability to reinvent itself again and again and again like to me that so much more of an interesting question then why did Silicon Valley happen here. Theres been regional economies forever. What is interesting is how on earth has the valley gone from sort of instrumentation to microchips to the stuff that im talking about in this book to the Networking Companies to you now, cloud and social mobile and now, we have got all of this ai stuff happening in his like again and again and again that sort of reinvention question, so do i think the valley is going to continue . Yes. Do i know how . No. You are hated historian you are a historian and thank you for your views really on how History Matters with whats happening today in this question comes from facebook lifestream, what are your thoughts on places that are trying to copy Silicon Valley and is it possible to have a second Silicon Valley or other places that have their own distinct model . Absolutely sick they exist today, i mean, i think the notion that it is a zero sum game for regional tech economies is flat out wrong, i mean, we were just talking about seattle, for heaven sake. I mean, seattle incredible and all of this country and all over the world you have these enclaves of innovation without which Silicon Valley would not exist, so i was just asked this question in my hometown of tulsa, oklahoma. How do we become Silicon Valley and i think that welcome i said first of all you need to figure out why you would want to become Silicon Valley. The second thing that i pointed to, i mean, to take the tulsa example is you sort of need to figure out what is it you are already doing that you are uniquely good at and how do you parlay that into being part of this economy, signing in total sum, williams pipeline had all this pipeline that was empty and someone had the idea of filling it with fiber optic cables and that became will tell which became worldcom which formed into mci and that was building on an existing infrastructure or corning new york where the gorelick glass and iphone guerrilla glass and iphone came from. Corning new york has been in the glass business at least since the 19th century. I dont know exactly when he got started picking those are places that have figured out that we are going to copy Silicon Valley. Silicon valley arose at a specific time, specific place. A unique confluence of very sophisticated technology, namely the transistor, showing up in a place that was still largely agricultural and then having the ability to essentially design this spoke ecosystem around the hightech industry and that is just not going to happen again. To say, well, we want to build and Silicon Valley having you can go to places and they have literally built universities with red tiled roofs and, you know, thats not going to do it. [laughter] you had talked some about unintended consequences and some of the costs that come for people like the middle class and others and this question talks about as various costofliving increases do you think barriers of is becoming an assessable to new people and ideas and perhaps missing out on new innovations . I do worry about this. I worry about it. I think there are plenty of people who are willing to sacrifice for a few years. They come over here. They are two new relationship. They dont have children and they are willing to go for it. I do worry about what comes next, though. I do worry, i mean, i live in palo alto, and basically none of our teachers, none of our firefighters, none of our police, none of them can afford to live in the community anymore and people are dealing with two hour commutes each way and we are all dealing with all that traffic, so that really does worry me and then i put on my historian hat and literally in the early 1970s people are talking about its too crowded, too expensive and so it seems really really really difficult right now and, you know, San Francisco in some instances will be the testing ground on this because there is a lot of activism around Affordable Housing and as such and a lot of these issues because we come up with it and San Francisco some suddenly is experiencing it with something new on this scale and we have seen it in the battle over the google buses, for example, socalled google buses in this question of how do we have a Livable Community when there are such a enormous buildings being built and some people building the fortunes are trying to answer these questions i would like to close our conversation with you putting your historian hat on to think about another sort of word of advice you might give to a young troublemaker for the next generation following. What is one word of advice you would give and can you tell us the story . Yes. Well, this is my word which is humility and i talked about the lube it why i think that matters another word i think i could have used his balance because someone who is full of humility to the extent that they never promote themselves or their ideas, obviously, thats not going to work. I would say that in general taking advantage of where you are is key because and its not just in the valley. Although, its very strong here. Find people who had done this before and get their advice. It doesnt have to be a perfect analog. You just need someone who has done this before and get their help. Its really important. Thank you. This is Leslie Berlin and her hair book troublemakers. She will be downstairs to sign. Please join me in giving a warm thank you. [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [applause]. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] you are watching the tv on cspan2, television for serious readers. Here is a lineup at 6 30 p. M. Eastern jake bernstein, senior journalist with the Investigative Team of that broke the panama paper story talks about what was revealed in the documents. 7 45 p. M. Voting College Academic affairs dean examines the value and impact of higher education. 9 00 p. M. Vanessa newman reports on how money from illegally purchased goods is filtered to organize crime. On book tvs afterwards at 10 00 p. M. Former clinton administrated official and Georgetown University law professor Peter Edelman argues courts are exploiting the poor by charging excessive fees for minor crimes. We wrap up our prime time programming at 11 00 p. M. With lee edwards, historian of american conservatism recalling his life, career and key moments in the conservative movement. That all happens tonight on cspan2 book tv, 72 hours of nonfiction authors and books this weekend. Television for serious readers. Heres a look at some of the best books of the year according to library journal. National book awardwinning author Sherman Alexi described his relationship with his mother in you have to say you love me journalist Jessica Bruder looks at the lives of Migrant Workers in the us in nomad land. In ghost of the innocent man, Benjamin Rocklin reports on a North Carolina man falsely convicted of rape in 1988 and his path to exoneration over two decades later. New yorker staff writer david grand recalls the murders of members of the osage Indian Nation in the 1920s in the killers of the flower man. Wrapping up our look at Library Journals best books of 2017 is hunger, roxane gay spots on body image. Could you talk to us about like what was hard about writing this for you . Everything. You want me to elaborate . Sure. [laughter] it was a difficult book to write. I sold this book just before bad feminist, came out and i was thinking what i want in my next nonfiction project to be and i thought the book i want to write least is a book about fatness and then i realized its the book i should probably write the most and my dad always tells me to do something no one else is doing if you want to achieve success and a lot of people write about fatness from the perspective of having already figured out their body and have lost a lot of weight at a so see a woman on the cover of her book standing and half of her formally fat pants and shes like i did it and i thought i cant write that book yet and i want to write that book, so why dont i tell the story of my body today without apology. Just explanations of this is my fatah body and this is what its like to be in this world in this body. Some of these authors have appeared on book tv work you can watch them on our website, book tv. Org. [inaudible conversations] good evening, everyone. Welcome to the jewish museum. My name is