← Not Dead Yet
Not Dead Yet
Katherine Boyle
01:13:16
Ben and Chris talk with one of the most interesting people in Silicon Valley who isn’t actually in Silicon Valley. Ben’s got morphine fog. Katherine’s got parenting sleep deprivation. Perfect conditions to talk about intergenerational family life,...
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- [00:00]
Katherine Boyle
Foreign.
- [00:08]
Ben Sasse
Sasse and I'm Chris Styrewalt.
- [00:10]
Chris Styrewalt
And this is not dead yet. We're all dying, but only some of us have been brought face to face with that reality.
- [00:18]
Ben Sasse
However long each of us have to do it, though, we all want to
- [00:21]
Chris Styrewalt
live a good life, one with meaning, love and joy. And our guests are here to help us do exactly that.
- [00:28]
Ben Sasse
Ben Sass I feel old and under accomplished. That, that, that, that is how I feel is old and under accomplished. Katherine Bole. Reading, reading the story of Katherine Bole, I was confronted multiple times with, oh my gosh, she was born 25 years or something after I was. No, that's not true. She, no, she, she, she is, she's younger than me, which means she's even more, more younger than you.
- [01:01]
Chris Styrewalt
Too soon.
- [01:02]
Ben Sasse
And she has done quite a lot. Tell us why you wanted to tell us why you wanted to talk to her before I give the specifics of her impressive resume.
- [01:13]
Chris Styrewalt
Yeah, I mean, Katherine is a polymath. I think she is one of the most interesting people in tech and yet she's not an engineer. She is one of the most interesting people in Silicon Valley, except she moved from there half a decade ago and she wanted to be back near kith and kin in South Florida. But she remains one of the most interesting people in Silicon Valley even though she's not there. She doesn't really do policy and yet she can cover that topic as well. So I think on so many dimensions about recent past, present, near future and long future intact, there's nobody better to talk to. Yeah.
- [01:58]
Ben Sasse
And she is just to go through the particulars very quickly. She is a Florida woman. She grew up in Gainesville. She was, of course, the valedictorian of her high school. She was, I believe, won Florida's America's Junior Miss pageant. And she was in it for the scholarship. She was in it for the scholarship money. She went to Georgetown, studied government and very Georgetown y things at Georgetown. She won a scholarship to go study at the National University of Ireland. All very this is, this is a lot to do by age 22 or whatever. She started writing at the Washington Post. She wrote I went back and looked at some of her writing there. So she's writing culture and style stuff for the Pre bezos Washington Post. She does that for a few years, correctly decides that journalism is not going to deliver the sweep that she's looking for. Enrolls at Stanford Business School, gets her degree there in 2016 and then pick it up from there. She writes an email to Peter Thiel and Says what's up? And take us from there. What, what are the. Give us the highlights.
- [03:27]
Chris Styrewalt
Well, I mean, I think that Andreessen Horowitz is just a very interesting.
- [03:32]
Ben Sasse
What is Andreessen?
- [03:34]
Chris Styrewalt
What is it? So Mark Andreessen, you know, now public intellectual of the Internet and has a lot of really good stuff to say and a lot of stuff that I also like to wrestle with. And Ben Horowitz, you know, they're investors who've gotten all the large moneyed endowments and establishments in the world to give them some money, but not just to do what a lot of tech investing has been like over the last 15 to 20 years. How do you get an app that makes self distraction easier? How do you also think about solving really big societal problems with, with new technological applications? And so you mentioned Peter Thiel. Peter is kind of at the center of so many of these conversations going back to PayPal mafia days. And so he was an advisor, mentor, gatekeeper for her to introduce her to some of these folks. But she ends up being a financier on new technologies. And a recurring theme of this podcast is the fact that America needs great thinkers. And Catherine is one of those. And I think when you look back on our moment 50 or 150 years from now, you're not going to talk about politics. You're going to talk about the fact that we were living through a technological revolution that created an economic revolution that undermined a sense of place. And so for good and for ill, we're going to have to build all sorts of new institutions and those are going to have to be bigger than a casino in your pocket distraction. And so how can technology be used for some of those really big problems and to help mitigate some of the downside effects of Insta technologies? And I think Catherine is, is big on all of these thoughts and applications.
- [05:22]
Ben Sasse
And she's very, she's a very patriotic person and she is a woman who is, she is, she is a writer of manifestos. I don't know what the, I guess it's Manifesta.
- [05:31]
Chris Styrewalt
I don't know. Manifesti.
- [05:34]
Ben Sasse
Manifesti, who has written very much about getting the tech sector engaged with the, with defense production, getting the tech sector Eng. In the way that the corporations and the, the creators of the second machine age became deeply involved in the American project. That's something that she has called people to do. She's also a person who is a mo. She, as you said, she moved to Florida. She's written a lot about. I'm, I'm, I Confess, I'm torn here about what I want to talk to her about, because I want to hear from her about living a good life and, and what technology means for that and her own story. And also how I could become really rich by stop being a journalist. That would be great. And her life in Florida and becoming a mother after doing all that stuff and her marriage. I'm totally torn. So I guess we should just probably get into it.
- [06:35]
Chris Styrewalt
I suspect that one podcast is not going to be enough to contain the bounds of Kathryn Boyle.
- [06:41]
Ben Sasse
There's. She contains multitudes of podcasts. Well, let's find out.
- [06:45]
Chris Styrewalt
Katherine, welcome. We are, we are thrilled to have you. This took a while to get scheduled, but we have regularly said on our team here at Not Dead yet, we've said we got to have the most interesting person in Silicon Valley on. Oh, gosh, that's, that's both you, but you live in Florida, so let's start there.
- [07:05]
Katherine Boyle
The leading Florida. Yes, yes, I am not in Silicon Valley.
- [07:08]
Chris Styrewalt
We have explained to our audience how you left WA and, and some of that, but you are the most interesting person in Silicon Valley. You're working with all these founders and yet you're also not living there. We're probably going to go vertical by vertical of everything that the digital revolution is going to eat up sector by sector, eat up for good. And sometimes maybe a little mixed, but for good. But first, staying at Bio. Explain how you live in Florida and what multigenerational familying looks like when you're kind of puppet master of all these new startup enterprises in California.
- [07:42]
Katherine Boyle
Puppet master? That's a little scary. That is definitely not me. But yes, well, I can say I'm a mother first. I moved to Silicon Valley during COVID or sorry, moved to Florida from Silicon Valley during COVID And I think we never expected to stay in Florida. It was a weird time in Silicon Valley. There were curfews in California and we said, okay, we're having our first. How are we going to get to the hospital if there's curfews and we don't have a car? So we flew last minute at about 37 weeks, flew to Florida and said, we're going to live with my mom. And then when everything goes back to normal, we will move back and we will live in Silicon Valley again. And of course, nothing has ever gone back to normal after Covid. So now we live in Florida in a multi generational household. I just had my third baby and we've been building this very different world down here in South Florida. And it's definitely, as I like to say, the sort of difference between the virtual world where I have my work and the physical world where I have my family and my kids and my community. They could not be more stark. And I like to keep them separate.
- [08:49]
Chris Styrewalt
Interesting. You have Richard. Florida has the line, the mobile, the rooted and the stuck. And sometimes when I romanticize multigenerational families, Chris helpfully reminds me that not every multigenerational family is healthy. Sometimes multigenerational households are, are great if there's a lot of opt in and opt out freedom. Would you tell us a little bit about what it's like to have your mom heavily engaged in raising your kids when you disagree? Like, like I know how it is in my marriage, we kind of got rules about, like there's stuff where we both have mutual vetoes on it. There's stuff where we negotiate to agreement, we just agree most of the time. But on the stuff we don't agree about, we kind of have rules. It's got to be different with your mom helping raise your kids.
- [09:34]
Katherine Boyle
I just wish we had invited my husband to this too. This could have been just like a great therapy session of what it's like to live in a big bustling household with a, with a mother who is type triple A and probably makes me look like the most like peace loving, agreeable person that you have ever met. But I'd say that, you know, the thing that I like about multigenerational living and what I like about having my mother here is that I know that there is no one else who will ever love my children more, you know, aside from me and my husband. It's like, who, who is going to take better care of my children than, you know, the, the, the 70 year old grandma who, who raised me, who, I know how she raised me, she raised me with a, a specific type of value. She, she is in some ways we're different in many ways, but we're also carbon copies of each other in certain ways. And so it's like I know that I can outsource the hard thing to her when I'm not around. Um, and I think that is the ultimate privilege of having grandparents help raise you. That, that said, I will say I, I, I had a go of this. My grandparents were, were really involved when, when I was growing up, both my parents worked, they worked together. Grandma and grandpa raised me. They lived down the street, right? So it's like you grow up in a tribe, you grow up in a rootedness and you grow up where there is, you know, authority like, like she has full authority to, to, to help raise the children, to help, you know, punish the children, to help explain how the world works. Like we have the same value set. But there's also just an understanding that I think you get when you're growing up in that family as a child, that there's all sorts of aspects of life. It's not all about work, there's seasons of life. And you can really only get that, I think, from having grandma and grandpa around in a really strong way where they're instilling values in you with wisdom, where it might be harder for the parents to have that sort of, let's step outside of what is going on and the immediate sort of chaos of our lives and teach those things to our children. So I really think I benefited from it and I saw how I benefited from it and I wanted, I wanted that for, for my children as well.
- [11:38]
Ben Sasse
So I'm conflicted.
- [11:40]
Dario Amodei
The.
- [11:41]
Ben Sasse
The purpose of this podcast.
- [11:42]
Chris Styrewalt
Evergreen. Evergreen.
- [11:44]
Ben Sasse
It's true. It's on the one hand. On the other hand, I'm, I'm, I'm true to my vocation. This is a podcast about the good life and helping people. Helping Ben and me first, but helping people to live a good life.
- [12:03]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah.
- [12:04]
Ben Sasse
And so you present this conundrum for me because your personal biography and the story of you is fascinating as a person who, as we said in the introduction, a journalist, a Georgetown person, a Florida person who goes through, I don't know, two or three or four radical vocational changes in her life and is successful at all these terms. Right. And radically redefines herself. I would also like to know what I did wrong so that I did not leave journalism to become wildly successful and wealthy in a non journalism space. We can take that offline. That's fine if you want to tell me what it is that I should have done to not be an ink stained wretch, but to be crafting the future.
- [12:54]
Katherine Boyle
You were probably too good of a journalist. That's the problem. I was a failed journalist. I'm not taking any credit for being a good journalist.
- [12:59]
Chris Styrewalt
I object to all three of these statements.
- [13:03]
Ben Sasse
I read your stuff. Okay, so there's the personal about your life as a way for people to live a good life and your own experiences and what you can teach us. And then there's the other part, which is how we as a society are interacting with technology and what's going to happen in the future, which is something practical and useful that people can use in their own lives to think better about how they use technology and also to think better about what's going to happen in the future. So I'm going to start maybe where the Nexus is, maybe where they meet, which is when you crossed over. And, and I. Is it true that you blind emailed cold, emailed Peter Thiel and said, hey, I'd like to get into this world? What was different about the tech space when you found it than what you thought it would be? Talk about what you discovered about the strange new world that you entered.
- [14:07]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah, so, I mean, it was, it was very different. And I guess the, the best way to describe it is I always point to, like 2011, when the social network came out as sort of. It was the equivalent of Wall street, the movie, when it came out, where it. It's caused such a, I would say a cultural change in how people viewed technology that a lot of young people like myself at the time were like, oh, I didn't know this technology thing worked right. Maybe I should go check it out. And I think right now, technology, technology is institutionalized. It is the conversation of future elections. People outside of tech, think about it. That was not the case when I moved to Silicon Valley in 2014. As you mentioned, Peter Thiel had just written a book now a very popular book, but at the time it had just come out, it was called Zero to One. And it was really like a philosophy of tech book. And I always say I lived all over the world, but when I moved to Silicon Valley, it was the worst culture shock I had ever felt in my life because the people there were so insular and so different. I joke that, like, you know how, like, a lot of Americans go to Japan for the first time and they're like, it's the weirdest thing. It's like they don't even think about anything outside of jap, outside of Japan. And it's the exact same thing in Silicon Valley. Or it was in 2014, where I always point to. When I, When I started school, I was in grad school. I lived in a dorm and it was like the height of luxury that they had every major newspaper in the front of the dorm. I couldn't believe it because they couldn't afford to subscribe. When I was a new. When I was a newspaper journalist to all these different FTs of Wall street journals, but they had all of them laid out in pr and I would pick out one every day, and I was the only person picking them up every day because no one in Silicon Valley cared about what was happening in the news. They just cared about that mission and that thing that they wanted to build. So it was a very, very insular culture, very much focused on heads down micro. I live day to day building my startup versus what is the macro situation happening in the world? Like no one talked about the news. And I do think that things have changed a lot in Silicon Valley since then and that Silicon Valley has become a little bit more sophisticated. Sophisticated about why they need to interact with Washington. Washington has become a lot more sophisticated about how Silicon Valley drives changes in the economy, how it change, how it drives real change in society. And so I think in some ways these sort of two poles that never really needed to talk to each other, now really need to talk to each other and kind of figure out how to work together. But when I first moved, that was not the case. It was still this sort of insular little sandbox that exports these treats to the rest of America. Right. That help make things, people's lives easier, but can't really have.
- [16:45]
Ben Sasse
Yeah, what we're doing is good. We're doing good and virtuous things and we just want you to leave us alone. And if you leave us alone, then we'll just keep making great new gizmos and we're not interested in you. And then they found out that in the United States of america in the 21st century, not being into politics is not an option because politics will be into you.
- [17:07]
Katherine Boyle
Absolutely.
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Chris Styrewalt
And, and when the eight largest market cap companies in the history of the world are all American companies today, and seven of the eight are tech companies, it's kind of impossible to not be connected to finance and power.
- [17:20]
Katherine Boyle
Totally. And that's, that's really important because I think a lot of people forget that if you looked at that Same stat in 2000, it was only three companies and only, I think one or two of them were tech. Right. Like the companies that you're mentioning, they weren't even founded in the year 2000. So we've really seen an extraordinary amount of change happen since, you know, in 25 years, in just a quarter century, things have really shifted where tech is now the epicenter of global business and global market cap.
- [17:50]
Chris Styrewalt
Let's stay at family and tech. Family versus tech. Obviously these are two of your deepest passions. And there's one view that's tech versus family. Screen addiction is horrible. Phones are having a big impact on the family. Phones are having an impact on fertility, etc. Lots of which I'm sympathetic to. There's also an optimistic view that says tech is indispensable for a free society where families can flourish. You look at what some, some of what's happening in the UK in the attack on speech in general and the government wanting to make illegal all sorts of just basic AI dissent. Oh yeah, let's lock you up. None. How do you see tech and family and tech and versus family 10, 15 years from now?
- [18:40]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah. So I'll start with the optimistic case because I think the sort of doomsday cases get a lot of play not only from regulators today, but they get a lot of play from people in Silicon Valley sort of predicting the end of the world. So I'll start with an optimistic case that is more personal for me, which is when I was growing up in high school, college, there was sort of a view that if you were going to have a career as a working mother, you were going to have to make extreme trade offs in how much time you spend with your family. There was no concept of working from home. Like you were going to have to go into an office from 9 to 5. You were going to have to figure out a way to have it all. But the view was that you really couldn't have it all unless you outsourced all of the labor of the home to other people. And I know that you had the wonderful Caitlin Flanagan on very recently. She's, I think, the best writer and the best cultural critic on everything having to do with the family. And she was writing the early 2000s, all the way up until today about sort of that dichotomy, which is that there is value in being a stay at home mom and that shouldn't be thrown out by feminists who say that it's not worthy. And I think what has changed. And again, I'm sort of at the forefront of it and I am at a point in my career where I'm taking full advantage of it. But I think the downstream effects of this actually happening are going to be real, is that I think we are returning work to the home. Work always started out at the home, right? Like the, you know, pre industrialization, families were family businesses. They were always working. You had more children so they could work on the farm. The thing that took women and men outside of the home was industrialization. But post Covid, I really do think Covid was the grand experiment. A lot of things have kind of moved back culturally to we have to be back in the office. But for a lot of people, they got their first glimpse at, wow, I'm on this thing called zoom. I'm in my House, being able to do a writing job or a commentating job or just a normal job of what you would call sort of keyboard work in my house. And that's allowing me to have more flexible labor so that I can pick up my children. Maybe the jobs returning back into the home is actually going to be what liberates the family and allows us to have larger families, more family cohesion, and allows to us allows women in particular, who usually are the ones doing most of the work in the home, to have sort of this, you know, I can have a career and I can also have a family. And I think for a very long time that was not the case. I'm seeing it in my own life where, you know, I'm able to hop on a zoom with you all when my three kids are in the other room with grandma. That was just not something that existed a few years ago. And so if we zoom out with all of the tools that AI is providing, all of the things that are sort of returning us to, well, maybe I could be more entrepreneurial because the incremental cost of labor is going down to zero. The incremental cost of building a website, of selling something online through Shopify, Etsy, Right? Like all of these different things that didn't used to exist where I can do it from my keyboard in my office, that is something that I think is going to benefit moms and lead us to a more flourishing home life. There's a great writer, John Ask, who had a piece called the Third Oikos, which is that if we believe that we started out in the beginning and agrarian society, as you like to talk about, Ben, and move to industrial society, we're now in the third part where we're coming back to the house, where we're going to be working in the virtual world, but existing in the physical. And so I do think that that is my experience, but I also think that you're seeing it in a much more distributed way across a variety of different industries, not just tech.
- [22:15]
Chris Styrewalt
Now I want to just scream violent agreement and say, style, hold my beer. Did you see she did the four stages of economic history that you always mock me for.
- [22:25]
Katherine Boyle
I told you, I'm a fan of the podcast. I told you.
- [22:27]
Ben Sasse
No, we should be clear. I'm not mocking the four stages of economic history. I'm mocking you. It's not about the four stages of economic history. It's you.
- [22:34]
Chris Styrewalt
I fully understand this. I want you to ask the question, Chris, But I first just want to distinguish three different important things that she said so that later we can get back to each of the threads. But I want to give you the question, brother.
- [22:46]
Ben Sasse
Well, what are the what are
- [22:50]
Chris Styrewalt
Caitlin as one of the greatest writers in America. Yes, Yeehaw and amen. Also, what you said about your mom. Hey bureaucrats. It turns out blood is thicker than bureaucracy and moms and dads and grandmas do love your kids more than anybody at the Department of Education ever would, even though some people there are doing good and sometimes important work. It is family first. And what you said about your mom is just a great echo of Caitlin. And I think that ties to this moment we are at in economic history where we don't yet know what comes next. But I do think, as you said said, it's going to be much more like hunter gatherers and agrarians and maybe the various early stages of the putting out revolution, which was the industrialization before you had a central factory line, but craftsmen who lived above their shop or their storefront where the work in the home place was close together. So you got to have extended kin networks helping raise families and cousins. Maybe you didn't have we won't have the need for people having seven kids because of the percentage that get to fertility rate themselves. But you have bigger families and kids can grow up around work. And I agree with you that only technology makes that possible. These new tools are great. And yet I also think our friend, a friend of this podcast, David Bonson, is also right that a lot of remote work has been disastrous for 22 and 26 year olds who didn't previously know how to work because they lose mentorship. And so I think there's a stages thing here where we just don't have the right institutions for 15 to 28 year olds yet to both come of age to learn how to work, to learn how to become lifelong learners without institutionalized schooling being the highest and best platonic thing. That means you're disconnected from founding, serving, building. Peter Thiel's great line about I go 2 and 47 and all these kids who went 0 and 1 think I'm super lucky. It isn't that I had two successes and they had zero successes. It's that I was willing to endure 47 failures and they quit after one.
- [24:55]
Ben Sasse
Chris okay, your and I will put it in the show notes the Great Tech Family alliance, which you delivered as a speech for aei. Thank you. And it's it's a great, fascinating read about all of this, but it got me thinking. I was reading today about the latest round of Chinese Breakthroughs on AI. And I don't know how much to believe, I have no idea how much to believe about what Chinese AI companies claim about what they're doing and whether they can do it. But here's my fear. My fear is that the, the migration that you talked about from being politically unengaged. So you have a tech sector that is like, like not engaged and then blue coated when it was engaged. Virtue, Virtue, Virtue. Signaling. Yes, we're the nice ones. So we're Democrats people. And then we have the awakening. Like oh no, actually they will sic the FTC on us too. It doesn't actually matter if we're nice to them or not nice to them. If we align with them, they'll come and try to kill us too. And then we have the reset of 2024, the post Covid reset that you really have written about and talked about. But now I'm looking, and I'm looking at the tech world goes into politics, but boy is politics going into the tech world. And when I look at the government taking ownership shares in tech companies and I look at, well, maybe you can release your model, maybe you can't release your model. Maybe you can do this, maybe you can't do this. I see a lot of chocolate in the peanut butter and tell me why I should or should not be concerned or how much I should be concerned about the possibility that as we are living through this incredible technological revolution that is changing work, is changing families, is changing everything, that the federal government of these United States is not going to screw it up because it feels like the federal government is going to screw it up.
- [27:08]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah, no, it's a great question, but I'll start with where I think Silicon Valley has really messed up, which is it is a huge problem. If you are the CEO of a trillion dollar company and you are going on Fox and Friends and talking to a mother who's getting her children ready for school and you are telling her that the world is about to end. There is a huge, huge disconnect. Our next guest, who is the CEO of one of the most powerful AI companies in the world, says we are heading for a catastrophic employment cross crisis that no one is talking about. Well, we are going to talk about it with Dario Amodei who is the CEO of Anthropic. He joins me now. So how many job losses are we talking about here and who is at risk?
- [27:51]
Dario Amodei
So just to back up a bit, I've been working on AI for, for 10 years and probably the thing I've noticed most about it is, is how fast it's making progress. Two years ago it was at the level of a smart high school student. Now it's probably the level of a smart college student in reaching beyond that. And on one hand I think there's a number of very positive things that are going to happen. I used to be a biologist. I think AI has exactly the kind of skills that are needed to cure important diseases like cancer and Alzheimer's to provide cheaper energy. Many positive things, but exactly those same kind of skills. Things like summarizing a document, brainstorming, putting together a financial report makes me worry a lot. Thought that entry level jobs in areas like finance, consulting, tech, many, many other areas like that entry level white collar work, I worry that those things are going to be first augmented but before long replaced by AI systems.
- [28:50]
Chris Styrewalt
What could go wrong?
- [28:51]
Katherine Boyle
What could go wrong? Right, like if you are going on and that's a, that's a real scenario. I did not make that up. There are CEOs who've decided that the place that they should tell people that they're about to lose, you know, that 50% of jobs are going to be gone in the next few years because we're about to achieve AGI. Like you should not be going on the morning shows on Fox and delivering that message no matter how great of a communicator you are.
- [29:12]
Ben Sasse
Let me just pull you into a slight cul de sac here. How much of the doom saying from the industry is self serving in saying we are so powerful, we are so mighty that you should all fear us and buy our stock.
- [29:28]
Katherine Boyle
So my, my, like my personal view is that this is a long standing trend. If you look at companies when they become wildly successful of pulling the ladder up behind them, of saying we, yes, we don't know what's going to happen. This is a different version of it. This is a more you know, kind of godlike imbued. We are creating the machine God narrative but it's a different version in many cases of okay, like now we've gotten to the point where we don't even know what we're doing. We need the regulators to, to pull up the ladder for everyone else and then we're gonna figure out what's going on. Creepy. I think it's a very dangerous, very dangerous scenario and I think people in Silicon Valley are aware of it. I mean if you've, there's, there's also people in Silicon Valley who've been, you know, working in this administration saying that exact thing where it's hey, like this, this is a kind of tried and true tech story where you get to a certain point and you say, you know, we should be the ones that become sort of the national champion again. Like China has national champions. America usually doesn't have that. And so I think that's a problem. But I think.
- [30:25]
Ben Sasse
I'm sorry I pulled you into the cul de sac.
- [30:27]
Katherine Boyle
Oh, no, no, no.
- [30:28]
Chris Styrewalt
Those are important. That's not a cul de sac. There are three more cul de sacs on this avenue.
- [30:33]
Ben Sasse
Keep going.
- [30:33]
Katherine Boyle
But I also think, like the. Again, I'm a. I'm an eternal optimist. I don't think it's the end of the world. I think there's a lot of reasons why it's not the end of the world and why it's not going to be a jobs apocalypse as predicted by some of the CEOs. Not. All right. Some of the CEOs in kind of the AI world that are sort of asking for more regulation. But I think the thing that we can't do and the reason why tech is now in the bind that it's in, where Republicans and Democrats are both upset with data centers, are both upset with the existence of AI, part of that is because for the last 10 years and again, AI has been a huge issue for 10 years in Silicon Valley, there's been talk about these sort of machine gods coming to life and the paperclip scenario and super intelligence and Nick Bostrom and all of these sort of philosophical debates that have spilled into normie land. And as someone who, you know, part of the reason I love living in suburban Florida is that I live in normie land. And when normies have to wake up and take their kids to school and see on the TV that they're gonna lose their job, that's when, you know, people get nervous and rightly should get nervous. That is not what CEOs should be saying. I don't think it's true, but it makes sense why most Americans now, or a lot of Americans are really worried about this thing that they don't understand. And it's on us, it's on tech. To do a much better job of saying, this is how it's going to make your life better. Here's how it's going to be used in your day to day life. Here's how they're tools, how we're not creating the machine God. The problem is that there are some people inside of these labs that genuinely believe they are creating a machine God. And to the point that I think Ben Thompson made on one of your pods a couple weeks ago. That's the weird, wacky San Francisco sort of thing that is never going to be outside of tech. It's never going to go away. But now it's spilling out into the political discourse in a way that, that isn't good for Main street and is not good for mom who's trying to get her kids to school.
- [32:27]
Chris Styrewalt
If we can keep giving ourselves permission for cul de sacs, how much of Dario and Sam Altman's impulse to talk this way is because they are in a bubble around talent recruitment? Like, I think there's philosophical debates, there are questions about whether or not their regulatory strategy is thought through, but how much of it is that. They just think they're in a catastrophic, cataclysmic race to acquire talent. And they're talking to a lot of people who do live a worldview that's really narrow. And if they don't think they're at the one place that's going to win The LLM version X.Y of 16 months from now, they won't have enough talent to go forward. So they have to talk like it's apocalyptic.
- [33:14]
Katherine Boyle
Yeah. So I can't ever say I could get into the heads of, you know, CEOs or people, you know, people in sort of the AI labs. But what I will say is that, like, you know, there are a lot of true believers in Silicon Valley. I think it's sort of convenient to say that these are all businesses, and I get this a lot, too, where people say, oh, well, you're in the business. You know, I lead the American dynamism practice and we invest in a lot of defense technology. And a lot of critics will say, well, you're in the business of war. And it's like if you talk to the founders who are building, you know, next generation defense, they care deeply about defending the homeland. Many of them are service members. Right. They have bought into the mission that they're going to protect America at all costs. Right. Like, they're not doing this to make the incremental dollar. They are doing this because they care about the mission. And I think one of the things that, you know, a lot of people who are looking outside in onto Silicon Valley, they do see it as, this is the economic center of the world. Right. Like the currency and Silicon Valley is equity. It's. It's a boom. And, you know, it's always going to be a boom and bust town. People, you know, you can't pretend that this that there, that money doesn't come into these conversations or that talent recruitment or, you know, all of the things to make a company as wealthy and powerful as is, that they don't matter. But most of the people who are successful in Silicon Valley are true believers to the core mission of the companies that they are building. And so I think that's the struggle here, is that for a lot of the people who are early to artificial intelligence, you know, they have been studying this for, for decades before ChatGPT became kind of a household name in 2022, right? Like, they understand how these systems work. They are students of the history. They believe that they are going to build AGI. They, they, they see it on the cusp, right? Like maybe they've already achieved it internally, you know, quote unquote, like they, they genuinely have drank the Kool Aid. And I, I think because they are not necessarily engaged with what is happening in the broader world that it goes back again to. They're not picking up the newspaper, they're not thinking about sort of what is top of mind for moms and dads in Main Street. Like, they can't communicate what people actually care about. And most people do not want to see a cataclysmic shift in how their lives operate. This is something that I think is often lost on people in Silicon Valley because Silicon Valley breeds on change. We love change. We love when there's a paradigm shift and we can go all in at the bottom and get to the top, right? That's the business of Silicon Valley. Most people just want to live happy, comfortable, flourishing lives. They want to be able to support their family, and we have to do a much better job of communicating that.
- [35:52]
Ben Sasse
One of the boring beliefs that I have is that there is no American journalism without Americanism, right? So I can't enjoy the benefits of the First Amendment. I can't enjoy the peace and freedom and prosperity of getting to do what I do, where I do it and how I do it it, and then do something that I think is bad for the country. Right? I can't, I can't make my bread in a way that I think is harmful and divisive and untrue and is and dishonors the land where our fathers died. Land of the Pilgrim's Pride. I'm absolutely on board with that. But I don't sell my products to the government. Right? The government is the, My relationship with the government is supposed to be that the government protects me, that doesn't let anyone kill me at home or abroad. And then is supposed to leave me alone. And that's what I'm looking for. I read from you a passionate defense of sort of a tech Americanism, right, that your industry, this sector, needs to understand its obligations and responsibilities to this nation.
- [37:11]
Katherine Boyle
Yes.
- [37:11]
Ben Sasse
But then it also does business with the government. That again, looks like chocolate and peanut butter to me. How, how, how do you do these things in a way in which the government does not distort the, the process or that you do not distort the government?
- [37:32]
Katherine Boyle
So, you know, I'll, I'll take this question from what I often get from people, which is, how do you work with this current Trump administration? But you also worked with the Biden administration. You worked with Trump one, you worked with the Obama administration. Going back this American dynamism practice that we founded, we've been investing in companies for 11 and 12 years now that are working directly with the Department of Defense, now Department of War. And so the question that always boggles people's minds is, well, how do you do that? How do you do that as an investor in companies that are selling to different administrations? And what we always say is, we do not have a Department of State at Andreessen Horowitz. We do not have a policy division that tells us how we are supposed to think about the Iran war. We invest in companies that are going to support the Department of War, knowing that those companies are, no matter who is in charge from a political process, Democrats or Republicans, we are going to be supporting the war fighter and the other people who have to come to terms with that, if you want to call it an ethical question, the other people who have to deal with that every day are both the civilian and the war fighters that work for the Department of War their entire careers. They serve at the pleasure of the president. The American people elect a president which then puts in charge a cabinet to make decisions about where the country is going. And so I think it's actually a pretty simple thing for us to think through, because again, Silicon Valley people put their heads down, but the simple principle is we invest in companies supporting the national interest. These companies believe in re industrialization. They believe that building tech and building with your hands in America is going to lead to a stronger America. It's going to lead to deterrence to keep us out of war. And that's going to lead to an American flourishing. And no matter who's in charge, you know, no matter how, how you know, who's, who's leading the government, we are going to support that. And where tech gets into a lot of problems. And again, you know, it's not only a recent phenomena where you sort of the, you know, the debate between the Anthropic and Department of War, like this is a recurring theme in Silicon Valley. Like we were there in 2017 when the Google walkout happened over project Maven where too many people said, hey, like, we do not want to work with the Department of War. That's actually the origin story of a company I work with called Anduril, where a bunch of people then said, hey, like if, if Google's not going to work with the Department of War, we have to create a next generation prime contractor that's going to work with the department no matter what. Because the most important thing that people can understand about where talent is in America, talent is in the private sector. SpaceX story should be this. When you look at what SpaceX has been able to achieve versus NASA in the last 20 years, they've been able to do it with equity. And I actually love all of these stories about how the lunch lady and how the janitors, how all these people who worked at SpaceX are now millionaires because they've been given equity to work on a mission of going to Mars over 20 years. And I think that's something that we have, have that is uniquely American. Like Silicon Valley story is uniquely American where when we look at our competitors, they're all national champions, they're all China telling its top engineers, you have to do this. Centrally planned organizations that are building things. We have a dynamic economy that allows us to experiment, that allows us to build new things. And if we do not have Silicon Valley building those things for the Department of War, we lose out on what makes America the best technology capital in the world.
- [40:59]
Ben Sasse
So, and I will, I will yield the gavel to Chairman Sass. But I'm, but I get why you or the companies in which you invest, or AT&T or anybody in any sector that's like, yeah, we sell to the government that we don't care whether it's a Republican or a Democrat, we sell to the government. This is, this is what we do. What I mean is, when I think about something like, well, maybe you tell me this. I watched a story where Anthropic got into a rhubarb with the Pentagon and there was this big back and forth and whatever, and Anthropic took a we are more virtuous than thou, we are better than thou. And then I watched later on the White House zap Anthropic on its released models now my cynical journalist mind, my highly skeptical journalist mind says that the government was punishing Anthropic. Am I thinking about this in too conspiratorial of a way? Am I thinking about this in a too sinister way? But I see as tech goes into the government and government goes into tech, more of that, that friggin in the rigged.
- [42:16]
Katherine Boyle
Well, I can speak about the one where I do have, I think where most of the story has come out now and there's more knowledge of it. We had a conference in March, our American Dynamism Summit, where Emil Michael, who's the CTO of the Department of War, spoke. And his telling of it was, you can't insert yourself into the chain of command in the Department of War, full stop. And when I talked to Palmer Luckey about this, who is the founder of Anduril, there's an understanding inside of pure defense companies and it might take a little bit of time. Time for, you know, again, Anthropic's only five years old. It's a, it's a, a very, very early company with a big mission. It might take a little bit of time for people to realize how the department works, right? When you look at these companies like SpaceX, Anduril, Palantir, Anduril's almost 10 years old. SpaceX is over 20 years old. Palantir is over 20 years old. They, they now know how to work with the department very well. They understand there is a chain of command that democratically elected officials make decisions about, about how products are used and that that is what the American people expect, that it's not going to be a CEO in San Francisco who makes decisions about how we go to war. It's going to be democratically elected officials and people who can be held accountable by the system. And I think if you ask the majority of Americans, who do you want making decisions about war? Do you want people who are democratically elected or do you want Dario, do you want Sam, do you want Marc Andreessen? Do you want those people making those decisions? Everyone would say no, we want the democratic process to work right? Like that is, that is who you want to make the decision. And so I think that is a good example of sometimes companies, they either overstep or they don't understand. I think more and more of these companies, because they are what we call dual use companies, they're going to have to work with the government, but they also work with consumers. They also work with businesses. They're going to start understanding the limits of how they operate. Where they operate and where they have to kind of concede to this is how the process works. And I think that was a really good example of. I would say maybe I'm not as cynical as you. I would say it's growing pains. I would say companies sometimes just do not understand they're making decisions in a silo of San Francisco. Maybe they haven't spent time in the halls of the Pentagon. I think as companies grow, as they hire more people, as they work with more people who understand how Washington works, they start to speak that language, they start to understand the limitations of to operate or how they can operate inside that system. And I think that's a good thing, right? Like we need our best companies, we need the top and smartest people in Silicon Valley working with the Department of War and. But we also have to do a better job, I think, as technologists of communicating and kind of understanding that language.
- [45:01]
Chris Styrewalt
I, I think we have four great nested questions happening here and I'm going to lead with my chin because dumbass Stywald is going to say if you put a three by two up on the whiteboard behind you, we're kicking you off the podcast. The reality is there are at least two big chunks here and I think sub pieces under it are Maven. Great tool, Great concept in 2017, Google terrible job of managing human capital inside their organization. To understand that not bringing people along about why you want the America and the free world to win these fights against the CCP was a really scary moment. I was involved in a lot of that in 2017 and the fact that you have had had the last nine years developed the way they have, messy to be sure, but in a much, much better place now with Anduril being where it is with some of the autonomous SEA drones that are coming with some of the growth of Palantir. So you've got a post 2017maven and I think I'm going to tee up two big questions for you, but a small one is you should tell people what Maven was doing as well. But the fact that we've gone from a terribly low Point in 2017 to this messy point now or Anthropic could have clearly screwed up like they did and the Department of War clearly screwed up as they did in this moment, it's still true that it's not a foregone conclusion yet that the AI race with the CCP will be won by freedom lovers and we need that to happen. And what's better about the American system and the west and open navigation of the seaways and trade and human rights and transparent contracts and the rule of law. What's better about all that stuff is decentralization both honors the dignity of individual souls and creates more entrepreneurial opportunity versus a centrally planned system that'll fail in a singular way. It's much better to try 50 things and fail 49 or 50 ways than to go 0 for 1 out of 1 attempt, because you can't learn anything out of that.
- [47:00]
Katherine Boyle
Totally.
- [47:00]
Chris Styrewalt
So we need to beat the ccp, and everything you're talking about in the ecosystem is there. At the same time, there's no way that bureaucrats are ever going to do in the digital age what bureaucrats could partly do in the industrial age. And so we need more government functions to be outsourced to the private sector to have more decentralization. And yet government is the entity that has to have a monopoly on violence. So I want to. I'd love to hear you talk a little bit about Maven, a lot about winning the fight with the ccp, but narrowly, I push back a tiny bit on the idea that you don't have a policy shop. I know you're telling the truth and you're sincere.
- [47:38]
Katherine Boyle
You're right, we do have a policy shop, but it's not. It's not deciding how we feel about the Iran war, whether we should support the Iran war with our country companies.
- [47:44]
Chris Styrewalt
Yeah, right. So I don't mean a geopolitical moment so much as new kinds of tools. So autonomous weapon systems are going to exist. We're going to have them, and they'll ultimately have our values embedded in them in some way, or we will be seeding all the rules of engagement to the ccp and it just isn't possible for the brokenness of dc, the lack of human capital talent there, and the transition of administrations every four years to think through a lot of questions around autonomous weapon systems in the same way that companies, you advise are going to have to have some theory of it. So I would have a libertarian sub one subscript one and a libertarian subscript two. Right. Which is, at one level, people, when they say they're libertarian, mean the government shouldn't decide all these things. And clearly we're going to need a lot more diverse opinions than stuff that'll come out of a bureaucracy. That's not the same thing as saying we're totally indifferent to how autonomous weapon systems work. And you've given a lot of thought to that?
- [48:41]
Katherine Boyle
Yes. No. And I'll start by saying, you know, the the, the Department of War is not new to autonomous weapons. I think that, you know, the conversation that we're having right now around, you know, autonomy and AI and how it's used inside of government. You know, the first government organization that I think had AI in the title was in the Department of War. It was called the Jake Joint AI center. And it was starting with early precision weapons, early, you know, AI weapons and how, how you would use them. You know, that was 10 years ago, or almost 10 years ago. I think that the Department of War has uniquely understood, again, the reason why there's now this partnership. And I say it sort of loosely because it's not a formal partnership, it is a loose partnership between people in Silicon Valley who care deeply about American national security and people in Washington is because of, under the Obama administration, DIU Defense Innovation Unit was founded. It was an experiment to bring the Department to Silicon Valley to teach them of how, as you said, this sort of dynamic ecosystem of experiments could support the Department. So there is sort of this ongoing information. There is also, I would say, and you know, people use the word revolving door in a bad way in Washington. I mean it in a good way. Like we should have more people in Silicon Valley doing a tourist in government and vice versa. It should not be as hard. You know, I think yesterday the NASA administrator said, you know, in order to do his job at NASA, he had to sell his SpaceX stake before it went public. That is a billion dollar sacrifice he was willing to make to the American people when, when someone called him on it or someone said, you know, have you made any gains since, you know, since being NASA administrator? And he's like, actually no, I've lost a billion dollars because of that. I think we need to make it much, much easier for our top technologists, our top engineers to go into government and vice versa, because this knowledge sharing is going to have to happen in a way, as you say, Ben, that's not regulating it as it is a physical good. Right? You cannot regulate something that changes dynamically every day. You cannot write rules so that, so that it is, you know, you can, you can give guidelines, you can do information sharing, but there's, there's not ways to regulate SOFTW software or to regulate AI in the same way that we were capable of doing in the physical world. And so I think that's just going to kind of create this tighter coupling between these two ecosystems. But that's why I keep going back to, we have to learn to speak each other's language. Like it cannot be okay, we're going to regulate data centers so they can't be built or you're going to. We're going to learn very quickly that these things are moving so fast and that they are so dynamic. And to your point, the thing that makes America always at the forefront is that we do have this dynamic ecosystem where many experiments can flourish and some can succeed and some can fail. That is something that China and the other centrally planned ecosystems do not have. And I think in some ways that is going to be the reason why we win. Because we are able to always pivot, to always change, to always kind of adapt to circumstances where if you are a centrally planned economy or if you're a centrally planned engineering ecosystem, you can't. You just have to continuously work on the thing that you were told to work on. So I know I didn't answer your question directly and again, as I said earlier, I'm very sleep deprived, so I know I'm going circle.
- [51:52]
Chris Styrewalt
That was very good.
- [51:53]
Katherine Boyle
But I do think there is something about allowing for more conversations so that there can be a better understanding of how these ecosystems work, what the Department of War needs to offer and what Silicon Valley needs to offer the Department of War.
- [52:07]
Ben Sasse
We're already over time but this is one of the best, most interesting conversations that I have ever had about this.
- [52:13]
Dario Amodei
This.
- [52:13]
Ben Sasse
So I'm going, I'm going to do. I'm going to go again. While Ben winds up his nine part. I think in the last question he said it was four nesting questions like
- [52:22]
Chris Styrewalt
four nested inside a 3x2 jack wagon.
- [52:27]
Ben Sasse
So Ben's ass. And I disagree about the TikTok ban. I'm a free speech person and I think it includes the right to be be to. If you want to be propagandized too, you're. You're free to be propagandized too. But it whether whatever one thinks about the TikTok ban, I do worry about the regulatory dark matter of national security exemption. And when we get into national security space, we have these extraordinary powers that we've put in the executive branch branch and we will. We don't really do politics on this podcast, but if I could do anything I wanted on this podcast, we'd have a 10 part series on why Congress doesn't work. We would talk about how the Article 1 branch became the article none branch and we would get all into that. But what we definitely have is a situation where national security creates extraordinary exemptions for the executive branch and gives the executive branch extraordinary power to shape markets and do things by saying we're invoking national security here. So you can sell this, you can't sell that. You can do this, you can do that. I certainly take your point that it is better to have democratically elected individuals in a republic, in a democratic republic doing this. But I do worry, maybe I should tell me whether I'm right to worry that all of the national security components in this will have knock on consequences that may be very negative for how the industry evolves and how things go.
- [54:10]
Katherine Boyle
Well, if I'm understanding your question, how the industry evolves, I actually think we're in a better place now in terms of how the industry has evolved than we were in the early 2000s. So I hear your point on executive power. You can make the argument that that started post September 11, 2001. There's also an argument that the Obama administration strengthened.
- [54:29]
Ben Sasse
Take me to the Woodrow Wilson admin.
- [54:32]
Katherine Boyle
I'll go all the way back, let's say like the last 25 years, post September 11. Yes, the executive branch has become far, far more powerful when it comes to national security than I think any anyone could have predicted in previous times, right. Post, post the Cold War, no one would have predicted that the movement of power would have started post 2001 and then in the Obama administration where it became much, much stronger. That said, despite that happening, your question was more about the industry. And again, I don't spend a lot of time in politics. I spend a ton of time in the industry. In 2015, when DIU was started, we were in dire, dire straits in that all of our great engineering talent in America, none of it was going to Boeing, none of it was going to Lockheed Martin, it was all going to Facebook, it was all going to software. We had a massive, massive problem where all of our cat capital was going to software. It was going to, you know, different apps that you could have on your phone. It was all going to the consumer economy. And if you had asked me in 2015, there was a statement that came out today that, and actually I want to, I want to get it right. I'm going to open it up right now because it's such an extraordinary number. Defense tech companies making drones, battlefield AI and more have raised $12.3 billion across 175 deals year to date, up from $10 billion across 158 deals last year. So the amount of capital that is now going into defense technology from the private sector, that was zero in 2015. You could not find a top tier Silicon Valley venture capital firm. You could find Private equity firms. You could find people doing variations on a theme, but you could find no one investing in anything that had to do with the Department of War. Part of the reason for that is because of limited partner agreements which said that you cannot invest in weapons, you cannot invest in anything kinetic. It has to be dual use, and it really has to be in service of things that are not going to be protecting our warfighter. And so, in 10 years, we have now seen something that was dead on arrival. No one would even touch it in Silicon Valley. Now become one of, I would say, one of the hottest and most dynamic sectors in. In. In Silicon Valley. Every single venture capital firm is investing in American dynamism. They all are investing in national security products. They have no ethical qualms about investing in companies that are going to work directly with the Department of War. That is a huge sea change. And so while there might be changes and to your point, there might be things that are happening where you're saying, okay, the executive branch has more power, there's far more dynamism on the private side in terms of the products that are being built that can be procured by the Department and that can be used and put into the hands of war fighters very quickly. I'll leave you with this amazing story. A couple years ago, I invested in Navy stuff. SEAL who had never built a company before. He had spent 11 years in the SEALs. He'd just gotten out of business school and worked at a private equity firm for a few years. And he wanted to build something called. I'd never heard of it before, unmanned surface vessels, autonomous boats without anyone from the Navy on them, that could be used in combat. And everyone thought he was insane. This was 2022. He got a couple other people involved, a Marine friend, an engineer friend. We put a little bit of capital in. Two years later, they had actually built the boat. We put a lot of capital in. Then two years later, they're rescuing two of our pilots in the Strait of Hormuz. Four years.
- [57:53]
Ben Sasse
I saw that.
- [57:53]
Chris Styrewalt
Yeah.
- [57:54]
Katherine Boyle
Four years, Congrats. And this. And this is a guy. And this again, this is a Navy SEAL who served his country valiantly, but he's not the guy that we would have said, you know what? That's the guy who's going to be building massive, massive boats in Louisiana, in Franklin, Louisiana. So I think there's something about, yes, things are dynamic and changing, and there's a lot of doomerism. But I look to that moment and I say, wow. Wow. Like what we are capable of doing in America right now we weren't even capable of doing 10 years ago. And it's an extraordinary time to be building for the national interest.
- [58:24]
Chris Styrewalt
I'm gonna do some cleanup first. I am against the CCP having control over our kids. Chris, infinite scroll on TikTok and Instagram are both stupid, but only one of them is a national security crisis and it's the one that gives all the data to Beijing. Moreover, over at a free speech level, any American who wants to use the Internet to go to China and on their reach by the, what was it, that center from Alaska called it the giant system of underground tubes who wants to go to China and use their tick tock? It turns out it's really different than our tick tock because one of them is meth for the brain. But anyway, we'll leave that aside.
- [59:05]
Ben Sasse
I shouldn't have cheap shotted you. I shouldn't have cheap shot.
- [59:08]
Chris Styrewalt
I, I, I'm going to cheap shot you back. But usually we fight off off the air software versus the dual use. Speech you just made was so good, Katherine, that I want to buttonhole you. Now can we have you back? I have a final question for you. But first, will you pre pledge to come back and let's bring your husband for eight or 10 minutes and let's make sure we will put wax in your mother's ears so your husband can speak free.
- [59:35]
Katherine Boyle
I think I've shared this with you. My husband is very offline and I always say there's one who, there's always in every couple there's a person who's just like, you know, terminally online, constantly on their phone, you know, like brain rotting. And that is me. And he's reading the old great books every day. And just like living a beautiful physical world life without any knowledge of what's happening on the Internet, it can be done. It, you know, there are people who do it. There's, they still exist and my husband is one of them. He will not listen to this podcast.
- [60:03]
Chris Styrewalt
I know that's fine, but when he will he talk, will he talk to this podcast with you? And we'll, we'll ply him with booze and you two can sit together on your zoom. Second point, the third point will be a question. America has always depended on manufacturing to win wars all the way back to Grant defeating Lee. America has a national security imperative to be on the cutting edge of defense tech and defense driven manufacturing. That's how we win wars. It's both good for America and it's good for Americans. Because it believes in human dignity. American businesses have always had to work with the government. When you think about the national security challenge, the difference was we had a manufacturing base that helped win World War II. But now instead of Ford building Jeeps, your surface drone example, the sea drones, the problem is that. Not the problem. The problem, slash opportunity, is that it's now anduril building drones. And the problem there isn't the defense tech companies. It's that the American government has lost the faith of the American public and can't possibly move fast enough to build a regulatory regime that would make sense because it won't be nimble enough. So anyway, one topic we should come back to is that. But let's go to the point of you and your husband reading great books. If people want to understand what you're thinking about, the pace of it is faster than books. There are some good books. Kill Chain by Chris Bros is really good. Good. Raj Shah has that book, Unit X, that's really good. But if I asked you for your five favorite books, you mentioned Peter Thiel's Zero to One. But I, I bet there aren't five great new tech books in the AGI debates of the last 18 months. So if there are books besides Bros and Shaw, give them to us. But also, what do you recommend for people to read who want to think about this American dynamism space over the next 36 months?
- [61:52]
Ben Sasse
Months?
- [61:52]
Katherine Boyle
Oh goodness, yeah. I mean that you bring up a really great point which is that all of the great, you know, information is instant on, on what's happening now around companies. You know, people aren't going to like this answer, but I spend a lot of time on X because that's where the young people who are building spend their time, right? That's where they're recruiting. That's where they're putting out theories and testing theories and getting instant feedback. So you know, I, my, my job, but also sort of the thing that I love most is meeting with sort of, of these young zoomers who, you know, they are, you know, wide eyed and optimistic and they are opening factories in El Segundo. If you, you know, if you spend time on X, you couldn't have gotten away from the idea or kind of what happened last week with Re Industrialize, a big conference in Detroit where pretty much all of the hard tech ecosystem congregated to talk about building back manufacturing in this country. You know, they release a lot of pods, we release a lot of episodes around kind of what we're investing in. But it really is real Time. I do think that Brose's book the Kill Chain was early, so I think it came out in 2019, 2018. And that book really talked about the kind of future of warfare that's happening today. My partner, Christian Kyle, actually just released a piece on Exaday called How to Start a Space War, how to Win a Space War, and he wrote it with Alex Oliver, who's on our team, who was in the army for 17 years. Those are the types of pieces where it's people who are on the ground who can finally talk about what they saw when they were a war fighter or what they saw when they were building satellites. And those are the sorts of things that I think give people kind of real time what is happening in the ecosystem and why manufacturing is so important.
- [63:32]
Chris Styrewalt
Thank you. You didn't exactly answer. Are you coming back?
- [63:35]
Katherine Boyle
I would love to. I would love to come back. As I said, you can ask me to come back anytime. We didn't even get into virtue and vice and all the, all the Christian ethics thing. I thought, like, that's what I thought we were going to talk about. Here we are talking.
- [63:47]
Chris Styrewalt
I want to hear the being a Catholic in Silicon Valley set of questions. There's a whole chain, I think, Chris, can we make her our first repeat guest?
- [63:55]
Ben Sasse
I'm, I'm. I'm here for it because as I, as I began this conversation, you present this terrible conundrum for me because there's two fascinating stories to tell. One personal, one policy, and I adore got sucked in on the policy side. So we have all of this unfinished business.
- [64:12]
Katherine Boyle
And I'm not a policy wonk. I don't know. I don't know much. I don't know about much about policy, but I can talk about.
- [64:16]
Ben Sasse
Oh, yeah, oh, yeah. You're just. You're just a simple country technologist. You just don't know.
- [64:21]
Katherine Boyle
I like that. I like. I'm gonna steal that. A suburban technologist.
- [64:24]
Ben Sasse
That's right. Just. Just little old you, I'm sure. I'm sure.
- [64:27]
Chris Styrewalt
I'm sure.
- [64:28]
Ben Sasse
Well, we, we really appreciate you and we do hope you'll come back.
- [64:31]
Katherine Boyle
Thanks so much for having me. It was truly an honor.
- [64:32]
Chris Styrewalt
Thanks, Catherine.
- [64:34]
Ben Sasse
Well, professor, other than the fact that I have a Washington journalist's inability to broaden my scope and thinking beyond the questions of the government and policy and politics, what did we learn today?
- [64:51]
Chris Styrewalt
Well, I think we said at the beginning that no one podcast was going to be able to capture all the dimensions. I mean, because you asked a lot of really good questions. They're not my top tier questions on this. I want to know why the shipyards have life again in Louisiana and Mississippi. How did this happen? And obviously these are partners policy questions, but a huge part of them are, holy crap. Autonomous sea drone. Sea ships are not only 36 inches like we predicted to incapacitate an aircraft carrier five years ago, but they're also all these 20 and 30 foot autonomous vessels. So I think we just, we have to have her back. We have to do the second episode with her right now. Except that next week is the 250th anniversary. So we are blessed to have Jeffrey Rosen coming on to talk about the American Foundation. But we got to get her back within a month. That's you on board.
- [65:44]
Ben Sasse
I'm on board. And we will, we will talk about, you know, I don't know whether if you saw the New York Times report how remote work has helped a generation of working parents. And it was fascinating to me. I wish I would have talked to this maybe. Well, this will go in the next episode. But it talks about the data supporting how for women, women, remote women particularly, but for families and for kids generally, remote work has been this extraordinary blessing. And how you guys, what did you, you, that's where you, this is where you got to hunters and gatherers.
- [66:26]
Chris Styrewalt
That's on every episode, brother. I don't know if you're paying attention. I, I try to get to hunter gatherers in the nomadic life every episode
- [66:32]
Ben Sasse
and working where you work. But I think there is in insufficient and so basically what the data say, that this is a Brookings Project. And, but more, more mothers are working now. Women age 25 to 54, they're working more, but they're working more to greater satisfaction and to better outcomes because they have the option to work from home.
- [67:05]
Dario Amodei
Home.
- [67:05]
Ben Sasse
Just very quickly we'll, we'll save this for the next episode, but very quickly talk about how you think that will change the way Americans live, work and pursue happiness.
- [67:19]
Chris Styrewalt
Well, I, I think your distinction is right. There's some male versus female. But I think the much bigger distinction is do you yet have kids or not on the question of how valuable is remote work? So I love people like David Bonson, but I only partly agree with David's crusade against remote work. I think he's totally right that for 23 and 26 year olds who don't have kids, haven't done meaningful work before, having remote work means you lose mentorship, you lose a sense of community and pulling on oars together. And so that's Terrible. But if you're 32 and trying to balance the challenges of work and home, remote work can be an unbelievable blessing. And I think more broadly the way to think about this is the idea that the family is the foundational institution for American society is obviously true. So American dynamism depends on strong families. And so the question now is how can tech come alongside the family? How can we create better habits to support families? And I think there's a ton of interesting topics there. But because you want me to say hunter gatherer more often. Yes, obviously I think it's, you know, it's pretty obvious that in the hunter gatherer and the agrarian area era, work and home were at the same place, except for the big hunt, which was a temporary departure and your 14 year old male went along on the first big hunt at some point, but work and home were together. It is the factory system that separates work and home. And our technologies are now better than the giant tools of the factory era. And so it can enable the reintegration of work and home. And that's, I think that's the aspiration
- [69:04]
Ben Sasse
and that if that were true, and I know we'll talk to her about this the next time we talk to her, if that were true, then we would expect to see family businesses and we would expect to see, much like it was once upon a time, that if your parents were glove makers, that you were that to the Bonson question, the point about socializing young people and giving them team membership, that families and local communities by extension would then and be what's socializing young people and maybe is, is that possible?
- [69:38]
Chris Styrewalt
Yeah, I mean, I think, I think you want to have a thick family, extended family networks, mentorship, gradual transition. Now peer segregation is a really stupid model. What John Dewey thought he was doing for reasons mostly ignoble, but in his mind some of them know noble. We're helping people. In an era of factory model work, we better have factory model schooling. And I think the institutionalization and bureaucratization of childhood is terrible. And so I think the rise of family compounds again right now, very small buds and shoots in this space, but important. You've pushed back on me a number of times and said, hey, kind of Richard, Florida's the mobile, the rooted and the stock. The rooted is the best thing to be, but the second best thing is mobile, not stock. And so, so extended family networks are great when people can choose into them, not when it's the only thing they have is to be constrained in that space. But I think the compound, the extended family network. Knowing your aunts and uncles and your cousins again to be. To be socialized and discipled and disciplined and curated and nurtured and brought of age in those kind of contexts. Pretty great to be able to have family businesses again or at least family side hustles where people get to be in projects together.
- [70:59]
Ben Sasse
Okay, we are counter programming on Independence Day in the semi quincentennial and as you said, we will honor that with Jeffrey Rosen belatedly next week. We have some other guests coming up. We love America 100% of the time. This is a resolutely pro American podcast. So I do just want to say though, that Happy Independence Day to you. I want to say that and to our listeners that that's really cool that we have America and it's cool if we all try to be better stewards of it.
- [71:37]
Chris Styrewalt
Yes, and amen to all that. America celebration of independence every day. Fireworks lots more often. And as the debate often happens in the Christian tradition. What are you talking about? We're only preaching about resurrection on Easter.
- [71:53]
Ben Sasse
We do it every week. Usa now we're going to get. Now you're going to get me into. We're going to argue about the Baptist, but we can do that another time. Now we can do that another time.
- [72:04]
Chris Styrewalt
Light them if you got them.
- [72:06]
Ben Sasse
All right, Ben Sass. Happy Independence Day to you and all the sasses everywhere.
- [72:10]
Chris Styrewalt
Happy independence to you, you freedom loving fool.
- [72:15]
Ben Sasse
All right, that is it for this week's episode. We hope you'll like, review and subscribe and tell a friend. Feel free to email us with your thoughts, corrections, questions or whatever else is on your mind. You can write us@sassandstyrewaltgmail.com this podcast was produced by Scott Immerget with the help of our colleagues at the American Enterprise Institute. The music is from Drew Holcomb and the neighbors. Thanks for listening and keep living the good life. Hell yeah, brother.
- [72:41]
Chris Styrewalt
Usa. Sam.