The Living Group House with Max Bodach
Oct 15, 2026 · 31 min · 9 segments
Tim Hwang and Rachel Reses are joined by FAI Executive Vice President Max Bodach to talk through FAI’s…
Oct 15, 2026 · 31 min · 9 segments
Tim Hwang and Rachel Reses are joined by FAI Executive Vice President Max Bodach to talk through FAI’s…
Max BodachGuest
Tim HwangHostRachel ResesHost
I want to bring you on because this past week, I think it's in the past week, FAI did something which is, I guess, a little bit unusual as far as think tanks go.
If you go to tribes.thefai.org, we have officially released the 2026 Field Guide to the Tribes of Silicon Valley, which is a quiz you can take to be placed into your respective tribe in Silicon Valley.
And This has caused a lot of joy, consternation, worry, critique, and discussion online.
And I guess, Max, maybe a good place to start is, do you want to talk a little bit about why we did this field guide and what it's for? Yeah.
The initial impetus for the tribes quiz was the head honcho of FAI, Zach Graves, tweeting out as a joke, would it be helpful for us to write a memo to policymakers explaining all the different tribes of Silicon Valley, right? All of the sort of weird intellectual subcultures that have been bubbling up in the ferment of the bay for the past 30, 40 years.
We talked to some of our friends in government and they're all like, yeah, that would actually be really helpful.
And started riffing with the idea and eventually landed on the idea that it was perhaps a memo was less useful here than a quiz and a phrase book and a big sort of interactive map of tribes that you could play around with and try to track the intellectual genealogies and lineages because Part of an ideological ferment means that also everyone's at one point in the same house parties, at the same group houses, at the same conferences and whatnot.
And so I tried to capture some of that, even though I think it's a bit of an exercise in futility in trying to exactly granularly map every single little fissure and schism that has ever happened in the Bay Area sort of tech community over the past 30 years.
So I think it's a very imperfect effort to try to taxonomize all the different groups and different ideas that have percolated in the Bay for the past couple decades.
I want to bring you on because this past week, I think it's in the past week, FAI did something which is, I guess, a little bit unusual as far as think tanks go.
If you go to tribes.thefai.org, we have officially released the 2026 Field Guide to the Tribes of Silicon Valley, which is a quiz you can take to be placed into your respective tribe in Silicon Valley.
And This has caused a lot of joy, consternation, worry, critique, and discussion online.
And I guess, Max, maybe a good place to start is, do you want to talk a little bit about why we did this field guide and what it's for? Yeah.
The initial impetus for the tribes quiz was the head honcho of FAI, Zach Graves, tweeting out as a joke, would it be helpful for us to write a memo to policymakers explaining all the different tribes of Silicon Valley, right? All of the sort of weird intellectual subcultures that have been bubbling up in the ferment of the bay for the past 30, 40 years.
We talked to some of our friends in government and they're all like, yeah, that would actually be really helpful.
And started riffing with the idea and eventually landed on the idea that it was perhaps a memo was less useful here than a quiz and a phrase book and a big sort of interactive map of tribes that you could play around with and try to track the intellectual genealogies and lineages because Part of an ideological ferment means that also everyone's at one point in the same house parties, at the same group houses, at the same conferences and whatnot.
And so I tried to capture some of that, even though I think it's a bit of an exercise in futility in trying to exactly granularly map every single little fissure and schism that has ever happened in the Bay Area sort of tech community over the past 30 years.
So I think it's a very imperfect effort to try to taxonomize all the different groups and different ideas that have percolated in the Bay for the past couple decades.
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