Silicon Valley on the Couch | Revisionist History

Silicon Valley on the Couch | Revisionist History | Malcolm Gladwell

Рет қаралды 15,309

6 ай бұрын

Why is Silicon Valley where it is? How did a narrow valley in California become the epicenter of the computer age? People usually say it’s because of Stanford, or the weather. But the answer may be something much more … Freudian. In this episode, Malcolm puts William Shockley-inventor of the transistor, winner of the Nobel Prize, father of Silicon Valley-on the couch.
Season 9 (2023)
#podcast #revisionisthistory #malcolmgladwell
ABOUT REVISIONIST HISTORY
Revisionist History is Malcolm Gladwell’s journey through the overlooked and the misunderstood. Every podcast episode re-examines something from the past - an event, a person, an idea, even a song - and asks whether we got it right the first time. Because sometimes the past deserves a second chance.
ABOUT MALCOLM GLADWELL
Malcolm Gladwell is president and co-founder of Pushkin Industries. He is a journalist, a speaker, and the author of six New York Times bestsellers including The Tipping Point, Blink, Outliers, David and Goliath, and Talking to Strangers. He has been a staff writer for the New Yorker since 1996. He is a trustee of the Surgo Foundation and currently serves on the board of the RAND Corporation.
ABOUT PUSHKIN INDUSTRIES
Pushkin Industries is an audio production company dedicated to creating premium content in a collaborative environment. Co-founded by Malcolm Gladwell and Jacob Weisberg in 2018, Pushkin has launched seven new shows into the top 10 on Apple Podcasts (Against the Rules, The Happiness Lab, Solvable, Cautionary Tales, Deep Cover, The Last Archive, and Lost Hills), in addition to producing the hugely successful Revisionist History. Pushkin’s growing audiobook catalogue includes includes the bestselling biography “Fauci,” by Michael Specter, “Hasta La Vista, America,” Kurt Andersen’s parody Trump farewell speech performed by Alec Baldwin, "Takeover" by Noah Feldman, and “Talking to Strangers,” from Pushkin co-founder Malcolm Gladwell. Pushkin is dedicated to producing audio in any format that challenges listeners and inspires curiosity and joy.
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Пікірлер: 37

@zazek84 5 ай бұрын

Freaking amazing episodie. I cut it before the twist and went and watched all of documentaries that shamelessly talk about the weather and Stanford hahaha. Imagine my surprise! Amazing!

@martynhaggerty2294 6 ай бұрын

Great conclusion.. heart-warming and challenging at the same time.. thanks Malcolm

@danosdotnl 2 ай бұрын

Wow I watched a podcast today, amaamamamamzing day! /s

@luv2dancesalsa465 6 ай бұрын

Fabulous storytelling, as per usual, Malcom. Thank you! * close to his Mom… awesome!

@maxheadrom3088 6 ай бұрын

At that time RCA was called RCA-Marconi, btw. GE, Westinghouse, Menlo Park, Kodak, Polaroid, Burroughs, Digital Control Data, Xerox and the small company that produced the first fiber optic was in the NE. Also, the HAL plant was in Urbana, Illinois. Correction: it was an Administration Professor from Stanford, Frederick Terman, who helped Hewlett and Packard to stay in California. Terman and Schokley have a couple of things in common - both are considered the fathers of Silicon Valley and both were eugenicists. California über alles!

@yogadoodles 6 ай бұрын

His mother graduated from Stanford. As a homeschooled kid he had Stanford tutors. Makes sense why he’d open his business there. Why wasn’t this included?

@geephlips 6 ай бұрын

Funny thing is I wrote a song about this subject about 10 years ago. Looking back it’s almost a 3-minute musical synopsis of this episode. One more thing. An episode on Claude Shannon would make a great companion to this one on Shockley. Shannon was as brilliant as Shockley and arguably more influential on the modern world, but not many people outside of computer science know who he is.

@OrigamiMarie 6 ай бұрын

No, Freud isn't maligned because he believed in emotions. Freud is maligned because his beliefs about how women work, are not based in any kind of fact. Freud is maligned because he didn't discover or invent anything about psychology, he just sat and thought about stuff and wrote it down, claiming it as universal truth.

@maxheadrom3088 6 ай бұрын

And before that there was Bell Labs ... and before that there was a Professor at MIT who kept telling his students to go west. A couple of his students - David Packard and Bill Hewlett - did that and set shop in California.

@barbaracastleton4337 6 ай бұрын

Who knew? Certainly not me, as I'd never heard of William Shockley before. So, thank you for having a teaser/title I could relate to, because this was a completely captivating episode, and so cannily constructed that when Malcolm asks, "Do you know why the book was named Broken Genius?" , I wasn't ready to learn about the reality of Shockley's childhood or adult quirks.

@dgar7272 6 ай бұрын

Haha Excellent, entertaining, inspirational, out of the box, and always educational. The most basic and simplistic suppositions are probably the best answers when human behavior is involved. History shows that being that smart and equally screwed up is rather common, but at the end of the day we are all nonetheless humans just with a different ratio of brains and hearts. I’m definitely for his mom’s monument.😂

@leekyoverhere 6 ай бұрын

Wow. I really enjoyed this one. Interesting how extreme intelligence is often accompanied by extreme malaise

@richardwallerstein539 6 ай бұрын

Silicon Valley is near UC Berkeley which had just run the Manhattan Project and had Lawrence Livermore Labs. Shockley won the Nobel Prize as had several at Berkeley

@richardwallerstein539 6 ай бұрын

Shockley won the Nobel Prize is physics in 1956, but UC Berkeley professors won the Nobel Prize in physics in 1938, 1951, 1959, 1960, 1964, and 1968. The movie Oppenheimer is set partly at Berkeley where Oppenheimer was a professor along with many of the Nobel Prize winners. So in addition to his mom, Shockley was moving to the hottest place on the planet for physics.

@planetarysolidarity 6 ай бұрын

I will contribute to funding that statue.

@PhoebeFayRuthLouise 6 ай бұрын

Same!

@tracywilliams7929 6 ай бұрын

Shockley was a Californian and may have wanted to feel at home. One thing notes is the distinctive architecture of tech headquarters which is largely glass and embraces sunshine and outdoor nature parks. So yes, programmers do love sunlight. A friend of mine who attended Harvard Business warned me tha weather was horrible, just cloudy all the time. Thats why students spent so much time indoors studying. You'd also have to ask why yet another tech hub relocated from Edison NJ to an orange grove in Hollywood CA. The motion picture industry packed up and left and never looked back East. Was it the weather? Fred Allen famously said "Hollywood is great - if you’re an orange!" Shockley had a horrible relationship with his mother. She made her disappointment clear when he scored only 130 on his IQ test. From that point on he seemed bent on proving himself, no matter at whose expense. Even his own son's. Then so upset when a woman - a NEGRO woman - scored 140 IQ in between Shockley's shocking race theories and her volunteering to be impregnated by him. All this in the interest of eugenics of course.

@nasirfazal5440 6 ай бұрын

I was the youngest son of 6 boys.l was the best science graduate in my country and received a gld medal from the president in science,did graduate work at MIT. I was rejected by Bell Labs. for a job. .Prof.Dr.Nasir Fazal gold medalist Cambridge USA.

@richardwallerstein539 6 ай бұрын

Freud’s great grand nephew confounded Netflix.

@KlingbergWingMkII 6 ай бұрын

It's the Santa Cruz Mountains. Having lived here since '82 I don't think I've ever seen the "Santa Clara Mountains" Proofing, baby, proofing

@HEWhitney1 6 ай бұрын

The Santa Cruz mountains (Scott's Valley) was where the silicon came from.

@KlingbergWingMkII 6 ай бұрын

@@HEWhitney1 That has nothing to do with my point. In the video the narrator says, "Santa Clara Mountains". No such mountains exist here that I know of. As to your point, the valley really got it's tech start with the Navy base (Ames) and when Lockheed moved its missile division (I used to work for them) up here from SoCal. That influx of engineers laid the knowledge base for the employees needed to make Silicon Valley a boom "town".

@HEWhitney1 6 ай бұрын

@@KlingbergWingMkII sorry I didn't make myself. The silicon itself came from the Santa Margarita sandstone in Scotts Valley and Zayante Creek.

@richard9827 6 ай бұрын

Born in Palo Alto 70 years ago. It’s technically the Santa Cruz Mountain. One mountain with many peaks. Mountain View is correct. Mountains View would be incorrect 😂