#216 Katherine Boyle - America's Defense Tech Renaissance

25:19Where 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.

26:01and 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 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, funniest one, the op-ed page from last week had three different stories about the declining birth rate.

26:32Three 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, you know, 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, 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.

27:00They 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.

27:30It'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 disappeared from the society? Yeah, or that they have no interest in relationships with women or that they have no interest in marriage. And it's, but 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?

28:05Why did the women change? Right. And I think that is a huge problem of the 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. Yeah. 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.

28:42But then there was a steep decline since COVID as well. So, yeah, we're at 1.6. And the millennials, I mean, the millennial generation, I think it's something like we're older millennials, where I think it's 1980 to 1986, it's 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, 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.

29:25Let'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, the boomers are the largest, I think, 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. It used to be that you were taken care of in the family. We don't do that anymore now.

29:59We have nursing homes. 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.

30:33You 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, you know, 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, may be sick in some way, may be, you know, unable to provide for themselves in some way, might have psychological issues.

31:05Now 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 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.

31:39So 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. You know, Japan is also heading this way. Their birth 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, right? Like, 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.

32:16I 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 they just have. Extremely short-sighted. And, yeah, I think the bulk, we're always talking about how dangerous China is, how 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. They're trying everything now, too. They're trying to end divorce. So there's now a policy, at least that I read about in China, where you have to have a 90-day cool-down period so that you don't divorce.

32:57They're trying to encourage 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, 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.

33:33it's now become sort of I think an issue that's okay for polite society and sort of liberal you know 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 you know waited way too long to have children I think the the kind of under there's a there's a couple underlying factors that that I don't think we talk enough about that that have caused this is when you look at sort of our parents generation a lot of people didn't go to college. They started adulthood at 18.

34:05And sort of the sort of, you know, 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, you know, 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.

34:38So 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, you know, finding themselves and sort of their extended adolescence rather than focusing on building a family earlier.

35:09You're just going to have fewer children. And then when you have fewer marriages, that also cuts it. So it's, you know, 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 89 % of our parents generation had children. Wow is the baby do you know if the baby boomer generation is are they still the biggest? I believe they're still the biggest yeah. So this this has always been a question about that I've had is just you know what it's just real estate but I mean you see all these 55 plus communities being built but I mean you live in Florida I came from Florida.

35:49They're everywhere. They're everywhere. I mean, the villages is like, you know about the villages. Yes, yes. It's great. What is going to happen to all these 55 plus communities when that massive generation dies off? I mean, 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 in Gen X it's 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've 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.

36:36And so, you know, if you have people living a lot longer and fewer and fewer people who are being born, it's just, it's 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. Has any nation reversed this? You know, I haven't seen anything recently successfully. There have been some attempts. Some people have pointed to countries like Hungary that are now paying. 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.

37:14the one place 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 ten percent of your population then you can make up for some who we're not having any. But we don't have that in America. We don't have as many, I would say, we have more than Europe, which Europe is really the continent.

37:47They're really on the decline, though. Really on the decline. I mean, the Islamic population is reproducing it massively. Yes. But even counting immigrant and Islamic population in Europe, they're still at countries, I think Italy's 1.2. I think France is 1.5. Everyone always looks at the Nordic nations is 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 pay 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 what's fascinating to me about this is that this isn't a country-specific problem or a cultural-specific problem.

38:29It's really all industrialized nations. And there's probably healthcare reasons for it. You know, there's a lot of research. Yeah. I mean, men, I think men are 70 % less, have a fertility rate of like 70 % less than it was roughly about a hundred 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?

39:09Like 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.

39:41I mean, how do we fix it? 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, you know, make women feel more, you know, feel that they have more benefits, maybe pay women to do work, right? Like pay them to stay at home. And, you know, some of those ideas, like, you know, I could say our healthcare system is expensive. It is expensive to have a baby in America.

40:14So making that cheaper on the margins, you know, might affect a mother who says, okay, I have two 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 think it stemmed from the feminist movement, where it was get out, get a job, provide for yourself, you can do everything, which, yes. But it detoured women from having children. And then women that do have children, it's almost like 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 like frowning upon us on yeah on a stay-at-home mom i mean what's more important than raising than raising your kids yeah and then you and then i mean and then i i don't even know how single mothers do it yeah i mean it's yeah the hardest job in the world it's it's you have to make it okay and And you have to take care of the single moms out there.

41:22Totally. You know, it's scary. Totally. And 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. Yeah. A lot of the research, it's always fascinating to me, the things you can't talk about. You know, we can talk about the problem, but there's certain things we can't talk about that add to it. And you'll see, you know, economics is always a thing people want to talk about because it's like, oh, 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.

41:59But at the same time, no one talks about when you introduce birth control into a society until women, you know, 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, you know, we're not going to go back to a world that is pre-pill. Like, that's just never going to happen across, you know, both Western society and 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 health care, related to how we, you know, abortion was made legal in 1973, other nations followed.

42:37When 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.

43:09And 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. Labor Day savings are happening now at The Home Depot with select appliances starting at$399. Plus, save up to an extra$1 ,000 and get free delivery on appliance purchases of$998 or more. Get a Whirlpool laundry tower featuring industry-first UV clean technology designed to reduce bacteria in the wash without fading fabrics. Plus, with great prices at The Home Depot, you can save on select appliances designed to make laundry day easier.

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44:32All 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, we'll probably go down a lot more, but yeah, 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.

45:09I 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 taught our family around the kitchen table the Socratic method, right? 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 at the table. Nobody will ask questions. Yes, and not being afraid to be disagreeable. And I think, you know, we're a family of disagreeable people, but it was really inculcated in me from an early age.

45:47So, 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.

46:26My dad had terrible handwriting. Like, you 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 where like they never need to tell me again, not to, not to not work hard or, 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.

46:56And my parents, my mom actually ran my dad's medical practice. And so the sort of our kind of typical life was, you know, 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 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.

47:28And 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 boil. Like no one is going to outwork you. And I think that was just sort of inculcated in me from early age. So I did a lot of things.

47:59I mean, I did piano. I was really into piano as a kid. I played sports. I wasn't naturally gifted, but, you know, 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 Brady Bench 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 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?

48:39I was around all these older, you know, babysitters and kids who would come through the house who were, you know, 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 action movies, you know, with a seven or eight year old kid. It was like, oh, she's the baby, whatever, she'll be fine.

49:11So I was an adult by the time I was, you know, by the time I was a teenager. Nice. So you go to college. I know you had interest in joining the CIA. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, 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 start, I'm seeing it happen with my friends now who, you know, their parents are getting older in their 60s and their 70s.

49:54And it's sort of like the caregiver-caretaker relationship and then the provider relationship sort of flips. Where, you know, like 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 he had a severe heart attack 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 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.

50:25But this is suffering. And he's going to suffer through it, right? Like he's going to, again, he was such a saint of a man too, where like he refused to take 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.

51:04And like when it happened, I was like, OK, like this is the beginning of my life. Right. Like it's because when that's all you've known is, OK, 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.

51:38She was afraid to walk around the neighborhood at 1030 at night. So every night, 1030 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. And like, 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'd 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.

52:16And 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? Like it 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.

52:45You 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 a shoo-in, right? Like, I'm top grad out of Georgetown. Like, you know, like I have all these great references. I have these mentors who've done it, right? Like, 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.

53:26You 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 that 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 the, because I was so young. Face officer? Yeah. But 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 do two or three years. It wasn't an analyst program, but they kind of put you in this sort of path, right?

53:56It'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... 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 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.

54:30There'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 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, his credit. She was like, honey, you think you're going to know in here?

55:01Like, you think you're going to come in here and you're going to know anything? Like, and again, it's like, okay, you 23-year-old, like, little girl who's never been told, like, get out of here. What a joke. Damn. So it's on me. And they're right, right? Like, I am not the, 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 I am not someone who doesn't say what I think. I am 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.

55:36Like 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, yeah. Probably for the best. Probably for the best. I mean, things always work out the way they are. 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, you know, who were already sort of in.

56:14And they're like, you've got to be in D.C. Just take a job. 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 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 this snarky, you know, free newsletter thing. And they needed someone who was just good at writing but unbylined so you don't have a record that you work there or whatever. And I was like, that sounds great.

56:45Like 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, you know, 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, like, if I can actually make this a real career.

57:14So I sort of convinced myself that intelligence isn't that different than reporting. You have sources. You have to have a network of nodes and people who are telling you information about whatever you're covering. You have to be really good at asking questions. You have to be good at listening, reading people, knowing what's true, knowing what's false, making decisions very quickly. And, you know, part of me was like, okay, if I can't do that in the agency, 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.

57:51Really? 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. Everyone thinks that the media really started declining like maybe 2014, 2015, 2016.

58:27But 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, 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? 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.

59:04So they were just hemorrhaging subscribers. And then the advertising, it was like, well, if people are advertising online, why am I going to advertise my store in 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, you know, 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.

59:39But 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, you know, 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?

1:00:16And I think, like, you know, the interesting thing about doing it as a reporter is 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 DC and art agencies and different things and sort of where they were getting their money from and kind of follow the money But at 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 25 year old knows nothing, and you call someone and you say, hey, I'm this reporter from the Washington Post.

1:01:05Can we get coffee? I'd just love to hear more about what you know. Can you show me what I should know about this beat? 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 gonna write the story about something. I also think there's something to, some people are really good at listening, and it's a gift. Growing up in a big family was probably that. 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.

1:01:51Can 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 the Washington Post in Washington, DC. You'd already built it. You've already built a network at that point. Yeah, but not a network in Silicon Valley. But you had the fundamentals down. 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.

1:02:29What 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 was, you know, 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, you know, 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.

1:03:02Her 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 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 the gmat like he he you know she he she told me kind of how he did it and i was like you know i i've never had any interest in business until working at the Washington Post where I see this grand paper just completely collapsing in on itself.

1:03:55Like the most important lesson to me at the Washington 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 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, 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.

1:04:30You 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, you know, 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 there.

1:04:58So 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 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.

1:05:36I 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 D.C., 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.

1:06:08And 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 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, like any customer, like people just finally give in. Like people will not say no 25 times. You know, so I got in last minute and, you know, it was sort of, it was like, okay, I'm going to Silicon Valley. I'm just going to figure it out. Wow. So you just, why didn't you look at any of the other intelligence agencies?

1:06:41I was just out of curiosity. Well, you know, it's interesting. The woman, the mentor who 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. There were certain things where I was just like, that's not going to be interesting. And I also think when I look back at my career, everything I've done has been information trading, but it's been very human-centric. I wasn't interested in you know NSA and and like 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 I there's something about the 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.

1:07:38It was more like, okay, they rejected me. Like there must be a reason. And maybe I'm supposed to be doing something else. So how'd 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, like, you know, 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, you know, how technology is impacting this industry or how technology is destroying another industry.

1:08:16And 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 I really want to, 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.

1:08:47Like, 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 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?

1:09:28It's like that company is a rocket ship. So in some ways, it's like you always feel like you've missed the boat. But when I got out there, in some ways, not knowing anything was really helpful because I just was sort of this former reporter emailing people just trying to figure out what's going on. And you and I talked about this earlier. Silicon Valley, 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.

1:10:05Can 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 kind of what I did. I was like, I am so confused. Like it was the worst culture shock of my life. 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?

1:10:45Yeah. 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.

1:11:16But, 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 crazy story of how I ended up in venture capital is it was 2014 in the fall. And I always joke 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 read about the Facebook IPO and things.

1:11:51And 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 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 partner's 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.

1:12:28And so I started talking to Trey, who was brand new in venture capital. Peter had brought him on from Palantir. to really look at national security and defense. And, you know, 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 intern with you? And again, to the point of people will not say no more than five or six times. He said no probably five or six times.

1:13:00He's like, we don't have a job for you. Like, what are you gonna do here? Like, you don't know anything about technology. You literally just showed up, you know? Like, it's nice. Like, we can talk. I can 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 come work at Founders Fund. So, you know, Founders Fund's a pretty iconic venture firm.

1:13:28I didn't know it at the time. but they've invested in SpaceX. Trey would go on to be the chairman of Anderle. 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 a handful of people in and around the space, but not very many.

1:14:03And 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 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'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?

1:14:38Like veterans will email me and they'll say, Ms. Boyle. And I'm like, do not call me Ms. 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.

1:15:04Because 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 first day at Founders Fund, 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 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.

1:15:50And when you understand it, then you can start being, you know, kind of yourself. You can start being a little more flamboyant 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 an incredible gift to be able to see how companies that are, you know, so iconic that no one believed in. And 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.

1:16:26And sort of catapulted me into venture capital. Wow.

1:16:32What'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 Anderil. And so I had the luxury of spending a year with these people, really understanding how well they understood the mission, understanding 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, lowest on the totem pole. Like, you know, like lowest again.

1:17:08Yes. Oh, yeah. Because you come out of school, and then you're you're the junior associate who's there to take notes, write memos, you know, 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 to you're also there to find companies and to be the first person to touch a company and bring it in. And, and so I it's actually a funny story. I was with with Trey at In-Q-Tel, 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 Andrel yet, but he's like, we're starting the company.

1:17:43I 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, you know, the head of engineering at Palantir. I think we can convince, you know, 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, you know, drive home, call the call the partners and say, like, Palmer Luckey's starting this company and we need to be a part of it.

1:18:17And usually in Silicon Valley, they'd be like, oh, that's great. Like this, this, this famous, you know, this famous founder who sold a company to Facebook for$3 billion is 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 Luckey the guy who just got fired for the Hillary billboard like the the fascist you know the the fascist guy in Silicon Valley and what's company do well they're they're building a border security company oh 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 like Catherine's kind of insane, but they're like, we're not, like, we're not going to do that.

1:18:58And, 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, if it's this small of a check, like, you know, like, like we'll see what happens. Right. But it sort of like kind of, kind of, you know, skirted in, um, 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'd 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.

1:19:30But this was because 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 you know kind of yeah i don't want to say throwing away their money but it's like this is kind of a crazy it's a huge crapshoot um 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 um but for the first you know the first big round they were doing about a year and a half later i was like, I want to lead this round.

1:20:20I 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, you know, as many different types of customers and, you know, operators, anyone who could possibly talk about what their tech was doing and to really showcase it to our firm. And, you know, 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 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.

1:20:56They've moved exceptionally fast. And he goes into the room after I've done 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, are you ever going to build missiles? Or 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. A great answer. Like, he leaves the room and people are like, we cannot invest in this company anymore. We cannot invest in this company because - Oh, shit. Yeah. And that was how they were viewed across a lot of Silicon Valley.

1:21:29It's like too much headline risk, too much fear 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, we can't do that. We're Silicon Valley. We'll lose our shirt. Our 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, like, the investment memo that talks about, like, 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.

1:22:10You know, Trey got on the call with all the partners, and he has a theology background as well and was talking about, you know, why they're, you know, 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 you know managing partners and it was you know the partnership was going to make a decision and I walked down across the street to to this this church in St.

1:22:54Dominic's in San Francisco and I just like kneeled down and I prayed to God 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 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.

1:23:25Like, this is it. This is all I care about. And like, 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, 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 big investment in defense. How? Good pick. 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?

1:24:09So 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?

1:24:36It'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. All I care about is the people. And I'm almost maniacally focused on it.

1:25:07I 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. I want to understand 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 in some ways there's a lot.

1:25:40Say 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 someone's going to flip, right, after you're spending years of time with them or months of time with them, right?

1:26:21Like, you know if someone is going to give you good information even before they know. And it's the same thing with, you know, 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, you know, that then became, I'd say, after Andrel, one after Andrel, it became clear that, like, Catherine doesn't, like, Catherine's going to invest in this stuff, right?

1:26:53Like, 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 still couldn't invest in it because their limited partner agreement, the sort of governing docs of how the funds they operate work, said they can't touch weapons. So there were firms in Silicon Valley that could not invest in Andrel because their limited partners wouldn't let them. But even after in 2019, when I made that investment, the number of founders who said, one, you're an idiot. That's a dumb investment.

1:27:25They're never going to make it. That was common. But there was another class of people who said, wow, you're a fascist too. Like, you're a bad person. Like, you must really, you know, 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 patriotic capitalist and I'm throwing money away. 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.

1:27:53And 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. 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-US, 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.

1:28:34So 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 around 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 an extraordinary company. Palantir went public. And people started realizing, oh, there are examples of companies that have just really taken off. Andurl changed this for defense where in the early days it was controversial.

1:29:11But the minute that Andurl 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.

1:29:42but like by 2015, 2016, they were, you know, relanding rockets. Like they were doing some really cool stuff. They were about to, in 2019, they were about to, you know, start Starlink, which was, you know, 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 a lot, 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.

1:30:12And 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 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.

1:30:43It'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, like his view was we have to go out. Interesting. To Silicon Valley and like actually have an outpost there. So we started DIU as an experiment. It's now, you know, it's now much bigger. What is DIU? Defense Innovation Unit. So it was the DOD initiative of we have to make, again, 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's structured.

1:31:18But in the beginning, it was like, we just got to go out and introduce ourselves to these people and show them who we are, show them what we care about. These are the things we 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.

1:31:48Maybe 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 Anduril, 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 customer has changed his view.

1:32:21And 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 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. Like they, again, they're like 20 years old. They'd 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.

1:32:55Okay, we need to build for this mission. Interesting. Interesting. Interesting. Well, Catherine, let's take a quick break.

1:33:29for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:33:41This episode is brought to you by Facebook. So you were scrolling on Marketplace, and there it was, the bike you'd been searching for. You sent a message, and it turned out the seller was super chatty, kind of funny, and an avid cyclist. The next thing you know, you're in a cycling crew, well, a community cycling group. The thing about Facebook, you might find more than what you're looking for. From a browse to a bike ride, this summer, find more on Facebook.

1:34:15All right, Catherine, we're back from the break. We kind of talked a little bit about the culture over there in 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 longstanding culture, say from 2000 all the way up until Andrel even existed, where there was a belief that you could not sell into the Department of Defense.

1:35:02Functionally, because of the procurement process, it would be impossible for startups, again, that are working 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, you know, one of the earliest kind of venture backed big companies and then Intel, you know, that type of engineer, you know, he was a Iowa farm boy.

1:35:47It 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 shift. 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 fancy school.

1:36:25It 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.

1:37:01They 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 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.

1:37:32Twitter, 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 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, you know, these hardware engineers, these guys who just really wanted to build things, right?

1:38:08And then when you kind of get into post-internet and the app culture, it really, it 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 was one of the most radical, most open sort of kind of iconoclastic cultural, you know, cities in the world.

1:38:49It'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, again, they go to schools like Berkeley or Harvard or places and they get these sort of radical ideas. And it's like, OK, we're going to bring that into the company.

1:39:23And 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, you know, misgendered someone. or de-platforming the president of the United States, right, 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, you know, things are going radical. A lot of people, you know, have their sort of extremist, I would say liberal beliefs, but then you have sort of a backlash to it.

1:40:01And I would say like Anderle 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. 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.

1:40:32He'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 - I actually 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.

1:41:04Still 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's still massive problems at Twitter. I mean, 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 and we need to solve the real problems at this platform. and we need to have free speech, you know?

1:41:32So 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, you know, 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 wanna be activists. They don't wanna 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.

1:42:04They want to be activists inside the company. And 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.

1:42:37Our 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.

1:43:09You know, I think it was like 2%, 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.

1:43:38We can say what we want on X, right? Like, we're not going to get in trouble if you, you know, could get reported to HR if you say the wrong name of someone or wrong word. And I think that was happening at the same time, sort of the backlash against all of the wokeism and sort of rigid orthodoxy of how you have to act. And that kind of opened up the way for American dynamism. Because I really think that the companies that are building these hard things in the physical world, 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.

1:44:09They 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 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, Sean 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.

1:44:51It's okay. 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, you know, 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 Anderle, 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 Yulovich, 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.

1:45:31He 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 Andrel, but there's only going to be one Andrel. You'll have a SpaceX, there's only going to be one SpaceX. But all of these other young companies, you know, the Dinos of the world, the Shield AIs, like these companies, they're, you know, we only need one of each.

1:46:04And our view was like, you know, 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.

1:46:40And I wrote about how like the next 25 years are going to be these categories and named companies like Andrel, 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 Andrel, 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.

1:47:11And 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 like the number of people emailing me, retweeting it, saying like, 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.

1:47:51We 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 a huge shock. It wasn't a shock to the 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, you know, 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 supporting the national interest, full stop. And we're not going to be ashamed about it.

1:48:26Again, 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.

1:48:57They 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 Marc Andreessen say it, you know, it's like, I'm just little old me, right, you know? But when Marc 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.

1:49:28And 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, you know, like Mike Gallagher and the China special committee that was happening in Congress and, you know, a bunch of people in the D.C. side, they kind of woke up about this. It's like, OK, Silicon Valley is actually, you know, Silicon Valley is saying, hey, we need to invest in America, too.

1:50:05Like people, important people in Silicon Valley are saying that. And so, you know, they started putting, I think, a little bit of pressure. The TikTok wars were happening, right? Like people were really starting to say, OK, like 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.

1:50:35And 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 believe 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.

1:51:05And if you say that, people will get in line. Like most people believe that in Silicon Valley. They just never heard it before. That's great. Man, kudos to you. That's incredible. I mean, in some ways, it shows the power of memes because it really only takes one Joe, one Mark, one of these guys, one Shom, one Palmer, to stand up and say the hard thing. And if you say it enough, Palmer had been saying since 2017, the CCP is our enemy. The CCP is our enemy. We should not be supporting 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 long enough.

1:51:48And 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 are going to build hard things in this country and go back to an era of the moon landing and the Manhattan Project, like, we have to be clear about what we are investing in. And we are investing in American interest. 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 of saw the craziness of the culture war.

1:52:32This has been reported before, but Mark's very big on the group chats. so I met him through 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 remember Clubhouse yeah sort of like Twitter spaces yeah 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 annoying me so uh so i was like you know i was like you know up at the middle uh 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 um through clubhouse and through you know a lot of these i'd say these these kind of you know chats of people who um i think were really interested in these these ideas of where is silicon valley going what does it mean you know again like this was sort of the height of the culture war um 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.

1:53:36And so there were sort of these, you know, underground, 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 were 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 Mark and and David and a bunch of people at Andreessen Horowitz. And, you know, I'd say a lot of these ideas 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.

1:54:16But 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, you know, had lunch with them. Like, you don't have to go to someone's, you know, 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, you know, acquainted with Mark and with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and with a lot of people at my current firm, too.

1:54:56it's just it's it's just really incredible that you know you you come from zero tech background until 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 he's sped he's he's the example of speedrunning that process even more, right? Cause 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 knew a little bit about tech, but he's not a, you know, cracked engineer himself, right?

1:55:35Like 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 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.

1:56:05But if you have an idea that's different, there are people who will take a bet on you if you, you know, seem to know what you're talking about, if you know the right people, if you're, you know, 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 your daddy is or, you know, what school you went to, what high school you went to.

1:56:33Right. 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 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.

1:57:04And I've had a number of these guys in here, all felt like just... And it's insanely smart. But the trend seems to be go to Silicon Valley, start talking about your idea, start working on it, and somebody is going to invest in it. Yeah. And you'll learn a lot. It's not guaranteed someone's going to invest in it. But what's interesting is Silicon Valley used to be like the Florentine Five Families, right? You have like five venture firms. They all sit on Sand Hill 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.

1:57:50It'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. Now, 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?

1:58:27Four of them were American companies. I 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 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.

1:59:08But 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-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.

1:59:58and 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 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 um and what was a problem five years ago is that because american dynamism didn't exist because these 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 be like, what? Like there's no ecosystem of people who are going to invest in that.

2:00:32There's no downstream capital of people in the later rounds. 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.

2:01:08And 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, you know, The faster you grow, the better. And so there's sort of a view that, you know, 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.

2:01:53And they want exposure to it. They want to invest in the next andrel. And so to me, whenever I go to the DoD, I'm like, this is the biggest boon for you. 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.

2:02:25You lose your money in some cases. You win in some, you lose in others. And it's like, that didn't used to be directed at America. Like, 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 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. It's like, he didn't know anybody. He didn't know who Joe Lonsdale was when he took him out to do a workout, right?

2:02:57He 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. Labor Day savings are happening now at the Home Depot with select appliances starting at$399. Plus, save up to an extra$1 ,000 and get free delivery on appliance purchases of$998 or more. Get a Whirlpool laundry tower featuring industry-first UV clean technology designed to reduce bacteria in the wash without fading fabrics. Plus, with great prices at the Home Depot, you can save on select appliances designed to make laundry day easier.

2:03:31Shop Labor Day savings at the Home Depot today. Offer valid August 27th through September 16th. U.S. and LAC store online for details. I mean, when you're looking for these companies, we had talked about it. You look at their network and you look at who they are as a person and their values. I mean, 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-idea. Pre-idea? Yeah. Yeah. Like, I have a great company called Cape that's building a mobile network for privacy. And the founder, I knew the founder from another company that I had invested in called Manavar Labs.

2:04:09It's working with a lot of the agencies in 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 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?

2:04:41That's going to be like the hardest thing I've ever heard. Like you were building the hardest company. But he's done an excellent job and is working with a number of different parts of the DOD to make it possible to basically be on your cell phone and to not be found. 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. It actually doesn't exist. Like all, you know, all the different carriers can, can take your data.

2:05:15And so, yeah, he's a great example of, I didn't care what he did. He just knew, he knew the biggest problem because he had been at Palantir 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 idea. We invest post, you know, people having a story. And I, and I always think like you're 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?

2:05:49Well, tell me more about that. Like actually, is that how it works? What other companies operate like that? How do you invest somebody pre-idea though? I mean, what are you investing in? Where do they put the money? Oh, well, I mean, they, so in John's case, who's the founder of Cape, like, I waited until he had the entity formed. And then, you know, and then we gave him the company. So when I say like, we invest before the company even exists, like, 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 Anderle is 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.

2:06:30and 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'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, it's Silicon Valley, it's like it's infamous. It's like, oh, a 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-idea, post-team, you know, the pitch deck, you know, is oftentimes explains the problem and the solution.

2:07:02Oftentimes 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 their history. You know, a lot of the teams that I've invested in, it's like, you know, 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 that where it's very clear that you can reference them and know what they actually built.

2:07:34So their reputation sort of precedes them. They wrote this paper or they did, you know, they built this product at Palantir or, you know, Brian Schimpf, who's the CEO of Anderil. 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 Anderil. 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?

2:08:07Yeah. So I'd say the thing that's happened that surprised me the most, it's like everyone kind of knows the Andurals, the Sironics, the companies that are selling directly to the DoD. The thing that surprised me the most is how many companies want to build 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 Andurals, 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.

2:08:50It'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 has the energy.

2:09:21It has the comms equipment. And really, every satellite can operate with the same bus. Like, 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, you know, 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 to build the same bus over and over again?

2:09:54And so it's called— In 30 days from three years to 30 days? 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, tens of millions of dollars, but, you know, wasn't, isn't SpaceX, right? But if a brand new company can go, can, can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months, you should be able to do the, you know, the, the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the DoD.

2:10:33And that's what China's doing. I mean, China is, 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 incredible service for this country in terms of what they're doing with Star Shield and Starlink. But the other companies coming up, they want to be able to build as quickly as possible and as fast as possible.

2:11:06And 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. Um, you know, they have three, like in some ways it's like, it's, it looks a lot more like consumer technology. It's like, we have three models. We have one for Leo.

2:11:36We 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.

2:12:10But 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, you know, malfunction?

2:12:41If 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, tens, 20, thousands of people out of, you know, Tesla and SpaceX, like 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 from the manufacturing.

2:13:23And 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, 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, 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.

2:14:00But now there's thousands of founders who've come out of his ethos and his, you know, 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. Or is it not working for them? Well, I mean, it worked for them in that it saved them a lot of money.

2:14:36But 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.

2:15:14The 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.

2:15:49It 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 were 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, like, and that is Elon's view, but it's really the view of, I think, a lot in defense tech today.

2:16:27I mean, how quickly is that shifted back to the U.S.? On the manufacturing side, I mean, when we talk about like what keeps me up at night, like 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, you know, companies that were invested in by American venture capital firms in China that, you know, are way ahead in terms of production. I always say like 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.

2:17:11But the biggest scandal of Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley did that too. In 2008, 2009, you know, venture capital firms that, you know, 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, you know, how venture capital works, They went in there and they trained people and they trained them as though they were, you know, training their own associates in Silicon Valley. And they told them how you how you build these companies. And so, you know, I always say that, you know, the sort of venture capital ecosystem, it is American dynamism.

2:17:44It 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 build in the kind of confines of how China expects them to build.

2:18:20But, 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.

2:18:49and 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? um it's it's pretty prevalent um from what i've heard from people i know you know inside the the dod and in various um agencies you know there are more spies in washington dc than any other city in america and number two is silicon valley man um and of course it's you know it's it's mostly chinese spies um but there's you know there's been a lot of stories recently it's there's things that happen where it's like it's clear you know it's clear espionage right it's like it's clearly there's there's you know spies that are in big companies stealing i mean the last 30 years of silicon valley how is china caught up so quickly it's of course you know a lot of these people are stealing the secrets out of the companies and stealing the intellectual property and taking it back so like that's that's a known story i think the the areas that are even you know 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 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.

2:20:22And, you know, that's happening across, like, I think all of our great, you know, university systems. Like anyone that has serious knowledge, like the Chinese have been very good at infiltrating those systems. I also think like 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, you know, 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, you know, in like 2015, 2016, when I was, you know, more open about that, I was, you know, investing in deep tech and different things.

2:20:53I would always get these emails from like, you know, random, you know, Chinese venture capitalists. It happens less now, but like Chinese venture capitalists who had a small venture capital firm and, you know, 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, you know, CFIUS concerns, Chinese capital getting on the cap tables 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 that sort of that, you know, they understand tech culture.

2:21:34They'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.

2:22:07And 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 not 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's, it's, 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, one of the guys that, that I had had on the show, tech guy.

2:22:47And he was talking about we were talking about finding a wife or something like that and and and somehow this spun up i'd brought up that china was setting up all these brothels all over the all over the middle east uh when i was there and you would it would lure people in from state and all these other government agencies that fall in love with this you know prostitute that's a spy and the next and 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 these beautiful Russian women or Chinese women that come in, and they'll find the startup guys or whoever is making it big, and 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 get married, become whatever.

2:23:47And there goes all the secrets. And he said that that was so prevalent, it's almost like a running joke inside Silicon Valley. It's like, oh, yeah, I mean, she's Russian. Like, you know what that is. But he just made it sound like it was very common for that kind of stuff to happen. Yeah, and I think there's 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 Xi Jinping has said this, Vladimir Putin said this, like he who owns AI will own the world, right?

2:24:27If you really believe that, 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 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.

2:25:04and it was clearly funded by the CCP. And the universities say, oh, well, you know, 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, these are sort of the soft power games and the espionage games that can, you know, over a 30-year period 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 Trump recently is the negotiation over the tariffs with China. I mean, we came to a settlement.

2:25:41I'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? It's sort of like what happened after the fall of Nazi Germany and we took the entire sort of physicist class and all of the great engineers and they made up our space program. 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.

2:26:26And 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, 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 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 that um that you know dc people would say which is like when when we look at china and 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?

2:27:21Like, like it was, it was very true that, you know, every company wanted to go into China. They wanted to, you know, they, 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 sell, 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 Pollyannish view. It was sort of a stupid view because, you know, China was protecting its own, but it's, it is only recently that Silicon Valley at all looks at China as a potential threat or adversary.

2:27:50I 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 that's that's crazy let's talk about the hypersonic company yeah what is the name of that so castellian um so it's another great story a company i met um very early in its trajectory um but it kind of again explains like why it's so important to to meet people that you um or to invest in people that have seen it before so the the team um the team was working at SpaceX.

2:28:42So a lot of the team was on the government sales. They were part of Star Shield, 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, like 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.

2:29:20And the founder said, you know, he consistently talked about this inside of SpaceX, but SpaceX is, you know, maniacally focused on going to Mars. So, you know, the sorts of projects that could done at SpaceX, you know, 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, you know, Palmer said the M word.

2:29:59He 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 that was crossing the line. And so this was 2023. And, you know, I brought them in to the entire firm. And Andreessen 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 slide is deterrence matters. This is such a serious team.

2:30:32This is a team that knows what they're doing. Like they 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 uh and you know pitch i mean 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 i it was like it shocked me because i'm like there 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?

2:31:18But there was something about like this team, like one, they're pros, you know, they clearly care about the mission. They talked about it 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 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. But I mean, the thing that was amazing for me was like, gosh, like how far we've come.

2:31:48Like 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. 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, like, I know 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, like, there's something about God gives you your calling and your mission, and it doesn't make sense, right?

2:32:32You say it makes absolutely no sense that someone who is just good with words, 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 it's someone else's will and not mine. So it makes me, you know, when Thibaut was on, Like, I think Tebow had the greatest. Your interview with him was incredible, 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.

2:33:10And then he just remembers, oh, yeah, it's, like, not about me. Like, what a beautiful reminder. Yeah, it's, like, it's really not about any of us. Yeah. Yeah. With the VC firm, I mean, will you guys invest in competitors? Would you invest in Anderil'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, you know, 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.

2:33:50But, 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.

2:34:24Like, 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, you know, silo the information that different partners are working on different things. you know and it does happen like there's there's definitely you know 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 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 had no if we knowingly knew that companies were competing against each other like we would pick the winner like we 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?

2:35:13Yeah. I mean, it's a great question. I'm spending a lot of time on 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 is 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.

2:35:49And the sort of, it went with a group to kind of learn about 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 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, you know, be able to have this war against the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians, to their credit, have built just-in-time manufacturing facilities where they can build drones very, very quickly.

2:36:26You 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 things that they need to build the drones or with drones themselves.

2:36:55And 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 the 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, SMRs, small modular reactors for nuclear.

2:37:28How 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 Andurl or a Sironic? Yeah. Because when I talk to Dino, it sounds like all of Ceronic is, it sounds like they're from, you know, conception of the idea to the end product.

2:38:07Yeah. 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, you know, they build parts for every company you've ever heard of in 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.

2:38:38It 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. Their goal is they 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, you know the the tier kind of two to three suppliers where it's you know the the kind of um you know the joysticks or the things that are inside you know it's like there's there's so many critical parts that are actually inside of of planes of of anything defense related where you just need to to be able to produce 10x more of all of those things um munitions i mean there's a lot of talk now about how do we how do we just turbocharge how how quickly we can build munitions because we don't have enough.

2:39:50But 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, Sironic 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 is the most incredible company in the world. They've done extraordinary work. You know, they do extraordinary work with government.

2:40:26They now have a direct-to-sell, you know, platform. They have Starlink, which I think is completely revolutionizing internet. But there's still more things that need to be done. You know, 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, 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.

2:41:00So they're doing, you know, they're working with USG. But I think there's, again, like 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 A lot of the things that I'm investing in are not science fair experiments. They're not things that are going to get you riled up about, wow, 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, SpaceBuild? No, no. He's, they're basically doing logistics to where they just, you build these things in space.

2:41:41That way it's not such a heavy payload. The satellite parts don't need to be protected with Kevlar and, you know, bulletproof vests or whatever the hell. Yeah. He's talking about bringing things up in sections and actually assembling in space so that the payload's a lot less leaving Earth. I'd love to chat with him. 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. Update your home with pre-finished siding from Menards. Choose between 13 timeless Sherwin-Williams colors, an LP SmartSide, or Allura fiber cement siding.

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2:43:27All 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 of two sons. Third on the way. Third on the way. I didn't know if I was supposed to say that or not. 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.

2:44:05It 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 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 interest.

2:44:37They 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.

2:45:08And 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 put there, there's this website called WTF happened in 1971. And it points to that's when we came off the gold standard. That's when, you know, regulations started exploding in America. what happened in this year where, you know, everything bad in America started like 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, you know, housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford health care or education.

2:45:55But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how 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 gonna be an all volunteer force and we're going to allow people to choose to serve their country.

2:46:34And of course, this is something that even today, our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft, that 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 might 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.

2:47:10And it was codified. It was like, that is not the purpose of manhood. And then 10 days later, 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 it in western, you know western society to 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.

2:47:57And it's like, you know, I would say there's, you know, a 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. Like not everyone, 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.

2:48:26In the 70s, there was this very clear, I would say almost nihilistic culture of, well, nothing really matters anymore. You can do whatever you want. And that, I think, has permeated so much of society where we don't even believe suffering should exist anymore. 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 the unique purpose of woman, which for, you can't debate that for millennial, that was the purpose of women was to bear children, to have family. And then the unique purpose of man, which is to fight.

2:49:02The minute that we destroyed those purposes, men and women stopped relating to each other. 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.

2:49:21damn you you think every man should have to serve the country no so that that i think is the 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.

2:49:56Like I, you know, it's almost, if I talk to, you know, nine people or 10 people, nine out of 10 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.

2:50:31The 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, 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?

2:51:00What is my purpose on this earth? There's a great book by Philip Reith that was written in the sixties 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.

2:51:34There'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. Similarly in the medical arena, this is around the time where ADHD sort of, the late 80s, SSRIs started really 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.

2:52:14Of course, depression, the SSRIs, I think, we're seen as kind of a niche thing. And now they're, what is the number of Americans that are on them? 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.

2:52:52They didn't have the extended adolescence where they could, you know, say, oh, well, I don't know myself. How am I going to go to war if I don't know myself? 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. 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.

2:53:27And 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 that default institution you build your life in, people just, they flail. You have the loneliness epidemic. You have young women and men who - Depression. Depression. Exactly. For 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 then you look around and where are all the men? Where did they go?

2:54:05They're quote the New York Times.

2:54:10Right, 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 other shit but but i mean so the question is you you'd 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 in the list goes i'm not weighing in on those subjects but what i'm 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.

2:54:54And there's just a whole number of things. And so is this, 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. Cause 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 gonna get you off of back pain.

2:55:35And 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 wanna 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.

2:56:03We 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 U.S., but it's happening in the U.K. 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 welcome to go to a doctor who will sign off of it and you can end your life. Suicide machines. That – yeah. And that was not the America we lived in before.

2:56:37Yeah. So the question is, why are we so opposed to suffering? And, you know, I get a lot of pushback from people on this. Well, why are you pro-suffering? And, you know, I'm 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.

2:57:17So I think one of the biggest lies is this - I think it takes drive away too. Oh, 100%. It takes personal drive away. Yeah. Which creates less innovators. Totally. Absolutely. Which is why 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.

2:57:55You don't need to do something greater than yourself or 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, people just get lost.

2:58:13Man, 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, you know, I, I, I won't volunteer our, our mutual friend, but I'd like to see him on the show as we talked about in the car. But, um, Elon, I think I'd love, I'd love to see you chat with, with Elon. I think, uh, 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, uh, I haven't heard him do a long form, um, interview of, of kind of what it's like to try to reform government.

2:58:50I 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 doged 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.

2:59:26We need to be more fiscally responsible. We need to be able to understand, like, where the money is 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 doged 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.

3:00:00They 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? Why do we need that? There's another vehicle that we could actually use that's built for modern warfare. And so they've been very forthright about, we want to doze 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 now goes right back to the same old shit. Yeah, I would have liked to see the Doge cuts codified.

3:00:37It still could happen, right? Like it could happen in a separate bill, but 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 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...

3:01:20It's going to take this younger generation to really step it up and fix that. So, all right, last, one more. One more person.

3:01:31I'm trying to think which founder you should have on. You should definitely have on Elon. The hypersonics guys. Yeah, I think, yeah, Brian Hargis at Castellian would be a good interview. Maybe you can connect me. I can definitely connect you. Perfect. Yeah. Well, Katherine, 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.