2min snip

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin cover image

Marc Andreessen

Tetragrammaton with Rick Rubin

NOTE

Silicon Valley takes its roots from California a frontier for innovation

Silicon Valley has a long history that dates back to the 1920s and 1930s, evolving into a hub attracting bright minds due to a network effect. California's allure as a frontier where individuals could carve their own paths and create something new is emphasized. The state's inclination towards creativity, experimentation, and pioneering spirit is likened to a dream factory where technology is built and dreams are manifested by Hollywood. California's mystique as a land of opportunity and innovation transcends its challenges, with iconic symbols like palm trees symbolizing its transformative nature and the 'made up' essence of its identity.

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Speaker 1
there's a natural kind of continuation thing that takes place. And then there's also a long history to it, which is Silicon Valley really started in like the 1920s, 1930s, even with technologies before the computer. So it's running on like 100 years of what you might call a network effect where it would basically meaning the next really bright person who's technical, technologically oriented is more likely to come to the place where all the other smart people are than to go anywhere else. So there's like a positive feedback loop that kind of just keeps spinning. And then quite honestly, I think there's just something really, I mean, but California has its problems and they are profound, but there's something magical about California. There has been something magical about California that predates the entertainment industry, the predates, you know, the tech industry. And it's basically the California is the frontier. And the same mentality that led to the original settlement. You know, California was the last, you know, sort of the furthest thing to the West that was settled. You know, it was sort of, you know, it was ungoverned for a long time. You had the gold, you know, the gold rush. The Wild West. And then what happened was there was this just like selection process where if you were, you know, if you were oriented around status and respect, you want to succeed on the East Coast in New York and Boston. And if you wanted to go carve your own path and create something new, you went to, you went to, you went basically as far away as East Coast as you could get. And that's basically right, right, right, right, right, where we sit right now. Like you could call it like creative, you know, people experiment, right? Like the blaze new trails in like every way, including like how you live your life. You know, California is famously the home of thousands of cults, you know, I've been developed here. I think it's actually no accident that California is sort of a, we call it sort of the stack, you know, California builds the technology of dreams. And then we also, you know, Hollywood and entertainment business, you know, actually makes the dreams, right? And so it's like this sort of integrated dream factory. You know, is it ever really quite real? You know, Los Angeles is like famously a fake city, right? It was just like a desert. And then they just basically, it was the Theranos of cities when it first got started and they ran newspaper ads in East Coast cities with like drawings of like palm trees, like, you know, this lush paradise and then people would buy porcelain and they come out here and it was just desert and then they famously had to go get the water from Central Valley and that led to fly in palm trees. Yeah, that turns out, it turns out the palm trees are imports. Like, it turns out palm trees is this actually one of my big breakthrough moments in understanding California, which is the palm trees are not native. Like, it's just like this made up, you know, basically, they're the most iconic kind of thing for California, basically. It's just like a made up important.

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