#216 Katherine Boyle - America's Defense Tech Renaissance

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Catherine Boyle, welcome to the show.

Thanks so much for having me.

Thanks for being here.

Thanks for being here.

So

you came on my radar, what, about a couple of weeks ago from a mutual friend.

And

so I looked into you and

you're invested in all of the companies that just fascinate me every day.

And I'm brand new to, you know, kind of diving into the tech space.

And

man, like what a...

This has been mind-blowing for me just to be able to talk to

these people who are just on a whole nother operating field as as everybody else, and learning about

some of the innovations and just talking to American innovators, which to be honest, you know, in the past couple years, I haven't had

a lot of hope in our country.

But since diving into the tech space and seeing, I mean, we really do have the world's best innovators.

We do.

And we attract that.

And these people come from all over the world to come here and live the American dream.

And I personally needed that to restore some hope in this country.

And

so, and so, like I said, you're invested in a lot of those companies and a lot more than I even know about.

And so, it's just, it's an honor to have you here today.

And I've been looking forward to this.

It's an honor to be here.

And I always say, I come bearing good news.

Usually, after people talk to me, they are very optimistic.

And I always have to warn people.

I am in the business of optimism, right?

Like, I'm an early stage investor.

I'm always thinking that a company, you know, I only invest if I think a company is going to become some extraordinary movement.

But I agree with you.

I mean, the last few years, what we have seen as investors in, you know, the American Dynamism ecosystem, the companies that are building for defense tech, it did not exist five years ago.

It just did not, like, there was not the enthusiasm or the excitement.

DOD wasn't excited about buying from startups.

It's a complete 180.

And so I always like when people say they meet these founders and they have hope for America, it's like, yeah, every day I get to meet them.

And I think that's why I'm such an optimist, too, is because I get to see on the ground floor these young engineers who are just incredibly patriotic.

Their patriotism, I always say, you know, I was patriotic because, you know, we were of the generation that remembers 9-11.

Like we were coming of age in 9-11, it changed our lives.

These kids weren't even born.

You know, like they have no recollection of some of the things that we understand.

And I think because of that, they have this youthful optimism of loving their country and wanting to build for the next generation of defense.

So it kind of keeps me going too.

I think I'm like you were, it's tempting to blackpill.

It's just, it's good to see.

Like it's, you haven't, I haven't seen that in Americans

in a long time.

I'm not just talking about the past four years.

I'm talking a long time.

I've not seen,

I've just not seen that.

And,

and,

and even, I mean, we were talking, we were chatting at breakfast a little bit about, you know, was it, I don't know how many years ago, it didn't seem long ago that Silicon Valley almost seemed

it seemed anti-American and zero patriotism.

And in the past, man, I would say in the past, what, year and a half, maybe?

And that's just from, you know, I haven't been looking into this very long, but maybe in the past year and a half, it seems like it's doing a 180.

It really is.

And very concentrated on defense tech and a lot of areas where we've been, I think we're weak on, you know, compared to a lot of our adversaries.

Totally.

So that'll be really, I know you have a huge part in that.

So I can't wait to get to that.

But

I'd like to do a life story on you and uh that's kind of my specialty here and so how you got into all this um which is also fascinating to me because you're not a tech person not a tech person and i want involved and i'm not an i'm not a tech person but i'm just i'm i'm just infatuated with everything that's going on so do a life story and then get to you know i'd like to talk about some mistakes you've made and some of the big wins and and what it's like getting in on the on the ground level at some of these companies so yeah a lot of mistakes we can talk about perfect

But

everybody starts out with an introduction.

So here we go.

Catherine Boyle, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of the firm's American Dynamism Practice.

Coined the term American Dynamism in 2021 to refer to companies supporting the national interests across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics,

and critical infrastructure.

Wrote the original American Dynamism Manifesto to encourage founders, veterans, and engineers to build companies for America.

Since then, Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions of dollars

in iconic defense tech companies including SpaceX, Andoral Industries, Shield AI, Sauronic Technologies, Castillion, Corp., Apex Space, CAPE, and many others.

Prior to becoming a VC, you were a reporter at the Washington Post and are a rabid defender of free speech and free thought.

BA in government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford, and a master's of public advocacy from the National University of Ireland, Galloway.

A mother and a practicing Catholic, you often write about the importance of building technology that strengthens the most important institution in America, the family.

And probably a lot more, but

I think that's most of the important stuff.

So

then before we get too in the weeds, I have a Patreon account, and that's our subscription account.

They've been with us since the beginning here, and we've turned it into quite the community and very engaged.

And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question before we get rolling here.

So this is from Ian Lane.

Given your work with the American Dynamism Initiative, what role do you see startups playing

in revitalizing U.S.

military industrial capacity, especially as peer adversaries like China scale up defense innovation through state-backed efforts?

Yeah, I mean, it is.

The startup community has to fix this problem because it's not going to come from the traditional primes.

It's not going to come from family-owned machine shops.

The new technology needed, particularly on the industrial-based side, is so important.

You need hardware, you need software, but most importantly, you need people who understand how to build for production.

So I think that startups are going to be, you know, they are integral.

That's the whole thesis of American Dynamism, which we'll get into.

But the real thing we need to be focusing on, and I think a lot of people don't recognize that, you know, they know Android, they know SpaceX, those are companies that sell directly to the government.

There's a whole other category of company that's building for the legacy primes.

It's building satellite buses or building automated machine shops so that you can build more critical parts for aerospace and defense.

So there's this whole category of tier one suppliers that are building up the defense industrial base, working with the primes and working with the new primes like SpaceX and Palantir and Androll.

So it is incumbent upon these young founders, these very technical founders, to be able to build as quickly as possible, but really to focus on production.

My focus as an investor, you know, there's a lot of companies that are focused on just building software.

I'm really focused on the SpaceX-like companies that are building for mass production, that understand that, you know, as Elon says, the best part is no part.

Simple, simple design for manufacturing so that we can go from one to 10 to 10,000 to 100,000 of something that's critical.

And that is going to come from startups.

It's a new methodology of how you build.

Why don't you think the Primes are re-engineering how they do business?

Oh, for so many reasons.

I mean, one is they are based on a set of requirements.

They have been building for a set of requirements for many, many years.

Oftentimes they're getting paid per hour.

They charge per hour, right?

Like they're not on fixed-priced contracts.

They're on

cost-plus contracts where it's the amount of engineering hours that you do on a product plus a fixed margin, which is a terrible incentive for any company.

Like if I'm saying, okay, I'm going to paint your house or mow your lawn and you're going to pay me per hour, but it'll take all day.

But if I actually judge the project and say it's going to cost however many dollars it does to paint this room, like I'm going to want to make sure that I, you know, budget it right, that I, you know, get the cheapest paint, right?

Like, so it's the the way that capitalism works outside of every other system except the DOD is that you have

fixed firm fixed price contracts where you know what something's going to cost you.

And if it goes over budget, the risk is on the company, not on the government.

But the primes have been engineered so that they can always say, well, we went over budget.

So you're going to have to give us more money.

We're going to get our 7% margin no matter what.

And if it takes two, three, four extra years because you have a different request or you say, actually, we want it built this way, we're happy to accommodate you but that that is going to mean that you're not getting the products in time and silicon valley operates in the opposite way and particularly venture capital you give a company more capital in many cases than it even needs to speed up the process of production to speed up the r d to speed up the the the number of products they can build at one time and the company is always going to zero what i what i always say about venture capital is it's it's so different than any other type of business where you take out a bank loan and you say i'm going to build a business and then you want to make more money than you spend.

Silicon Valley is the opposite.

You want to spend more money at knowing that you're going to go to zero in 18 months if you don't raise another round of capital.

What that allows you to do is to bring on the best engineers to produce the, you know, to produce the product as fast as possible.

And when you compare that methodology of we're going to build hypersonic weapons or we're going to build satellite buses to the companies that have been around for 100 years, they don't know how to operate like that.

It's not their incentives, but it's also it's not the type of talent that they they have on the team that wants to operate in that 20-hour day environment of knowing they're going to go to zero.

So it's a very different incentive structure.

But the last 25 years in America, this is how companies have been built.

Venture capital is the dynamism engine of all innovation in America.

It's the envy of the world.

And so we have to make sure that this system is not just operating for the Facebooks of the world and the TikToks of the world, the consumer technology that we use.

We have to make sure that we bring this urgency and this capital and the speed to the things that matter most, which is, of course, building our defense industrial base.

I mean, what do you think is going to happen to the primes?

Are they going to just get phased out?

So I don't think so.

I think they're waking up.

My view is probably the best thing that can happen for the DOD, and this is me speaking as someone who would like to see the DOD encourage competition, is to go back to that pre-Last Supper 1990s model where we had 50,000 companies working in defense, a lot more primes, right?

Like, you know, now I think something like 40% of the major programs go to five primes.

It was not like that in the 90s.

Post-the last supper, when the DOD came to all these companies and said that there's going to be massive budget cuts post-Soviet Union, you're going to have to merge.

That led to a merging of these companies where there was just no competition.

And I think the DOD thought by merging them

that you'd save the companies, that they become more efficient, the opposite happened.

It just meant that they didn't have to innovate and they didn't have to work hard because there was no competition.

So I think the best thing that can happen is we'll probably see those primes lose a stranglehold on programs.

They're good at building some things, right?

Like they're good at building very exquisite systems, right?

We were talking about like the B2 and how we only have 19.

You know, the companies like the startups that we are investing in now, they want to build thousands of something.

And that's how they're building their product design is to build attritable systems versus these sort of legacy, exquisite systems.

So I think you'll see primes that are focused on the things that they know how to build, that take a little bit longer.

I think they'll lose their stranglehold on sort of getting these new programs of records.

I think that would be the best thing that could possibly happen.

And then startups can focus on the things that have to be made fast, and particularly the software-defined, you know, tritable systems that operate in the battlefield that have to be upgraded, that have to be changed based on the technology that's changing the battlefield.

I don't think the primes are capable of doing that.

How are they, I mean, when you say they're waking up,

what do you mean by that?

They're waking up.

It used to be when I would go to, so I was a very early investor in Andrew.

And in Silicon Valley, a billion-dollar company is like a big deal.

You know, it's not a big deal.

A billion dollars in Washington is not a big deal, which tells you how screwed up our incentive systems are.

But when I would go to talk to people inside the DOD or talk to, you know, across administrations, you know, from 2017, 2018, 2019,

companies like Andrew, they'd be like, that's cute.

That's really cute what Palmer and those guys are doing over there, right?

It was almost like laughing at them.

And Elon had this same experience with ULA and Boeing.

They used to make fun of the fact that their sort of place in Cape Canaveral, you know,

there was a tent, right?

It wasn't like this fancy launch pad.

Like it was, it was, it was kind of, you know, I would say homegrown, kind of homespun.

And they'd make fun of them, like, these guys, like, these guys that have everything under a tent are going to be able to launch a rocket?

Yeah, right.

And then look at where we are now, where SpaceX is, you know, responsible for 85% of launch across the country, or across the world, actually.

So

they are a true, they are our path to space.

And that only took, you know, SpaceX was started in 2002.

It's 2025.

You know,

they really gained market share very quickly.

And so you kind of see it happening with Andrell now, where people are picking their heads up.

Andreil is an eight-year-old company, and they're kind of like, huh.

Like they're down selected for, you know, some major programs now.

Like they're not just building, you know, in the beginning, I'm sure, you know,

you spent some time with Palmer.

He talked about how how they were building sentry towers and really focused on border control.

They were selling to DHS.

So DOD just thought they were, you know, kind of a cute little company that was never going to get in the way of any of these primes.

And now they're winning major contracts.

And so I think it's irresponsible if the primes are saying, oh, well, those guys are never going to win.

Or we'll beat them at the law fair, right?

Like it's like, oh, well, we'll take them to court and make sure that they can't get access to

these big contracts.

because these are ours.

I just think that the world has fundamentally shifted.

There's too many people who recognize that you need the best and brightest engineers in America and the people of Silicon Valley.

You need the talent and the AI labs across the country.

You need them working on defense.

And those guys aren't at Lockheed Martin.

Yeah.

And

it's really interesting.

It's like a whole new wave, you know, of innovations coming in.

And,

I mean, like I said, I know.

I don't know much, but it doesn't, you don't, you don't hear a lot of innovation coming out of the big primes like Raytheon, Lockheed,

Boeing.

I think it's 2% of their budget is spent on R ⁇ D.

See a lot of Boeing's falling out of the sky lately, but

not much innovation.

A lot of witnesses are being killed mysteriously.

But anyways, yeah, well, we'll get into a lot more of that.

And one more thing before we get going, everybody gets a gift.

Oh, thank you so much.

Terrific.

Thank you.

Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears.

I was wanting to try these, so thanks so much.

You're welcome.

They're amazing.

So

get into your let's get into your backstory a little bit here.

Sure.

Where did you grow up?

So I grew up in northern Florida in Gamesville,

university town, football town.

You had our guy Tebow on recently.

And he's just amazing human.

He's still the pride of the city, right?

It's like those are the, those are the glory days.

You know, it's like we, he's a, he's, he's still our guy.

But I grew up, I always say had like the most normal 90s Florida childhood.

And in some ways, it's like, that's what I, in some ways, I feel like I want to give my children is that same sort of normal 90s childhood.

But my story really starts with, I always say it starts with my dad.

I came from a family of priests.

My father was born during the Depression, 1931.

And as happens in big Irish Catholic families at that time, poor Irish Catholic families, the smartest kid was always sent off to the priesthood.

So at 17, he joined the Jesuits.

And his dream was he wanted to be a missionary doctor.

He wanted to go to the poorest parts of America across the world.

But he also wanted to be a physician.

So if he wanted to practice medicine, heal the body, heal the soul.

I sometimes think he would have been very aligned with some of the Maha stuff that's happening today.

But 10 years into the seminary, and this is why it's so important for my life,

the seminary in Chicago told him, like, sorry, we don't have the money to send you to medical school.

Sorry, you're just going to have to be a normal priest.

And he had sort of this life crisis.

What am I going to do?

And he decided to leave.

And I always say, like, that's why I'm sitting here.

Like, if he had stayed, he would have been a very good priest, but I wouldn't be here.

So I'm very grateful.

He had that crisis of self and decided that

his calling for medicine was more important than his calling for God.

But the reason that happened, and the other person I'm really grateful to who just passed away is my

uncle Pat.

My uncle Pat is like a hero to me.

He's a hero to a lot of people, but he was my father's Irish twin.

So he was nine months younger, and he was in the Jesuits with him, following him.

And the reason my family was okay with my dad leaving was because my uncle Pat's like, well, I'm going to stay.

And of course, my Uncle Pat was sort of a rebel.

He got kicked out of the Jesuits three times for language, beating people up, not respecting authority.

He was not a good priest.

Probably like some of the priests you've had

on your show.

He's more like that.

He's a tough guy.

I love those kind of priests.

Yeah, yeah.

There were more of them back in the day.

There's not enough of them anymore.

But he stayed in the priesthood, became a Jesuit, and then Vietnam happened and he joined the army.

So he joined 82nd Airborne Division.

And the reason he joined is he's like, you know, know, I'm a tough guy.

Like I'm physically fit.

I look around at all these other priests.

Like, who else is going to go to Vietnam?

So he was an army chaplain.

He was one of the first Catholic chaplains in Vietnam, did four tours.

No kidding.

Yeah, it's an incredible story of the stuff he saw.

He never talked about it, of course.

Like, I only really started learning a lot about it at the very end of his life.

But he came back, I mean, four tours, came back radically anti-war, but also radically pro-life.

Like, we have to protect life at all costs.

And I, you know, I grew up in this family where like he was the hero of the family.

You know, it's like

he was what we aspire to be, God and country.

So I grew up in this very Irish Catholic family.

My dad started medical practice in the 60s in northern Florida.

Integrated practice was sort of radical at the time,

very poor practice.

His view was, you know, you take care of the working people.

So all the images of me, you know, growing up, I just have all these memories of my dad having all the cops come into our house at like nine or 10 o'clock at night and giving him a shot, like the old,

what is it, the image of the old timey doctors.

You like pull your pants down, give you a shot, and plank you down the name of the Norman Rockwell, like, you know, in the white coat with the stethoscope.

But that was my dad.

He was just like a, you know, wanted to be a priest, ended up a doctor, and took care of the people in our community.

And I always say, like, pillars of the community used to be a thing.

We don't have, like, our generation doesn't have as many of those people that stay in their community that say, I want to take care of everyone where you're just known as the person that the first responders could go to, or that the cops can go to, or the people, like that you're going to help out the people who are really supporting your community.

Why do you think that's changed?

I think it's changed for a lot of reasons.

I think people didn't used to move around in the same way, right?

Like, it's like, you know, it's the kind of push for college, I think, has destroyed so much of the social fabric of the country.

But it's like, now, if you're, you know, it's like he was, he was the smartest in his family, he got sent to the priesthood.

Now, if you're the smartest in your family, you get sent to Harvard, right?

Like, you get sent to a school, you get pulled out of your family, you get pulled out of your church, you get pulled out of of your community and then you're you're told you know you have to chase the job you have to chase the you have to chase the dream you have to keep making more money you have to keep doing more things and it's like it's rare for people who are six who who are who are sort of treated as the success stories to stay in their community um and i think that that's it that's a huge problem it's like a huge problem that people you know don't don't put down roots and live somewhere for 50 years in a town that you know where they can truly be sort of that pillar and that beacon

interesting do you think it has anything to do with

the political climate, the polarization of America?

Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking about this.

I actually think the politicization of America might actually be a good thing after COVID, right?

It's like a lot of people, like I'm in Florida now.

I used to be in San Francisco.

A lot of people are waking up that where you live, the city you live in, it actually matters.

It matters for how your kids are educated.

It matters for a lot of the things you don't think about until it's too late.

It matters for crime.

It matters for

the sort of ideologies you want your family exposed to.

And so I think there's something of, there is a bit of a return.

Talk about optimistic things.

I think there's a bit of a return to people recognizing, you know, I don't need to live in New York City or San Francisco.

Like where I really want to be is in a place where I know I'm raising my family and raising my kids with the values that I had.

I mean, I always say I moved to Florida, I moved back to Florida because I wanted my kids to have the 90s childhood that I did.

And I think they can get it there in a way that they're certainly not going to get it in San Francisco.

Yeah.

Yep.

Yeah, I don't know.

It's like,

we just keep, we seem to be moving farther and farther and farther apart every four years for the past, what, I don't know, 12 years?

Yeah.

Seems like at least 12 years.

And it's like, man, like, it's just, I catch myself doing it.

It's like

not much, but a lot of people are just scared to share just a simple opinion because they don't want to be, you know,

blasted or judged, even in like a small town environment like this.

Totally.

It seems like.

I think a huge part of the problem is we've replaced, you know, America has always been a religious country.

And then you saw this decline starting around, you know, 1970s, this real decline in religion.

It's coming back up again.

We'll talk about a lot of optimistic things, but that's one thing I'm optimistic about is the religious revival.

But, you know, five, ten years ago,

it was really bad, right?

Where the just the continued decline of people not believing in God, not going to church.

But it leaves this hole for some other sort of ideology.

And I think Americans have replaced their love of God, their love of country with their love of politics.

And so now we sort by ideological preference, politics.

It's like, well, you're, you know, the way that people in previous civilizations used to feel about religious outsiders is how we feel about political outsiders.

And so I do think we're more polarized, but I think the root of that is that we don't have anything in common anymore.

And we used to have sort of this, you know, Christian ideology or, you know, or sort of even just understanding that America has certain values.

And we don't, for a very long time, that was under attack.

Decades, that was under attack.

And it's only now that we're sort of moving back to people saying, okay, maybe, maybe I should go to church.

Maybe going to church is a good thing.

I mean, you even have the New York Times.

People, you know, on the op-ed pages, I always think like they're a good beacon of sort of liberal thought.

The op-ed page is saying, well, maybe we should return to religion.

Are you serious?

The New York Times is putting this out?

Yeah, I mean, they've been putting out some stuff recently where it's like,

the funniest one, the OP-ID page from last week had three different stories about the declining birth rate.

Three different stories about what is wrong, that we are not having enough children.

And that used to be a conservative, social conservative, religious person talking point about having more babies.

And now the New York Times is worried, you know, and they're saying, there was another article that was so funny.

I wish I had the actual headline.

It was like, we don't see men anymore.

Like, where did the men go?

The men need to come back.

Come back to us.

Like, like, it's a woman talking about how there's a gulf between men and women.

And I'm just thinking, at least they see there's a problem.

They don't know the reason for the problem.

Like, that's a whole backstory.

Well, you know, like, hopefully they'll learn at some point, but they see there's a problem.

And so I think I'm at least optimistic that

we seem to be kind of turning the corner on.

Okay, like, it's good to have families.

It's good to think about where you want to live, how you want to raise your children.

And

hopefully that will lead to asking bigger questions about what does it mean to have a good family and what does it mean to be a good person.

Wow.

I had no idea the New York Times was putting pieces out like that.

It's fun to read just for opposition research.

It's a fun thing to read just to see, okay, like you might not agree with what they're saying, but it's like, wow, like they wouldn't have published that five years ago.

Yeah.

Yeah.

When did you notice, by the way?

Like, when did you

notice that men have

society?

Yeah.

Or that they have no interest in relationships with women or that they have no interest in marriage.

And it's a but it, but you know, it was, it was interesting because the article sort of blamed men for everything.

And it's like, well, yeah, like next week they need to have the men saying, why did the women disappear?

Or why did the women change?

Right.

And I think that is a huge problem

of

why we have this birth collapse is that really, like, there's just been a full-on assault attack on the family for the last 30, 40 years.

And so it makes sense why you see fewer and fewer people having children.

How bad is our birth decline?

Oh,

it is shockingly bad.

So we are now at 1.6 per woman.

Our replacement rate is 2.1.

I thought we were at 2.1.

It's been about, I think, eight years that we passed the 2.1.

And then there was a mild uptick in COVID.

So people were hopeful.

They were thinking, well, maybe it was just an anomaly those last few years.

But then there was a steep decline since COVID as well.

So yeah, we're at...

We're at 1.6.

And the millennials, I mean, the millennial generation, I think it's something like we're older millennials.

We're like, I think it's 1980 to 1986 is called the elder millennial generation.

Something like 58% of us have children.

That's the

lowest in history.

So it is going to be a shock, a huge shock when our generation ages and there's no one there to do important services.

I mean, like, there's a lot of...

not only economic reasons, but just like the social fabric of what's about to happen of not having children.

I mean,

this is how civilizations die.

Let's go into it.

How is it going to affect us?

This isn't something I've talked about.

Yeah.

So one, it's the economic situation is going to get very bad.

When you think of, you know, we, the boomers are the largest, I think, a generational cohort.

They're living longer than they ever have.

They're healthier, but they're getting to ages, right?

Like, who takes care of boomers when they're in their 80s and 90s?

They're in nursing homes.

You need service workers.

You need people to be able to take care of these aging people, right?

It used to be that you were taken care of in the family.

We don't do that anymore.

Now we have nursing homes, right?

Like it's very rare that someone moves in when they're at a certain age with their children and they're taken care of.

So those...

jobs, which used to be filled by service workers, there's no one who's going to be able to fill that.

On every economic dimension, if you do not have a generation of workers, of people paying into the system, Social Security, I mean, Social Security is a huge issue, but if you don't have people paying into the system, doing the labor, being able to do the things for the elder generation, society starts crumbling.

And then there's, of course, the social ramifications of not having families.

You know, I'm a firm believer that the most important institution in America is the family.

The family used to exist to take care of the people who were weakest, right?

Like it's like, you know, you used to have these big families and sometimes the weakest child would still be living with mom and dad at home, and that was okay.

You know, you sort of had empathy for them, but it was like it was the family's responsibility to take care of these people.

We quickly moved that to now it's the state's responsibility to take care of these people who, you know, maybe sick in some way, maybe,

you know, unable to provide for themselves in some way, might have psychological issues.

Now the state has to take care of them, which is why you see a lot of these people on the street now, because the state does a terrible job of taking care of these people.

But as fewer and fewer children exist, it's like

you're not going to have a society that can provide for itself, that can continue into perpetuity.

And the exponential decline of this too, where it's like, it sounds, oh, well, we went from 2.1 to 1.6.

That can't be that bad.

I mean, in a couple of generations, that means that our population has shrunk by half.

In a couple of generations?

Yeah.

And the best example of this, and I wish I had the numbers in front of me, is South Korea.

So South Korea, I think their birth rate is the lowest of any country, any industrialized country.

I think it's 0.9.

And when you have fewer and fewer people, no one's doing the jobs.

Japan is also heading this way.

Their birth rate's rate's quite low.

The only sort of argument that people make as sort of

the bright side of this that could potentially make up for both the labor loss and also just the civilizational collapse is robotics.

You could have robots do a lot of these jobs.

But I think it is a very dangerous thing to say we're going to depend on automation and robotics to make up for the fact that humans are disappearing.

I mean, even China's dealing with this.

You know, they had the one-child birth policy and then they boarded all of the girls.

So now now they

just have

extremely short-sighted.

And the, yeah,

I think the bulk, we're always talking about how, you know, how dangerous China is, how, you know, China is growing in power and importance.

The most short-sighted thing they have ever done to their society that will eventually catch up with them is the demographic collapse that they are going to feel because of one child.

Like,

they're trying everything now, too.

They're, you know, they're, they're trying to end divorce, right?

Like, so they're, they're, there's now a policy, at least that I read about in China, where you have to have like a 90-day cooldown period so that you don't divorce.

They're trying to, you know, encourage, you know, young women to have children.

Young women don't want to have children.

They're bringing in women from

other countries, from what I understand.

Yeah.

They're sending them out to go find wives in the Philippines, Thailand,

Japan, everywhere.

Yeah.

But they recognize it's a massive problem.

And probably recognized it before even we did.

I think in some ways the conversation sort of hopped from the social conservative sort of church going movement of, gosh, like this is a huge problem

to sort of the, I would say the sort of techno optimist Elon Musk talking about the birth rate as a big deal.

It's now become sort of, I think, an issue that's okay for polite society and sort of liberal New York Times to be talking about.

Like this is actually a real, real issue.

So first step is acknowledging it, but it is, you know, 1.6 is a long way to come back from, especially with a millennial generation that

waited way too long to have children.

I think the kind of under, there's a couple underlying factors that I don't think we talk enough about that that have caused this.

When you look at sort of our parents' generation, a lot of people didn't go to college.

They started adulthood at 18.

And sort of the sort of fertile window you could say for women was between 18 and 40, say, like that was sort of the nominal window of when you could have children and it was socially acceptable.

And then we had this incredible push against fertility and against

having a family young that I think the millennials really caught wind of.

It's like everyone needs to go to college,

extended adolescence, like use your 20s to experiment and enjoy life.

Like you don't really need to be focused on having a family.

And what happened is the average age now of a first-time, I think, mother in America is 28.

So 10 years after that 18.

So you've cut the window in half.

The average age of a first-time father in America, I think, is 31.

And that's for both college-educated and not college-educated.

If you add on college on that, which I think is a real issue, it's even higher.

It's like the average age of a first-time mother is 30.

So you can understand how the birth rate's being cut in half if the entire window of when you can have children is cut in half.

Because people are so focused on career and

finding themselves and sort of their extended adolescence rather than focusing on building a family earlier.

You're just going to have fewer children.

And then when you have fewer marriages, that also cuts it.

So

it's fewer people getting married, fewer people are going to decide to have children, which from a millennial perspective, to have 58% of people only having kids, I mean, that's compared to, you know, what, what, 89% of our parents' generation had children?

Wow.

Do you know if the baby boomer generation is, are they still the biggest?

I believe they're still the biggest, yeah.

So this has always been a question about, that I've had.

It's just, you know, what

it's just real estate, but I mean, you see all these 55-plus communities being built.

I mean, you live in Florida.

I came from Florida.

They're everywhere.

They're everywhere.

I mean, the villages is like, you know about the villages.

Yes.

Yes.

What is going to happen to all these 55-plus communities when

that massive generation dies off?

Are we just going to have,

it's going to create a housing crisis?

Yeah.

I think it'll be a housing crisis, fewer people.

And also, like,

are millennials going to want to, you know, the millennials in Gen X, or Gen X is actually a pretty small generation.

Are they going to want to move into those places?

Definitely not.

You know, in some ways,

the bigger question, I think, is also, and I know you've had people on who have talked about longevity.

People are living a lot longer too, which means they're going to have to work a lot longer, which means they have to be healthier for a lot longer.

And so, you know, if you have people living a lot longer and fewer and fewer people who are being born, it's just society inverts on itself.

You have a very top-heavy society of people who are older who can't do the work that needs to be done

to actually protect a country.

Aaron Powell, has any nation reversed this?

You know,

not success.

Like, I haven't seen anything recently successfully.

There have been some attempts, like, you know, some people have pointed to countries like Hungary that are now paying.

I think there's a policy in Hungary where if you have more than four children, you don't have to pay taxes.

So there's some extreme policies where you've seen that.

So the one anomaly in the Western world or in the industrialized world where they are well above birth rate replacement is Israel.

And so there's questions about: is it because it's a religious society, they have a pretty large religious Orthodox community, right, that kind of makes up for the rest of the secular society that doesn't have children.

If you have a family of eight and nine and ten, that's 10% of your population, then you can make up for some who are not having any.

But we don't have that in America.

We don't have as many, you know, I would say, we have more than Europe, which Europe is really the country.

We're really on the decline, though.

Really on the decline.

I mean, the Islamic population is reproducing at a massive massive rate.

Yes, but even counting immigrant and Islamic population in Europe, they're still at

countries, I think Italy is 1.2,

I think France is 1.5.

Everyone always looks at the Nordic nations as sort of the beacon of how we should be doing policy in the U.S.

because they pay for free health care for mothers.

They pray for free IVF, different things that people say we should experiment with.

Their population decline is worse than ours.

They're at 1.2, 1.3, 1.5.

And so I think this is what's fascinating to me about this is that this isn't a country-specific problem or a cultural-specific problem.

It's really all industrialized nations.

And there's probably healthcare reasons for it.

There's a lot of reasons for that.

I mean, men,

I think men are 70% less, have a fertility rate of 70% less than it was.

roughly about 100 years ago.

Yeah, yeah, sperm counts are down.

You know, the sort of fertile window for women, again, cut in half.

It's, yeah, so there's something about

the medical side of this and the health side of this that's also happening, but you can't ignore the memes and sort of the cultural destruction that happened since the 1970s, in my opinion, which is family bad, you know, individual good, right?

Like you shouldn't have to sacrifice yourself for the needs of your family.

And the minute that people across the Western world started believing in sort of this like individualism, that's where you see just the family completely destroyed.

And just fewer and fewer families means fewer and fewer children.

And we're finally waking up to the consequences of that, which is a society that can't grow its GDP.

I mean, the economist version of this is it's a society that can't grow its GDP and that can't remain successful.

But I think the human part of this is it's a dying society.

It's a frail society.

I mean,

how do we fix it?

I mean, I mean,

I think you have to change the culture.

I think you cannot change a spiritual and a cultural problem with economic policies.

So the sort of easy answers that a lot of economists and sort of people who study this say is, okay, well, we need to make healthcare free, make birth free, make women

feel that they have more benefits, maybe pay women to do work, right?

Like pay them to stay at home.

And some of those ideas, like, you know, I could say our healthcare system is expensive.

It is expensive to have a baby in America.

So making that cheaper on the margins might affect a mother who says, okay, I have two children.

Maybe I want to have a third.

But I actually think the bigger problem is cultural and spiritual.

I think it's the culture too.

I mean, you had, I think it stemmed from, you know, the feminist movement.

Yeah.

You know, where it was, get out, get a job, provide for yourself.

You can do everything, which,

yes, but

it deterred women from having children.

And then women that do have children.

I mean, it's almost like, I mean, me and my wife talk about this all the time.

If you say you're a stay-at-home mom, it's almost, it's like it's frowned upon in a lot of areas in the country.

And it's like,

what the fuck are you talking about?

Like frowning upon us

on a stay-at-home mom.

I mean,

what's more important than

raising your kids?

And then I don't even know how single mothers do it.

I mean, it's the hardest job in the world.

You have to make it okay.

And you have to take care of the single moms out there.

It's scary.

Totally.

I think about it.

It's terrifying.

I don't know how they'd make ends meet.

But

yeah, I think

the culture change is

paramount for that.

A lot of the research, it's always fascinating to me, the things you can't talk about.

We can talk about the problem, but there's certain things we can't talk about that add to it.

And you'll see, economics is always a thing people want to talk about because it's like, oh, well, if we could just fix it with an economic policy.

But no one ever talks about what you said, which is that feminism did change the memes and the culture.

But at the same time, no one talks about when you introduce birth control into a society until women

you can control your own destiny.

That is a huge part of it.

Like all of these declines in the industrial world started at the exact same time that the pill was introduced.

So

we're not going to go back to a world that is pre-pill.

Like that's just never going to happen across both Western society and the industrial world.

But I think you actually have to acknowledge all the factors.

And the fact that a lot of the people doing this research won't even acknowledge, oh, something magical changed in the 60s and the 70s, related to healthcare, related to how we, you know, abortion was made legal in 1973, other nations followed.

When you look at those as inputs into the story as well, it's like there's a reason why the birth rate is so low in these countries.

And

it's not just an American phenomena, it's a global phenomena.

And you have to take into account all of those things.

And I just keep coming back to the culture changed.

Like, there was something about what we prized and what we made high status in America, where most people, or I shouldn't say most people, but a lot of people chose to have, you know, only one to two children, whereas their grandparents' generation and their parents' generation had three and four.

And a society that changes that dramatically in one generation or two generations is unstable.

It's completely unstable.

Yeah.

Well, Catherine, let's take a quick break.

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All right, Catherine, we're back from the break.

Get a little sidetracked there, but let's get back to.

It's always good to go down a rabbit hole.

Yeah, before I go down a lot more.

But yeah, let's get back to your story.

So

son of a priest who left, who left, talked about your uncle.

What were you into as a kid?

Gosh,

I was a very precocious kid.

Again, my dad was much older.

I was the youngest.

And so I was really into the news.

I read a lot of books, but extremely precocious.

I

loved

watching things with my parents.

I got really into movies growing up.

But I was always sort of this very inquisitive kid.

My dad, coming from the Jesuits, kind of like taught our family around the kitchen table the Socratic method, right?

Like that you need to ask questions, that you can't be afraid of the truth.

He was sort of this philosopher king.

I love that.

I think that's a huge problem nowadays.

Yeah, not sitting down.

Nobody will ask questions.

No, yes, no, and not being afraid to be disagreeable.

And I think, you know, we were a family of disagreeable people, but it was really inculcated in me from an early age.

So, you know, I was always just interested in whatever was happening on the news, whatever was happening in the world.

I was a very good student.

My parents were not,

they didn't like really push me.

It was sort of a self-driven thing.

I always tell the story of when I was in third grade.

I got one B in my entire life, and it was in penmanship.

And this is my very hard-ass, amazing saint of a mother sat me down, and she was like, it's okay if you get a B in math.

It's okay if you get a B in reading or whatever.

But penmanship means you're lazy.

You are lazy.

And she's like, you were, and it's funny.

I have the worst handwriting today.

My dad had terrible handwriting.

Like, you know, know, some doctor would probably say I have a genetic thing, but she's like, anyone can write.

And you're going to sit down and you're going to practice writing penmanship an hour a day.

And within like three months, I had the best penmanship of anyone in the class.

I was celebrated for it.

But it was like, it was moments like that where my parents were just so involved and so good.

They never need to tell me again not to, not to not work hard or that I wasn't working hard enough or that I was, you know, lazy in some way.

Like I just, I just kind of, it was, you know, you learn the lesson very quick.

And my parents, my mom actually ran my dad's medical practice and so the the sort of our kind of typical life was you know my they would take us to the office we saw the patients with my dad we worked in the office like from a very young age they opened the office on saturdays because people have to work and they they wanted to be there for the patients and so we had this really really tight-knit family of work matters work is a virtue Everyone works hard and the kids work hard too.

It's not just mom and dad work hard and the kids get to play.

It's no, it's like we're going to work as a family.

And then on Saturday nights, we're going to go to church, the whole, you know, go out to dinner after the whole family with my grandparents who live down the street.

But it was like a very simple life, but it was very focused on working hard.

And there was always these sort of stories in my family where, you know, my dad would always say, like, you're not going to be the smartest in the room.

You know, you're not going to be the best at everything.

But like, no one is going to outwork a boy.

Like, no one is going to outwork you.

And

I think that was just sort of inculcated in me from early age.

So So I did a lot of things.

I mean, I did piano.

I was really into piano as a kid.

I played sports.

I wasn't naturally gifted, but worked hard at it.

But I just had this sort of kind of seriousness of, okay, like we're boils and we work hard.

How many siblings?

So my dad had six kids.

And it was sort of a Bradybench family.

So I was the youngest of his six and they were much older because he was, as I said, he was 55 when I was born.

And then my mother, we had two.

So they were were older and out of the house, but very much like part of the family, half brothers and half sisters.

And I always think part of the reason why I was so precocious is because I was around, you know, I was millennial, but I was around all these Gen Xers, right?

I was around all these older, you know, babysitters and kids who would come through the house who were

in their 20s.

And now they're in their 60s.

But it was definitely this, you know, this sort of, I was the baby sort of absorbing all of this stuff.

And so I grew up really fast.

You know, it's like I was joking about movies I watched when I was a kid.

My parents took me to see True Lies in 1994.

I was eight years old in the theater.

You know, it's like seeing these Arnold Schwarzenegger acts movies with a seven or eight-year-old kid.

It was like, oh, she's the baby, whatever.

She'll be fine.

So

I was an adult

by the time I was a teenager.

Nice.

So you go to college.

I know you had interest in becoming a joining the CIA.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, I was I was very interested in politics, foreign affairs.

That was like my love growing up.

I'd say the big thing that happened before I went to college was my father got very sick.

He was chronically ill.

So around when I was 12 years old, he had to retire.

And I think that's something where if you're a kid that grows up with a chronically ill parent, like you grow up really fast.

Like you, you, you, you know, you start.

I've seen it happen with my friends now who, you know, their parents are getting older in their 60s and their 70s.

And it's sort of like the caregiver, caretaker, you know, relationship and then the provider relationship sort of splits where you know like when you're when you're in your mid-40s you start taking care of elderly parents but i had that when i was 12 right it was like it was he had a severe heart attack and and then had a chronic condition that made it hard for him to get out of bed so my mother was an absolute saint man at 12 yeah which is why i also think kids are resilient and like my my mother again an absolute saint she didn't try to keep it from me she was like your father's sick doctor thinks he's probably going to die um but this is suffering this is and he's and he's going to suffer through it, right?

Like he's going, he's like he's going to, again, he was such a scientific man too, where like he refused to take med, you know, pain pills.

He refused to sort of succumb to what was happening.

And he actually lived for a while.

He lived until I was in college, but he died when I was in college.

And I always think the thing that like kind of,

if you've had to take care of a parent for a while, you're, of course, sad when they're gone.

But like the other thing that happens is you have this moment of just relief.

Like that was like the real emotion that I felt was like, wow, like, you know, my mother had been taking care of him for eight years.

And like when it happened, I was like, okay, like this is the beginning of my life.

Right.

Like, it's because when that's all you've known is, okay, like I have to take care of my family.

That's when I really just had this moment of, okay, like maybe I can go do something big now.

Maybe I can go do the thing and not have to worry about family or have to think about anyone but myself.

I can be super selfish about what I want.

And a lot of my friends were thinking about, you know, joining the agency.

I actually had a really interesting thing happen where I worked all through college and I started walking a lady's dog, like this older lady who lived in Georgetown.

She was afraid to walk around the neighborhood at 10.30 at night.

So every night at 10.30 at night, I would leave the library, go to her house and walk her dog.

And over time, I learned that she was the first female station chief at the CIA.

No kidding.

Yeah.

And like, I, you know, I'd go into her house and she had like, I mean, in some ways, it looks like a room like yours, just like, like, just mementos of a life well lived.

Like she had been everywhere, she'd been all over Asia, just had the most incredible stories, but she was like this very demure, quiet lady.

You would never know.

You know, she's beautiful, just lovely, very well-mannered, but you know, but a polyglot.

Like she could speak many languages, you know, but you would never suspect her.

And I just like, I think it was partially spending so much time with her and like looking at her life and just thinking like, wow, like this is this is really cool.

But then also, you know, like just my, you know, I grew up during September 11th, too, right?

It like changed everyone's mind about, okay, what are you going to do?

And that's why I wanted to go to Washington and kind of work in foreign affairs in some capacity.

And I just said, you know, after my dad died, I'm like, I want to do that.

Like, I can finally do that.

And going back to sort of like, I, you know, I hadn't ever failed at anything.

You know, I was, I was one of these kids.

I was sort of the, I don't want to say I was a trophy kid, but it's like, again, I just worked hard at everything I did.

And it was always a view that like, if you work hard enough in life, you can get what you want.

Right.

So I just, I just assumed going into that recruitment, like, oh, I'm, I'm a shoe-in, right?

Like, I'm, I'm top, top grad out of Georgetown.

Like, you know, like, I, like, I have all these great references.

I have these mentors who've done it, right?

Like, I'll be, I'll be fine.

It's not to say I didn't take it seriously.

I did, but I was not prepared for the response I got in 2009, which was, you know, after a year and a half in, like, sorry, you know, you just get a letter back from the recruitment and retention center that says, we do not need your services.

You can, you know, apply three years from now.

And I think that was like the first time in my life where I was like, oh my, I don't have a plan B.

Like, I don't know what I'm going to do.

I can't believe they didn't pick you up.

What did you want to do over there?

So, I mean, I want to do ops.

Like, I wanted to just, but it, but the, the, the, because I was so.

Yeah.

But, uh, but the, but the, the, the young, like the, you know, 22, 23 year olds, like they didn't put, like, they sort of had a training program, right?

Like, it was like you, you do two or three years.

It wasn't an analyst program, but, but they kind of put you in this sort of path, right?

It's the kids who know how to do nothing, right?

Like, you knew how to do things when you were contracting, but the kids who are just out of college, they have sort of a training path for them and then they figure out where they want to go.

And it's funny, like I, I...

So you were in the training path?

Yeah.

So I had done like multiple interviews.

Yeah.

So it wasn't, it was, yeah, I mean, they did, you know, multiple rounds of interviews.

And I look back on it, it's so funny.

I'm like, I know exactly why they didn't pick me.

I am not an easy person.

I am a disagreeable person.

You know, it's like after, you know, eight-hour interviews where they're really trying to get to know you.

I, there's times where I'm like, I know exactly what I said wrong.

Like you're supposed to answer the question of like, why are you wanting to do this?

Right.

The right answer is you want to serve your country, which is the right answer.

Right.

And I said it multiple times, but by like the fifth time they ask it in a different way, I said something that was probably the through line of my life, which is,

I just can't stand not knowing.

I just can't stand not knowing.

And of course, that's like the wrong answer.

And to

the lady who was interviewing me's credit, she was was like honey you think you're gonna know in here

like you think you're gonna come in here and you're gonna know anything like like and again it's like okay you've 23 year old like little girl who's never been told like like get out of here what a joke damn

so it's on me like i and they're right right like i am not the

I even today, it's like my colleagues are like, it's amazing you can actually work at a company, right?

You are such a disagreeable, and they mean that lovingly, but like, I am not someone who doesn't say what I think.

I'm not someone who takes orders very well.

So I think they probably looked at my character after, you know, it's like spikes in certain areas, like, probably very good at getting information and meeting people, talking to people, you know, doing the things that you need to do.

But also probably not going to be able to deal with the culture.

Yeah.

Probably for the best.

Probably for the best.

I mean, things always work out.

In the short amount of time I've known you,

a lot of things over there would have driven you insane.

I think

she did me a favor.

But it was definitely like coming out of college, you know, 24, no idea what I was going to do with my life.

And it was sort of serendipitous how I ended up at the Washington Post because I had taken a job and I had friends

who were already sort of in and they're like, you've got to be in D.C.

Just take a job, but like take any job you can get.

And so I got this kind of ridiculous, like

copy editor job, but it was at

a newspaper called The Express.

So if you've ever been in D.C.

and and you've gone on the Metro, it's the free Metro paper that the Washington Post hands out.

And everyone, you know, who's ever been on the Metro remembers this paper, loves this paper.

It's sort of the snarky, you know, free, free newsletter thing.

And they needed someone who was just good at writing, but unbylined, so you don't have a record that you worked there or whatever.

And I was like, that sounds great.

Like I can just, you know, just write during the day for, you know, three to six hours or whatever, and then do what I need to do for my real career, my real job, right?

You know, I was so convinced that was going to happen.

And so when I got the letter, I was like, wait, wait, I'm just a, right now I'm just a copywriter at the lowest person on the totem pole inside the Washington Post without a byline, without anything.

I'm not even a real reporter.

Like, what am I going to do?

Like, what am I going to do?

Like, I should probably figure out if I can actually make this a real career.

So I sort of, you know, I sort of convinced myself that intelligence isn't that different than reporting, right?

You have sources.

You have to have

a network of nodes and people who are telling you information about whatever you're covering.

You know, you have to be really good at asking questions.

You have to be good at listening,

you know, reading people, knowing what's true, knowing what's false, you know, making decisions very quickly.

And I, you know, part of me was like, okay, if I can't do that as, as a, you know, in the agency, like, I could do that at the Washington Post.

I just have to convince them to let me do it.

And it turned out to be the most opportune time to be in media for a young person.

Really?

Yeah, because I was cheap.

I was making $30,000 a year.

And I would write as much as they wanted me to.

I'm like, I have no obligations, right?

I can come in on Sundays.

I can do whatever story you want me to do.

So I found an editor

inside the Washington Post and she's like, you can write as many stories as you want.

We just need people to fill the actual physical paper because they were slashing the people who were well-known reporters left and right because the business was going under.

Why was it going under?

Oh, I mean, just the business of media with the internet.

I mean,

everyone thinks that the media really started declining like maybe 2014, 2015, 2016.

But the first wave of real layoffs were like 2008, 2009, where there was just an understanding that Google and then Facebook, but Google really was just eating the lunch of these companies.

The business models of every major newspaper up until this point, of regional newspapers, were classifieds,

you know, subscriptions, and then syndication.

So syndication, sending out the story, people paying to have to reprint it.

That was Google.

Google completely took that, right?

Like, so

all of the stories would go on the internet for free.

No one was paying for the digital copy.

The Wall Street Journal figured it out, but none of the other papers did.

So they were just hammering subscribers.

And then

the advertising, it was like, well, if people are advertising online, like, why am I going to advertise

my store and your newspaper?

No one's reading the physical paper anymore.

But they still had it and they still had subscribers that were reading it.

So it was actually a great time to go in and just be like, okay, like I'll work for basically

very little

and I'll work a lot and I'll fill your paper.

And so after about a year of that, they brought me on full-time as a staff writer because I was breaking stories and things as someone who really wasn't affiliated with the paper.

But it was not what I wanted to do.

It was not like my dream was to be, you know,

a reporter.

But there was something about just being in that place at the right time where I was like, okay,

I can make something out of this

major setback or this thing that I thought was a major setback.

And I can learn a new trade, even if it's not the thing that I thought I would be doing.

So did you develop your own sources and all of that network?

Yeah.

How'd you do it?

Where'd you start?

Well, yeah, I mean, it's a good question because it's also what venture capitalists do.

Like, how do you get dropped into a culture you know nothing about, which was the case with VC, and start meeting people and start building up relationships?

And I think like, you know, the interesting thing about doing it as a reporter is like, they give you a beat.

Like my beat in the beginning was like retail and the business of, you know, like almost like the business of arts and culture.

And then it moved on to like nonprofit investigations.

So I started researching like the Smithsonian Institution and all of the government-funded agencies in Washington, D.C.

and art agencies and different things and sort of where they were getting their money from and kind of follow the money, but of the nonprofit areas.

But it started out as like, okay, like you get your assignment and then you just start calling people.

And the thing I know you know better than anyone else is like, people just love to talk.

People will tell you anything if you will sit there and listen.

And when you're a 24 or 25 year old who knows nothing, and you call someone and you say, hey, I'm, you know, this reporter from the Washington Post, can we get coffee?

You know, I'd just love to hear more about what you know.

Can you show me what I should know about this beat?

Like the nut, like you do that over and over and over again.

And people will tell you what you need to know.

And then they start seeing your name in the paper.

And then they know that you're the person who's going to write the story about something.

I also think there's something to, some people are really good at listening and it's a gift.

You know, growing up in a big family was probably that a loud Irish family.

I learned how to listen.

But I'm always amazed at like the stories I would break.

It would just be someone coming up to me at a cocktail party or a book party or something,

not even necessarily knowing that I was a Washington Post reporter, finding out and then just kind of sharing, just like just getting it off their chest and me saying, you know, that's actually a really important story.

Can I write it?

But I think people are desperate to talk and they're desperate to get that type of attention.

And so it really, like in some ways, I think the reporting thing was easier than when I got to Silicon Valley and was nobody, right?

It was like I was a Washington Post in Washington, D.C.

You'd already built it.

You've already built a network at that point.

Yeah, but not but not a network in Silicon Valley.

But you had the fundamentals now.

I think you can get dropped into any culture and learn it very quickly.

if you know the types of people that are going to talk to you and if you're actually willing to listen.

What got you

so

you're at the Washington Post.

What ended it?

So I

kind of knew it was going to be a temporary thing just because of how bad the business was.

I mean, it was all we talked about.

This was before Jeff Bezos bought the paper.

And I actually decided to leave right as he was buying it.

And a lot of people, you know, said that was the saving grace of the paper.

You know, one of the richest men in the world buying it,

putting money into it so that it wouldn't go down the drain.

But what happened actually was my best friend at the Washington Post, she was the religion reporter.

Her husband was in the Navy and he had just left the Navy and he was going to Stanford Business School.

And I knew nothing about business school.

I was stunned he got in.

I was like, I didn't know your husband knew anything about business.

I thought he was in the Navy.

And she's like, no, no, no.

Like the business schools take like 5% of their class every year.

They call them non-traditional candidates.

A lot of them are veterans.

But they'll take people who know nothing about business to just kind of almost like

create a like an interesting group of people for the class, right?

Like you're not there because they think you're going to be great at business.

They like they want to create a diverse sort of class of experiences.

And she's like, he got in, like, you know, he, he, this is how he got in.

Like he spent hours every day learning the GMAT.

Like he, he, you know, she, he, he, she told me kind of how he did it.

And I was like, you know, I've never had any interest in business until working at the Washington Post where I see this grand paper just completely collapsing and on itself.

Like the most important lesson to me at the Washington Post Post was it was like watching the leadership.

It was, you know, the phrase rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

Everyone who worked there was in complete denial that the internet was changing their business.

Are you serious?

It was shocked.

It's shocking to me.

What is it?

Is it ego?

It's ego.

It's desperation.

It's, I don't want to lose my job.

It's we are bigger than this.

We're the Washington Post.

We're the brand.

You know, we're like, everyone needs us.

But I think this is true of humans that are in these kind of grand institutions.

They can't recognize when something's crumbling.

You see it happening with universities today, where these universities are sort of in some ways in major crisis because of what the students are doing.

And they just can't ever see that things need to be reformed.

You know, federal government too can't see that things need to be reformed.

But that was certainly like a learning for me where I saw it.

Because I wasn't wedded to it.

I hadn't been there during the heyday where everyone was getting to fly wherever they wanted.

They could be bureau chief of any country they wanted to be bureau chief of.

I mean, we had shuttered all of our international bureaus by the time I had gotten gotten there.

So it was, it was, it was a paper that was clearly in decline.

And I saw it.

For me, it was just, okay, this is a job.

I can learn something.

And like original dream didn't work out.

But I knew I had to leave.

And when she told me that her husband got in, I was like, well, I'm different.

I know nothing about business.

If it's really, if there's really no, you know, you just have to, you know, get it, get a decent score on a test and write a good essay.

I'm like, I know I can write an essay.

That's like probably one of the few things I can do.

So I got really, really lucky.

I got off the wait list last minute.

I actually found out I was on the wait list on a reporting trip to Beirut.

I was like, I was on the

plane and I was like checking my phone and you're supposed to get a phone call from the dean of the school and like no one's ringing.

And as I'm like taking off to go to Beirut from DC, I'm like, I'm not getting in.

Like I'm just going to be a reporter forever.

And I land

and see the email and it's like, you know, you're on the wait list.

And I'm like, okay, that's not a no.

It doesn't mean they want me, but it's not a no.

And so I just, I sent a letter pretty much every day.

I was like, I'm in Beirut.

You know, every time I would go to a new place to

do a story, I was like, this is the story I'm working on.

And I think it's relevant to the class because of this.

And I think after enough annoying emails, and this is a really important life learning, but there's a, if you're the most annoying person to any admissions group, but like really to any company, if you're just like constantly pounding down the table, or any customer, like people just finally give in.

Like people will not say no 25 times, you know, so it was, so I got in last minute and, you know, that it was sort of, it was like, okay, I'm going to Silicon Valley and I'm just going to figure it out.

Wow.

So you just, why didn't you look at any of the other intelligence agencies just out of curiosity?

Well, you know, it's interesting.

My, the, the, the woman, the, the mentor who, who, you know, had been at CIA, she was like, do not go to CIA, go to state.

And I was like, that sounds boring.

I don't want to go to the state department.

Right.

Like there were, there was, there were certain things where I was just like, that's not going to be interesting.

And I also think like

when I look back at my career, everything I've done has been like information trading, but it's been very human-centric.

I wasn't interested in

NSA.

And I like the human connection.

Like I've never, you know, it's like even in my business career, I was never interested in things that didn't have like where you're negotiating with people.

which is a lot what VC is.

I know we'll get into it.

But

there's something about the human component where I think that's what I wanted to do.

And it was also, I don't know, I was probably so dejected.

I didn't have that many mentors where I didn't have people who were like, oh, well, you should go this path or you should do this or talk to this person.

It was more like, okay, they rejected me.

Like, there must be a reason.

And maybe I'm supposed to be doing something else.

And so

how did you,

out of all the different business avenues you could have done, why Silicon Valley?

So, I mean, Silicon Valley was more of, okay, like the biggest story that I'm writing about ever.

Like, and, you know, you you see patterns in the stories you write, and the stories you write every day sort of tell the story of the country, of the ethos.

I was actually a culture writer, too.

So I would write, I had a really broad swath of things I could write about, but a lot of things I was writing about were

how technology is impacting this industry or how technology is destroying another industry.

And just the conversation at the Washington Post day in, day out, was, we're all going to lose our jobs because, you know, Facebook is gaining momentum and everyone wants to read their news on Facebook.

Like, there's no business model.

And so there was something of, I really want to go, like to me, this is the biggest story of my life.

Like tech is the biggest story.

I don't understand it.

And a lot of the Washington Post people I worked with, they hated tech, right?

Like they were, like, tech is what's destroying their livelihood and they have every right to hate it.

But me, I was like, I want to understand it.

Like, I want to go out here and understand this culture.

Like, I don't know nothing about it.

I've never met anyone who's worked in tech or Silicon Valley.

But like,

it's clearly having an impact.

And this is like the biggest story of our time.

And I'm a reporter.

Like I should go out and kind of figure out what's going on out there.

What year is this?

This was 2014.

So it was right sort of, it's funny.

When I arrived, and this is like a funny thing people always say about Silicon Valley, they say, you know, you always feel like you're too late, like you missed the big ones.

So I had missed Facebook.

I had missed Airbnb.

You know, it was the Palantir.

It felt like I had missed Palantir in 2014, which is comical because, you know, even last year, you couldn't have missed Palantir, right?

It's like that company is a rocket ship.

So it's, in some ways, it's like you always feel like you've missed the boat.

But when I got out there, you know, in some ways, not knowing anything was really helpful because I just was sort of this, you know, former reporter emailing people, just trying to figure out what's going on.

And, you know, you and I talked about this earlier.

Silicon Valley is, for all of its weirdness, the best part about Silicon Valley is everyone is afraid they're going to miss the next thing.

And so a young person with no experience with a Stanford email emailing you saying, Hey, I'm a former reporter and I'm really interested in your job or I'm really interested in your company.

Can I sit down with you for 30 minutes or get coffee or get on the phone and just hear about what you do?

People will pick up that, like, people will take that call.

And so, that's that's kind of what I did.

I was like, I am so confused.

Like, it was the worst culture shock of my life.

Like, I, you know, I had been around the world, but I had not experienced sort of that

insular culture of how tech companies are built.

And I'm always impressed with how many people picked up that call.

So hold on.

So you were 100% out of Washington Post by this time, right?

Yeah.

So I quit my job.

So you quit your job

and just inserted yourself in the middle of Silicon Valley and just started emailing people?

Yeah.

And did you have any idea what your business was going to be, what you were going to be doing?

No.

You just immerse yourself in it to figure it out.

No.

And it's interesting because I know Dino has been on your show and he talked about what it was like as a veteran going to business school, right?

Like you go to business school and you think, oh, I got two years to figure it out.

It's like you get to business school and like recruiting starts immediately for jobs.

I had no idea.

You know, I was like, what do you mean?

I have no idea what I'm going to do.

I'm a former reporter.

So there was sort of this like kind of, you know, you feel like you're on sort of really shaky ground.

But I, you know, my personality is I do very well in those situations.

Like I do very well when I have no idea what I'm going to do and I have to make a next move.

So the crazy story of how I ended up in venture capital is it was 2014 in the fall, and I always show up no one in business school reads books.

And they have a library at the business school that has only business books, but they don't have real books.

And I'm a reader.

And I walked into the library one day, and there's this new book called Zero to One.

It's on the shelf, and it's by this guy named Peter Thiel.

And I had heard of Peter Thiel because I was a reporter and I had like, you know, read about the Facebook, you know, Facebook IPO and things.

And so I knew who he was, but I didn't know he was as big of a deal as he has now become and kind of is in Silicon Valley.

So I reached out to Peter Thiel.

And what's crazy about this is, again, I wasn't expecting a response.

I was very, you know, very good at reaching out to people, but not everyone would respond.

And I didn't get a response from him, but he had forwarded my email

to one of his kind of junior partners, principals at his firm, Founders Fund, named Trey Stevens.

And Trey and I had overlapped in school.

He had actually been at one of the agencies.

And whatever I said in my email or whatever kind of context he had, Peter thought we would hit it off.

And so I started talking to Trey, who was brand new in venture capital.

Peter had brought him on from Palandir

to really look at national security and defense.

And

I kind of told Trey my story.

I was a former reporter.

It turns out he had at one point wanted to be a reporter in his life.

So we really just hit it off talking.

And I said, you know, I'm really bored in.

business school.

I need to do something this summer, but I'd also love to like just work for you guys.

Like, can I just, can I just intern with you?

And again, to the point of people will not say no more than five or or six times.

He said no probably five or six times.

He's like, we don't have a job for you.

Like, what are you going to do here?

Like, you don't, you don't know anything about technology.

You literally just showed up.

You know, like, like, it's, it's, it's nice.

Like, we could talk.

I could try to help you and things, but like, you really should work at a company.

Like, we can't have you in our firm.

And I just kept emailing, like, hey, you know.

Like, I don't really want to work at any of these companies.

Can I please work for you?

And after about like four or five no's, he finally said, okay, fine.

Like, you can, you can come work at Founders Fund.

So, you know, Founders Fund's a pretty iconic venture firm.

I I didn't know it at the time.

But, you know, they've invested in SpaceX.

You know, Trey would go on to be the chairman of Andoril.

He would go on to incubate that company with Palmer.

But this was a year and a half before that happened.

So what do they have somebody with no tech background doing in a tech firm?

I helped Trey just look at companies.

So I sat in on every pitch.

We were just kind of surveying the landscape of

which companies are operating in the defense space.

Are there any sort of government companies that are actually interesting?

We met the SHIELD AI team, like, you know, like there were, there were a handful of people in and around the space, but not very many.

And I always say, it was like a gift, right?

Because it wasn't like I was giving them anything, right?

Like they would tell me, hey, like maybe look for some companies or whatever.

And I would try to find things that could be relevant for the national security mission.

But it was really a gift.

And like that, that is, frankly, that's how all of tech works, where someone gives you a break.

And if you show up early, you're the first person there, you work your ass off, like you do any job they want you to do.

Like that, that's often what it's like to be in a startup.

And I always tell, you know, I coach a lot of veterans because I have so much empathy for, you're coming from a culture that is so different, right?

Like veterans will email me and they'll say, Miss Boyle.

And I'm like, do not call me Miss Boyle.

Call me Catherine.

Like you call a 70-year-old, like famous venture capitalist by their first name.

Like you have to shed whatever you have learned in your previous life and realize you're going into a totally new culture.

And you have to blend in on that culture.

Like you have to learn the culture.

Like that's what your first year in Silicon Valley should be.

And you should go to a crazy early stage startup or a venture firm that's totally different than anything you've seen and you should just listen.

Because once you learn the culture and once you learn the language, then you can be an operator.

But you have to learn the culture and you have to respect it.

So, you know, first day at Founders Fun, actually, one of the EAs came over to me.

I was wearing heels, you know, and I can dress like this now because I'm a Florida, Florida lady, but I was in San Francisco.

And I was wearing heels and, you know, like nice, like I dressed like I was going to a nice internship.

And she's like you need to take that off I'm gonna get you a SpaceX hoodie like you need to wear jeans you need to like you need to blend in here like this is not gonna work if you can't blend in and I like I'm very grateful for that because it's like she's right like you're learning a new culture like you were you were learning like how to operate inside of an ecosystem that's nothing like what you've experienced before and when you understand it then you can start being um you know kind of yourself you can start being a little more flamboyant when you're when you're accepted when people accept you as one of their own, but when you're learning the culture, like you're there to listen and you're there to work your ass off.

And that's kind of what I did.

And it was it was an incredible gift to be able to see how companies that are so iconic that no one believed in, even 2015, SpaceX was still seen as, oh, well, how big can that company become?

It wasn't what it is today.

And so to see people, how they make bets on the future and sort of the philosophy of how they take bets on the future, like that completely transformed

and sort of catapulted to me into venture venture capital.

Wow.

What's the first company that you found interesting that you presented?

Well, so when I left business school and I ended up working at another venture capital firm, that was right when Palmer and Trey and Brian and the guys were founding Andrel.

And so I had the luxury of spending a year with these people, like really understanding how well they understood the mission,

understanding like how valuable palantir talent is to people who've actually worked with the government and sort of that model.

So I was probably six months into the job at this new fund and again, like lowest on the totem pole.

Lowest again.

Yes.

Oh yeah, because you come out of school and then you're the junior associate who's there to take notes, write memos.

You're there to learn the trade.

It's an apprentice job.

You can ask questions, but like you, you know, you're there to source too.

You're also there to find companies and to be the first person to touch a company and bring it in.

And

so

it's actually a funny story.

I was with Trey at Incutel, which is the CIA's investment arm.

They have a big conference every year.

And we were at that conference and he's like, we're starting the company.

It wasn't even named Andrew yet, but he's like, we're starting the company.

And I knew what that meant.

He's like, Palmer has just been fired from Facebook.

He cares a lot about defense.

I think we can convince the head of engineering at Palantir.

I think we can convince

some of these guys to join and we're going to start it.

And I just said, I don't care.

And of course, I didn't have the authority to say this, but I said, I don't care whatever you're doing.

Like, I want to be an investor in it.

I want our firm to be an investor in it.

I'm going to get it done.

Of course, I can't make that promise because I'm nobody.

Right.

But I immediately drive home,

call the partners and say, like, Palmer Lucky is starting this company and we need to be a part of it.

And usually in Silicon Valley, they'd be like, oh, that's great.

Like.

This famous founder who sold a company to Facebook for $3 billion to starting a new company.

We want in.

We want in on the second time founder who knows how to do it.

But it was like Palmer Lucky, the guy who just got fired for the Hillary billboard?

Like the fascist,

you know, the fascist guy in Silicon Valley?

And what's this company do?

Well, they're building a border security company.

Oh, they're building a border security company to help ICE?

You know, like, I mean, it was, it was, it was, immediately I was sort of outed in my firm as, right, Catherine's kind of insane, but they're like, we're not, like, we're not going to do that.

And it was, you know, pushing.

I pushed a bunch.

And finally, we got a tiny little check-in.

And the conversation wasn't even about the company.

The conversation was about, well, if it's this small of a check, like, you know, like, we'll see what happens, right?

But it sort of like kind of, you know, skirted in

a small check into the seed round.

But that kind of gave me entree.

What's a small check?

Like a couple million dollars.

And they had raised what was at the time a very big seed round.

It was a $17 million round.

And people thought that was insane.

I mean, now you're seeing seed rounds of hundreds of millions of dollars, but this was because,

you know, Palmer, Palmer was extraordinary.

He was an extraordinary founder.

He had an extraordinary exit.

But there was definite concern, particularly among the early investors of, okay, is this a company that's even going to be able to raise capital?

Because no one actually believes that you can sell into the Department of Defense.

Maybe the border security thing can happen, but like, this is so crazy.

Like, everyone felt like they were kind of,

I don't want to say throwing away their money, but it's like, this is kind of of a crapshoot.

It's a huge crapshoot.

And then it was about like a year and a half of like really working with them.

Because I was, you know, I was, I was young, I was enthusiastic, but I, you know, you know, Joe Lonsdale, who had already sold multiple companies.

He was involved in the company.

There were a handful of other people involved.

But for the first, you know, the first big round that they were doing about a year and a half later, I was like, I want to lead this round.

I want to put, like, I want our firm that I was at to do the big investment into your company.

And it took, you know, six months of diligence and meeting with as many different types of customers and operators, anyone who could possibly talk about what their tech was doing to really showcase it to our firm.

And

the kind of crazy thing that happened was like the story of, I think it was like 2019 when they went out to raise, Palmer pitches, you know, what they've done.

And they already have towers on the border that are actually working.

Like they're already selling to the Department of Defense.

They've moved exceptionally fast.

And he goes into the room after I've done, you know, all this work to try to show that this is an incredible investment.

And one of the partners kind of raises his hand at the very end and says, like, are you ever going to build missiles?

Or are you going to, are you ever going to build weapons?

And Palmer says, of course, like, we're going to build what the DOD wants us to build to protect the warfighter.

Great answer.

Like, he leaves the room and people are like, we cannot invest in this company anymore.

And we cannot invest in this company because.

Holy shit.

Yeah.

And that was how

they were viewed across a lot of silicon valley it's like too much headline risk uh too much fear um that that you know that palmer's a little bit of a wild card but also it was like we're not going to support the trump administration and the things that like like we can't do that we're silicon valley like we'll lose our shirt or lps will be upset right and it took like to the credit of the firm i was at like it took maybe three days where i said no no no like

These guys understand ethics.

They understand just war theory.

I ended up writing like a 16-page memo in addition to the investment memo that talks about the numbers and how big this company can get on just war theory, on like, you know, why this is an ethical product, like how the DOD thinks about ethical products.

You know, Trey got on the call with

all the partners, and he has a theology background as well and was talking about

why they're seeing this as an ethical company.

I mean, just things you shouldn't have to do, right?

Like, if you're in Washington, D.C., if you're in a place that understands defense, you should not have to explain why supporting the DOD is good.

But this was right after Project Maven.

It's right after the Google employees walked out and said, we are not supporting the Trump administration and the DOD.

And, you know, I haven't told this story before, but I had this moment where they were debating the ethics and I was asked to leave the room because I wasn't one of the managing partners and it was, you know, the partnership was going to make a decision.

And I walked down across the street to

this church in St.

Dominic's in San Francisco.

And I just like kneeled down and I prayed to God.

I I was like, okay, like, there's a reason why I've spent a year and a half on this company.

Like, this is like the most important thing I've ever done,

trying to get capital into this company.

And like, if it doesn't happen, I'm going to walk in there tomorrow and I'm going to quit my job because you don't want me in venture capital.

Like, this is not where you want me to do.

I'll figure out something else, right?

Like, I've done that before.

I've changed my career.

I've done things before.

But like, if

indeed like this goes through and we end up leading this investment into this company, like, this will be my mission, investing in America.

Like, this is it.

This is all I care about.

And like, these these are the companies I want to invest in.

This is what America needs more than anything.

Silicon Valley doesn't get it yet, but they're going to.

And the minute I leave that church, you know, walking back home, five minutes later, I get a call from one of the managing partners, and he's like, You have the green light.

Go give Palmer a term sheet.

Wow.

Wow.

That's incredible.

Yeah.

So it was a crazy story, but that was my first, that was my first big investment in defense.

Good pick.

And it's been a good one.

I mean,

how long did it take you to get that kind of insight to know, like to feel,

you know, that this is

the company?

So

a lot of it comes from the people.

And that's like, I don't know much about technology.

Right.

Like I've never built anything in technology.

I'm not a technologist by nature.

I've learned a lot having been in the industry for 10 years, but that's not how I make decisions.

You know, there's a lot of venture capitalists.

They always say that venture capitalists have sort of three different dimensions they judge.

They judge the market, how big is the market size.

DOD has a very big market.

Small market for startups, but a very big market.

It's, you know, 800 billion and growing every year, right?

It's a massive, massive budget.

The product.

So a lot of technologists, people who are really, really good at, you know, they've worked at Facebook or Google or these different companies.

They come out, they become VCs, and they always want to talk about the technology.

How does it work?

How does it operate?

And those are people who, you know, oftentimes they're genius level.

We have a lot of them on our team, but they just, they know how technology works and they have a theory of where technology is going.

I don't care about any of that.

Like all I care about is the people.

And

I'm almost maniacally focused on it.

I want to know their story.

I want to know who they know.

I want to know their network.

I want to map their network because I want to know who their first 10 hires are.

I want them to tell me who their first 10 hires are so that I can verify those people are probably going to join them.

Like I want to understand sort of the network node of

who these people are and how it's going to expand.

And I always say like early stage investing,

the best early stage investors are building relationships with someone who's going to build a company before that person even realizes that they're going to build a company.

Like it's, it's, in some ways, there's a lot.

Say that again.

The best thing you can do as an early stage investor is to build relationships with people who are, you know, director of, you know, of technology or some sort of, you know, I would say very good engineer at a company where you know in two or three years, they're probably going to leave and start a company, but they don't know that yet.

They have no idea that that's

on their horizon, but you know they're going to be a great founder.

And so you start building a relationship for them so that when they do leave, you're their first call.

And so it actually has a lot,

you know, there's a lot in common with intelligence operations where you know if if someone's going to flip, right, after you're spending years of time with them or months of time with them, right?

Like you know if someone is going to give you good information even before they know.

And it's the same thing with

sourcing and reporting.

Like you can spend a lot of time with a source and them give you nothing.

And then, you know, six months into building the relationship, they have a story they want to give you.

The best reporters are like that.

Same is true of venture capitalists.

It's figuring out who are the people who matter and making sure that they call you first.

And so

that then became, I'd say after Andrell, one, after Andrell, it became clear that like, Catherine doesn't like, Catherine's going to invest in this stuff, right?

Like it's like, this is what she cares about.

I started writing very publicly about it.

A lot of people weren't even talking about it.

Right.

Like people were still afraid of it.

There were firms that, you know, still couldn't invest in it because their, their limited partner agreement, the sort of governing docs of how the funds they operate work, said they can't touch weapons.

So there, there were firms in Silicon Valley that could not invest in Androil because their limited partners wouldn't let them.

But even after in 2019, like when I made that investment, the number of founders who said, like, one, you're an idiot, like, that's a dumb investment.

They're never going to make it.

Like, that was common.

But there was another another class of people who said, like, wow, you're a fascist too.

Like, you're a bad person.

Like, you, you must really, you know, you're, you're really on that MAGA train.

You know, like, just like the horrible things people would say.

And it's like, I care a lot about my country.

That's why I'm doing it.

And I think there's a business opportunity here, right?

It's not just, oh, I'm a, you know, patriotic capitalist and I'm throwing money away.

Like, I think this is the biggest business opportunity of our time.

And it's sitting right in front of my face and no one's looking at it.

And so I'm going to invest in it.

And I'm going to be the first call of these people who want to work here.

Wow.

That's some serious insight.

I mean, at that time, I mean, you just brought it up, but there was a strike at Google.

I mean,

very,

I mean, whatever you want to call it, anti-Trump, but anti, it seemed like anti-U.S., like it just, like nobody wanted to upgrade our defense tech.

And I mean, you're on the precipice of that change.

What was it that changed?

I mean, it seems like Silicon Valley's done a complete 180 now.

Yes.

A lot has changed.

And I think it was multiple things changing at the same time.

So the first thing that changed is Silicon Valley likes winners.

We're very mimetic.

You know, it's like VCs will feel very strongly about, oh, I don't want to work with a defense company in 2017.

And those same VCs will be begging to get in a round.

three or four years later.

So things move very fast in Silicon Valley.

People will completely update their knowledge.

And so what I think happened is SpaceX became became an extraordinary company.

Palantir went public.

And people started realizing, oh, there are examples of companies that have just really taken off.

Anduril changed this for defense, where, you know, in the early days it was controversial, but the minute that Anduril just started just getting all of the great engineers, really just crushing it on the contracting side and just building really cool products.

Silicon Valley just loves to be around cool things.

And the thing that I think Elon did for the rest of the ecosystem is he made hardware manufacturing, he made space, he made these really difficult things cool again in a way that no one had ever, I mean, aerospace before him was just like a backwater.

No one was majoring in aerospace engineering in colleges.

No one wanted to work at those companies.

And the first 10 years of SpaceX were hard.

But like by 2015, 2016, they were, you know, re-landing rockets.

Like they were, they were doing some really cool stuff.

They were about to, in 2019, they were about to start Star Alink, which was kind of this crazy idea that no one thought was going to work.

And look at it now.

So it's like Silicon Valley likes winners.

And so the minute that they started seeing winners, it's like, oh, okay, like you can make money doing this.

And so that kind of brought along, I'd say, the rest of the ecosystem, people who maybe weren't as interested in DOD, but they started seeing, you know, things change.

And then on the DOD side, I mean, I would actually say that this movement was really created by the DOD.

Like former Secretary of Defense, Ash Carter, in 2015 launched DIU.

And he was the first person, I think, inside, it was during the Obama administration.

He said, you have all these incredible engineers in in Silicon Valley.

None of them know anything about the military.

Like they don't see anyone in the military.

We're not out there, right?

Like in Washington, D.C., if you live in D.C., you go on the metro, you see people in uniform, they're headed to the Pentagon.

It's part of your life.

So you're not as weirded out by defense culture.

It's part of daily life.

Silicon Valley, they don't see anything.

And a lot of these people, you know,

many people are new to America.

Like

they have very different views, right?

So it's, we have to, like, his view was we have to go out

to Silicon Valley and like actually have an outpost there.

So he started DIU as an experiment.

It's now, you know, it's now much bigger and

Defense Innovation Unit.

So it's, it was the, this, the DOD initiative of we have to make, again, it was, it was as much a relationship initiative.

Now it's a contracting initiative.

They actually have real budget and the third iteration of how it, how it's structured.

But in the beginning, it was like, we just got to go out and like introduce ourselves to these people and like show them who we are, show them what we care about.

These are the things we want to understand.

Again, people on the ground, understand the technologies that are being built, really create a kind of real communication.

And so, you know, you had the DOD really focused on this.

Then you had winners in Silicon Valley, people who had been at SpaceX for 10 years leaving and saying, well, maybe I'll start a company in deep tech or hard tech or physical world.

And what should I do?

Well, maybe defense is where I want to do it.

Maybe I want to do another aerospace company.

Maybe I want to build a nuclear company.

And so you just had this exodus of extraordinary talent who had all been trained by Elon.

And now it's happening with Andrell too, all been trained by Palmer, where they just know how to manufacture things.

And it's been extraordinary to watch the number of young people who spend a couple years at a great company.

Palantir

has this tradition as well, where it's like it just mints founders of new companies that operate in the government space.

So it's like, one, you have winners.

Two, you have the customers changed his view.

And then the last thing that I think really changed was COVID happened.

I think people sort of lifted their head and said, okay, like something is wrong with America.

And people started really thinking about how do you, how do you solve real problems?

And then right after that, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, that changed everything for a young generation of engineers who had never seen war, right?

Like they, again, they're like 20 years old.

They have no memory of September 11th.

They maybe had no exposure to military, but like they're watching how FPV drones are being used on the Ukrainian battlefield.

And that is inspiring them.

Okay, we need to build for this mission.

Interesting.

Interesting.

Well, Catherine, let's take a quick break.

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All right, Catherine, we're back from the break.

What we kind of talked about a little bit about the culture over there at Silicon Valley.

I don't think we got too into it, though.

So I am curious, what was it five years ago?

So, I mean, five years, I think a lot of things have changed about how Silicon Valley not only views, you know, American interest,

but just the sort of

how people view

the business opportunity, but also the mission.

So I think, you know, talked about how Ukraine really did change everything for these young engineers, but there was this culture, and this is a long-standing culture, you know, say from 2000 all the way up until Andreil even existed, where there was a belief that you could not sell into the Department of Defense.

Like functionally, because of the procurement process, it would be impossible for startups, again, that are working, you know, on these 18-month timelines of they take capital, they're supposed to get big as quickly as possible,

and hire more people and grow, that they would hit the valley of death of the DOD and it would be impossible for them to break through.

So you had a kind of a financial class, but also a founder class that like just really didn't think about the DOD.

And then you, it was also sort of this interesting time in Silicon Valley.

And I think a lot of people look at kind of the old school Silicon Valley.

Bob Noyce, sort of the Fairchild Semiconductor, which was one of the earliest kind of venture-backed big companies, and then Intel,

that type of engineer, he was an Iowa farm boy.

It was sort of the people who put a man on the moon.

Those types of engineers were sort of the old school Silicon Valley.

And I always think something really shifts.

Sometimes people point to like the early 2000s.

I think Silicon Valley really shifted for a couple of reasons.

The first reason I think it shifted was kind of post-Facebook.

So Facebook started in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room.

A bunch of kids went out, then a bunch of Stanford kids joined it.

But what I think Facebook did, it was sort of the first company alongside of Google, was they made tech sexy for a certain type of worker that is not technical, that goes to a fancy school.

It used to be if you went to a Harvard or Yale, you'd go work on Wall Street.

You would go work in investment banking or something.

And around like 2008, 2009, that's when you started seeing a lot of these really talented, really bright, but sort of indoctrinated like Ivy League types come out to Silicon Valley.

And they brought with them sort of this.

the same thing that the journalists, you know, have, the same sort of activism, the same sort of, I have a certain set of beliefs about how the world works, and I'm going to bring that into the company culture.

Google was really the kind of, you know, they encouraged it.

They were sort of bring your whole self to work.

Like, you know, it's like we have laundry here and we have, you know, free, free gyms, all sorts of free perks for you to stay here constantly and work.

But it was really like a bring your whole self to work kind of identity thing.

And a lot of sort of the kind of, I think, kind of radical activism we're seeing on campuses now, but really have seen for like the last 10 years, got imported into Silicon Valley with Facebook, with Google, and with these sort of what we call app companies, sort of the

kind of web 2.0,

you know, the big companies of the last generation.

Twitter, yeah.

The people who were working there weren't sort of the, I mean, yes, they had sort of the cracked engineers, right?

But then you also had sort of this keyboard class, this sort of keyboard warrior, where it was really, really sexy to work in tech.

It became sort of the sexy, dominant thing coming out of these sort of prestigious schools.

And I think they brought...

a lot of sort of the kind of liberal, sort of liberal trends, liberal fads into the companies that looked very different than what tech was in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s.

And it was really before it was

these hardware engineers, these guys who just really wanted to build things, right?

And then when you kind of get into post-internet and the app culture, it really became something totally different.

At the same time, what was also happening in Silicon Valley is, you know, Silicon Valley is about 40 minutes south of San Francisco.

So the kind of hubs for Facebook and different places and Google, they're down in what's known as the South Bay.

But San Francisco is, you know, it really wasn't a tech city until like 2009, 2010.

Twitter headquartered itself in San Francisco in 2009.

And you saw a lot of tech workers sort of moving to the city.

And San Francisco is one of the most radical, most open, sort of kind of iconoclastic cultural

cities in the world.

It's its own weird culture.

Anything goes, you know, you kind of get these radical sort of cult-like experiences.

There's a great book about San Francisco called Season of the Witch, and it talks about how like the spirit of San Francisco has always been sort of this like people joining cults, the hippie movement, like these are the most radical people in the world.

And you meld that with the tech people who are also sort of iconoclastic and they're also sort of, you know, like again, like they...

They go to schools like Berkeley or, you know, Harvard or places and they get these sort of radical ideas.

And it's like, okay, we're going to bring that into the company.

And Twitter actually, I think, became kind of the iconic example of this where, you know, they became so radicalized about certain ideas and viewpoints that they would start completely deplatforming people who misgendered someone or deplatforming the president of the United States right after after

the

2020 election.

So it's like

the sort of radicalization of Silicon Valley, I think, was happening at the same time that you had this other shift happening, which was

things are going radical.

A lot of people have had their sort of extremist, I would say liberal beliefs, but then you have sort of a backlash to it.

And I would say like Andrell in many cases was a huge backlash to it where it's like, hey, we just want to build stuff for our country.

We're not Democrats, we're not Republicans, you know, like we're just, we're just a bunch of engineers who want to build hard things and we want to put our heads down and work.

And I actually think that's kind of the underpinning of the American dynamism movement.

It's like people got sick of the culture wars and particularly the culture wars that were being fought all of big tech.

Even big tech has gotten sick of it.

You know, it's like you kind of see Mark Zuckerberg has completely changed his tune on a lot of things.

He's kind of gone, you know, he said the culture became too feminized at Facebook.

I mean, what he's really saying is we became way too radical.

We became way too hall monitor in our views of social media and free speech.

And so I think.

It makes you wonder how much it's taken.

I mean, how much time was wasted on that kind of stuff.

So much.

And how much more innovation would have happened had they not been so wrapped up in

their own ideologies and cultures.

Totally.

I mean, like, that's why when Elon bought Twitter, I mean, he was saying we could fire 75% of the people at Twitter and the service still ran, still ran perfectly, right?

What were these people doing?

Well, they were, you know, deplatforming people or they were the trust and safety team making sure that things on Twitter were fine, right?

Like there were still massive problems at Twitter.

I mean, like, like there were still ridiculous amounts of porn and child pornography on Twitter that they didn't deal with when they were there, right?

It was, but Elon got in and saw, he's like, this is completely backwards.

We need one fourth of the people who are here.

We need great engineers.

I mean, you solve the real problems at this platform.

And we need to have free speech.

So in some ways, it's like a lot of these companies got really fat.

The business models were good.

They were really bloated, but people weren't working.

And what were they doing?

They were becoming activists.

And I do think there's, you know, across, it's not just tech.

It certainly was happening at the tail end of my time at the Washington Post, but

a lot of these young people go, you know, get out of college.

They think they're activists.

They go work at a company and they want to be activists.

They don't want to do the work of the company, which is to

build an app or to write a story.

They want to go there and they want to shake up the company.

They want to be activists inside the company.

And, you know, what really changed, I think, in Silicon Valley that sort of led people to say, okay, we can build hard things, one.

And I think that's why there's a lot of people focusing on like, let's build things that are so hard that you don't get these activists into your company.

But there was another company called Coinbase where the founder of Coinbase, I believe it was 2020, Brian Armstrong, he wrote a letter called the Coinbase memo.

And he said, if you want to be an activist, and it was during BLM and just after me too.

And he said,

if you're going to be an activist, you can go somewhere else.

Our mission is to focus on crypto.

It's to focus on ensuring that we have the best customer support and that we serve our customers who are interested in crypto and we expand that customer base.

And if you care about anything else at this company, you can walk out the door.

And he lost, I think, 6% of his company that day.

No kidding.

And he's like, you know, he'll say it publicly.

That's the best thing he's ever done because those are the 6% of people who were causing a lot of problems.

And the same can be said about Google and Project Maven.

It's only a tiny portion of people inside of a massive company.

You know, I think it was like 2% or 1%, less than 1% of people signed the Project Maven letter and walk out.

We're not going to work with the DOD.

But that can cause so much damage to a company if a company allows the activist class to control them.

So I think the thing that people learn from watching Elon just completely remake Twitter and now that and Brian, you know, Brian at Coinbase really say like, hey, like, see the door.

Because I think a lot of founders are now saying, hey, we can work on these hard problems.

We also don't have to be beholden to an activist class.

We have free speech now.

We can say what we want on X, right?

Like, we're not going to get in trouble if you, you're not going to get reported to HR if you, if you say the wrong name of someone or some wrong word.

And I think that was happening at the same time, sort of the backlash

against all of the wokeism and sort of, you know, rigid orthodoxy of how you have to act.

And that kind of opened up the way for American dynamism.

Because I really think the companies that are building these hard things in the physical world, like they just want to put their head down and build.

They don't want to talk politics.

They don't want to know who you voted for.

They really just want to build hard things and they care about the country.

And it's like they care about the mission they are working on.

I mean, how long...

How long was this process?

Because, like I said, from an outsider, it looks like it was in about a year.

Yeah.

Like

a light switch.

Yes.

To get rid of that rot.

Yeah.

Was it a lot longer than that?

It's a lot longer.

I mean, for someone, so I can say like, you know, there were a handful of us.

You've had Joe on, you've had Palmer on, you've had people on who, you know, Shaam at Palantir, like, right.

There's a handful of people who I think have been sort of saying the same things over and over and over again about like, it is okay to build for government.

It's okay.

My, my own sort of kind of experience of where I saw just a huge change is I, you know, I

was having lots of conversations with Mark Andreessen, who's the founder of our firm, about a lot of the issues that were happening in Silicon Valley.

And

I kind of told him, I said, I think that this category of investment is not just, you know, it's not just one-off companies.

It's not just going to be SpaceX and Andrew, but there's going to be an explosion of these companies.

And this was during COVID.

So I wrote this memo for him.

I ended up joining the firm, my partner David Ulovich and I, we always joked, we were sort of competing for the same companies, but there was such a small group of people who were competing to get on the same deals.

He called me one day after we had dinner with Mark, and he was like, Do you just want to come do it here?

Like, just come here, come here and build, help, like, let's build a practice together around these ideas.

And so, you know, I always give major credit to Mark and David for having the foresight of saying, hey, like, this is a real thing.

Because a lot of people didn't think it was real.

A lot of people thought, okay, yeah, you'll have an Andoral, but there's only going to be one Andoral.

You'll have a SpaceX, there's only going to be one SpaceX.

But all of these other young companies, the Dinos of the world, the S.H.I.L.D.

AIs, like these companies,

they're, you know, we only need one of each.

And our view is like, no, this is the next 10, 20, 30 years of American innovation.

If the first 25 years

of the second American century, right, 2000 to 2025, if that was investing in apps, investing in software, software eating the world, the next 25 years are taking all of that software and building for the physical world.

So it's critical minerals, it's aerospace, it's defense, it's infrastructure, logistics, all the things that touch the physical world.

And so it was actually January 2022.

It was three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine.

I just joined the firm.

I put out this manifesto called American Dynamism.

And I wrote about how like the next 25 years are going to be these categories and named companies like Andrew.

You know, we'd already invested in those companies, knew them very well, but I said, you're already seeing so many extraordinary engineers leaving these companies and wanting to build new versions of Andrew, new versions of SpaceX, right?

Like building the next generation of aerospace and defense, public safety, like the entire public safety field has been completely transformed by technology.

And we have great companies that are operating with police forces across the country doing really important work using machine learning and AI.

And

it's, you know, we were seeing this, but it was sort of this kind of secret.

People hadn't been talking about it publicly.

So we announced the thesis, and I've never seen such an explosion.

Like to me, this was like probably the biggest moment

in my career of seeing the number of people emailing me, retweeting it, saying, This is where Silicon Valley is going.

And within six months, the term American dynamism had become this kind of hilarious internet meme.

It was everywhere.

People were using it as a joke.

People were using it as, hey, I'm an American dynamism company.

Investors were raising funds off of it, saying we want an American dynamism practice.

We ended up raising a very large fund to invest in the category.

And it really, like, the thing I think I'm most proud of, because

it was, it was a huge shock.

It wasn't a shock to engineers.

It wasn't a shock to the veterans, but it was a huge shock to the investor class when we said the word America.

No kidding.

And

I had been saying American dynamism for a long time, but I said, this practice has to be named American Dynamism.

And when people ask us what it is, it is a very clear meme.

We're investing in companies that are supporting the national interest, full stop.

And we're not going to be ashamed about it.

Again, it was, you know, it was 2022.

It was before Russia invaded Ukraine.

We're not going to be ashamed of it.

But like by their nature, these companies have to sell to the DOD.

They sell to the DOD before they sell to other countries.

They're not global companies.

They are American companies.

They are very different than the software that sells all over the world, that can operate on the internet.

These are physical different things.

And we have to be very clear with our language that these are American companies.

And the investor class, I think, was stunned, mainly because A lot of our rival firms were still investing in China.

Like they had still made so much money in China, And this is a whole other story.

But when we said America, it was like we planted the flag of our own country and said, yeah, we're going to build for this country.

And it was probably the most refreshing thing to founders because they had never heard an investor.

They had never heard.

And again, having Mark Andreessen say it, you know, it's like, I'm just little old me, right?

You know, but when Mark Andreessen, the founder of the internet, basically, right?

Like

the godfather of Silicon Valley comes out and he says, we're investing in America.

People perk up and they listen.

And so it completely changed the game.

You know, later it became a meme.

Other people started raising funds off of it.

But the thing I think I'm most proud of is within a year, a lot of peer funds or what's called peer funds, like firms of our size or

other famous firms that operate in the Valley, almost all of them had decoupled from their China practices.

No kidding.

At the same time, like Mike Gallagher and the China

Special Committee that was happening in Congress and a bunch of people in the DC side, they kind of woke up about this.

It's like, okay, Silicon Valley is actually,

Silicon Valley is saying, hey, we need to invest in America too.

Important people in Silicon Valley are saying that.

And so

they started putting, I think, a little bit of pressure, the TikTok wars were happening, right?

Like people really starting to say, okay, how is TikTok being weaponized against American kids?

And it just became too much for a lot of these firms who had been investing for 15 years in China to be able to make a good faith argument that it's fine, that we're sending American money, American know-how, and that we're making tons of money off of technology that's being used as a weapon against the United States.

And so pretty much all of these firms had to divest, you know, or decouple themselves.

They turned into separate funds where there was no sharing of information, no sharing of carry, of sort of the economics among the partners.

But I think five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that would have happened.

It was just, it was too much money.

It was too big business.

People had way too many entrenched interests in China.

And if anything, what it taught me is: if you speak truth, like if you say, I'm not afraid to say I love this country and that I don't care about making money in China because I love this country.

And if you say that, people will get in line.

Like most people believe that in Silicon Valley.

They just, they just never heard it before.

That's great.

Ben.

Kudos to you.

That's

incredible.

I mean, it's, it's, in some ways, it's, you know, it's, it shows the power of memes because it really only takes, you know, one Joe, one Mark, right?

One of these guys, right?

One Sham, you know, one, one Palmer to stand up and say the hard thing.

And if you say it enough, like Palmer had been saying since 2017, like the CCP is our enemy, right?

Like the CCP is our enemy.

We should not be supporting, you know, anything to do with China.

We should not be supporting them.

We should not be investing there.

And it just, in some ways, it's like, it wears people down if people hear the meme large, like long enough.

And in some ways, I feel like the sort of meme of American dynamism is even more powerful.

than the investing practice.

It's not just an investing practice.

It's a true philosophy that like if we're going to build hard things in this country and go back to an era of the moon landing and the Manhattan Project, we have to be clear about what we are investing in and we are investing in American interest.

How did you, so how did you

meet Mark?

So

it's a funny story.

I'd say

There were a handful of people, I think, during COVID who kind of saw the craziness that was happening in Silicon Valley, kind kind of saw the craziness of the culture war.

This has been reported before,

but

Mark's very big on the group chats.

So I met him through, actually, actually, this is very funny.

I met him through, there was an app in COVID called Clubhouse, where it was sort of like a...

I don't remember Clubhouse.

Yeah, sort of like Twitter spaces.

Like Skip.

But I was very bored.

I was also pregnant with my first child.

You know, I was kind of locked up

in my house.

And I always joke, my husband was like, you know, after like the first month of COVID, it was great that you had Clubhouse because you could talk to other people.

You could stop and away me.

So I was like, you know, I was like, you know, up at the middle of the night talking on Clubhouse.

And of course, there were a handful of people there and Mark was one of them.

So I got to know Mark through

Clubhouse and through a lot of these, I'd say,

these kind of chats of people who I think were really interested in these ideas of where is Silicon Valley going?

What does it mean?

Again, like this was sort of the height of of the culture war.

And I do think it was, you know, it was forbidden.

It was like, you know, people were getting left and right kicked off of Twitter.

And so there were sort of these underground,

and it's kind of funny to say now because all of the things that were being said are being said publicly now.

It's not like there was sort of some crazy, you know, conversations happening, but it really was sort of this.

You were so forced to sort of falsify your preferences publicly if you didn't want to get canceled,

that you really couldn't talk about things.

And you could on Clubhouse in some ways, and you could in the group chats.

And so i got to know um mark and and david and a bunch of people at andrees and horowitz and you know i'd say a lot of these ideas were were really sort of you know talked about and sort of debated on an app that you know was sort of this ephemeral thing that was really important during covid because no one had a way to connect um but i also tell people a lot like especially young people like you'd be surprised who you can meet on the internet Like you'd be surprised like the people you can connect with and have deep relationships with, even if you haven't had lunch with them.

Like you don't have to go to someone's

house or office and have coffee with them.

Like, you can have deep connections with people just by writing and thinking online.

And,

you know, I spend a lot of time on the internet.

And I live in the middle of nowhere.

So it's like I need to spend a lot of time on the internet.

But that's how I got acquainted with Mark and with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and with a lot of people at my current firm, too.

It's just, it's, it's just really incredible that, you know, you, you come from zero tech background into where you are today.

I think that's just

really fascinating.

Yeah.

But, um, but I do think, you know, it's, it's, I look at someone like Dino, who I think your conversation with him is extraordinary, right?

Like in some ways, he's even,

he's sped, he's, he's the example of speed running that process even more, right?

Because it's like he's building, he's the CEO of a massive company and he had no tech relationships, you know, it's like he, he he knew he knew a little bit about tech but he's not he's not a you know cracked engineer himself right like he he you know went from being a navy seal to now running one of the most important companies for the navy in three years right like i mean he went to business school yes he went to private equity but like the things he was doing in private equity are not at all like what he's doing here and so i think it it says something about the culture of tech, which is, and I always tell veterans this because I get, you know, so many people saying, how do you transition?

It's like, it is a very open culture.

By its nature, people are open about meeting people, talking to people.

Yes.

Yes, it's kind of monolithic.

But if you have an idea that's different, there are people who will take a bet on you if you seem to know what you're talking about, if you know the right people,

if you have a talented team surrounding you.

And so I do think it's probably one of the few places that like...

misfits can go in America.

You know, it's like you couldn't go to New York City and kind of crack your way into different parts of finance.

You know, it's like there's too many places in New York where they care who who your daddy is or, you know, what school you went to, what high school you went to, right?

Like there's too much of that kind of elite culture in Washington and New York.

But something about Silicon Valley is, you know, you can just be loud on the internet and get people's attention and have everyone important in Silicon Valley talking about you, making fun of you, mocking you, right?

But like you can, you can become the center of attention very quickly.

Interesting.

And so I really encourage young people to do that, especially if they're a talented engineer.

Like you don't have to know anyone.

How does, I mean, how does venture capital work?

It seems to me like venture capital runs Silicon Valley.

And, you know, I've had a number of these guys in here

all like just

insanely smart.

And, but the trend seems to be

go to Silicon Valley, start talking about your idea, start working on it, and somebody, somebody is going to invest in it.

Yeah.

I mean,

and you'll learn a lot.

Like, not like, it's not guaranteed someone's going to invest in it.

But

what's interesting is Silicon Valley used to be, it used to be like, it's like the Florentine five families, right?

You have like five venture firms.

They all sit on Sandhill Road, which is like the classic place where all these firms were built.

And companies would go by and they'd pitch.

And then, you know, a firm would pick one company.

It's not like that anymore.

It is ruthlessly competitive.

There is more capital than there has ever been in the asset class.

I think there's something like $300 billion of dry powder just raised now, which dry powder is the amount of capital on the sidelines that's going to come into companies.

Something like 1.25 trillion AUM.

I mean, it is not a, they used to call it sort of a cottage industry.

People used to ignore it.

It's not.

It is how we've built companies over the last 25 years.

You know, I always point to this graph.

I wish I had the graphic.

Where if you looked at the Fortune 100, and then if you even went further down and you said, what are the 10 most valuable companies in the world in 2000?

Four of them were American companies.

I think think two of them were tech companies.

If you do that same experiment in 2025, nine of them are American companies, eight of them are tech companies.

And the only company that's not a tech company that's the most valuable company in the world in America is Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a massive chunk of Apple.

So tech is the story of the 21st century.

It's how we've built companies.

A lot of the companies that

are now in that, the most valuable 10 weren't even founded in 2000, right?

Like Facebook wasn't around.

Google had just gone public in 2004.

It is extraordinary that we have been able to build companies that big that surpass all of industry across the world in 25 years.

But part of that is because of the venture capital industry, which is not this cottage industry of a couple people sitting around doling out money anymore.

It is billions of dollars given by what's known as institutional limited partners.

So what they are is they're the big pension funds.

The big, you know, every state has massive pension funds, you know, nonprofits, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds across the world.

So like, you know, every country has sovereign wealth money that they want to put into various things.

And now they all want to put money into technology.

And so when you add all of that up and you say, like, everyone recognizes that they need exposure to high growth venture capital company backed companies that are going to go public and that are going to be the next Uber, the next Stripe, the next, you know, the next Facebook, the next Google.

It's just so much bigger than it was even 10 years ago.

And it's become, I'd say it's become really competitive because, you know, any really talented engineer now that has a group of people with a good idea, like it's never been, I don't want to say it's easy, but it's easier to get seed capital.

It's easier to get someone to bet on you because there's more capital in the industry.

And what was a problem five years ago is that because American dynamism didn't exist, because this category of innovation didn't exist,

You couldn't go into a venture capital firm and say, I'm going to build a hypersonics company.

People would be like, what?

Like, there's no ecosystem of people who are going to invest in that.

There's no downstream capital of people in the later rounds.

And the way venture capital structured is every 18 months, 18 to 24 months, a company will raise an additional round of capital.

And if they're successful, it makes their valuation go up.

It makes the amount the company's worth go up.

And it allows them to expand.

It allows them to grow the number of engineers, the number of people working there, number of products they're offering.

And the goal is don't go out of business, but grow as fast as possible.

And each new layer of investor will come in with a bigger check to fund the research and development, to fund the growth of the company until you go public.

And

the sort of,

it sounds completely, again, it sounds completely different

to any other way that we build businesses, but the kind of speed at which you're supposed to grow is determined, is, you know, it's the faster you grow, the better.

And so

there's sort of a view that

that is the best way to build companies, but that did not exist, I'd say, five years ago for this category of building the physical world.

There was just, there's no way that you're going to be able to get through the valley of death, get later investors to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a satellite bus company.

And I think the biggest thing that's changed is all of those partners that I talk about, the people who are investing in the funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the pension funds, all of those people in the ecosystem now believe that you can make money off of defense companies.

And they want exposure to it.

They want to invest in the next andrew.

And so to me, whenever I go to the the DOD, I'm like, this is the biggest boon for you.

Like this is, this is going to save us because you have capital from all over the country, every endowment, all over the world, frankly, that wants to invest in American innovation, American dynamism, and you don't have to use taxpayer money to do the R D.

There's hundreds of companies in El Segundo right now that are all doing the R ⁇ D, that are all raising outside capital from people who know that they might lose their money.

But that's the business model.

You lose your money in some cases.

You win in some, you lose in others.

And it's like, like, that didn't used to be directed at America.

Like that just, it did not used to be directed at the Department of Defense.

It's never been directed at these categories in the way it is today.

So it's

it does on the outside look easy.

Like everyone can just come in and raise capital, but you do have to have a great idea.

You have to know the right people.

You have to network with the right people, right?

Which is not impossible.

Like that's what I love about Dino's story is like, he didn't know anybody.

He didn't know who Joe Lonsdale was when he took him out to do a workout, right?

He just wanted to do a defense company.

And so there's so many stories of just being young and hungry and determined and have a good idea and like the right people will find you.

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I mean, when you're looking for these companies, we had talked about it.

You looked at their network and you look at who they are as a person and their values.

But what about the idea?

So, I mean, the idea matters a lot.

I mean, there's examples where I've invested in people pre-ide.

Pre-ide.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Like, I have a great company called CAPE that's building an MVNO, a mobile network for privacy.

And the founder, I knew the founder from another company that I had invested in called Manabar Labs.

It's working with a lot of the agencies and DOD.

He was on the board.

And he was the head of government sales, agency sales at Palantir for a very long time.

And so he just knows government sales better than anyone.

You know, he had been in the army and then, you know, then went to Palantir.

And I always just said, like, hey, if you're ever leaving Palantir,

please, please let me know.

And, you know, one day I got the call and it was like, I don't care what you're doing.

And, you know, I just, I just want to back you.

And within a couple weeks, he told me what he was doing.

And I'm like, oh, you're building a new mobile carrier for privacy.

That's going to be like the hardest thing I've ever heard.

Like you were building the hardest company.

But it's been, it's, he's, he's done an excellent job and is working with, you know, a number of different,

you know, parts parts of the dod um to to make it possible to to

basically be on your cell phone and to not be found i mean every that's sort of like the holy grail if you're an operator if you're part of the dod or if you're a high net worth individual who's worried about privacy to be able to travel around the world and to not ping different cell towers so that no one can track you that actually doesn't exist like all you know all the different carriers can can take your data and so yeah he's a great example of i didn't care what he did he just knew he he knew the biggest problem because he had been at palander for so long and I wanted to invest in him.

And I knew he was going to have a great team.

But on the flip side, like most of the time we invest post-ide.

We invest post, you know, people having a story.

And I always think like you're testing for a couple different things.

You're testing for how quickly someone can learn and the depth of knowledge.

And you know this better than anyone in the interviews that you do.

If you just sit there and ask questions, you can learn a lot about how deep someone's knowledge goes, right?

Well, tell me more about that.

Like, actually, is that how it works?

Like, what other companies operate like that?

How do you invest somebody pre-ide, though?

I mean, what are you investing in?

Where do they put the money?

Oh, well, I mean, they, they, in, so in John, in John's case, who's the founder of Cape, like, I, I, I waited until he had the, the entity formed and then, you know, and then we gave him the company.

So when I say like, we, we invest before the company even exists, like, there's a, there's a company.

It's just, sometimes he doesn't know what he's going to do, right?

Like there are some founders where you don't know what, I even say Andrell's a great example of this where like, yes, they started off with Sentry Tower, but like, you know, products three and four and five, they had no idea what those products were going to be.

And some of those have just been extraordinarily successful.

And so a lot of founders kind of, you know, they learn on the job, right?

Like they, they're talking to new customers every day.

And it's like, actually, maybe we should do this instead.

They call it the pivot.

You know, in Silicon Valley, it's like, it's infamous.

It's like, oh, company's pivoting into a different direction.

But a pivot isn't seen as a bad thing.

It's seen as, oh, they learned something new and they're taking that knowledge and they're building something with it.

It's much more common to invest in a company, you know, post-ide, post-team.

You know, the pitch deck, you know, is oftentimes explains the problem and the solution.

Oftentimes there's a product built.

But for early, early stage investing, which is where I like to invest, sometimes you don't need it.

Sometimes it's just about a credible team coming together.

and you having belief that that team can actually pull it off based on based on their history.

A lot of the teams that I've invested in, it's like the head of manufacturing was doing something at SpaceX, which makes me know that they know how to do manufacturing.

Or, you know, the head, the CTO was at, you know, another company where it's very clear that you can reference them and know what they actually built.

So their reputation sort of precedes them.

It's like, oh, they wrote this paper or

they built this product at Palantir.

Or, you know, Brian Schimpf, who's the CEO of Andoril, I mean, he's sort of legendary as one of the best, you know, best engineers, best coders that's ever come out of Palantir.

And so it's like when you hear that about someone and it's like, okay, now they're going to come be CEO of Andoril, you don't worry that much about whether they're going to be able to build just an incredible product.

Gotcha.

Gotcha.

What are some of the companies that you're most excited about that you guys have invested in?

Yeah, so I'd say the thing that's happened that surprised me the most, you know, it's like everyone kind of knows the Andorals, the Saronics, the companies that are selling directly to the DOD.

But the thing that surprised me the most is how many companies want to build, you know, the tier one supplier, like basically rebuild the defense industrial base and not sell directly to the Department of Defense, but sell to those Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins, and the Andrels, right?

Like they'll work with anyone, but really build out the supply chain.

And that's where I've been investing a lot.

Like we have a company, a great company called Apex Space that's building modular satellite buses.

And the view in the space industry, and space, I mean, space is, to me, space is going to be the next theater.

It's going to be the next, you know, space warfare is something we really have to think a lot about.

But you can't be good at space warfare if you don't have enough stuff.

Like if you don't have the actual like platforms to send payloads up to space on.

Logistics.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Well, and it's like we have, you know, SpaceX can get things to space.

But the biggest problem that the DOD has, and it's a problem that China's really focused on as well, is it can take three years to get a satellite bus, which is just, you know, it's not the payload.

It's not the thing that you're sending to space.

It's the thing that, you know, has the energy.

It has the comms equipment.

And really every satellite can operate with the same bus.

You don't need

the way that, again, going back to how the primes do work is the government will say, well, we're sending up this payload and this is how we want it designed.

And so they'll design a brand new bus every time they do new non-recurring engineering for the product.

And then they'll send the payload up.

And it's like, it can take three years to get a satellite bus.

So this company is building satellite buses in 30 days.

Like, why should it take so long long to build the same bus over and over again?

And so it's called

30 days from three years to 30 days.

Yeah, they went from clean sheet design to their first mission in 13 months, like first working mission with payloads in space and low Earth orbit.

And it's like if a brand new company that at that time had only 30 employees and had raised, you know, you know, tens of millions of dollars, but, you know, wasn't, isn't SpaceX, right?

But if a brand new company

can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months, you should be able to do the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the DOD.

And that's what China's doing.

I mean, China is maniacally focused on space and they are maniacally focused on how do we build as many buses as possible so that we can own the satellite infrastructure in low Earth orbit.

And it's something that we're going to have to very much worry about because right now we're in the lead in space.

I actually think that's the theater where we should feel the most confidence because Elon and SpaceX have done an incredible service for this country in terms of what they're doing with Star Shield and Starlink.

But like the other companies coming up, they want to be able to build as quickly as possible and as fast as possible.

And the big fear that I have is that government's going to say, oh, well, we've written the requirements so that we need this thing on this bus.

And it's like, no, like we just need the bus that can do 90% of the job and just get it up as fast as possible and make them as fast as possible.

We need to produce as quickly as we can.

So this company just, it's a bus.

Yeah.

Brings things to space.

Yeah.

So they can, they can take any payload to space.

You know, they have three, like in some ways, it's like,

it looks a lot more like consumer technology.

It's like we have three models.

We have one for Leo.

We have one for Geo.

We have one for, you know, the different orbit that you're going to.

But for 90% of payloads, that bus is going to be perfect.

And because they're only designing something three times versus designing a brand new thing every time they need to send something up, you take out all the design work,

you crunch all the R ⁇ D, and then you build a system that allows you,

it's designed for manufacturing, you manufacture as quickly as possible.

And that methodology of manufacturing, again, this is, I think people underestimate the impact that Elon Musk has had on the country.

He's had an incredible impact on a bunch of companies.

But the thing that he taught people, again, is the best part is no part.

It's you have to make the product as simple as possible so that you can manufacture it as quickly as possible.

And if you make it simple and if you make it, you know, modular, something that can just be churned out, where it doesn't have to be, you know, every single time something happens, you have to design something new and you have to change your manufacturing process, you'll have fewer problems with the quality control.

You'll have fewer problems with, you know, is something going to blow up?

Is something going to malfunction?

If you're only designing a system where you don't change it and where you keep it simple, it's going to be far more successful in space.

It's going to be far more successful on the road.

And like that process, he's now graduated 20, 10s, 10s, 20s, thousands of people out of Tesla and SpaceX, like these, these engineers who understand how to design for manufacturing and how to engineer and that engineering and manufacturing have to be linked.

And for a very long time, that is not how people viewed.

how you build.

I mean, actually, Vice President J.D.

Vance actually talked about this.

He came and spoke at our summit.

And he said, the biggest lie that America was ever told about manufacturing was that you could divorce the design design from the manufacturing.

And of course we did that.

Apple's the best example of this where if you open up an iPhone, it says designed in California.

And there's this belief that you can, you can, all of the premium jobs are the design jobs and the manufacturing jobs are the cheap jobs and you can outsource that anywhere.

But it's like actually linking them.

is the most important, you know, that is the most important thing.

The design for manufacturing, where you link those roles in a company, is

how you manufacture things that are simple, good, and you can do it as quickly as possible.

And so that's the philosophy of Elon Musk.

That's why everything he has done has

been successful.

And a lot of other people who do manufacturing are not.

But now there's thousands of founders who've come out of his ethos and his kind of the gospel of Elon, right?

And they know how to build like that.

And so they get on the factory floor and that's what they do.

And the DOD can just, you know, they can just pick winners.

They can say, this is what we need.

This one works the best.

You have 100 of them, we'll take them.

And there's something about that didn't exist even five years ago.

And it's only going to grow.

I mean, now Apple's a wildly successful company as well.

And so it did work for them.

So

or is it not working for them?

Well, I mean, it worked for them in that it saved them a lot of money.

But this is what's interesting.

We were talking earlier about this

Apple in China book that came out where I think it's rewriting the narrative of what Apple did.

So it wasn't like Apple went to China.

And I'm blanking on the writer's name, but he was the Financial Times reporter that covered Apple for like 20 years.

And it's like he, it wasn't like they went to China and they said, oh, these guys know how to manufacture.

We're going to give them, you know, like they're going to help us manufacture and achieve our goals.

Apple trained all of the people in China to do manufacturing.

It was something like 28 million over the course of the last, you know, 10 years that they've been there, that they've trained, which is the workforce of California.

The interesting stat that this writer notes is that Apple invested, I think, something like $58 billion per year into China so that they could invest in these manufacturing hubs and invest in these factories.

And when you compare it to the Marshall Plan, it's something like 2x the entire Marshall Plan that Apple has invested in China over the last 10 years.

And the thing that

is shocking about sort of this like divorcing the manufacturing and moving manufacturing out of America into a country is like, It wasn't like they had the people and the systems and the know-how where they were helping us.

It was like we made an active choice, or I should say Apple made an active choice to train those people and to give them the knowledge, to give them the know-how of this is how you are going to build.

And, you know, until this book came out, I don't think people really recognized just how much capital that American companies are putting into China to train them on things we know how to do.

And so...

You know, I think the kind of point of the vice president's speech was more about like, we have to bring this design for manufacturing view back, where it's like you design where you manufacture.

And that is Elon's view, but it's really the view of, I think, a lot in defense tech today.

I mean, how quickly is that shifted back to the U.S.?

On the manufacturing side, I mean, when we talk about what keeps me up at night,

it is really, really hard to build factories that compete with the manufacturing production capabilities of China.

And, you know, again, this started 10, 15 years ago with Apple, but there's many good examples of companies that were invested in by American venture capital firms in China

that

are way ahead in terms of production.

I always say the biggest scandal,

Apple is a good example of us taking our knowledge and our know-how into China and teaching them something that was an American secret in many cases.

But the biggest scandal of Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley did that too.

In 2008, 2009, venture capital firms that

are very large and very successful went into China and they taught them how to do early stage investing.

Like the overview that I, the simple overview I gave of how venture capital works, they went in there and they trained people and they trained them as though they were training their own associates in Silicon Valley.

And they told them how you build these companies.

And so I always say that the sort of venture capital ecosystem, it is American dynamism.

It is the thing that allows America to be dominant in the global economy.

It's the thing, it's how we build tech companies.

And we just went over there as venture capitalists.

And I shouldn't say we, because it wasn't my firm, it wasn't me, but VC has went over there and shared information, shared limited partners, shared all of the aspects and the functions of how you build an incredible, you know, legacy-defining venture firm.

And over 20 years, like, you know, Silicon Valley or China has a true ecosystem of tech companies now.

And they all work with the CCP, right?

Like they figured out, you know, how to, how to build in the kind of confines of how China expects them to build.

But like, this is scandalous.

Like, I think it's, you know, it's Apple in China is scandalous that we invested that much money into another country's manufacturing regime and not into our own.

Like why didn't we do that for the state of Ohio?

Why didn't we do that in the state of Florida?

Like what was it about America that Apple didn't want to invest in our own manufacturing capabilities 15 years ago so that they can make 500,000 iPhones in a day?

And so that I think is the thing that's going to be hard to overcome.

Now it's happening on the defense side because you have to manufacture in the U.S.

and there is this, you know, manufacture where you are.

But I think

it's the thing that keeps me up at night is the production gap.

Man.

You know, we talked a little bit about

Chinese espionage at Silicon Valley

at breakfast this morning.

How prevalent is that over there?

It's pretty prevalent.

From what I've heard from people I know, you know, inside the DOD and various agencies,

there are more spies in Washington, D.C.

than any other city in America.

And number two is Silicon Valley.

Man.

And of course,

it's mostly Chinese spies.

But

there's been a lot of stories recently.

There's things that happen where it's like, it's clear, you know, it's clear espionage, right?

It's like clearly, there's spies that are in big companies stealing the last 30 years of Silicon Valley.

How is China caught up so quickly?

It's, of course, a lot of these people are stealing the secrets out of the companies and stealing the intellectual property and taking it back.

So that's a known story.

I think the areas that are even more shocking are how the universities play into this, how, you know, there's, there's, you know, there was a story actually in the Stanford Review, which is a student paper at Stanford, that was saying like there are known agents on, you know, like basically spies in Stanford campus that are either professors or working with professors where they are, you know, stealing AI secrets from Stanford.

And And that's happening across, I think, all of our great university systems.

Anyone that has serious knowledge, the Chinese have been very good at infiltrating those systems.

I also think the thing that's sort of...

misunderstood about Silicon Valley is because it's such an open culture, anyone can come and anyone can sort of

have a coffee and learn about things and kind of infiltrate the culture.

And so there is also this cultural aspect in Silicon Valley where I was sharing in like 2015, 2016, when I was more open about that I was investing investing in deep tech and different things, I would always get these emails from like random Chinese venture capitalists.

It happens less now, but like Chinese venture capitalists who had a small venture capital firm and

they were from China and like you didn't know where the money was from, but they were really interested in your companies and they wanted to learn more.

And the DOD was very worried about that because they were worried about Siffius concerns, Chinese capital getting on the cap tables of these of these important companies.

But it was more like the bigger danger was it was more of just like completely infiltrating the culture, which is what's happened in Silicon Valley, where you can't really divorce, you know, a lot of a lot of tech culture from, you know, that sort of, that, you know,

they understand tech culture.

They're there.

They're completely part of it.

And so, you know,

it's something where I think we need much, much better security around a lot of these AI projects in particular, a lot of these AI companies.

It's clear that they're being targeted for espionage purposes.

It's clear that like, how did the Chinese catch up so quickly?

You know, it's like this is, again, a whole of society sort of project for them.

And Silicon Valley, like this, you know, I'd say it's sort of a Pollyanna view.

Sort of this, well, we're sort of this open, you know, we're this open ecosystem.

And, you know, anyone can come here and build.

And again, it's part of the reason why it works is like you have an open society where anyone takes a phone call and you get people like me who know nothing about it and they can infiltrate it.

But if you're working on behalf of a foreign government, it's that easy for nobody to infiltrate it with no resources, right?

How easy is it for someone who's been trained to infiltrate a society, to infiltrate a company or infiltrate an ecosystem to be able to capture the intelligence they need?

Like

it is a very easy target.

Man, you know,

I told you this at breakfast, but I mean, we were, we were having a conversation at lunch with one of the guys that I had had on the show, tech guy, and he was talking about, we were talking about finding a wife or something like that.

And,

somehow this spun up.

I had brought up that China was setting up all these brothels

all over the Middle East when I was there.

And

it would lure people in from state and all these other government agencies that fall in love with this

prostitute that's a spy.

And the next thing you know, they're telling them secrets and

they're on camera and all these other things.

And he had said,

he goes, this sounds just like silicon valley he's like you'll get he goes you'll get like these beautiful russian women or chinese women that come in and they'll you know they'll find the the startup guys or or whoever is making it big and you got it you know you got a tech guy that's normally in his basement that's probably never been with a woman before and now he's with a 10 and and

get married become whatever and there goes all the secrets yeah you know and and he said that that was so prevalent, it's almost like a running joke.

Yeah.

Well, I think there's inside Silicon Valley.

It's like, oh, yeah, I mean, she's Russian.

You know, like, you know what that is.

But, but

he just made it sound like it was, it, it was very common for that kind of stuff to happen.

Yeah.

And I think, you know, there's the, the famous sort of economic security is national security.

You hear that all the time in Washington.

And it really is like technological

supremacy is national security.

And so if you really believe that, you know, and Xi Jinping has said this, Vladimir Putin said this, like he who owns AI will own the world, right?

If you really believe that, like, why wouldn't you be infiltrating every single one of our major research labs?

Like, why wouldn't you, you know, be

just maniacally focused on getting this information out of people?

And if you've already set up a 30-year ecosystem where, you know, it's sort of a, you know, it's been very easy for Chinese researchers to come to Stanford or Berkeley or places like that.

And it's been, you know, very, very easy for the universities have taken funding.

I mean, they have, you know, there's, I can't, I can't remember the name, but like Stanford got in a lot of trouble for having this sort of center devoted to Chinese cultural understanding and different things.

And it was clearly funded by the CCP.

And the universities say, oh, well, you know, that's, that's just, it's fine.

We're taking capital for Chinese cultural understanding.

It's like, what do you think that's actually being used for?

You know, it's, it's, these are, these are sort of the soft power games and the espionage games that can, you know, over a 30-year period have a, have a striking impact on a culture.

How widely known is that?

I mean, I got to be honest, you know, that was one of the things that I was really disappointed in with with

Trump recently is the negotiation over the tariffs with China.

I mean, we came to a settlement.

I've heard about

Chinese being embedded in

our educational institutions for a long time.

And part of the deal was, yep, we're still going to take Chinese and put them in our Ivy League schools.

Well, I think

there's arguments, the Silicon Valley argument for it is it's like the

golden visa, right?

Like it's, it's sort of like what happened after

the fall of Nazi Germany, and we took the entire sort of physicist class and like all of the great engineers and they made up our space program.

Like that, that's sort of the argument is, you know, if you can get all of these exceptional engineers working in American companies, if you can get them at American universities, a lot of them stay and they're brilliant, then they're working on American interests.

And that's the argument that a lot of people make when they say, you know, we can't cut off immigration from other countries because you want to take, I mean, Palmer says this too.

It's like, you want to just gut other countries

and you want to take their talent so that they can't operate.

I think the problem is

that it's so widespread and everyone, there's no way to defend against it that these large companies, particularly the Apples of the World, you know, Google, I mean, it's like there are just repeat cases consistently of people stealing intellectual property and just the security around these important things just not being, you know, no one's paying attention to it.

And I think that the bigger problem is, you know, whenever I go to DC, there was a really good quote that,

you know, DC people would say, which is like, when we look at China in Washington, we think China is our adversary.

When Silicon Valley looks at China, they think China is my customer.

And until very recently, that was true, right?

Like, it was very true that, you know, every company wanted to go into China.

They wanted to, you know, they wanted to sell around the world, right?

Like, it was sort of this global phenomena.

China can help me.

I can learn a lot from China.

I can manufacture in China.

I can potentially sell to China, even though China doesn't like American companies, right?

Like, I think in some ways that was sort of, again, a Pollyanna-ish view.

It was sort of a stupid view because China was protecting its own.

But it is only recently that Silicon Valley at all looks at China as a potential threat or adversary.

I mean, again, two years ago, American venture capital firms were investing in China and they were investing in AI companies in China.

There are still American venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI companies.

And that's legal.

Like, that's legal.

That's not breaking any American laws.

And to me, it's like

that can be a weapon of war.

How are American investors allowed to invest in these companies?

That's crazy.

That's crazy.

Let's talk about the hypersonic company.

Yeah.

What is the name of that?

So Castellion.

So it's another great story, a company I met

very early in its trajectory.

But it kind of, again, explains why it's so important to meet people that you,

or to invest in people that have seen it before.

So

the team was working at SpaceX.

So a lot of the team was on

the government sales.

They were part of Starshield, which was selling to the government, working with government on some classified projects and different things.

And

this team,

the founder will tell the story that every time he would talk to people inside the DOD, they would say, the biggest issue for America is we have no hypersonic weapons.

Our missiles will be depleted.

I think Palmer talked about this.

If we were in

a potential hot war with China, our missiles would be depleted within eight days or some crazy scenario in terms of the scenario running.

And so this has been top of mind for DOD for a very long time.

And

the founder said, you know, he consistently talked about this inside of SpaceX, but SpaceX is maniacally focused on going to Mars.

So, you know, the sorts of projects that get done at SpaceX, they have many projects and many types of things that they're building, but hypersonics was not on the menu.

And so he and

a number of his colleagues, they left in 2023 to start this company, really focused and, I mean, just from day one, focused on hypersonic missiles, long-range hypersonic

strike missiles.

And the thing that I found so interesting about this is, again, like going back to 2019, where Palmer said the M-word, he said missiles in a pitch, you know, in a pitch to a bunch of investors and they freaked out, right?

Like missiles?

You're going to invest in missiles and hypersonic weapons and things that are kinetic.

Like, no, no, no, right.

Like, like,

that was crossing the line.

And so this was 2023.

And I, you know, I brought them in to the entire firm.

And Andrees and Horowitz sat down for this pitch.

And I just remember saying to my partner David, I was like, you know, I didn't ask, but like, you think anyone's going to care that we're investing in missiles?

Like, really, the first, the first slide is deterrence matters.

This is such a serious team.

This is a team that knows what they're doing.

Like, they've built things before.

You know, they've studied under Elon.

But I'm like, do you think anyone's going to worry about the M-word?

And he's like, I don't know.

We'll see.

And, and, you know, the pitch, made a beautiful pitch.

It ends or whatever.

And, you know, there's people on the consumer team, the games team, all the teams, like, like, not everyone is American Dynamism.

And, you know, afterwards it was sort of like silence.

And, you know, it was like, does anyone want to say, everyone think this is cool?

And literally everyone was like, yeah, it's great.

And it was like, it shocked me because I'm like, I've been so used to like, okay, there's always one person who's like, oof, I'm like kind of uncomfortable, you know, or like, like, I don't know that I,

how am I going to tell my friends?

you know, at a cocktail party that we're investing in missiles.

But there was something about like this team, like one, they're, they're pros, you know, they clearly care about the mission.

They talked about it from a, from a deterrence perspective, right?

Like this is the only way we're going to deter wars.

You have to build up your defense industrial base.

You have to build up your missile capabilities to stop wars, not start them.

And I think it was such a compelling pitch and just an honest pitch about like, this is the state of play.

Like we are not prepared.

And if we don't do it, no one's going to do it.

That

I mean, the thing that was amazing for me was like, gosh, like how far we've come.

Like in just five years to go from, you know, headline risk, like we can't touch that to, okay, we're all in on this.

Wow.

Um, and they've just been, they've been moving very fast.

Wow.

And you're a big part of that.

I mean, what is that?

How do you feel about that?

Just being such a big part of that shift.

You know, it like,

I, I know you, you've talked about like signs and callings, and I think you believe deeply in that.

I do too, where I'm like,

I look at my uncle, who, you know, everyone made fun of and kicked out of the Jesuits.

And it's like, if not me, then who?

And I do think that there's something about God gives you your calling and your mission.

And it doesn't make sense.

You say, it makes absolutely no sense that someone who is just good with words, right?

Like I'm a good writer.

I know what I'm good at, but I'm not a technologist.

I'm not going to explain to you how Castellian's missiles work.

I'm not going to sit here and be able to answer any of those questions.

But I do think that I've been given a mission.

And why me?

I don't know, but I'm not going to question it.

And that is, that is, it's someone else's will and not mine.

So it makes me, you know, when Tebow was on, like, I think Tebow had the greatest,

your interview with him was incredible, but where he had the 316

moment where he was just so happy for, like, I can't believe I've been able to do what I've done.

And then he just remembers, oh, yeah, it's like not, not about me.

Like, what a beautiful reminder.

Yeah.

It's like, it's really, it's really not about any of us.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Would with the VC firm, I mean, will you guys invest in competitors?

Would you invest in Anderil and Andrell's competitor?

Or do you put your bet all in one?

So, yeah, it's a good question because one thing is, you know, sometimes you invest in a company and

they have no plans to build something and then they end up competing with various companies or whatever.

We kind of have a strong rule about it.

It actually comes from my partner, Chris Dixon, who leads our crypto practice, where he basically says, like, you know, every company gets to tell you who their one competitor is.

But like at a certain point, like there are some companies that get so large where they're going to do everything or they think they're going to do everything.

And so you can't say, oh, you know, a company,

you know, like you can't honestly make the argument that say SpaceX is somehow competitive with a small company that's building satellite buses or a company that's building ground stations, right?

Because they have a ground station product that works with

Starlink.

So we try to make it like, you know, it's like we would never invest in companies that are competing directly head on, you know, that are doing the same product.

Like, we don't do that.

But it's more like sometimes you invest in a company that starts out as one thing and again, it pivots into something else, and then they're competing against each other.

And whenever that happens, we always try to make sure that we sort of silo the information, that different partners are working on different things.

And it does happen.

There's definitely examples of two companies just getting so big and so great.

And it's always good when you see two companies winning, but it's like then they realize, oh, like we can each acquire the same company and do something new.

And so they compete on acquisitions.

It's like, it's normal in business that companies will compete.

But

if we knowingly knew that companies were competing against each other,

we would pick the winner.

We put our eggs in one basket.

What gaps in the defense tech sector do you see that you think innovators should be looking at?

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question.

I'm spending a lot of time on the future of space and space warfare.

Like, I think there needs to be a lot more built for the next war being in space.

So that means like building things on the software side for tracking.

Like there needs to be, you know, a lot more on the production side, on the propulsion side to make sure that things can be kinetic in space.

So there's a lot, I think, happening in sort of what does the future of space warfare look like.

But everything for me comes back to this production issue.

Like I recently was with some operators on the ground on the border of Ukraine.

And the sort of, I went with a group to kind of learn about how and where investors should be investing, where are sort of the major gaps in that war.

And the kind of takeaway that I took from it that I don't think I really fully kind of understood until I was there was Russia has built up their own defense industrial base over three years in an extraordinary way, right?

Like they were kind of weak when they first started.

Now they've built up their production capacity

to really greatly be able to

be able to have this war against the Ukrainians.

The Ukrainians, to their credit, have have built just-in-time manufacturing facilities where they can build drones very, very quickly.

You know, they get the information off the battlefield that allows them to innovate on how the drones work.

They're doing that on the ground.

They have distributed manufacturing capabilities that are tailor-made for this war.

So in some ways, they've built up a defense industrial base as well.

So it's Ukraine and Russia have done a great job of building that capacity up and that production capacity.

The other player in this is China, who is supplying both sides of the war.

So they're greatly supplying the Russians with the dumb parts and the the things that they need to build the drones or with drones themselves.

And they're also supplying the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation.

They're building things in the trenches.

They'll take whatever they can get and they'll take Chinese infrastructure as well.

So the only group of people and the only country that really hasn't benefited from the war, and I say benefit loosely, but really hasn't been able to build up industrial capacity in the same way that those three countries have is America.

And so the thing that keeps me up at night, the place where we invest is how do we increase the speed of production?

And it can be on satellite buses, ground stations, modular things, you know, modular forms of energy, you know, SMR, small modular reactors for nuclear.

How do we build those as quickly as possible?

But it's just the modularization and the production thing that, you know, I'm less interested in software or design.

I'm much more interested in like, how do we just rebuild the manufacturing powerhouse that America once was?

And I think we can do it,

but there's a lot of gaps in there.

Where would that fit in?

Where would that fit in?

Would that be a manufacturing company that attaches itself to an Andural or a Sauronic?

Because when I talked to Dino, it sounds like all of Saronic is, it sounds like they're from

conception of the idea to the end product.

Yeah.

So, yeah, I mean, they vertically integrate to where they're building everything.

Like they have an in-house machine shop.

We have another company that I work very closely with called Hadrian that's building these automated machine shops where

they build parts for every company you've ever heard of and defense and aerospace, critical parts that have to be built in the U.S.

And it used to be that if you needed a critical part, you'd go to one of these massive machine shops.

The machine shops are run by someone who's older usually in their 60s, 50s, 60s.

They have apprentices who study them.

It can take two to three years to learn how to manufacture these critical parts.

If you bring software into the factory, as Hadrian has done, they can teach a former bus driver, a high school dropout, someone,

their goal is they want want to take baristas and train them to make these critical parts in 30 days.

And it's because you automate 80, 90% of the process, the quality control, the

design aspects, you automate it with software.

And then the last 10% you can teach a human to do.

But that leads to just extraordinary output.

So the more factories we can have that are software-defined factories where the software is actually making it easier for humans to produce more in the factory, whether it's critical machined parts, whether it's casting, whether it's sort of the

tier kind of two to three suppliers where it's the kind of

the joysticks or the things that are inside, it's like there's so many critical parts that are actually inside of planes,

of anything defense related, where you just need to be able to produce 10x more of all of those things.

Munitions, I mean, there's a lot of talk now about

how do we just turbocharge how quickly we can build munitions because we don't have enough.

But it really is, like all of, I think all of the fears that I have about defense come down to production.

It's all how quickly can you build.

And yes, Saranic is vertically integrated, but there's a lot of companies that would attach one of those software-defined factories to them and say, hey, just build us this one, build us as many as you can of this one part.

What are you excited about in space?

So, I mean, in space, it really is anything to do with offensive space.

I think we, you know, SpaceX, SpaceX is the most incredible company in the world.

They've done extraordinary work.

You know, they do extraordinary work with government.

They now have a direct-to-sell, you know, platform.

They have Starlink, which I think is completely revolutionized, you know, it's revolutionizing the internet.

But there's still more things that need to be done.

I'm invested in a company that's focused on ground stations, Northwood Space.

They're building modular ground stations for every other company that needs to get data back to the ground.

Our ground station infrastructure is extremely old.

It takes forever to

send, like the comms take forever.

And so if you can just have more modular ground stations

across the world to get that data back from low Earth orbit, that's game-changing.

So they're doing, you know, they're working with USG.

But I think there's, again, it all comes back to just more.

It's like these things are in some ways like, I don't want to say simple, but it's, you know, a lot of the things that I'm investing in are not.

science-fair experiments.

They're not things that are kind of going to get you riled up about, wow, like that sounds like the future.

But it's just, okay, we're just going to produce more of the things that we need because the infrastructure is just

so lagging or so old.

I'm just curious.

Have you looked at Steve Quast's company, Space Built?

No, no.

They're basically

doing logistics to where they just, you build these things in space.

That way it's not such a heavy payload.

The satellite parts don't need to be protected with Kevlar and, you know, bulletproof dust or whatever the hell.

he's talking about bringing things up in sections and actually assembling in space so that so that so that the payload's a lot less coming leaving Earth.

I'd love to chat with them.

I'll connect you.

Thanks.

But yeah, fascinating guy.

But let's take a quick break and then when we come back, we'll wrap it up.

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All right, Catherine, back from the break.

We're going to do a shift here and talk about the attack on the American family.

So your mother had two sons.

Third on the way.

Third on the way.

I didn't know if I was supposed to say it.

Yeah, no, I think it's obvious at this point.

I'd rather people know.

But yeah, what do you mean by that?

The attack on the American family?

Yeah, no, it's

I wrote a speech that I gave a couple months ago where I really started talking about how I see kind of all of history as a war between the family and the state.

These two big institutions.

One is, you know, and it goes back to Plato.

It goes back to like the Republic, the Greeks, right?

Where the entire

you know, philosophy of the Republic is that perhaps the state can take better care of a society than these institutional families.

And so when you look at sort of, you go back through history and you see that especially authoritarian regimes, the first thing that an authoritarian regime does when it wants to take over a society is it ruthlessly destroys the family.

So you mentioned the one-child policy in China.

That was an attack, a deliberate attack on the family from an authoritarian regime.

And the purpose of it was, you know, it was for national interests.

They talk about, oh, we couldn't, you know, we wouldn't be able to supply enough people with food.

But what it really was, was to weaken the only institution that can ever combat the state, which is the family.

And so I'm a pretty conspiratorial person.

I think there's been a concerted attack on the family to strengthen the state.

particularly for the last 50 years, but it's been done in very specific ways, in legal ways, through the education system, through the medical system.

And it is deliberately destroyed.

And you see it through the birth rate, like we talked about in the beginning.

Fewer and fewer people want to have families.

And it's because of this deliberate attack on the family.

And I wrote this piece called The War on Suffering, where I've been very vocal about the fact that I think everything in America changed in 1973.

Everyone always pointed, there's this website called WTF Happened in 1971.

And it points to that's when we came off the gold standard.

That's

regulation started exploding in America.

What happened in this year where

everything bad in America started

from this moment where you just see just complete change in a lot of things around America?

And I've always said that that might have been the economic change that happened in America, where financialization started and where housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford health care or education.

But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how men and women view themselves.

And ultimately, what I think is sort of the impetus and start of this sort of unraveling of the family.

And I've said this a lot publicly on what I think changed for men, which was 1973 in January, Nixon did the most

profound and most popular thing that he ever did during his presidency, which was that he ended the draft.

It was unanimous.

It was coming off of Vietnam.

It was like a unanimous thing that everyone loved.

Everyone knew what needed to happen, where he said, we're going to be an all-volunteer force and

you know we're going to allow people to choose to serve their country and of course this is something that even today people you know our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft that you know this is this is part of american culture but i think what it fundamentally said to young people is that it is a choice to serve it is a choice not everyone does it only the people who want to they might want to do it for economic reasons they want to do it for love of country but it is not something that everyone has to do to serve and defend their country.

And if you think about it, throughout human history, that is the first time that a country has said to young men, your purpose on this earth is not to defend where you live.

And it was codified.

It was like, that is not the purpose of manhood.

And then 10 days later, and it was only in 2023 when I was writing this piece that I actually even realized this.

10 days later, the female equivalent happened, where Roe v.

Wade passed from the Supreme Court.

And that had a similar impact on women, where it used to be for all of human history, your purpose on this earth is to have children, is to have a family.

And this was the first time, and in Western, you know, Western society too, a lot of nations copied us after it, but this was like, this was the moment that really changed, where 10 days after men were told your purpose is not to serve, women were told, your purpose is not to have a family, it's your choice.

And so it completely changes the view of how men view themselves and how women view themselves.

All in 1973, January, 10 days.

And it's like,

you know,

I would say there's, you know, a lot lot of people who would say, well, these are all good things.

It's really good that there's choice in America.

Not everyone should have to serve their country.

Men and women shouldn't have to go to war or women shouldn't have to become mothers.

But what we didn't do in that moment is we didn't provide anyone an alternative purpose.

We didn't provide men and women anything that says, actually, the purpose of manhood is this.

Or actually, the purpose of womanhood is this.

We just said, go figure it out yourself.

Actually, maybe there is no purpose.

And the 70s, like there was this very clear, you know, kind of, I would say, almost like nihilistic culture of, well, nothing really matters anymore.

Like you can do whatever you want.

And like that, that I think has permeated, you know, so much of society where we don't even believe suffering should exist anymore.

It's, you know, it's like the suffering for your country is why would anyone do that?

Suffering for your family, why would you do that?

But I think the minute that we destroyed, you know, the unique purpose of woman, which for, you know, you can't debate that for millennial, that was the purpose of women was to bear children and to have family.

And then the unique purpose of man, which is to fight.

The minute that we destroyed those purposes, men and women stopped relating to each other.

They didn't know how to, they didn't know who they were.

They didn't know what their purpose was.

They didn't know how they could relate.

And when you look at it from that framework, the family was destined to fail from that moment.

Damn.

You think every man should have to serve the country?

No.

So that I think is the...

I don't know that every man needs to go to war, right?

But I think there is something that happens when you say, we once were a country where everyone was treated this way.

Everyone knew their purpose.

Everyone woke up in the morning and knew at 18, I am going to, there is a chance I will have to serve my country.

And that just understanding that that is your purpose changes the way you walk.

It changes the way that you think about your life.

And the same thing for, I don't think every woman should have to be a mother.

Like I, like, you know, it's, it's, it's almost, it's,

if I talked to, you know, nine people or ten people, nine out of ten people would say, of course, like these are good things, right?

These are popular things.

But at the same time, when we didn't replace that purpose with something else, and we didn't have a way of saying, this is how society should be organized.

You're saying that it changed the consciousness of the country.

Yes.

And the only, the thing that we did instead was instead of, you know,

serving your country is an outward focus thing.

It's focused on other people.

It's focused on someone other than you.

The same thing with being a mother.

The minute you become a mother, you stop worrying about yourself, right?

Like you don't have time to make yourself the most important thing.

Like you have to worry about your children.

So in both of those cases, those purposes, they were outwardly focused.

They were things where this is how we organize society and you care about the institution of family and the men care about the institution of their country.

And then it, but what we did instead was we turned inward.

We started focusing on our own mind.

And this is like the moment that we really start thinking about, you know, psychology.

Like, who am I?

What is my purpose on this earth?

There's a great book by Philip Reith that was written in the 60s actually called The Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is that, you know, man really started turning inward in the 60s and early 70s and really thinking about like, do I have purpose on this earth and what is this?

And the minute that you stop focusing outward and you become very contemplative, which is really what American culture has become, you become very individualistic, become very obsessed with yourself.

Our generation is, you know, the trophy generation, the me generation of like everything, you know, everything about me is interesting and I'm an individual and I can achieve anything I want.

There's no barriers, there's no limitations.

But it completely rips out all of the sort of underpinnings of what makes a society function.

And I think in some ways that those were sort of the moments where it's like then you saw the unraveling of, well, there shouldn't be any kind of suffering.

Like, you know, it's around the same time that no-fault divorce happened, around the same time that, you know, like you shouldn't be told who you are, you shouldn't be judged.

You know, similarly in the medical arena,

this is around the time where ADHD sort of, you know, the late 80s, you know, SSRIs started really coming, you know, coming about where it's like we have to start medicating us because we're thinking too much about ourselves and we have too much depression.

And of course, depression, you know, the SSRIs, I think, you know, we're seen as kind of a niche thing.

And now they're, you know, what is the number of Americans that are on them?

You know, the sort of the sort of focus on the the move to focus on the self was a very deliberate action.

And I think that the crisis of the family comes from the fact that if you're focused on yourself, you really can't be focused on a family.

And you hear this all the time from young people.

It's like, I haven't achieved what I wanted.

I can barely take care of myself at mid-20s.

You know, I don't know who I am.

How am I going to be able to take care of a kid?

And we've forgotten that like previous generations,

that was, they didn't have that luxury.

They didn't have the extended adolescence where they could, you know, say, oh, well, I don't know myself.

Like, how am I going to, how am I going to go to war if I don't know myself?

Like, the greatest generation wasn't able to say that.

They just had to do it.

And in some ways, it's like,

we can definitely make the argument that things are better now in many ways.

Like,

people are living longer.

You can definitely make the argument that these things were not necessarily good for society, but at least there was a societal purpose and organization.

And I think the thing that has really been corrupted over the last 50 years is that we do not know what our American purpose is.

And particularly as it comes to the family,

family has become an option.

It's no longer the default institution that you build your life in.

And without, without that default institution you build your life in, people just, they flail.

You have the loneliness epidemic.

You know, you have young women and men who...

Depression.

Depression.

Exactly.

If there are any men out there that are wondering what your purpose is, it's to provide for your fucking family and protect them.

That's it.

But I didn't realize there was that much confusion out there about it.

But, I mean, but then, you know, you look around and

where are all the men?

Yeah, where did they go?

Yeah,

they're quote the New York Times,

yeah,

right, right.

So, I mean, I wish I would have known you were a conspiratorial person because otherwise, we'd be talking about aliens and the pyramids and Machu Picchu and all kinds of other shit.

But, but I mean, so the question is, you had mentioned, you know, those were draft-ended

pro-choice or Roe v.

Wade, you know, 10 days apart.

I mean, so is this just the result of shitty decision-making?

You know, the list goes, I'm not weighing in on those subjects, but what I'm saying is, you know, it sounds like you think that's where it started.

Then we see, you know, all the stuff with the gender stuff nowadays and Washington State, the state will come and take your kid if you don't do the gender-affirming care.

And

there's just a whole number of things.

And so

is it stemming from somewhere or is this just a result of decisions?

I think it's a result of both legal and medical decisions because I think the medical community has a huge part of this as well.

But I think it comes down to the war on suffering has been won.

We've defeated suffering and life is not about suffering.

That is what I think our legal system thinks.

That's what our medical system thinks.

And when you think of the opioid epidemic, what started the opioid epidemic in the 90s?

It was the belief in the medical community that suffering from back pain is one of the worst things that can happen and that there's a magical pill that you can take that's going to get you off of back pain.

And then there were pill mills across America handing out opioids because people couldn't deal with suffering.

And that was seen as a good thing.

Like, don't you want to eradicate suffering?

Same thing with ADHD.

Young boys, you know, it's like they can't focus in school.

Here's a magical pill and you're not going to suffer anymore.

Your family's not going to suffer.

Your teacher's not going to suffer.

You're going to feel great.

And now 23% of boys, at 17 years old are on ADHD medication in America.

And it's because we just do not believe that anyone should have to suffer.

We don't believe in resilience.

We don't believe that anyone should have to make a choice that has nothing, that has something to do with society or something that is duty versus what they want to do.

It's all individualistic.

And I think, you know, the best example of the war on suffering is what hasn't happened fully in the US, but it's happening in the UK.

It already happened in Canada, which is if you now suffer from mental illness, you can you have the right to die.

If you're over 18, you are, you are welcome to go to a doctor who will sign off of it and you can you can end your life.

Suicide machines.

Yeah.

And that was not the America we lived in before.

So the question is,

why are we so opposed to suffering?

And I get a lot of pushback from people on this.

Well, why are you pro-suffering?

And

I'm a practicing Catholic.

The entire story of Catholicism is about Jesus suffering.

for something noble, for something good for us, right?

But it is a story of suffering.

And the movement to try to pull the story of suffering out of human life, that's removing human nature.

That's removing the entire Christian story

out of how we live and saying, you are not expected to suffer, which what happens then?

You have an entire generation of young people who are no longer resilient.

So I think one of the biggest lies is that.

I think it takes drive away, too.

Oh, 100%.

It takes personal drive away.

Yeah.

Which creates less innovators.

Totally.

Which is why I I do think a lot of these young people, the reason they go to Silicon Valley and they sleep on the factory floor and they work hard and they're building hard things is because

they know that suffering is inherently, like there is something good about suffering for a purpose greater than yourself.

But I do think that people are confused about how to find that.

Like how do you find that outside of a society that tells you you don't need to get married, you don't need to have kids, you don't need to serve your country, you don't need to do something greater than yourself for your community, you don't need to be a pillar of the community anymore.

You can move wherever you want.

Just total freedom.

And I think without those guardrails or those guides or people who can help you navigate life, like people just get lost.

Man, we covered a lot of ground there.

Yeah, we did.

We covered a lot of ground.

I wish we had more time, but I know you got a flight to catch.

But

last question.

Three people you want to see on the show.

Oh, my goodness.

Well,

I won't volunteer our mutual friend, but but I'd like to see him on the show as we talked about in the car.

But Elon, I think I'd love to see you chat with Elon.

I think he's, you know, his,

we didn't get a chance to talk about Doge, but I think he's learned a lot about government.

And I haven't heard him do a long-form

interview of kind of what it's like to try to reform government.

I think that'd be really an interesting story.

Do you think, sorry, I lied, not last question.

Do you think Doge worked?

I do, but for different reasons than most people.

I think it worked as a cultural,

I think it changed the culture in Washington, but also across the country, where, you know, Twitter was sort of the early experiment in doging.

And, you know, he proved you can cut 75% of people.

And then he went to government and he

doge different, you know, different departments.

And there was a lot of, I think, backlash, but I think it made people realize we don't need as many people.

We can work harder.

We need to be more fiscally responsible.

We need to be able to understand where the money's going.

I think a lot of people woke up and realized we're spending ridiculous amounts of money on things we don't need.

And I do think that that sort of cultural change is going to permeate all industries.

all places.

I mean, it's happening in the Army now.

Like the Army dog itself with the Army Transformation Initiative.

So General George and Secretary Driscoll came out and they said, like, we're not going to wait for Doge to come to us.

We want to cut our budget by 8%.

We want to get all of these old, you know, old products we don't need anymore, all these defense things that we don't need.

They call it the Humvee.

They say, why do we have Humvees in production that were built for pre-desert storm that we haven't used in 20 years?

Like, why, why do we need that?

Like, there's another vehicle that we could actually use that's built for modern warfare.

And so they've been very forthright about, like, we want to doge ourselves.

Wow.

So I think it's caused this sort of cultural change.

I mean, are you upset that it didn't stick?

It's not going to stick, correct?

My understanding is that

this is for one year.

Yeah.

The house never got on with it.

And

I think now it goes right back to the same old shit.

Yeah.

I would have liked to see the Doge cuts codified.

It's still, it still could happen, right?

Like it could happen a separate bill.

But,

you know, then there's still tremendous young people.

We know a lot of them who are working in Doge and doing important work and modernizing the systems.

So I'm hopeful that at least that entity will stay.

But I think as a cultural movement, I mean, it's certainly changed how companies think about how many people they need.

I also think AI is going to change how many many people people think they need, right?

Like

there's other factors that are going to impact that.

But

I think it will prove to have been successful.

I hope so, man.

I think,

I don't know, I feel like our institutions are in shambles and it's

going to take this younger generation to really step it up

and fix that.

So, all right, last one more.

One more person.

I'm trying to think which founder you should have on.

You should definitely have on Elon.

The hypersonics guy.

Yeah.

I think, yeah, Brian Hargis at Castellion would be a good interview.

Maybe you can connect me.

I can definitely connect you.

Perfect.

Yeah.

Well, Catherine, what an awesome conversation.

I'd love to chat with you again sometime if you'd come back.

Absolutely.

Thank you so much for having me.

This has been great.

It's my pleasure.

Thank you.

Thank you so much.

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