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1440 Explores

1440 Explores

The Origins of Silicon Valley

Apr 23, 2026 · 34m

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About this episode

Silicon Valley wasn’t supposed to happen. A stretch of California orchard land somehow became the place that built the modern world: chips, PCs, the internet, the smartphone, and now AI. But the real story isn’t the garage myth. It’s a series of contradictions hiding in plain sight. So what actually built Silicon Valley, and what does that tell us about where it’s going next? We'll unpack: The Cold War military money that quietly funded Silicon Valley's rise, before anyone called it that. How a Stanford dean's real estate gamble changed the course of American technology. Why the Space Race is what made the microchip cheap. How a generation of anti-establishment hippies built one of the…