E20: Katherine Boyle on Building a16z’s American Dynamism Practice

24:49Um, and the military used to be a proxy for serving your country. So we've lost sort of the thing that one creates binds between people of different regions, socioeconomic class, different belief systems, where when you're serving and fighting alongside someone who's different than you, but you're fighting for the same beliefs, that creates a camaraderie that this country had until 1973. And so I think in some ways that can't necessarily be replicated by other types of service organizations or by the college experience that excludes people based on income in many ways in this country or people based on class in this country.

25:27So how do we replicate it? I don't know. I think there's been lots of ideas about, oh, well, can we create a national call to public service that would, like their pipe dreams? No one would ever vote into law, a system that says every American between the ages of 18 to 20 has to serve in a certain capacity. It'd be nice, but that's just not going to happen. We don't have the will for that. So I don't know how we replicate a system that that forces people to believe in something greater than themselves, and to sacrifice something that that just sacrifice something that's greater than than what they have, like, we don't have that experience anymore, that's universal across this country.

26:04And it's probably the biggest change in the last 50 years that no one talks. And that is a lot of sort of secondary effects that we may not appreciate. Like we've been talking with our friend Antonio, or he's claimed that Israel's mandatory conscript conscription, maybe even inspires things like you're keeping their birth rate high, because people, you know, settle down early or become adults sooner in their lives and start to think about the future. And maybe that leads them to, you know, take their 20s more seriously and have kids earlier. No, no, I mean, there's probably a lot of downstream effects.

26:35But it also I mean, I'd say the the the sort of immediate effect and you know, anyone who served in the military, and even in the all volunteer forces is very much the case that you meet people from different, different walks of life. It's the most diverse organization in the country. You meet people who have, you know, different experiences, different viewpoints, and you're forced to work alongside of them. Whereas you can't say the same thing about Google. That's not the same, you know, you can't say the same thing about Harvard. You know, like the institutions that have sort of replaced for pockets of society, the institutions that would have replaced this experience at the ages of 18, 19, 20 do not offer the same sort of, you know, rigor, but also the same sort of, you have to work with people who are different than you, which I think sets you up very well, um, for the rest of your life.

27:21Um, and you know, most, most Americans don't get that anymore. Shifting gears a little bit. One thing I've reflected on is Elon taking over Twitter and then just like a whole regime change, um, and making it a new, uh, kind of, you know, act like a startup again, in terms of being able to ship new products and sort of reinvigorating. And of course, when you're a startup, things are messy, has shown me that that could happen at a massive institution, to which Bology says, yeah, it could happen in a company, but it can't happen at a government level. But it seems like FDR did that to some degree, or it seems that there have been some presidents who've been able to implement kind of a, I don't want to say a different regime, but just a wholesale reset of some institutions that were 100 years old or many decades old and some people are calling for things like that in certain agencies.

28:09Do you think that that is potentially practical or potentially where things could go or what do you take even from that idea? I think SpaceX is a better example than Twitter because Elon Musk was seen as this sort of crazy guy who said, I'm going to kind of reshape the launch industry and we're going to go to Mars. And it's a perfect example of Washington ignoring him for a very long time until it became impossible to ignore that he had built the best rockets, that he had made them reusable, that he had completely transformed an industry that would not have been able to transform itself with insiders.

28:44And I'd say actually that is the best example of an American dynamism story, an American dynamism spirit, where you don't have to, you know, like the sort of burn it all down approach is not tenable. But the I'm going to build something and I'm going to show you that it works and you're going to come see it. and ultimately then you are going to work hand in hand with me on these problems. That is a success story. And it's a success story not only for the private sector and for companies like SpaceX, it's a success story for the American government and one that should be touted across the world.

29:19Look at what we were able to build. Look at the companies that we've been able to foster and look at how we're now working hand in hand. And we're not the CCP. We're not top down telling our best technologists what they are going to build and how they're going to build it. We are letting private competition and we are letting private enterprise build the best companies in the world. And so I actually think there's many success stories. There's going to be many more success stories because SpaceX has been so successful because companies like Anduril and the defense base are following in their wake.

29:51But I don't think that it's, we need to, you know, burn everything down and not, you know, and sort of exit what we've built because some things aren't working. To that end, we're certainly not China and we do things differently. But one thing you said we can learn from them is how close their private and public sector works together on some of the most important problems. Why don't you say more about exactly what we should do that reminds you of what they do? Sure. So, I mean, I think the DOD is probably the place where we've, we have the best, you know, I'd say technology has the best relationships because there is a procurement regime.

30:30There, there always has been a standing defense industrial base that is supposed to work with, you know, hand in hand with the Department of Defense. So there is sort of laws that have already been built. Yes, there are companies that have been around 100 years that get 40%, you know, there's five companies that get 40 % of the procurement budget every year, which is sort of insane, given how old they are and given that they, you know, that they aren't sort of modernized in terms of their approach. But there is at least a methodology for procuring technology. And, you know, what we've seen that works, and it's very different than the CCP model, is you are going to be told exactly what to do.

31:04And if you don't comply, there will be consequences. That is an authoritarian model. And sometimes you could make the argument, actually Palmer Luckey, who's the founder of Andrew makes this argument. It's probably an easier way to oftentimes make companies and make technology. But we have a different model that should be and should be prized, which is capitalism, which is let the best technologies win. like let there be robust competitiveness and real competitiveness, not like faux competitiveness of innovation theater, where then the contracts all go to Lockheed Martin because they've been around the longest, which is oftentimes what happens.

31:37But real competitiveness, like who can create the best rocket? Whoever can create the best rocket gets the contract. It's a very simple thing. And I think that that is what we need more of. And honestly, that's where we're moving more towards. And I actually, I'm hopeful, maybe I'm naive, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing the Department of Defense sort of wake up and have been over the last few years and saying, okay, AI is very different than battleships. Having autonomy in a lot of our systems and building next generation capabilities is going to come from new companies. And therefore, we have to be able to make decisions fast and we have to be able to award real contract dollars.

32:14You mentioned earlier about America being a great place to come and build a family and a life for your family. You have a quote here. You said previously, I've always believed that much of American life and history is experienced through the rise and fall of families. How is that true for your family? And unpack that quote. And I'll have to say it's not my quote. I mean, like that quote has been repurposed in so many, like it was the, what the Hallmark quote of The Departed, which of course is one of the greatest mafia films ever created. it. Daniel Hawthorne, you know, said something similar like these, not an original thought at all.

32:46I think a lot, you know, it's interesting, like I was reflecting actually with you and a few others on sort of the life extension movement in Silicon Valley. And I think that is a very specific Silicon Valley millennial movement where people only think about their lifespan. It's like zero to 80, a hundred, maybe 120. If, if, you know, all this stuff works out, whatever. and they don't think about it through the life of their family. Other cultures, I think, are much better at this than the sort of American individualist experience of, I exist on this earth as part of a long story of the family and my life is not over at whatever age I die at because I have children who carry on the legacy, carry on the name, carry on the experience of the family and these family stories actually matter.

33:33um and i very much come from a tradition like that oftentimes you only hear people talk about like bringing shame to their families of if they're you know first generation americans or whatnot um i i'm not my grandfather was an immigrant from ireland i have you know i say in some ways the the experience of my family comes from their beginnings as you know very poor the two things they had in common uh you know my my paternal grandfather came from ireland at the turn of the 19th century, ended up in the coal mines, fought in World War I. My maternal grandfather fought in World War II, grew up as one of 12 children, graduated from eighth grade, but didn't have a high school education and drove a truck his entire life.

34:13And so when you look at two generations to go from that experience in America of driving trucks, coal mines, fighting in wars, coming over on boats, to sitting here and having a conversation with you, that's an extraordinary American story. And again, it's an extraordinary, it's a story that's becoming less and less true for, for, for people. And there's reasons why very ordinary men were able to benefit from hyper growth, strong public and private investment in technology, a strong investment in education, all of these things that I think were the hallmarks of the 20th century, very ordinary people and very ordinary families were able to go from working class, working poor to middle class.

34:53That is changing. And that I think is probably the question of my life, the story of my life, how I, you know, how I ended up escaping that. There's probably some reasons for that luck being a huge portion of that. But I also think like there is sort of this question of believing the memes that society gives you. And for too long, for the millennial generation in particular, there has been this meme that you cannot escape your past. you know that that everything is you know is sort of set in stone there has been sort of an epic focus on the culture war versus on actually doing things and building things and I look to those generations of people who didn't know that much or think that much but they did a lot and they believed that they could escape their past and I think that meme is really powerful and important And it's one that we have to kind of reignite as a society that you can escape and that you can kind of carry on and better yourselves versus what your parents had or what the previous generation had and see that sort of betterment as a success story in and of itself versus like, oh, well, you know, where am I in my individualist life?

36:01you know, this little like thing that is such a kind of tiny moment in time. So that's sort of a convoluted way of saying that I think the family is far more important than the individual. And that it's an institution that's understudied, underutilized in many ways, and that the status of it, or people seeing it as something that can help them achieve what their goals are in life. That's sort of been memed out of the story of why it's so important. So much of society seems more so than it was a few decades ago, kind of anti-family or less excited about the family or anti-parent, you know, less excited about parenting or being a mother even.

36:39Is that just because of the rise of the celebration of the individual? This sort of, you know, everyone's got this trauma they've got to work through and the work was never done and they just have to have to do that work. and that's an individual task? Or what's your kind of, you know, broad assessment as to why the rise of anti-family or anti-parenting, like sentiment in the culture? So that's a huge portion, I think, of it. You know, like you and I have talked about, you know, Triumph of the Therapeutic and sort of books that have said, you know, there was this movement of looking outward. And I think it goes back to the conversation we just had about the draft and public service.

37:12But, you know, there used to be sort of this, society had expectations of you. and there was suffering, there was sacrifice, and it was sort of outside of the bounds of your control. And that sort of shifted. And when it shifted, there's arguments about when it shifted, but this sort of movement towards we are going to look inward and we're going to look for fulfillment in ourselves, that's sort of a modern American conception. It's not, you know, I think people often talk about sort of the individualist American sort of sentiment. I think it's different. I think it's a variation on that theme, but it's more, I'm going to look inside myself.

37:47I'm going to know myself. I'm going to, to, to focus on trauma, focus on the things that have happened in my history. And, and that's going to be sort of the, the unique sort of identity that I put forth to the world. I don't think that's been a very helpful philosophy in terms of building things, um, in terms of, in terms of being an interesting person, you know, like having stories, being really focused on yourself, maybe, but like it hasn't actually helped people achieve more than their grandparents achieved. I've heard it be described is the difference from honor culture to dignity culture, whereas honor culture is much more external and are you serving your family and your community and your society?

38:25And dignity culture is kind of, are you being recognized in the way that you want to be recognized, right? Like participation trophies. So you mentioned this as sort of a kind of, you mentioned this somewhat of a distortion of an American value, but you also, I believe, read a bit about how there was some influence from Vienna on this worldview. Is there anything worth sharing about what that influence was? I recently mentioned I had a hard time getting a job out of college. Actually, I had my master's program. I did everything wrong in my 20s. It's a longer story, but I didn't have any skills.

39:04I graduated into the Great Recession. And my first job was actually au pair. I was a manning. And it's so funny because it's like it's not something that comes up in my current line of work, but I learned a lot from taking care of children when I was 23, 24. And I did it in Vienna. You know, I, it was, it was one of these things where it's like, I can either sit at home or I can do grunt work. I'm a huge believer in grunt work. I think not enough young people do grunt work and, and sort of understand that not everything is a salary job with healthcare and that sometimes you have to work. I, you know, like not everyone has that experience.

39:41I was really fortunate in looking back to have that experience at the time. Was not fortunate to have that experience, but decided that if I was going to go do this type of grunt work and have a job, that I needed to do it in a place where I could learn a new language and that sort of thing. So I ended up in Vienna. It was a place that I've always been fascinated by. And I lived about a block away from Freud's house, which I thought was really interesting at the time. But it's like, if you spend time in Vienna, you realize that it It is an underexplored, understudied city in world history, but also the impact that that tiny little pocket in time of the late 19th century, particularly when there were writers and dreamers and artists and philosophers and frankly, like psychology was born in these coffee houses that has now been exported across the world as the only way to understand your mind.

40:34Like the dominant theory of mind is the kind of Freudian psychology of what happens to you in your childhood, that you need to dive deep into the depths of your soul through talk therapy. This was seen as an extremist philosophy in the 19th century. And sort of the experiments that were done, and it's like living next to Freud's house, I went to the museum a lot. The experiments that were done on what were known as hysterical women at the time, hysterical rich women, were frankly very cruel. A lot of the kind of history around sort of how this kind of practice developed is actually quite raw and quite cruel.

41:11And so my experience in Vienna was sort of seeing this kind of niche pocket of history having this extraordinary impact on American society when there's a whole other sort of theory of mind and many other theories of mind that could have taken kind of precedent. And so that's a question that I have. I don't have an answer to it as to why some sort of very extremist doctors in a time, a very precarious time in a city that was going through tremendous change and, you know, in advance of World War One, why that is now the dominant sort of way that the Western world views, views our story. I don't know.

41:47I don't know if you have an answer. Mark Andreessen has this quote, he said publicly about how capitalism absorbs dissent and like converts it into a luxury good or something. And I wonder if there's something applicable here where, you know, to the extent that Freud is like the, or this idea is like the satisfaction of one's desires and capitalism in some ways is about the satisfaction one desires. And, you know, maybe with a, you know, more, if society has a bunch of religion or religious fabric or certain traditions that kind of channel desires or suppress certain desires that, that can work.

42:22But when that kind of erodes over time or gets muted among a certain elite class or a certain class, and it's all, all you have is the satisfaction of desires. And, you know, individualism is very, uh, sort of, you know, simpatico with that. Maybe it's, uh, it works in conjunction with, uh, with our, our modern economy and our, our lack of sort of shared, um, you know, religious fabric. Yeah. I, I don't know. I mean, my, my, my view is that memes are powerful and part of me is like, well, well, Freud must've been the best at making memes because you had Adler at the same time. And if people haven't read, uh, uh, the, the correct to be disliked.

42:55It's a great book on what could have been a totally different philosophy of, you know, how, how to, how to overcome things like anxiety, how to overcome things, you know, like, like family history or family trauma, you know, but operating in the exact same time, you know, you often think about like, we're living in a time where a lot of the most powerful and most interesting technologists all know each other. And 200 years from now, many of them will be forgotten and some of their theories will be 100 dominant in terms of how people view how technology should be built we don't know who those people will be and you could say the same thing about kind of you know 19th century vienna where there were a lot of different philosophers and psychologists and doctors and people practicing and writers and some of those theories turned into memes like everyone needs to go to therapy which is a freudian beam but adler must have been really terrible at marketing his ideas like that that's sort of my takeaway way is that like there were lots of people operating at the same time, but some of them were good marketers.

43:57And what would have been if we had gone with the exact opposite theory, which, you know, the Adlerian theory is it doesn't matter what happened to you in your childhood, that you every day is a new day, like focus on the future. Don't focus on the past. Actually, don't dig deep into your past because there's nothing you can do about it. And I do think that for a while, that was sort of the dominant American philosophy. People came here from other countries to forget about the horrors of what had happened to them and their families. And it was, we're going to build something new. We're going to hit the frontier.

44:27And we're only going to go forward because the past was so horrific. That is not the culture that we have now. Yeah. We've also talked about two books that kind of describe the different poles here. One is the body keeps the score and sort of discovering, you know, trauma, you didn't even know you had this kind of thing. And then the other is the mind is flat, which is a lot of the traumas is is invented and reified by us, like continuing to believe it exists. And a lot more is up to us than we think. And those are both kind of physiological books about how the body works that say, say and imply very different things.

45:00You don't want to talk about my nannian experience. Your nanny experience? I do believe in grunt work. I was a manager for the men's basketball team at Michigan, University of Michigan, and also at IMG Academy. And that was my first job after college as well. Um, and that was, um, you know, a glorified water boy and, and rebounder and just full on bitch work. Like the players didn't even know my name. Like I was one that existed, but I, um, but I'd never worked harder in my life. And there's just something about just like being on the total bottom and just a hundred percent grinding. And, um, that is just really inspiring and, uh, you know, uh, edifying and codifying and, you know, formative.

45:40Um, and So why did you choose to do that? Like, I actually, I actually think this is probably one of the biggest problems of our generation is very few people. Like, I love asking people if they ever waitress, like I waitressed in college. Like, did you do that? Why did you do it? Did you do it? Because it seemed like a fun job? Did you do it? Because you had to do it? What did you learn from it? You know, like, those are questions that I, you know, oftentimes don't come up in interview situations, but they tell you a lot about people. if you've worked physical labor, if you've, as you said, if you've been at the bottom where people don't know your name, or people see you as a shadow, that can be, you know, it can light a fire under you.

46:19It can teach you a lot about how society works, can teach you how to work with different types of people to serve people who think they're better than you. I think those experiences, sadly, are being siloed for various parts of the population and for the people that we interact with in, you know, in, in elite culture, um, oftentimes they haven't had those experiences. Whereas, you know, 50 years ago, it's like, it matters that Jeff Bezos worked at McDonald's when he was in high school, but how many CEOs have that experience now? No, it's, uh, it's fascinating. This idea of, of earning your, earning your stripes.

46:53It's a, it's a sacrifice going back to our sacrifice portion of, of, of, of, and even service to some degree related to that. We were talking about anti-family anti-motherhood, you know, life is tough for the lower class men these days uh you know 40 of men uh go to college as opposed to you know 60 of women and you know much of manual labor has you know been um either automated or outsourced now you you hopefully are bringing back um you know some of these jobs to to the us but how do we think about and then that's separate from sort of the um value shift from some traditional masculine values that used to be celebrated to now um them expecting to be more more feminine or shun some of their masculine values.

47:33Some of them are, are even, uh, you know, demonized in certain ways. How do we think about restoring, uh, dignity and opportunity for sort of the median, uh, or lower class men, uh, going forward? How do you think about that? It's a really good question. I think there's many compounding factors. We're now in a place where I think they, it's now majority of the workforce is women, majority of the knowledge workforce is women, majority of college graduates. I mean, this was even, you know, 15 years ago, majority of college graduates were women. So when they say the future is female, it's not just a catchphrase.

48:05It's very much the very people who are able to procreate in society are also the ones who are doing the vast majority of the work. That is new for history. Like that is new for, that has never been done before. So we are in the midst of an extraordinary experiment. In terms of, you know, in terms of the question of how do we support men? I actually think it starts earlier, which is how do we support boys? I don't think it's just men become adults and then they're not achieving. I actually think, you know, from what I've seen, I'm the mother of two boys, the very little glimpses of this that I've seen is that like a lot of boyhood is demonized in our current education system.

48:47And, you know, there's, there's, you know, people who've written far more about this than me, but, or, you know, it's something that I've just experienced where if you're not sitting in your chair, if you're not reaching certain milestones by the appropriate age, if you're very physical by age two, but not very vocal, there's something wrong. And I think that sort of medicalization of what is probably gender difference, which that sort of medicalization of it is not healthy for boys. And, and that if it starts with, with, you know, the earliest of I'm in a daycare, I'm in a, you know, a kindergarten where my instinct to run around because I just want to go outside and play is different than the, the kind of teacher's pet, which I was, which was, I want to sit and read a book.

49:39Of course, every adult wants the little girl who's going to sit and read a book or the little boy is going to sit and read a book. But like, when we look at sort of differences on a, on a wide enough scale, the vast majority of boys want to go out around and play with swords in that setting, it becomes, you know, I would say almost a, an early demonization of the boyhood instinct, which kind of in many cases lasts throughout society. Um, you, and we see this through, through all levels of, of education where, where girls are performing far better than boys, where women are performing, you know, there, there's a new study out actually saying that, um, women, women are in, in the three GOs, um, of, of the highest earners.

50:17So New York, Los Angeles, Washington, DC, women under the age of 30 are earning at parity or more than men. So the pay gap is actually being reduced to, um, which, you know, is something that in should be celebrated, uh, but also says something about sort of the way that we're educating boys or says something about male performance. There shouldn't be zero sum. I don't think there should be. I probably feel feel the strong. I feel very strongly that the wars of the sexes are not healthy for society, that we should learn to work better together and that we shouldn't have sort of this demonization of, well, girls should succeed.

50:52And actually, there's a great book. Boys and Men, Richard Reeves. Yeah, Richard Reeves has written about that it doesn't have to be zero sum, that the success of women over the last 50 years doesn't have to mean the downward spiral of men. And we have to figure out how to solve that issue if we're going to have a prosperous society. But I don't think it necessarily starts at young men aren't going to college. Why? I think it starts much earlier with little boys are active in a way that little girls aren't or aren't achieving for some reason in elementary education. And why is that? And we have to be really stoic and really thoughtful about why that's happening.

51:30So we're not saying bring bullying back to quote Sam Biddle. When would I tweet, I believe that started Gamergate, but we're potentially saying, hey, maybe we've gone so far on the other side of the spectrum in terms of, you know, cataloging all male or many kind of natural male tendencies as problematic by their very nature. Definitely. I mean, I don't think it has anything to do with bullying. I think it has a lot to do with recognizing that children learn differently. And it's not even, and it's across children too. It's not just boys learn one way girls. I mean, that's like very productive and simple that there are different ways that people learn.

52:07There are like some people, you know, you see it early, like you see it so early when children are, are, are young, like, like some children just love to take things apart and put things back together. Other children love to sing other children, you know, like, like, like to read books or like to be told stories or like to communicate with their, with their moms and their dads. And it's like, there's such a variance of how people accumulate knowledge and how people build and create things. And our current system of education really values one way of doing that. And it's, and, and that's, that's often because, and it's no fault of the teachers themselves.

52:44You have an overworked teacher who has 35 kids in a class and it will be absolute chaos if they don't all sit in their chair, if they don't sit in a circle, the only way you can see 35 kids is to put them in a circle, you know? So, so it's, it's, it makes sense why we have the systems that we do, but the people who are losing the most are just based on the studies, and we know this, are young boys. They do not thrive in those environments. And so how can we create environments that allow them to thrive so that they can be promising men who then contribute in society and the workforce? If we do not solve this problem in the next decade, there will be dramatic consequences that everyone knows about and no one wants to say.

53:24Your father-in-law, Timur Karam, popularized the idea of preference falsification. And the idea that people believe things but don't want to say, and this is maybe one of the, one of the areas, I mean, the irony to, to quote Larry Summers or paraphrase where he talked about how males are higher variants and that they do the best in society, you know, their fortune 500 CEOs, the majority of them, but also the worst in society. And the irony is that that fortune 500, you know, CEO level will probably continue to be majority men, even if it decreases, but the, you know, median and lower class, you know, college sort of, you know, rate percentage or just their overall relative to the media and lower class women will continue to drop or continue to get worse.

54:08And it'd be interesting to see. And, and, but people use justification of, Hey, as long as our president and Fortune 500 CEOs are men, I don't want to hear about the problems of middle-class or lower-class men relative to women. But it'd be interesting to see if there will be kind of a, a focus on equalizing that gap as well at the median level and lower level, just like there is at the top level, but reverse gender. You know, we oftentimes talked about family formation as imperative for children, um, for, for a lot of different reasons. Like, like I like saying that like families are like families are the example of economies of scale.

54:40Like if you have it in this environment where it is almost impossible to raise a family on one income, if you have two incomes for one, it allows for, you know, a better quality of life. Marriage actually does improve quality of life. Like every study shows that. But, but it also, you know, it's also a very civilizing force for men. And it's something that people have, people have been very confident saying that for, for generations. I don't know if we can say that now, but it is very important for, for a lot of different reasons in society. And so the fact that we sort of demonize family formation or that we said it's not necessary or that we say it's a choice, it's not it doesn't necessarily have to be the backbone of society.

55:21I think there's a lot of reasons why families should be the backbone of society, not only to protect children, not only to give them more stable lives, but also because it's a civilizing force for now the the sex that is ultimately going to be left behind in this current current industrial revolution. Like it is imperative. So I, in some ways, I think we've been studying sort of family formation from a variety of different contexts, and it needs to be studied in terms of how are we going to ensure that men are supportive in this new era. We've talked a lot about memes in this conversation. You had a quote in an interview.

56:00We are in a full contact, all out war with forces competing for control of our minds. I want you to unpack that, but also just the idea of what memes and culture do you think are most either misunderstood or most prominent, but we're not paying attention to their effects because you're a student of how these memes influence culture. Nothing is, uh, is innocuous these days, but like, I'll give an example of one that I think is simple for people to understand and how detrimental it can be. Um, and I wrote about it, um, in, in my, in my piece that I write for, for the, for the free press that it was basically about time, about one of the most reckless memes that has been delivered, particularly to the college educated, particularly to, to millennials and younger is that your twenties don't matter is that you have time.

56:46Um, and it's one of these things that like, I think has become more common for people to hear as lifespans have got longer, as we've sort of created this, you know, this sort of extended adolescence where, you know, you're 18 and you're old enough to fight in a war, but you're not old enough to really think about career or to really think about what you could potentially do for society. And sort of in, you know, in the piece I talk about, like SBF, for example, who the media consistently referred to as a boy or a wonder kid or, you know, someone who who was really young and successful and you're like, he's 30, you know, he's, he, he's, he's actually in his thirties.

57:23Um, and 30 is old, 30 is old by any stretch of the imagination. Like, even if you're just looking at what is the half-life of the average American man, um, it's late thirties. Um, it may be, it may be a little bit older, like 40 for women. Um, if you're, if you're looking at, you know, siloing it by very various demos, but like, you know, I think about that a lot. I'm at my half-life, midlife. But society is telling me that I am extremely young. And why is that? Why has that meme been delivered for me? And there's probably reasons for it. It's one is that certain generations want to hold onto power.

57:58That's like the more nefarious reading of the meme is that older people are living longer, therefore they're working longer, therefore they're in charge of organizations longer. And therefore, what would have been someone being at the peak of their career at 30. Now that person will be at the peak of their career at 60. That's one interpretation of it. But I also think that it's an example of sort of coddling and sort of this view that you don't have to make hard choices in your life. And you certainly don't have to make hard choices in your life when you're best equipped to make hard choices, which is when you don't have children, which is when you don't, you know, don't have sort of the same requirements and responsibilities of someone who has people depending on them.

58:40And it's just a very dangerous thing to tell children and to tell people who are, you know, entering adulthood. And it is by like, by and large, the thing that I hear the most often is like, okay, I'm only 25. I don't have to have my life figured out. But like, how great would it be if you had your life figured out? How great would it be if you knew who your spouse was? If you knew what you wanted your career to be? How great would it be if you had a five-year plan where at 30, you would be operating at something that's compounding over time. And we know this mathematically, that the sooner that your life starts compounding, the sooner you stop sort of, you know, messing around and experiencing the world and trying new things, the sooner you make hard decisions, the better your life gets because, because those decisions compound.

59:22And I've heard you say this capacity, like in some way diversifying is a hedge and, you know, hedging is not how you compound. And so, and then to push back there, they would say, Hey, but picking the wrong thing. Also either picking the wrong partner or picking the wrong career could also be, um, you know, the wrong thing. And given, you know, I'm going to live longer and be healthier. Like, shouldn't I take more time to really like, I'm not just, you know, dilly dally, but, um, really try a bunch of things and, and travel and experiment with new lives. So I, I, I often point to, you know, the best executives know that that's also another, another fallacy that by pushing off the decision, it doesn't make the decision any easier.

1:00:01Oftentimes it makes it harder, but there's some cost fallacy. The people who make the best decisions make them very fast. And when they make the wrong decision, they realize it and they reverse course. And oftentimes, you know, we have this fear that we're going to make the wrong decision, but that's an, you know, an unplaced fear. Oftentimes we make the right decisions about life. So, you know, the, the sort of Bezos one-way door, two-way door, there are very few decisions in life that are one-way door, um, even career. So I went all in on what was 100 % the wrong career for me. And I was able to reverse that decision.

1:00:33It was difficult. I wish I hadn't done it. Like, I wish I had been smart enough to make the right decision. But like, you can reverse your career. And oftentimes, people do not want to do that. They don't want to go all in on one thing. They don't necessarily, you know, want to commit to a person, to a job, to an identity. and I think the earlier that you make those choices in life and the earlier that you kind of stop experimenting, there's so many examples of success stories and that's sort of a very dangerous meme that has been given to people so they won't compete with the other people who are making really difficult decisions.

1:01:10I mean, it's like, this is the most dangerous meme. So yeah, that's one example but I think there's so many examples of people who are at war for your mind and you have to ask yourself, what are the incentives of these people who are creating these memes? Like, do they want me to succeed? My parents want me to succeed or the vast majority of parents want to see their children succeed. But like, what about the other people? Do they really want to see me become the best version of myself? Probably not. Maybe this is a low trust society that I'm speaking in, but I think these memes are far more dangerous than people let on to.

1:01:44Well, I think about this a lot. Why do people celebrate other people being vulnerable on social networks? like about their failures and stuff. Because maybe they're kind of excited when you fail. Like, you know, maybe it makes them feel better about themselves or they can rise up or like, why play into this, you know, sort of attention game for people who actually would prefer that you didn't succeed. The memes are people should strive for optionality and freedom. And yet they don't appreciate that. One, doing things like starting a company builds lots of optionality because or committing to something like, because lots of opportunities will emerge that you wouldn't have foreseen otherwise.

1:02:22And then, and similarly, like, you know, pursuing things for optionality too many times, like you, it will, like, for example, if people will go be consultants for like 10 years, because they want, they want to start a company, well, in order to start a successful company, you might need a few tries. And plus your opportunity cost rises to your point, like the optionality death trap is, is actually like flawed on its own terms. And then similarly, like the freedom thing, You know, David Brooks once said, what you chain yourself to is what sets you free. Like once you commit to a person or a place or a project, you now are free from, from agonizing over what person, project or place did you commit to, which will save a ton of brain space.

1:03:01We know this instinctually, like we actually, and this is why society by and large has, has organized itself in these ways of making decisions at a certain point, you know, encouraging marriage so that you can have children, encouraging, you know, encouraging staying with a career, encouraging staying with a role, an identity in life. And, you know, I think there's, it's sort of, you know, in some ways, because America has become so prosperous, many more people are confronted with these questions. This used to be a question of kings and queens of who am I and sort of these sort of heady questions of how to spend your time.

1:03:40so in some ways it is it is a symptom of progress and success but we need these structures and we need to encourage you know encourage sort of structure in society so that people don't lose their minds and I think if you if you look at sort of you know why does it feel like people are like why does it feel like people are losing their minds like there's no one who's going to argue against that that we haven't sort of you know and it's like what are the reasons for it well it could be perhaps that there is no structure it could be perhaps that there is too much choice it It could be perhaps that too many people are sort of waiting for perfection on all dimensions of their life instead of just making choices that are ultimately going to maybe not make them happy, but maybe make them content.

1:04:21And when we look back at previous generations, that's what they did and things worked out. And again, I think a lot of the pressure is taken off of those decisions when you're not thinking of your life as this thing that is only you, but you're thinking of your life as one part of a long lineage of people. It's just comforting to know that it doesn't all rest with you. And that your choices, as long as you're sort of moving the ball forward for this group of people that are your family, your kin, like the people you care the most about, that that's okay. It doesn't have to be perfection. We don't all have to kind of achieve the ultimate dream.

1:05:04It's this great irony that pursuing what we think might make us happy in the moment at, you know, our whole lives in some ways won't make us happy or fulfilled looking back at our lives. Whereas, you know, pursuing things, you know, you've talked about the importance of suffering or believing the value of suffering, things in which involve sacrifice and deep suffering. And hey, we're not happy at that given time because we're engaging in hardship could lead to a life, you know, more fulfilled or happy. And what's ironic is that economic growth is really focused on removing, first on removing privation, like basically going on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.

1:05:37And once you, you know, many people have gotten, you know, great food and shelter and, and those needs met. And at some point, it's all about increasing utility, but at some point you kind of need to introduce disutility. Like you need to introduce that suffering and, and capitalism doesn't do it easily for us unless we choose to start a company or things like that. But there's this kind of broader layer of like, this thing that was once the good and the thing to optimize for, which is the satisfying of desires on the lower level of Masaharic you need, doesn't help us get to that, like removing suffering, right?

1:06:09Like we want to move suffering to a point, but not all the way. And so how do we voluntarily introduce some level of suffering to have that level of meaning? No, and even if we remove all suffering, we introduce synthetic suffering. And, you know, suffering is a huge part of life and how you deal with suffering ultimately defines you. So this sort of like push to reduce all kinds of suffering at the, you know, at the expense of any type of sacrifice or any type of progress, I actually think is part of the reason why we're so, you know, so sad. I mean, if you look at every new poll that's come out, Jonathan Haidt has really good statistics around just depression and rising teen depression and sort of this sort of the numbers are shocking because it shows that the vast majority of people are sort of entering this world where they feel unhappy just being.

1:07:03And so we have to figure out why that is. It can't just be, you know, like a lot of the hypotheses, I think, are wishful thinking at not doing the kind of real kind of saying the saying the the the truths that are hard to recognize, which is that maybe we're consuming memes that are very, you know, very dangerous or memes that that are just not true. And that it's leading people to, you know, leading people to believe things that are they're actually harmful for them. Religions are sets of memes, among other things and practices that help guide choice or restrict choice. And I believe you're Catholic and religiously inclined, but you're also pro-tech and pro-building.

1:07:42And one stereotype of that group of people or certain peers is they're not as pro-tech or pro-building because they see it as a threat to a certain way of life. I'm curious if you can comment on to what extent is that true? And if so, why are you different in that way? It's not true because Pope Francis just came out very much in favor of AI. He actually said we should embrace new technologies responsibly and look at, you know, the Catholic Church has a long history of sort of having a weird relationship with technology, oftentimes because it was a political relationship. but I think the Catholic church is actually pretty pro-progress and pro-technology in terms of how we use it to become more human.

1:08:19We have to use it to become more human, not to make this a theology lesson, but I think people who are anti-technology because of their religion are sort of missing the point of how technology can serve us and sort of this, you know, this sort of constant quest to become more human and kind of more, more divine. Um, if you're, if you're, um, if you're sort of looking at it through that lens, um, you know, to, to your question of like, how, how does, how did I become the way I was, or how has religion impacted my life? I mean, I think it's like religion impacts all aspects of my life, but the thing that I think, you know, reflecting on sort of what, there aren't many really, really religious people, um, or people who like, like I don't encounter many serious, serious religious people in my day-to-day life.

1:09:09And I think the having, having grown up in a religion where, you know, I I've constantly questioned it, but never wavered in it. Um, and having that be sort of the pillar of my identity of who I am, of how I make decisions, it has made me a true contrarian. It has made me very disagreeable because if you're going to live inside of, uh, uh, if you're going to take, if you're going to wrestle with really, really deep questions from very early on where people are telling you that you are constantly wrong or, or that those, or that those religions just aren't relevant anymore, it forces you to kind of have an internal debate with yourself every day.

1:09:46And if you end up on the side of actually, I believe this, even though everyone around me tells me that it's wrong, it is a lot easier to go into a boardroom and to say the hard thing. It is so much easier for me to go into a room full of people that are saying this investment will never, ever make sense. And to basically say, you're wrong. Because I've been told that I'm wrong so many times about so many things that I'm absolutely convinced in. But being contrarian on things like investment decisions is very easy. um and so i i actually think being a religious person in 2023 cultivates disagreeableness it allows like and especially if you're someone who's had to live with that and wrestle with those decisions every day of your life it is a practice that has led to the ability to to build a trait that is very useful in the corporate world it's something we don't talk about very much um you know when i say like i'm not around that many religious people i very well could be but it doesn't come up because people don't bring it up because it's not like part of, you know, like, like people kind of keep it to themselves.

1:10:48But I am sure that a lot of very disagreeable people either come from a tradition, maybe it's not religion, but maybe it's a cultural tradition, or maybe it's an experience where they feel so siloed from other people in their life, that that sort of identity has allowed them to be disagreeable in every other aspect of their life, because they know that the thing that they hold most dear to themselves is true and other people don't believe it. So it's been useful for me in a very both granular way, but also in a this is, this is also, you know, who I am. So it's, it's definitely a part of not only how I make decisions, but just how I present myself.

1:11:26In some ways, it's not just an, you know, pushing back towards people who are telling you you're wrong. It's also pushing back towards people who are telling you, you know, why is it even worth pursuing? Or ha ha, you know, irony, it's an antidote to irony, among other things. And in some ways, the description you just gave is really similar to your description of seriousness, which we've talked about in the Moment of Zen podcast, of how you're doing something in the face of people telling you it's wrong, of people telling you it's stupid, of people telling you why you've been doing this in the first place, just deploying every tactic to get you to stop doing something.

1:11:59And someone serious or religious is someone who does it anyways, because they believe and they have faith that that thing is worth worth pursuing and they pursue it single-mindedly. Yeah, no, no, I think, you know, seriousness is sort of the, the way in which you pursue things and it doesn't have to be, it can be any sort of, it could be any sort of job, any sort of noble goal. It can be anything, but I think the commonality of pursuing something with a serious mindset is that you will be mocked, that the world will come after you. And that you will be seen as, you know, at the most extreme sense, you will be a pariah.

1:12:33Whether you know, whether we're doing the secular example of that, which is, which is Socrates or whether we're doing the religious example of that, which is Jesus, like you will be seen as someone who is embarrassing at best and dangerous at worst. And so seriousness is actually the quality of that, which is means someone is pursuing a, a, a, a, an activity that is noble and that is good. And that is innately human, but in a way that makes others uncomfortable because of how deeply they believe. I think we need more of that. Like you and I've talked about this a lot, like there aren't many people who see that quality as something they aspire to anymore.

1:13:07And, you know, maybe that will change. You know, I think like probably the last time where we had a kind of large population of people who were serious about a mission was probably in World War II. And so it could change, but I think we need more people who are resolute in their beliefs and in their values and who are not afraid of the consequences of that. So gearing back to sort of the beginning of this conversation, here's a question. Do you think more tech people should run for office? Like, how do you think about that? Running for office is such a, it takes a particular type of person who wants to put themselves and their family through that.

1:13:46And I think it is a hard thing to ask people to do. We've actually made it very difficult for people who are not career politicians to run for office, just given how much you have to open up your life. how much, you know, it's almost impossible from both a business perspective, from a, you know, from a family perspective. You know, a lot of tech people don't have the same sort of insatiable urge to be in the national spotlight. They just want to build things. So to ask them to then go and be performative, which, you know, frankly, a lot of running for office is really more like acting than it is like being the CEO of a company for better or worse.

1:14:22And so, you know, there's a lot of reasons why people shouldn't do it. Would we be better off if more successful people across various fields decided that they wanted to give back through running for public office? 100%. Is that going to happen? No, because these people are rational and they've already been successful in their fields and it's become harder and harder to, you know, to enter the culture war, to enter these actual sort of political wars that we're going through. So I don't fault tech people for saying they don't want to run for office. I know I would never want to run for office, even though I think public service is really important.

1:14:57I think it's a really hard thing to ask a person to do unless they've built their life around this goal, which is why we have the culture and politics that we have. You know, Teach for America helped raise the status of teachers by making this exclusive program that more people then wanted to do who wouldn't have been teachers otherwise. That's people in the beginning of their career. But I'm curious if if there'll be something like that for public service that will raise the status and importance and maybe even opportunity set for people who go pursue it as a way to get better people. I would hope so.

1:15:27I think there's been a lot of experiments with how to bring people from various fields into public life. I think the examples of people actually doing it and just the difficulty of it probably keep more people away from it than sort of the experiments. But I'm hopeful that at some point we can turn the card or completely change the course of America at any point. It's just what is going to be the event or what is going to be the thing that really leads people to say, you know, I want to give back. I want to contribute. And we'll see what that is. I'm glad we spent the second half of this conversation talking about things like family and commitment and fulfillment and opportunity, because those are implicitly some of the values guiding things like things like American dynamism and why our country is so worth protecting and building for both internally and externally.

1:16:14Catherine, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining and for building out your American Diabetes and Practice for any entrepreneurs building in this space. Catherine is the number one person to work with. We're lucky to share a number of companies in common and couldn't recommend the A6 and Z practice any more than I do. Thank you so much, Catherine. Thanks so much, Eric. Turpentine BC is a podcast from Turpentine, the network behind Moment of Zen and Econ 102. too. If you liked the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store or rate us on Spotify.