#216 Katherine Boyle - America's Defense Tech Renaissance

Summary

Shawn Ryan Show Episode #216: Kathryn Boyle - America's Defense Tech Renaissance

Host: Shawn Ryan
Guest: Kathryn Boyle
Release Date: July 10, 2025

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Introduction and Background

In Episode #216 of the "Shawn Ryan Show," host Shawn Ryan engages in an insightful conversation with Kathryn Boyle, a prominent venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and co-founder of the firm's American Dynamism practice. Kathryn brings a unique perspective, being the daughter of a former Jesuit priest who transitioned to medicine, and she combines her journalistic background with her venture capital expertise to drive innovation in America's defense technology sector.

Kathryn Boyle's Career Path

Kathryn Boyle's journey into venture capital and defense technology is both unconventional and inspiring. Initially aspiring to join the CIA, Kathryn faced rejection, which redirected her path towards journalism. She became a reporter at the Washington Post, where she honed her skills in information gathering and relationship building—skills that would later prove invaluable in her venture capital career.

In 2014, Kathryn transitioned from journalism to venture capital by reaching out to Peter Thiel, which eventually led her to Founders Fund. Her persistence paid off, allowing her to immerse herself in Silicon Valley's tech ecosystem despite having no prior tech background. Kathryn's determination and ability to build relationships facilitated her entry into the defense tech investment space, culminating in key investments in companies like Anduril Industries.

Notable Quote:
“I am in the business of optimism. If I think a company is going to become some extraordinary movement, I invest.”
— Kathryn Boyle [02:11]

American Dynamism and Defense Tech Renaissance

Kathryn coined the term "American Dynamism" in 2021 to describe companies that support the national interest across various sectors, including aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics, and critical infrastructure. Under her leadership, Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions in iconic defense tech firms such as SpaceX, Anduril Industries, Shield AI, and Apex Space Cape.

Kathryn emphasizes the pivotal role of startups in revitalizing the U.S. defense industrial base. Unlike traditional primes like Lockheed Martin and Boeing, which operate on long-term, cost-plus contracts with limited incentives for innovation, startups bring agility, rapid production capabilities, and innovative methodologies essential for modern defense needs.

Notable Quote:
“The real thing we need to be focusing on, and I think a lot of people don't recognize that, is the production capacity and the speed of manufacturing. That’s going to come from startups.”
— Kathryn Boyle [07:10]

Shift in Silicon Valley's Attitude Towards Defense

Historically, Silicon Valley maintained an anti-defense stance, with tech companies focusing primarily on consumer technology and avoiding government contracts. However, recent years have witnessed a significant cultural and strategic shift. Influenced by leaders like Elon Musk and the success of companies such as SpaceX, the valley now recognizes the immense potential and necessity of integrating defense technology into its innovation pipeline.

Kathryn attributes this transformation to multiple factors:

• Successful Models: SpaceX's rapid advancements and Anduril's breakthrough contracts with the Department of Defense (DoD) have demonstrated the viability and profitability of defense tech startups.
• Defense Innovation Unit (DIU): Initiated by then-Defense Secretary Ash Carter in 2015, DIU has actively engaged Silicon Valley engineers, fostering collaboration between the tech sector and the military.
• Global Geopolitical Tensions: Events like the Russian invasion of Ukraine have underscored the urgency of modernizing defense capabilities, accelerating investments in defense technology.

Notable Quote:
“We are investing in companies that are supporting the national interest, full stop, and we're not gonna be ashamed about it.”
— Kathryn Boyle [112:14]

Cultural and Demographic Changes in America

Kathryn delves into the profound demographic shifts affecting America, highlighting a significant decline in birth rates from a replacement rate of 2.1 to the current 1.6. She attributes this decline to cultural and spiritual changes initiated in the early 1970s, specifically:

• End of the Draft (1973): President Nixon's termination of conscription encouraged men to see military service as a choice rather than an obligation, altering traditional perceptions of masculinity and purpose.
• Roe v. Wade (1973): The legalization of abortion empowered women to make reproductive choices, shifting societal expectations regarding family and motherhood.

These changes fostered an individualistic culture where traditional institutions like family and national service lost their central roles. Kathryn argues that this erosion has led to a fragmented society with diminished communal responsibilities, impacting everything from social cohesion to the defense workforce.

Notable Quote:
“We did not replace that purpose with something else, and we didn’t have a way of saying this is how society should be. And without those guardrails or those guides or people who can help you navigate life, people just get lost.”
— Kathryn Boyle [167:32]

Challenges in Manufacturing and the Defense Industrial Base

A central theme of the discussion revolves around the critical need to rebuild America's defense industrial base. Kathryn identifies several challenges:

• Production Speed and Capacity: Traditional defense primes are hindered by rigid procurement processes and slow production cycles. Startups, on the other hand, can innovate rapidly and scale production efficiently.
• Automation and Software-Defined Manufacturing: Companies like Hadrian are revolutionizing production by integrating software into manufacturing processes, enabling faster and more flexible production lines.
• Supply Chain Modernization: Investing in tier-one suppliers and modular manufacturing techniques ensures that the DoD can procure essential components swiftly and reliably.

Kathryn stresses that bridging the production gap is imperative to maintaining national security and technological superiority.

Notable Quote:
“The thing that keeps me up at night is the production gap. How quickly can we build? It can be on satellite buses, ground stations, modular forms of energy. It all comes back to the modularization and the production thing.”
— Kathryn Boyle [134:37]

Chinese Espionage in Silicon Valley

The podcast addresses the pervasive issue of Chinese espionage infiltrating Silicon Valley and American universities. Kathryn highlights:

• Espionage Tactics: Chinese agents exploit open Silicon Valley cultures to steal intellectual property and sensitive information, posing significant threats to national security.
• University Infiltration: Institutions like Stanford have become targets for espionage, where professors and researchers may inadvertently or deliberately aid foreign intelligence efforts.
• Impact on Defense Technology: The theft of technological advancements hampers American innovation and can provide adversaries with significant strategic advantages.

Kathryn emphasizes the need for enhanced security measures within tech companies and academic institutions to safeguard against espionage and protect critical defense technologies.

Notable Quote:
“It's clear that these large companies, particularly the apples of the world and Google, have repeat cases consistently of people stealing intellectual property and just the security around these important things just not being, no one's paying attention to it.”
— Kathryn Boyle [140:48]

Overview of Invested Companies

Kathryn highlights several key companies Andreessen Horowitz has invested in, emphasizing their strategic importance and innovative approaches to defense technology:

• Anduril Industries: A leader in defense technology, developing autonomous systems and surveillance tools.
• Apex Space Cape: Focused on modular satellite buses, significantly reducing the time and cost required for satellite deployment.
• Shield AI: Specializes in artificial intelligence for defense applications.
• Capitalize Space: Enhancing ground station infrastructure to support data transmission from space.

These investments underscore the firm's commitment to bolstering America's defense capabilities through cutting-edge technology and scalable manufacturing solutions.

Notable Quote:
“A lot of the companies we are investing in are not science fair experiments. They’re built to manufacture things simple, good, and you can do it as quickly as possible.”
— Kathryn Boyle [131:42]

Conclusion and Future Outlook

Kathryn Boyle envisions a future where American dynamism propels the nation's defense technology sector to unprecedented heights. By fostering a robust ecosystem of startups focused on defense innovation, leveraging advanced manufacturing techniques, and mitigating espionage threats, the United States can secure its technological and military supremacy.

Kathryn remains optimistic about the cultural shift within Silicon Valley towards embracing defense investments, driven by a confluence of successful role models, governmental support, and global geopolitical imperatives. She underscores the importance of continuous investment in production capabilities and the nurturing of a new generation of engineers committed to national service and innovation.

Notable Quote:
“The best early stage investors are building relationships with someone who's going to build a company before that person even realizes that they're going to build a company.”
— Kathryn Boyle [62:06]

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Final Thoughts

Kathryn Boyle's insights illuminate the transformative landscape of America's defense technology sector. Her advocacy for American dynamism, coupled with strategic investments and cultural resilience, positions the United States to navigate and thrive amidst evolving global challenges. This episode serves as a compelling narrative on the intersection of venture capital, national security, and the rebuilding of critical industrial capacities.

Transcript

[Kathryn Boyle]

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[Unknown Host]

Kathryn Boyle, welcome to the show.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Thanks so much for having me.

[Unknown Host]

Thanks for being here. Thanks for being here. So you came on my radar what about a couple of weeks ago from a mutual friend and so looked into you and you're invested in all of the companies that just fascinate me every day. And I'm brand new to kind of diving into the tech space and man, this has been mind blowing for me just to be able to talk to these people who are just on a whole nother operating field as everybody else and learning about some of the innovations and just talking to American innovators which to be honest, in the past couple years I haven't had a lot of hope in our country. But since diving into the tech space and seeing, I mean we really do have the world's best innovators. We do and we attract that. These people come from all over the world to come here and live the American dream. And I personally needed that to restore some hope in this country. And so like I said, you're invested in a lot of those companies and a lot more than I even know about. And so it's an honor to have you here today and I've been looking forward to this.

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's an honor to be here. And I always say I come bearing good news. Usually after people talk to me, they are very optimistic. And I always have to warn people I am in the business of optimism. Right. Like I'm an early stage investor. I'm always thinking of that a company I only Invest. If I think a company is going to become some extraordinary movement, I agree with you. I mean, the last few years, what we have seen as investors in the American dynamism ecosystem, the companies that are building for defense tech, it did not exist five years ago. It just did not. There was not the enthusiasm or the excitement. DoD wasn't excited about buying from startups. It's a complete 180. And so I always like when people say they meet these founders and they have hope for America. It's like, yeah, every day I get to meet them. And I think that's why I'm such an optimist too, is because I get to see on the ground floor these young engineers who are just incredibly patriotic. Their patriotism. I always say I was patriotic because we were of the generation that remembers 9 11. We were coming of age in 9 11. It changed our lives. These kids weren't even born. They have no recollection of some of the things that we understand. And I think because of that they have this youthful optimism of loving their country and wanting to build for the next generation of defense. So that kind of keeps me going too. I think. I'm like you where it's tempting to black pill.

[Unknown Host]

It's just, it's good to see like it's. You haven't. I haven't seen that in Americans in a long time. I'm not just talking about the past four years. I'm talking a long time. I've not seen, I've just not seen that. And even, I mean we were chatting at breakfast a little bit about was it, I don't know how many years ago. It didn't seem long ago that Silicon Valley almost seemed, it seemed anti American and zero patriotism. And in the past, man, I would say in the past what Year and a half maybe. And that's just from, you know, I haven't been looking into this very long, but maybe in the past year and a half it seems like it's doing a 180.

[Kathryn Boyle]

It really is.

[Unknown Host]

And very concentrated on defense tech. And a lot of areas where we've been, I think we're weak on. Totally, totally. Compared to a lot of our adversaries.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally.

[Unknown Host]

So that'll be really. I know you have a huge part in that, so I can't wait to get to that. But I'd like to do a life story on you. And that's kind of my specialty here. So how you got into all this, which is also fascinating to me. Cause you're not a tech person. Not a tech person and I want involved and I'm not a tech person, but I'm just infatuated with everything that's going on. So do a life story and then get to, you know, I'd like to talk about some mistakes you've made and some of the big wins and what it's like getting in on the, on the ground level at some of these companies.

[Kathryn Boyle]

So yeah, a lot of mistakes we can talk about.

[Unknown Host]

Perfect. But everybody starts out with an introduction. So here we go. Kathryn Boyle, a venture capitalist at Andreessen Horowitz and co founder of the firm's American Dynamism practice. Coined the term American Dynamism in 2021 to refer to companies supporting the national interest across aerospace, defense, manufacturing, energy, logistics and critical infrastructure. Wrote the original American Dynamism Manifesto to encourage founders, veterans and engineers to build companies for America. Since then, Andreessen Horowitz has invested billions of dollars in iconic defense tech companies including SpaceX, Anduril Industries, Shield AI, Saronic Technologies, Castilian Corp, Apex Space Cape and many others. Prior to becoming a VC, you were a reporter at the Washington Post and are a rabid defender of free speech and free thought. BA in government from Georgetown University, an MBA from Stanford, and a master's of Public Advocacy from the National University of Ireland. Galloway. A mother and a practicing Catholic, you often write about the importance of building technology that strengthens the most important institution in America, the family, and probably a lot more. But, but I think that's most of the important stuff. So then before we get to in the Weeds, I have a Patreon account and that's our subscription account. They've been with here with us since the beginning here and we've turned it into quite the community and very engaged. And so one of the things I do is I offer them the opportunity to ask each and every guest a question before we get rolling here. So this is from Ian Lane. Given your work with the American Dynamism Initiative, what role do you see startups playing in revitalizing US Military industrial capacity, especially as peer adversaries like China scale up defense innovation through state backed efforts?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I mean it is. The startup community has to fix this problem because it's not going to come from the traditional primes, it's not going to come from family owned machine shops. The new technology needed, particularly on the industrial based side, is so important. You need hardware, you need software, but most importantly you need people who understand how to build for production. So I think that startups are going to be, they are integral. That's the whole thesis of American dynamism, which we'll get into, but the real thing we need to be focusing on, and I think a lot of people don't recognize that, you know, they know Anduril, they know SpaceX, those are companies that sell directly to the government. There's a whole other category of company that's building for the legacy primes, that's building satellite buses or building automated machine shops so that you can build more critical parts for aerospace and defense. So there's this whole category of tier one suppliers that are building up the defense industrial base, working with the primes and working with the new primes like SpaceX and Palantir and Anduril. So it is incumbent upon these young founders, these, these very technical founders to be able to build as quickly as possible, but really to focus on production. My focus as an investor. There's a lot of companies that are focused on just building software. I'm really focused on the SpaceX. Like companies that are building for mass production, that understand that, as Elon says, the best part is no part simple, simple design for manufacturing so that we can go from 1 to 10 to 10,000 to 100,000 of something that's critical. And that is gonna come from startups. It's a new methodology of how you build.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

For so many reasons. I mean, one is they are based on a set of requirements. They have been building for a set of requirements for many, many years. Oftentimes they're getting paid per hour, they charge per hour. They're not on fixed price contracts, they're on cost plus contracts, where it's the amount of engineering hours that you do on a product plus a fixed margin, which is a terrible incentive for any company. Like if I'm saying, okay, I'm gonna paint your house or mow your lawn and you're gonna pay me per hour, but it'll take all day. But if I actually judge the project and say it's gonna cost however many dollars it does to paint this room, I'm gonna wanna make sure that I budget it right, that I get the cheapest paint right. So the way that capitalism works outside of every other system except the DOD is that you have fixed, firm fixed price contracts where you know what something's gonna cost you. And if it goes over budget, the risk is on the company, not on the government. But the primes have been engineered so that they can always say, well, we went over budget. So you're gonna have to give us more money. You know, we're gonna get our 7% margin no matter what. And if it takes two, three, four extra years because you have a different request or you say actually we want it built this way, we're happy to accommodate you. But that is gonna mean that you're not getting the products in time. And Silicon Valley operates in the opposite way, and particularly venture capital. You give in many cases than it even needs to speed up the process of production, to speed up the R and D, to speed up the number of products they can build at one time. And the company is always going to zero. What I always say about venture capital is it's so different than any other type of business where you take out a bank loan and you say I'm going to build a business and then you want to make more money than you spend. Silicon Valley is the opposite. You want to spend more money at knowing that you're going to go to zero in 18 months if you don't raise another round of capital. What that allows you to do is to bring on the best engineers to produce the product as fast as possible. And when you compare that methodology of we're going to build hypersonic weapons or we're going to build satellite buses to the companies that have been around for 100 years, they don't know how to operate like that. It's not their incentives, but it's not the type of talent that they have on the team that wants to operate in that 20 hour day environment of knowing they're going to go to zero. So it's a very different incentive structure. But the last 25 years in America, this is how companies have been built. Venture capital is the dynamism engine of all innovation in America. It's the envy of the world. And so we have to make sure that this system is not just operating for the Facebooks of the world and the TikToks of the world. The consumer technology that we use. We have to make sure that we bring this urgency and this capital and the speed to the things that matter most, which is of course building our defense industrial base.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, what do you think is going to happen to the primes? Are they going to just get phased out?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So I don't think so. I think they're waking up. My view is probably the best thing that can happen for the dod. And this is me speaking as someone who would like to see the DoD encourage competition, is to go back to that Pre Last Supper 1990s model where we had 50,000 companies working in defense, a lot more primes now. I think something like 40% of the major programs go to five primes. It was not like that in the 90s, post the Last Supper, when the DoD came to all these companies and said that there's going to be massive budget cuts post Soviet Union, you're going to have to merge. That led to a merging of these companies where there was just no competition. And I think the DoD thought by merging them that you'd save the companies, that they'd become more efficient. The opposite happened. It just meant that they didn't have to innovate and they didn't have to work hard because there was no competition. So I think the best thing that can happen is we'll probably see those primes lose a stranglehold on programs. They're good at building some things. They're good at building very exquisite systems. We're talking about the B2 and how we only have 19. The companies like the startups that we are investing in now, they want to build thousands of something and that's how they're building their product design is to build attritable systems versus these legacy exquisite systems. So I think you'll see primes that are focused on the things that they know how to build that take a little bit longer. I think they'll lose their stranglehold on sort of getting these new programs of records. I think that would be the best thing that could possibly happen. And then startups can focus on the things that have to be made fast. And particularly the software defined attritable systems that operate in the battlefield, that have to be upgraded, that have to be changed based on the technology that's changing the battlefield. I don't think the primes are capable of doing that.

[Unknown Host]

How are they? I mean, when you say they're waking up, what do you mean by that they're waking up?

[Kathryn Boyle]

It used to be when I would go, so I was a very early investor in Anduril and in Silicon Valley, a billion dollar company is like a big deal. It's not a big deal. A billion dollars in Washington is not a big deal, which tells you how screwed up our incentive systems are. But when I would go to talk to people inside the DoD or talk to across administrations from 2017, 2018, 2019, companies like Anduril, they'd be like, oh, that's cute. That's really cute what Palmer and those guys are doing over there, right? It was almost like laughing at them. And Elon had this Same experience with ULA and Boeing. They used to make fun of the fact that their sort of place in Cape Canaveral there was a tent, right? It wasn't like this fancy launch pad. It was kind of, I would say homegrown, kind of homespun. And they'd make fun of them like these guys, these guys that have everything under a tent are gonn be able to launch a rocket. Yeah, right. And then look at where we are now, where SpaceX is responsible for 85% of launch across the country or across the world actually. So I mean they are a true, they are our path to space. And that only took SpaceX was started in 2002. It's 2025. They really gained market share very quickly. And so you kind of see it happening with Anduril now where people are picking their heads up. Anduril is an 8 year old company and they're kind of like huh, like they're down selected for some major programs now. Like they're not just building in the beginning. I'm sure you spent some time with Palmer. He talked about how they were building sentry towers and really focused on border control. They were selling to dhs. So DOD just thought they were kind of a cute little company that was never going to get in the way of any of these primes. And now they're winning major contracts. And so I think it's irresponsible if the primes are saying oh well, those guys are never going to win or we'll beat them at the law fair. Like it's like oh well, we'll take them to court and make sure that they can't get access to these big contracts because these are ours. I just think that the world has fundamentally shifted. There's too many people who recognize that you need the best and brightest engineers in America and the people of Silicon Valley. You need the talent and the AI labs across the country, you need them working on defense. And those guys aren't at Lockheed Martin.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, it's man, it's just, it's, it's really interesting. It's like a whole new wave of innovations coming in. And like I said, I don't know much, but you don't hear a lot of innovation coming out of the big primes like Raytheon, Lockheed, Boeing.

[Kathryn Boyle]

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

[Unknown Host]

A lot of Boeings falling out of the sky lately, but not much innovation. A lot of witnesses are being killed mysteriously. But anyways, yeah, well we'll get into a lot more of that. And one more thing before we get going. Everybody gets a gift.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, thank you so much. Terrific. Thank you.

[Unknown Host]

Vigilance Elite Gummy Bears wanting to try these.

[Kathryn Boyle]

So thanks so much.

[Unknown Host]

You're welcome. They're amazing. So let's get into your backstory a little bit here.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Sure.

[Unknown Host]

Where did you grow up?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So I grew up in Northern Florida in Gainesville. University town, football town. You had our. You had our guy, Thibaut, on recently, and he started.

[Unknown Host]

Amazing human.

[Kathryn Boyle]

He's still the pride of the city. Right. It's like, those are the. Those are the glory days, you know, it's like we. He's. He's. He's still our guy. But I grew up, I always say, had like, the most normal 90s Florida childhood. And in some ways it's like, that's what I. In some ways, I feel like I want to give my children is that same sort of normal 90s childhood. But my story really starts with. I always say it starts with my dad. I came from a family of priests. My father was born during the depression, 1931, and as happens in big Irish Catholic families at that time, poor Irish Catholic families, the smartest kid was always sent off to the priesthood. So at 17, he joined the Jesuits, and his dream was he wanted to be a missionary doctor. He wanted to go to the poorest parts of America, across the world, but he also wanted to be a physician. So he wanted to practice medicine. Heal the body, heal the soul. I sometimes think he would have been very aligned with some of the Maha stuff that's happening today. But 10 years into the seminary, and this is why it's so important for my life, the seminary in Chicago told him, like, sorry, we don't have the money to send you to medical school. Sorry, you're just going to have to be a normal priest. And he had sort of this life crisis. What am I going to do? And he decided to leave. And I always say, like, that's why I'm sitting here. Like, if he had stayed, he would have been a very good priest, but I wouldn't be here. So I'm very grateful. He had that crisis of self and decided that his calling for medicine was more important than his calling for God. But the reason that happened, and the other person I'm really grateful to who just passed away is my Uncle Pat. My Uncle Pat is like a hero to me. He's a hero to a lot of people. But he was my father's Irish twin, so he was nine months younger and he was in the Jesuits with him, following him. And the reason my family was okay with my dad leaving was because my Uncle Pat's like, well, I'm gonna stay. And of course, my Uncle Pat was sort of a rebel. He got kicked out of the Jesuits three times for language, beating people up, not respecting authority. He was not a good priest, probably like some of the priests you've had on your show. He's more like that. He's a tough guy.

[Unknown Host]

I love those kind of priests.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, yeah. No, there were more of them back in the day. There's not enough of them anymore. But he stayed in the priesthood, became a Jesuit, and then Vietnam happened and he joined the Army. So he joined 82nd Airborne Division. And the reason he joined is he's like, you know, I'm a tough guy, like, I'm physically fit. I look around at all these other priests, like, who else is going to go to Vietnam? So he was an army chaplain. He was one of the first Catholic chaplains in Vietnam. Did four tours.

[Unknown Host]

No kidding.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. It's incredible story, the stuff he saw. He never talked about it, of course. Like, I only really started learning a lot about it at the very end of his life. But he came back, I mean, four tours, came back radically anti war, but also radically pro life. Like we have to protect life at all costs. And I grew up in this family where he was the hero of the family. It's like he was what we aspire to be, God and country. So I grew up in this very Irish Catholic family. My dad started medical practice in the 60s in northern Florida. Integrated practice was sort of radical at the time, very poor practice. His view was, you know, you take care of the working people. So all the images of me, you know, growing up, I just have all these memories of my dad having all the cops come into our house at like 9 or 10 o' clock at night and giving him a shot. Like the old. What is it? The image of the old timey doctors who like, pull your pants down, give you a shot and blanket on the name of the Norman Rockwell, like, you know, in the white coat with the stethoscope. But that was my dad. He was just like a, you know, wanted to be a priest, ended up a doctor and took care of the people in our community. And I always say, like pillars of the community used to be a thing we don't have. Like our generation doesn't have as many of those people that stay in their community that say, I want to take care of everyone. Where you're just known as the person that the first responders could go to or that the cops can go to or the people like that. You're going to help out the people who are really supporting your community.

[Unknown Host]

Why do you think that's changed?

[Kathryn Boyle]

I think it's changed for a lot of reasons. I think people used to move around in the same way, right? Like, it's like, you know, it's the kind of push for college, I think, has destroyed so much of the social fabric of the country. But it's like now if you're, you know, it's like he was the smartest in his family. He got sent to the priesthood. Now, if you're the smartest in your family, you get sent to Harvard, right? Like, you get sent to a school, you get pulled out of your family, you get pulled out of your church, you get pulled out of your community. And then you're told, you know, you have to chase the job, you have to chase the dream, you have to keep making more money, you have to keep doing more things. And it's like, it's rare for people who are sort of treated as the success stories to stay in their community. And I think that's a huge problem. It's like a huge problem that people don't put down roots and live somewhere for 50 years in a town where they can truly be sort of that pillar and that beacon.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting. Do you think it has anything to do with the political climate, polarization of America?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I mean, you and I were talking about this. I actually think the politicization of America might actually be a good thing. After Covid, right? It's like a lot of people, like, I'm in Florida now. I used to be in San Francisco. A lot of people are waking up that where you live, the city you live in, it actually matters. It matters for how your kids are educated. It matters for a lot of the things you don't think about until it's too late matters for crime. It matters for, you know, the sort of ideologies you want your family exposed to. And so I think there's something. There is a bit of a return, talking about optimistic things. I think there's a bit of a return to people recognizing, you know, I don't need to live in New York City or San Francisco. Like, where I really want to be is in a place where I know I'm raising my family and raising my kids with the values that I had. I mean, I always say I moved to Florida, moved back to Florida because I wanted my kids to have the 90s childhood that I did. And I think they can get it there in a way that they're certainly not going to get it in San Francisco.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, yeah. I don't know. It's, it's like just keep. Seem to be moving farther and farther and farther apart with every, every four years for the past, what, I don't know, 12 years. Yeah, seems like at least 12 years. And it's like, man, like, it's just, I catch myself doing it. It's like not much, but a lot of people are just scared to share just a simple opinion because they don't want to be, you know, blasted or judged even in like a small town environment like this.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally. It seems like, I think a huge part of the problem is we've replaced, you know, America's always been a religious country. And then you saw this decline starting around, you know, 1970s, this real decline in religion. It's coming back up again. We'll talk about a lot of optimistic things, but that's one thing I'm optimistic about is the religious revival. But you know, five, 10 years ago it was really bad, right. Where just the continued decline of people not believing in God, not going to church. But it leaves this hole for some other sort of ideology. And I think Americans have replaced their love of God, their love of country with their love of politics. And so now we sort by ideological preference, politics. It's like, well, you're, you know, the way that people in previous civilizations used to feel about religious outsiders is how we feel about political outsiders. And so I do think we're more polarized. But I think the root of that is that we don't have anything in common anymore. And we used to have sort of this Christian ideology or sort of even just understanding that America has certain values and we don't. For a very long time that was under attack. Decades that was under attack. And it's only now that we're sort of moving back to people saying, okay, maybe I should go to church. Maybe going to church is a good thing. I mean, you even have the New York Times people, you know, on the op ed pages. I always think like they're a good beacon of sort of liberal thought. The op ed page is saying, well, maybe, maybe we should return to religion.

[Unknown Host]

Are you serious? The New York Times is putting this out?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I mean, they've been putting out some stuff recently where it's like funniest one, the oppa page from last week had three different stories about the declining birth rate. Three different Stories about what is wrong, that we are not having enough children. And that used to be a conservative, social conservative, religious person talking point about having more babies. And now the New York Times is worried, you know, and they're saying what? You know. There was another article that was so funny. I wish I had the actual headline. It was like, we don't see men anymore. Like, where did the men go? The men need to come back, come back to us. Like, it's a woman talking about how there's a gulf between men and women. And I'm just thinking, at least they see there's a problem. They don't know the reason for the problem. Like, that's a whole backstory. Well, you know, like, hopefully they'll learn at some point, but they see there's a problem. And so I think I'm at least optimistic that we seem to be kind of turning the corner on. Okay, like, it's good to have families. It's good to think about where you want to live, how you want to raise your children. And hopefully that will lead to asking bigger questions about what does it mean to have a good family and what does it mean to be a good person?

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, yeah. When did you notice, by the way? Like, when did you notice that men have disappeared?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Men have disappeared. Or that they have no interest in relationships with women or that they have no interest in marriage. And it's. But it was interesting because the article sort of blamed men for everything. And it's like, well, yeah, next week they need to have the men saying, why did the women disappear? Why did the women change? Right. And I think that is a huge problem of why we have this birth collapse. Is that really, like there's just been a full on assault attack on the family for the last 30, 40 years. And so it makes sense why you see fewer and fewer people having children.

[Unknown Host]

How bad is our birth decline?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, it is shockingly bad. So we are now at 1.6 per woman. Our replacement rate is 2.1.

[Unknown Host]

I thought we were at 2.1.

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's been about, I think, eight years that we passed the 2.1. And then there was a mild uptick in Covid. So people were hopeful. They were thinking, well, maybe it was Just an anomaly those last few years. But then there was a steep decline since COVID as well. So, yeah, we're at 1.6. And the millennials, the millennial generation, I think it's something like we're older millennials. We're like. I think it's 1980 to 1986 is called the elder millennial generation. Something like 58% of us have children. That's the. Yeah, the lowest in history. So it is going to be a shock, a huge shock when our generation ages and there's no one there to do important services. I mean, there's a lot of. Not only economic reasons, but just, like, the social fabric of what's about to happen, of not having children. I mean, this is how civilizations die.

[Unknown Host]

Let's go into it. How is it gonna affect us? This isn't something I've talked about.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. So one, it's. The economic situation's gonna get very bad. When you think of the boomers are the largest, I think, a generational cohort. They're living longer than they ever have. They're healthier, but they're getting to ages. Right. Like, who takes care of boomers when they're in their 80s and 90s? They're in nursing homes. You need service workers. You need people to be able to take care of these aging people. Right. It used to be that you were taken care of in the family. We don't do that anymore. Now we have nursing homes. Right. Like, it's very rare that someone moves in when they're at a certain age with their children and they're taken care of. So those jobs which used to be filled by service workers, there's no one who's going to be able to fill that. On every economic dimension, if you do not have a generation of workers, of people paying into the system. Social Security, I mean, Social Security is a huge issue. But if you don't have people paying into the system, doing the labor, being able to do the things for the elder generation, society starts crumbling. And then there's, of course, the social ramifications of not having families. You know, I'm a firm believer that the most important institution in America is the family. The family used to exist to take care of the people who were weakest. Right. Like, it's like, you know, you used to have these big families, and, you know, sometimes the weakest child would still be living with mom and dad at home, and that was okay. You know, you sort of had empathy for them, but it was like it was the family's Responsibility to take care of these people. We quickly moved that to now it's the state's responsibility to take care of these people who may be sick in some way, maybe unable to provide for themselves in some way, might have psychological issues. Now the state has to take care of them, which is why you see a lot of these people on the street now. Because the state does a terrible job of taking care of these people. But as fewer and fewer children exist, it's like you're not going to have a society that can provide for itself, that can continue into perpetuity. And the exponential decline of this too, where it's like it sounds, oh well, we went from 2.1 to 1.6. That can't be that bad. I mean, in a couple generations that means that our population has shrunk by.

[Unknown Host]

Half in a couple of generations.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. And the best example of this, and I wish I had the numbers in front of me, is South Korea. So South Korea, I think their birth rate is the lowest of any country, any industrialized country. I think it's 0.9. And when you have fewer and fewer people, no one's doing the jobs. Japan is also heading this way. Their birth rate's quite low. The only sort of argument that people make as sort of the bright side of this that could potentially make up for both the labor loss and also just the civilizational collapse is robotics. Right. Like you could have robots do a lot of these jobs. But I think it is a very dangerous thing to say we're going to depend on automation and robotics to make up for the fact that humans are disappearing.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, even China's dealing with this. They had the one child birth policy and then they boarded all of the girls. So now they, they just have.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Extremely short sighted. And yeah, I think the bulk. We're always talking about how dangerous China is. China is growing in power and importance. The most shortsighted thing they have ever done to their society that will eventually catch up with them is the demographic collapse that they are going to feel because of one child. They're trying everything now too. They're trying to end divorce. So there's now a policy, at least that I read about in China where you have to have a 90 day cooldown period so that you don't divorce. They're trying to encourage young women to have children. Young women don't want to have children.

[Unknown Host]

They're bringing in women from other countries. From what I understand, they're sending them out to go find wives in the Philippines, Thailand, Japan, everywhere.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, but they recognize it's a massive problem and probably recognized it before even we did. I think in some ways the conversation sort of hopped from the social conservative sort of churchgoing movement of, gosh, like this is a huge problem, to sort of the, I would say the sort of techno optimist Elon Musk talking about the birth rate as a big deal. It's now become sort of, I think, an issue that's okay for polite society and sort of liberal, you know, New York Times to be talking about. Like, this is actually a real, real issue. So first step is acknowledging it. But it is, you know, 1.6 is a long way to come back from, especially with a millennial generation that, you know, waited way too long to have children. I think the kind of under. There's a couple underlying factors that I don't think we talk enough about that have caused this is when you look at sort of our parents generation, a lot of people didn't go to college. They started adulthood at 18. And sort of the sort of fertile window you could say for women was between 18 and 40. Say, like that was sort of the nominal window of when you could have children and it was socially acceptable. And then we had this incredible push against fertility and against having a family young that I think the millennials really caught wind of. It's like, everyone needs to go to college. Extended adolescence, use your 20s to experiment and enjoy life. You don't really need to be focused on having a family. And what happened is the average age now of a first time, I think mother in America is 28. So 10 years after that, 18. So you've cut the window in half. The average age of a first time father in America, I think is 31. And that's for both college educated and not college educated. If you add on college on that, which I think is a real issue, it's even higher. It's like the average age of a first time mother is 30. So you can understand how the birth rate's being cut in half. If the entire window of when you can have children is cut in half because people are so focused on career and finding themselves and sort of their extended adolescence, rather than focusing on building a family earlier, you're just going to have fewer children. And then when you have fewer marriages, that also cuts it. So it's, you know, it's fewer people getting married, fewer people are going to decide to have children, which from a millennial perspective, to have 58% of people only having kids, I mean, that's compared to, you know what? 89% of our parents generation had children.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

I believe they're still the biggest. Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

So this has always been a question about that I've had is just, you know what, it's just real estate, but I mean, you see all these 55 plus communities being built. I mean, you live in Florida, I came from Florida.

[Kathryn Boyle]

They're everywhere.

[Unknown Host]

They're everywhere. I mean the villages is like, you know about the villages.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes, yes.

[Unknown Host]

It's crazy. What is gonna happen to all these 55 plus communities when that, you know, when that massive generation dies off? I mean, are we just going to have. It's going to create a housing crisis.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I think it'll be a housing crisis. Fewer people. And also like are millennials going to want to, you know, the millennials in Gen X, Gen X is actually a pretty small generation. Are they going to want to move into those places? Definitely not. In some ways the bigger question I think is also, and I know you've had people on who have talked about longevity, people are living a lot longer too, which means they're going to have to work a lot longer, which means they have to be healthier for a lot longer. And so, you know, if you have people living a lot longer and fewer and fewer people who are being born, it's just society inverts on itself. You have a very top heavy society of people who are older who can't do the work that needs to be done to actually protect a country.

[Unknown Host]

Has any nation reversed this?

[Kathryn Boyle]

You know, like I haven't seen anything recently successfully. There have been some attempts, like, you know, some people have pointed to countries like Hungary that are now paying. There's a policy in Hungary where if you have more than four children, you don't have to pay taxes. So there's some extreme policies where you've seen that. So the one anomaly in the western world or in the industrialized world where they are well above birth rate replacement is Israel. And so there's questions about is it because it's a religious society, they have a pretty large religious orthodox community. Right. That kind of makes up for the, of the secular society that doesn't have children. If you have a family of eight and nine and 10, that's 10% of your population, then you can make up for some who are not having any. But we don't have that in America. We don't have as many. You know, I would say we have more than Europe, which Europe is really.

[Unknown Host]

The, they're really on the decline, though.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Really on the decline.

[Unknown Host]

The Islamic population is reproducing at a massive rate.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes. But even counting immigrant and Islamic population in Europe, they're still at, you know, countries. I think Italy's 1.2. I think France is 1.5. Everyone always looks at the Nordic nations as sort of the beacon of how we should be doing policy in the US because they pay for free healthcare for mothers, they pray for free ivf, different things that people say we should experiment with. Their population decline is worse than ours. They're at 1.2, 1.3, 1.5. And so I think what's fascinating to me about this is that this isn't a country specific problem or a cultural specific problem. It's really all industrialized nations. And, you know, there's probably healthcare reasons for it. You know, there's a lot of reasons for it.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, I mean, men, I think men are 70% less, have a fertility rate of like 70% less than it was roughly about 100 years ago.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, yeah. Sperm counts are down, you know, the sort of fertile window for women again cut in half. It's. Yeah. So there's something about the medical side of this and the health side of this that's also happening. But you can't ignore the memes and sort of the cultural destruction that happened since the 1970s, in my opinion, which is family bad, you know, individual good. Right. Like you shouldn't have to sacrifice yourself for the needs of your family. And the minute that people across the Western world started believing in sort of this, like, individualism, that's where you see just the family completely destroyed. And just fewer and fewer families means fewer and fewer children. And we're finally waking up to the consequences of that, which is a, a society that can't grow its gdp. I mean, the economist version of this is it's a society that can't grow its GDP and that can't remain successful. But I think the human part of this is it's a dying society, it's a frail society.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, how do we fix it?

[Kathryn Boyle]

I mean, I think you have to change the culture. I think you cannot change a spiritual and a cultural problem with economic policies. So the sort of easy answers that a lot of economists and sort of people who study this say is, okay, well, we need to make healthcare free, make birth free, you know, make women feel more, you know, feel that they have more benefits. Maybe pay women to do work. Right. Like pay them to stay at home. And, you know, some of those Ideas like, you know, I could say our healthcare system is expensive. It is expensive to have a baby in America. So making that cheaper on the margins, you know, might affect a mother who says, okay, I have two children, maybe I want to have a third. But I actually think the bigger problem is cultural and spiritual.

[Unknown Host]

I think it's the, I think it's the culture too. I mean, you had, I think it stemmed from, you know, the feminist movement.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

You know, where it was, get out, get a job, provide for yourself. You can do everything. Which. Yes, but it detoured, it detoured women from having children and then women that do have children. I mean, it's almost like me and my wife talk about this all the time. If you say you're a stay at home mom, it's almost, it's like it's frowned upon in a lot of areas in the country. And it's like, what the fuck are you talking? Like, frowning upon us on a stay at home mom? I mean, what's more important than raising, than raising your kids? And then, I mean, and then I don't even know how single mothers do it.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, it's.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. The hardest job in the world.

[Unknown Host]

You have to make it okay and you have to take care of the single moms out there.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally.

[Unknown Host]

You know, it's, it's scary.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally.

[Unknown Host]

I think about it, it's terrifying. I don't know how they make ends meet, but yeah, I think the culture change is paramount for that.

[Kathryn Boyle]

A lot of the research, it's always fascinating to me the things you can't talk about. We can talk about the problem, but there's certain things we can't talk about that add to it and you'll see. Economics is always a thing people want to talk about because it's like, oh, well, if we could just fix it with an economic policy. But no one ever talk about what you said, which is that feminism did change the memes and the culture. But at the same time, no one talks about when you introduce birth control into a society and tell women, you know, you can control your own destiny, that is a huge part of it. Like, all of these declines in the industrial world started at the exact same time that the pill was introduced. So, you know, we're not going to go back to a world that is pre pill. Like, that's just never going to happen across, you know, both Western society and the industrial world. But I think you actually have to acknowledge all the factors and the fact that a lot of the people doing this research won't even acknowledge, oh, something magical changed in the 60s and the 70s related to health care, related to how we, you know, abortion was made legal in 1973. Other nations followed. When you look at those as inputs into this, into the story as well, it's like there's a reason why the birth rate is so low in these countries. And it's not just an American phenomena, it's a global phenomena. And you have to take into account all of those things. And I just keep coming back to the culture changed. There was something about what we prized and what we made high status in America where most people, or I shouldn't say most people, but a lot of people chose to have only one to two children, whereas their grandparents generation and their parents generation had three and four. And a society that changes that dramatically in one generation or two generations is unstable. It's completely unstable.

[Unknown Host]

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[Kathryn Boyle]

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

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, we'll probably go down a lot more, but yeah. Let's get back to your story. So son of a priest who left. Who left. Talked about your uncle. What were you into as a kid?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Gosh, I was, I was a very precocious kid. Again, my dad was much older. I was, I was the youngest and so I was really into the news. I read a lot of books. But extremely precocious. Like, like loved, you know, like watching things with my parents. I got really into movies growing up. But I was always sort of this like very inquisitive kid. My dad coming from the Jesuits, kind of like taught our family around the kitchen table, the Socratic method. Right. Like that you need to ask questions that you can't be afraid of the truth. He was sort of this philosopher king.

[Unknown Host]

I love that. I think that's a huge problem nowadays.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. Not sitting down.

[Unknown Host]

Nobody will ask questions.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes. And not being afraid to be disagreeable. And I think we were a family of disagreeable people. But it was really inculcated in me from an early age. So I was always just interested in whatever was happening on the news, whatever was happening in the world. I was a very good student. My parents were not. They didn't really push me. It was sort of a self driven thing. I always tell the story of when I was in third grade, I got one B in my entire life and it was in penmanship. And this is my very hard ass, amazing saint of a mother sat me down and she was like, it's okay if you get a B in math, it's okay if you get a B in reading or whatever. But penmanship means you're lazy. You are lazy and she's like, you were. And it's funny, I have the worst handwriting today. My dad had terrible handwriting. Like, you know, some doctor would probably say I have a genetic thing. But she's like, anyone can write. And you're gonna sit down and you're gonna practice writing penmanship an hour a day. And within like three months, I had the best penmanship of anyone in the class. I was celebrated for it. But it was like, it was moments like that where my parents were just so involved and so good, where, like, they never need to tell me again not to. Not to not work hard or that I wasn't working hard enough or that I was, you know, lazy in some way. Like, I just, I just kind of. It was, you know, you learn the lesson very quick. And my parents, my mom actually ran my dad's medical practice. And so the sort of our kind of typical life was, you know, they would take us to the office, we saw the patients with my dad, we worked in the office like from a very young age. They opened the office on Saturdays because people have to work and they wanted to be there for the patients. And so we had this really, really tight knit family of work matters. Work is a virtue. Everyone works hard and the kids work hard too. It's not just mom and dad work hard and the kids get to play. It's no, it's like, we're going to work as a family and then on Saturday nights we're gonna go to church, go out to dinner after the whole family with my grandparents who live down the street. But it was like a very simple life, but it was very focused on working hard. And there was always these sort of stories in my family where my dad would always say, like, you're not gonna be the smartest in the room. You're not gonna be the best at everything. But no one is gonna outwork a boil. Like, no one is gonna outwork you. And I think that was just sort of inculcated in me from early age. So I did a lot of things. I mean, I did piano. I was really into piano as a kid. I played sports. I wasn't naturally gifted, but worked hard at it. But I just had this sort of seriousness of, okay, we're boils and we work hard.

[Unknown Host]

How many siblings?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So my dad had six kids, and it was sort of a Brady Bench family. So I was the youngest of his six and they were much older. Cause he was, as I said, he was 55 when I was born. And then my mother, we had two. So they were Older and out of the house, but very much like part of the family. Half brothers and half sisters. And I always think part of the reason why I was so precocious is cause I was around. I was millennial. But I was around all these Gen Xers, right. I was around all these older babysitters and kids who would come through the house who were in their 20s and now they're in their 60s. But it was definitely this sort of, I was the baby, sort of absorbing all of this stuff. And so I grew up really fast. You know, it's like I was joking about movies I watched when I was a kid. My parents took me to see True Lies in 1994. I was 8 years old in the theater. You know, it's like seeing these Arnold Schwarzenegger actor movies with a seven or eight year old kid. It was like, oh, she's the baby, whatever, she'll be fine. So I was an adult by the time I was a teenager.

[Unknown Host]

Nice. So you go to college. I know you had interest in becoming. Joining the CIA.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, yeah. I mean, I was very interested in politics, foreign affairs. That was like my love. Growing up, I'd say the big thing that happened before I went to college was my father got very sick. He was chronically ill. So around when I was 12 years old, he had to retire. And I think that's something where if you're a kid that grows up with a chronically ill parent, like, you grow up really fast. Like, you know, you start. I'm seeing it happen with my friends now who, you know, their parents are getting older, in their 60s and their 70s, and it's sort of like the caregiver caretaker relationship and then the provider relationship sort of flips where, you know, like when you're in your mid-40s, you start taking care of elderly parents. But I had that when I was 12. Right. It was like. It was. He had a severe heart attack and then had a chronic condition that made it hard for him to get out of bed. So my mother was an absolute Saint.

[Unknown Host]

Man at 12.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. Which is why I also think kids are resilient. And like my mother, again, an absolute saint. She didn't try to keep it from me. She was like, your father's sick. Doctor thinks he's probably gonna die, but this is suffering. This is. And he's. And he's gonna suffer through it. Right? Like he's going. He's like he's going to again. He was such a saint of a man too, where like he refused to take med you know, pain pills. He refused to sort of succumb to what was happening. And he actually lived for a while. He lived until I was in college, but he died when I was in college. And I always think the thing that, like, kind of if you've had to take care of a parent for a while, you're, of course, sad when they're gone. But, like, the other thing that happens is you have this moment of just relief. Like, that was, like, the real emotion that I felt was like, wow. Like, my mother had been taking care of him for eight years. And when it happened, I was like, okay, this is the beginning of my life. Cause when that's all you've known is, okay, I have to take care of my family. That's when I really just had this moment of, okay, maybe I can go do something big now. Maybe I can go do the thing and not have to worry about family or have to think about anyone but myself. I can be super selfish about what I want. And a lot of my friends were thinking about joining the Agency. I actually had a really interesting thing happen where I worked all through college. And I started walking a lady's dog. Like, this older lady who lived in Georgetown. She was afraid to walk around the neighborhood at 10:30 at night. So every night at 10:30 at night, I would leave the library, go to her house and walk her dog. And over time, I learned that she was the first female station chief at the CIA.

[Unknown Host]

No kidding.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. And I'd go into her house and she had. I mean, in some ways, it looks like a room like yours, just mementos of a life well lived. Like, she had been everywhere. She'd been all over Asia. Just had the most incredible stories. But she was like this very demure, quiet lady. You would never know. You know, she's beautiful, just lovely, very well mannered, but, you know, but a polyglot. Like, she could speak many languages, you know, but you would never suspect her. And I just, like. I think it was partially spending so much time with her and, like, looking at her life and just thinking, like, wow, like, this is. This is really cool. But then also, you know, like, just my. You know, I grew up during September 11th too, right? Like, it changed everyone's mind about, okay, what are you gonna do? And that's why I wanted to go to Washington and kind of work in Foreign affairs in some capacity. And I just said, you know, after my dad died, I'm like, I wanna do that. Like, I can finally do that. And going back to sort of like, you know, I hadn't ever failed at anything. You know, I was one of these kids. I was sort of the. I don't wanna say I was a trophy kid, but it's like, again, I just worked hard at everything I did. And it was always a view that, like, if you work hard enough in life, you can get what you want, right? So I just assumed going into that recruitment, like, oh, I'm a shoo in, right? Like I'm top grad out of Georgetown. Like, you know, like, I, like, I have all these great references. I have these mentors who've done it, right? Like, I'll be fine. It's not to say I didn't take it seriously. I did, but I was not prepared for the response I got in 2009, which was, you know, after a year and a half in like, sorry, you know, you just get a letter back from the recruitment and retention center that says, we do not need your services. You can, you know, apply three years from now. And I think that was like the first time in my life where I was like, oh my, I don't have a plan B. Like, I don't. I don't know what I'm gonna do.

[Unknown Host]

I can't believe they didn't pick you up. What did you want to do over there?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So, I mean, I want to do ops. Like, I wanted to just. But, but the. Cause I was so young. Yeah, but, but the, but the, the, the yacht, like the, you know, 22, 23 year olds, they sort of had a training program, right? It was like you do two or three years, it wasn't an analyst program, but they kind of put you in this sort of path, right? It's the kids who know how to do nothing. Right? Like, you knew how to do things when you were contracting. But the kids who are just out of college, they have sort of a training path for them and then they figure out where they want to go. And it's funny, like, I.

[Unknown Host]

So you were in the training path?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, So I had done like multiple interviews. Yeah. So it wasn't. It was, Yeah. I mean, they did, you know, multiple rounds of interviews. And I look back on it, it's so funny. I'm like, I know exactly why they didn't pick me. I am not an easy person. I am a disagreeable person. You know, it's like after, you know, eight hour interviews where they're really trying to get to know you, there's times where I'm like, I know exactly what I said wrong. Like, you're Supposed to answer the question of like, why are you wanting to do this? Right? The right answer is you want to serve your country. Which is the right answer. Right? And I said it multiple times, but by like the fifth time they ask it in a different way. I said something that was probably the through line of my life, which is, I just can't stand not knowing. I just can't stand not knowing. And of course that's like the wrong answer. And to the lady who was interviewing me's credit, she was like, honey, you think you're gonna know in here? Like, you think you're gonna come in here and you're gonna know anything? Like, and again, it's like, okay, you 23 year old little girl who's never been told like, get out of here. What a joke.

[Unknown Host]

Damn.

[Kathryn Boyle]

So it's on me. And they're right, right? Like, I am not the. Even today, it's like my colleagues are like, it's amazing you can actually work at a company. Right? You are such a disagreeable. And they mean that lovingly. But like, I am not someone who doesn't say what I think. I'm not someone who takes orders very well. So I think they probably looked at my character after. You know, it's like spikes in certain areas. Like probably very good at getting information and meeting people, talking to people, you know, doing the things that you need to do. But also probably not gonna be able to deal with the culture.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah, probably for the best.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Probably for the best. I mean, things always work out that way.

[Unknown Host]

In the short amount of time I've known you, a lot of things over there would have driven you insane.

[Kathryn Boyle]

I think she did me a favor, but it was definitely like coming out of college, 24, no idea what I was gonna do with my life. And it was sort of serendipitous how I ended up at the Washington Post, because I had taken a job and I had friends who were already sort of in, and they're like, you gotta be in D.C. just take a job. Like take any job you can get. And so I got this kind of ridiculous copy editor job, but it was at a newspaper called the Express. So if you've ever been in D.C. and you've gone on the Metro, it's the free metro paper that the Washington Post hands out. And everyone who's ever been on the Metro remembers this paper, loves this paper. It's sort of this snarky free newsletter thing. And they needed someone who was just good at writing but unbylined. So you don't Have a record that you worked there or whatever. And I was like, that sounds great. Like, I can just write during the day for three to six hours or whatever, and then do what I need to do for my real career, my real job, right? I was so convinced that was gonna happen. And so when I got the letter, I was like, wait, wait. Right now I'm just a copywriter, the lowest person on the totem pole inside the Washington Post without a byline, without anything. I'm not even a real reporter. Like, what am I gonna do? Like, what am I gonna do? Like, I should probably figure out, like, if I can actually make this a real career. So I sort of, you know, I sort of convinced myself that intelligence isn't that different than reporting, right? You have sources. You have to have a network of nodes and people who are telling you information about whatever you're covering. You know, you have to be really good at asking questions. You have to be good at listening, reading people, knowing what's true, knowing what's false, making decisions very quickly. And part of me was like, okay, if I can't do that in the agency, I could do that at the Washington Post. I just have to convince them to let me do it. And turned out to be the most opportune time to be in media for a young person.

[Unknown Host]

Really?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. Cause I was cheap. I was making $30,000 a year, and I would write as much as they wanted me to. I'm like, I have no obligations, right? I can come in on Sundays. I can do whatever story you want me to do. So I found an editor inside the Washington Post, and she's like, you can write as many stories as you want. We just need people to fill the actual physical paper because they were slashing the people who were well known reporters left and right. Because the business was going under.

[Unknown Host]

Why was it going under?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, I mean, just the business of media with the Internet. I mean, everyone thinks that the media really started declining, like maybe 2014, 2015, 2016. But the first wave of real layoff were like 2008, 2009, where there was just an understanding that Google and then Facebook. But Google really was just eating the lunch of these companies. The business models of every major newspaper up until this point of regional newspapers were classifieds, subscriptions, and then syndication. So syndication, sending out the story, people paying to have to reprint it. That was Google. Google completely took that, right? So all of the stories would go on the Internet for free. No one was paying for the digital copy. The Wall Street Journal figured it out. But none of the other papers did, so they were just hemorrhaging subscribers. And then the advertising, it was like, well, if people are advertising online, why am I gonna advertise my store and your newspaper? No one's reading the physical paper anymore, but they still had it, and they still had subscribers that were reading it. So it was actually a great time to go in and just be like, okay, I'll work for basically very little, and I'll work a lot and I'll fill your paper. And so after about a year of that, they brought me on full time as a staff writer because I was breaking stories and things as someone who really wasn't affiliated with the paper. But it was not what I wanted to do. It was not like my dream was to be a reporter. But there was something about just being in that place at the right time where I was like, okay, I can make something out of this major setback or this thing that I thought was a major setback, and I can learn a new trade, even if it's not the thing that I thought I would be doing.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

How'd you do it? Where'd you start?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Well, yeah, I mean, it's a good question because it's also what venture capitalists do. Like, how do you get dropped into a culture you know nothing about, which was the case with vc, and start meeting people and start building up relationships. And I think like, you know, the interesting thing about doing it as a reporter is like, they give you a beat. Like my beat in the beginning was like retail and the business of, you know, like almost like the business of arts and culture. And then it moved on to like nonprofit investigations. So I started researching like the Smithsonian Institution and all of the government funded agencies in Washington D.C. and art agencies and different things and sort of where they were getting their money from and kind of follow the money, but at the nonprofit areas. But it started out as like, okay, like, you get your assignment and then you just start calling people. And the thing I know you know better than anyone else is like, people just love to talk about. People will tell you anything if you will sit there and listen. And when you're a 24, 25 year old who knows nothing and you call someone and you say, hey, I'm, you know, this reporter from the Washington Post. Can we get coffee? You know, I'd just love to hear more about what you know. Can you show me what I should know about this beat? Like the, like you do that over and over and over again. And people will tell you what you need to know. And then they start seeing your name and the paper, and then they know that you're the person who's gonna write the story about something. I also think there's something to. Some people are really good at listening, and it's a gift. You know, growing up in a big family was probably that. A loud Irish family. I learned how to listen. But I'm always amazed at, like, the stories I would break. It would just be someone coming up to me at a cocktail party or a book party or something, not even necessarily knowing that I was a Washington Post reporter, finding out and then just kind of sharing, just like just getting it off their chest. And me saying, you know, that's actually a really important story. Can I write it? But I think people are desperate to talk and they're desperate to get that type of attention. And so it really, like, in some ways, I think the reporting thing was easier than when I got to Silicon Valley and was nobody right? It was like I was the Washington Post in Washington, D.C. you'd already built it.

[Unknown Host]

You've already built a network at that point.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, but not a network in Silicon Valley.

[Unknown Host]

But you had the fundamentals down.

[Kathryn Boyle]

I think you can get dropped into any culture and learn it very quickly if you know the types of people that are gonna talk to you and if you're actually willing to listen.

[Unknown Host]

What got you? So you're at the Washington Post. What ended it?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So I kind of knew it was gonna be a temporary thing just because of how bad the business was. I mean, it was. All we talked about was, you know, this was before Jeff Bezos bought the paper. And I actually decided to leave right as he was buying it. And a lot of people said that was the saving grace of the paper. One of the richest men in the world buying it, putting money into it so that it wouldn't go down the drain. But what happened actually was my best friend at the Washington Post, she was the religion reporter. Her husband was in the Navy, and he had just left the Navy, and he was going to Stanford Business School. And I knew nothing about business school. I was stunned he got in. I was like, I didn't know your husband knew anything about business. I thought he was in the Navy. And she's like, no, no, no. Like, the business schools take like 5% of their class every year. They call them non traditional candidates. A lot of them are veterans, but they'll take people who know nothing about business to just kind of almost like, create an interesting group of people for the class, right? Like, you're not there because they think you're gonna be great at business. They wanna create a diverse sort of class of experiences. And she's like, he got in. This is how he got in. He spent hours every day learning the gmat. She told me, kind of. And I was like, you know, I've never had any interest in business until working at the Washington Post, where I see this grand paper just completely collapsing in on itself. Like, the most important lesson to me at the Washington Post was it was like watching the leadership. It was. You know the phrase rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic? Everyone who worked there was in complete denial that the Internet was changing their business.

[Unknown Host]

Are you serious?

[Kathryn Boyle]

It was shocked. It was shocking to me.

[Unknown Host]

What is it? Is it ego?

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's ego. It's desperation. It's, I don't want to lose my job. We are bigger than this. We're the Washington Post. We're the brand. You know, like, everyone needs us. But I think this is true of humans that are in these kind of grand institutions. They can't recognize when something's crumbling. You see it happening with universities today, where these universities are sort of in some ways in major crisis because of what the students are doing. And they just can't ever see that things need to be reformed. You know, federal government, too, can't see that things need to be reformed. But that certainly like a learning for me where I saw it because I wasn't wedded to it. I hadn't been there during the heyday where, you know, everyone was getting to fly wherever they wanted. They could be bureau chief of any country they wanted to be bureau chief of. I mean, we had shuttered all of our international bureaus by the time I had gotten there. So it was. It was. It was a paper that was clearly in decline. And I saw it, for me, it was just, okay, this is a job. I can learn something. And, like, original dream didn't work out. But I knew I had to leave. And when she told me that her husband got in, I was like, well, I'm different. I know nothing about business. If it's really. There's really no. You know, you just have to, you know, get a decent score on a test and write a good essay. I'm like, I know I can write an essay. That's, like, probably one of the few things I can do. So I got really, really lucky. I got off the wait list last minute. I actually found out I was on the wait list on a reporting trip to Beirut. I was like, I was on the plane and I was like checking my phone and you're supposed to get a phone call from the dean of the school and no one's ringing. And as I'm taking off to go to Beirut from dc, I'm like, I'm not getting in. I'm just gonna be a reporter forever. And I land and see the email and it's like, you're on the wait list. And I'm like, okay, that's not a no. It doesn't mean they want me, but it's not a no. And so I just, I sent a letter pretty much every day. I was like, I'm in Beirut. Every time I would go to a new place to do a story, I was like, this is the story I'm working on. And I think it's relevant to the class because of this. And I think enough annoying emails and this is a really important life learning. But if you're the most annoying person to any admissions group, but really to any company, if you're just constantly pounding down the table, any customer, people just finally give in. People will not say no 25 times. So I got in last minute and it was like, okay, I'm going to Silicon Valley and I'm just going to figure it out.

[Unknown Host]

Wow. So you just. Why didn't you look at any of the other intelligence agencies just out of curiosity?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Well, you know, it's interesting. The woman, the mentor who had been at CIA, she was like, do not go to CIA, go to State. And I was like, that sounds boring. I don't want to go to the State Department. Right. Like, there were certain things where I was just like, that's not going to be interesting. And I also think, like, when I look back at my career, everything I've done has been like information trading, but it's been very human centric. I wasn't interested in nsa. I like the human connection. It's like, even in my business career, I was never interested in things that didn't have. Where you're negotiating with people, which is a lot what VC is. I know we'll get into it, but there's something about the humic component where I think that's what I wanted to do. And it was also, I don't know, I was probably so dejected. I didn't have that many mentors where I didn't have people who were like, oh, well, you should go this path or you should do this or talk to this person. It was more like, okay, they rejected me. Like, there must be a reason, and maybe I'm supposed to be doing something else.

[Unknown Host]

So how'd you. Out of all the different business avenues you could have done, why Silicon Valley?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So, I mean, Silicon Valley was more of, okay, like, the biggest story that I'm writing about. And, you know, you see patterns in the stories you write, and the stories you write every day sort of tell the story of the country, of the ethos. I was actually a culture writer, too, so I would write. I had a really broad swath of things I could write about. But a lot of things I was writing about were how technology is impacting this industry or how technology is destroying another industry. And just the conversation at the Washington Post, day in, day out, was, we're all gonna lose our jobs because Facebook is gaining momentum, and everyone wants to read their news on Facebook. There's no business model. And so there was something of. I really want to. Like, to me, this is the biggest story of my life. Like, tech is the biggest story. I don't understand it. And a lot of the Washington Post people I worked with, they hated tech, right? Like, they were like, tech is what's destroying their livelihood, and they have every right to hate it. But me, I was like, I want to understand it. Like, I want to go out here and understand this culture. Like, I don't know nothing about it. I've never met anyone who's worked in tech or Silicon Valley. But, like, it's clearly having an impact. And this is, like, the biggest story of our time. And I'm a reporter. Like, I should go out and kind of figure out what's going on out there.

[Unknown Host]

What year is this?

[Kathryn Boyle]

This was 2014, so it was. Right. Sort of. It's funny, when I arrived, and this is like, a funny thing people always say about Silicon Valley. They say, you know, you always feel like you're too late, like, you missed the big ones. So I had missed Facebook, I had missed Airbnb. You know, it was these. Palantir felt like I had missed Palantir in 2014, which is comical, because even last year, you couldn't have missed Palantir, right? It's like that company is a rocket ship. So in some ways, it's like, you always feel like you've missed the boat. But when I got out there, in some ways, not knowing anything was really helpful because I just was sort of this former reporter emailing people, just trying to figure out what's going on. And you and I talked about this earlier. Silicon Valley for All of its weirdness. The best part about Silicon Valley is everyone is afraid they're going to miss the next thing. And so a young person with no experience with a Stanford email emailing you, saying, hey, I'm a former reporter and I'm really interested in your job, or I'm really interested in your company. Can I sit down with you for 30 minutes or get coffee or get on the phone and just hear about what you do? People will pick up. That people will take that call. And so that's kind of what I did. I was like, I am so confused. Like, it was the worst culture shock of my life. I'd been around the world, but I had not experienced sort of that insular culture of how tech companies are built. And I'm always impressed with how many people picked up that call.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, so I quit my job.

[Unknown Host]

So you quit your job and just inserted yourself in the middle of Silicon Valley and just started emailing people?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

No.

[Unknown Host]

You just immerse yourself in it to figure it out?

[Kathryn Boyle]

No. And it's interesting. Cause I know Dino has been on your show, and he talked about what it was like as a veteran going to business school, Right? Like, you go to business school and you think, oh, I got two years to figure it out. So you get to business school and, like, recruiting starts immediately for jobs. I had no idea, you know, I was like, what do you mean? I have no idea what I'm gonna do. I'm a former reporter, so there was sort of this, like, kind of, you know, you feel like you're on sort of really shaky ground. But, you know, my personality is. I do very well in those situations. Like, I do very well when I have no idea what I'm gonna do and I have to make a next move. So crazy story of how I ended up in venture capital is it was 2014 in the fall. And I always joke, no one in business school reads books. And they have a library at the business school that has only business books, but they don't have real books. And I'm a reader. And I walked into the library one day, and there's this new book called Zero to One. And it's on the shelf, and it's by this guy named Peter Thiel. And I had heard of Peter Thiel because I was a reporter, and I had read about the Facebook IPO and things So I knew who he was, but I didn't know he was as big of a deal as he has now become and kind of is in Silicon Valley. So I reached out to Peter Thiel. And what's crazy about this is, again, I wasn't expecting a response. I was very good at reaching out to people, but not everyone would respond. And I didn't get a response from him. But he had forwarded my email to one of his kind of junior partners, principals at his firm, Founders Fund, named Trey Stevens. And Trey and I had overlapped in school. He had actually been at one of the agencies. And whatever I said in my email or whatever kind of context he had, Peter thought we would hit it off. And so I started talking to Trey, who was brand new in venture capital. Peter had brought him on from Palantir to really look at national security and defense. And I kind of told Trey my story. I was a former reporter. It turns out he had at one point wanted to be a reporter in his life. So we really just hit it off talking. And I said, I'm really bored in business school. I need to do something this summer. But I'd also love to just work for you guys. Can I just intern with you? And again, to the point of people will not say no more than five or six times. He said no, probably five or six times. He's like, we don't have a job for you. What are you gonna do here? You don't know anything about technology. You literally just showed up. It's nice. We could talk, I could try to help you and things, but you really should work at a company. We can't have you in our firm. And I just kept emailing, hey, I don't really wanna work at any of these companies. Can I please work for you? And after about four or five nos, he finally said, okay, fine, you can come work at Founders Fund. So Founders Fund's a pretty iconic venture firm. I didn't know it at the time, but they've invested in SpaceX. Trey would go on to be the chairman of Anduril. He would go on to incubate that company with Palmer. But this was a year and a half before that happened.

[Unknown Host]

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

[Kathryn Boyle]

I helped Trey just look at companies. So I sat in on every pitch. We were just kind of surveying the landscape of. Of which companies are operating in the defense space. Are there any sort of government companies that are actually interesting? We met the Shield AI team. There were a handful of People in and around the space, but not very many. And I always say it was like a gift, right? Cause it wasn't like I was giving them anything. They would tell me, hey, maybe look for some companies or whatever. And I would try to find things that could be relevant for the national security mission. But it was really a gift. And that is frankly, that's how all of tech works. Where someone gives you a break and if you show up early, you're the first person there. You work your ass off like you do any job they want you to do. That's often what it's like to be in a startup. And I always tell, I coach a lot of veterans cause I have so much empathy for. You're coming from a culture that is so different. Veterans will email me and they'll say, Ms. Boyle. And I'm like, do not call me Ms. Boyle, call me Catherine. You call a 70 year old famous venture capitalist by their first name. You have to shed whatever you have learned in your previous life and realize you're going into a totally new culture and you have to blend in on that culture. Like you have to learn the culture. Like that's what your first year in Silicon Valley should be. And you should go to a crazy early stage startup or a venture firm that's totally different than anything you've seen and you should just listen. Because once you learn the culture and once you learn the language, then you can be an operator. But you have to learn the culture and you have to respect it. So, you know, first day at Founders Fund, actually One of the EAs came over to me. I was wearing heels, you know, and I can dress like this now, cause I'm a Florida lady, but I was in San Francisco and I was wearing heels and you know, like nice, like I dressed like I was going to a nice internship and she's like, you need to take that off. I'm gonna get you a SpaceX hoodie. Like you need to wear jeans. You need to like, you need to blend in here. Like this is not gonna work if you can't blend in. And I, like, I'm very grateful for that because it's like she's right. Like you're learning a new culture. Like you were learning like how to operate inside of an ecosystem that's nothing like what you've experienced before. And when you understand it, then you can start being, you know, kind of yourself. You can start being a little more flamboyant when you're accepted, when people accept you as one of their own. But when you're learning the culture, like, you're there to listen and you're there to work your ass off. And that's kind of what I did. And it was an incredible gift to be able to see how companies that are so iconic that no one Believed in even 2015, SpaceX was still seen as, oh, well, how big can that company become? It wasn't what it is today. And so to see people, how they make bets on the future and sort of the philosophy of how they take bets on the future like that completely transformed and sort of catapulted me into venture capital.

[Unknown Host]

Wow. What's one of the first. What's the first company that you found interesting that you presented well?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So when I left business school and I ended up working at another venture capital firm, that was right when Palmer and Trey and Brian and the guys were founding Anduril. And so I had the luxury of spending a year with these people, really understanding how well they understood the mission, understanding how valuable Palantir talent is to people who've actually worked with the government and sort of that model. So I was probably six months into the job at this new fund, and again, like, lowest on the totem pole.

[Unknown Host]

Lowest again, yes.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, yeah. Because you come out of school and then you're the junior associate who's there to take notes, write memos. You're there to learn the trade. It's an apprentice job. You can ask questions, but you're there to source, too. You're also there to find companies and to be the first person to touch a company and bring it in. And so it's actually a funny story. I was with Trey at In Q Tel, which is the CIA's investment arm. They have a big conference every year. And we were at that conference, and he's like, we're starting the company. It wasn't even named Anduril yet, but he's like, we're starting the company. I knew what that meant. He's like, palmer has just been fired from Facebook. He cares a lot about defense. I think we can convince the head of engineering at Palantir, I think we can convince some of these guys to join and we're going to start it. And I just said, I don't care. And of course, I didn't have the authority to say this, but I said, I don't care. Whatever you're doing, I want to be an investor in it. I want our firm to be an investor in it. I'm going to get it done. Of course, I can't make that promise, because I'm nobody. But I immediately drive home, call the partners, and say, palmer Luckey is starting this company and we need to be a part of it. And usually in Silicon Valley, they'd be like, oh, that's great. Like, this famous founder who sold a company to Facebook for $3 billion is starting a new company. We want in. We want in. On the second time founder who knows how to do it. But it was like, Palmer Luckey, the guy who just got fired for the Hillary billboard, like, the fascist, you know, the fascist guy in Silicon Valley. And what's this company do? Well, they're building a border security company. Oh, they're building a border security company to help ice. You know, like, I mean, it was immediately. I was sort of outed in my firm as Katherine's kind of insane, but they're like, we're not. Like, we're not gonna do that. And it was, you know, pushing. I pushed a bunch. And finally we got a tiny little check in. And the conversation wasn't even about the company. The conversation was about, well, if it's this small of a check, like, you know, like, we'll see what happens, right? But it sort of like, kind of skirted in a small check into the seed round. But that kind of gave me entree.

[Unknown Host]

What's a small check?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Like, a couple million dollars? And they had raised what was at the time a very big seed round. It was a $17 million round. And people thought that was insane. I mean, now you're seeing seed rounds of hundreds of millions of dollars. But this was because Palmer was extraordinary. He was an extraordinary founder, had an extraordinary exit. But there was definite concern, particularly among the early investors of, okay, is this a company that's even going to be able to raise capital? Because no one actually believes that you can sell them to the Department of Defense. Maybe the border security thing can happen. But, like, this is so crazy. Like, everyone felt like they were kind of, I don't wanna say, throwing away their money, but it's like, this is kind of a crazy. It's a huge crapshoot. And then it was about, like, a year and a half of, like, really working with them. Cause I was, you know, I was young, I was enthusiastic. But, you know, Joe Lonsdale, who had already sold multiple companies, he was involved in the company. There were a handful of other people involved, but for the first, you know, the first big round they were doing about a year and a half later, I was like, I want to lead this round. I want to put Like, I want our firm that I was at to do the big investment into your company. And it took, you know, six months of diligence and meeting with, you know, as many different types of customers and, you know, operators, anyone who could possibly talk about what their tech was doing and to really showcase it to our firm. And the kind of crazy thing that happened was the story of, I think it was 2019 when they went out to raise Palmer, pitches what they've done, and they already have towers on the border that are actually working. They're already selling to the Department of Defense, They've moved exceptionally fast. And he goes into the room after I've done all this work to try to show that this is an incredible investment. And one of the partners kind of raises his hand at the very end and says, like, are you ever going to build missiles or are you ever going to build weapons? And Palmer says, of course. Like, we're going to build what the DoD wants us to build to protect the war fighter. Great answer. Like, he leaves the room and people are like, we cannot invest in this company anymore. We cannot invest in this company because. Oh, shit. Yeah. And that was how they were viewed across a lot of Silicon Valley. It's like too much headline risk, too much fear that Palmer's a little bit of a wild card. But also it was like, we're not gonna support the Trump administration and the things that we can't do that, we're Silicon Valley, we'll lose our shirt, our LPs will be upset, right? And it took, to the credit of the firm I was at, it took maybe three days where I said, no, no, no, these guys understand ethics. They understand just war theory. I ended up writing a 16 page memo, in addition to the investment memo that talks about the numbers and how big this. On just war theory, on why this is an ethical product, how the DoD thinks about ethical products. Trey got on the call with all the partners and he has a theology background as well and was talking about why they're seeing this as an ethical. I mean, just things you shouldn't have to do, right? Like, if you're in Washington, dc, if you're in a place that understands defense, you should not have to explain why supporting the DoD is good. But this was right after Project Maven. It's right after the Google employees walked out and said, we are not supporting the Trump administration dod. And, you know, I haven't told this story before, but I had this moment where they were debating the ethics and I was asked to leave the room Because I wasn't one of the managing partners. And it was. The partnership was going to make a decision. And I walked down across the street to this church in St. Dominic's in San Francisco, and I just kneeled down and I prayed to God. I was like, okay, there's a reason why I've spent a year and a half on this company. This is the most important thing I've ever done, trying to get capital into this company. And if it doesn't happen, I'm gonna walk in there tomorrow and I'm gonna quit my job. Cause you don't want me in venture capital. This is not where you want me to do. I'll figure out something else, right? I've done that before. I've changed my career. I've done things before. But if indeed this goes through and we end up leading this investment into this company, this will be my mission. Investing in America. This is it. This is all I care about. And these are the companies I wanna invest in. This is what America needs more than anything. Silicon Valley doesn't get it yet, but they're going to. And the minute I leave that church, you know, walking back home five minutes later, I get a call from one of the managing partners, and he's like, you have the green light. Go give Palmer a term sheet.

[Unknown Host]

Wow. Wow, that's incredible.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, so it was a crazy story, but that was my first. That was my first big investment in defense. How.

[Unknown Host]

Good pick.

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's been a good one.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, how long did it take you to get that kind of insight? To know, like, to feel, you know, that this is. This is the company.

[Kathryn Boyle]

So a lot of it comes from the people. And that's like. I don't know much about technology, right? Like, I've never built anything in technology. I'm not a technologist by nature. I've learned a lot having been in the industry for 10 years. But that's not how I make decisions. You know, there's a lot of venture capitalists, they always say that venture capitalists have sort of three different dimensions. They judge. They judge the market. How big is the market size? DOD has a very big market. Small market for startups, but a very big market. It's 800 billion and growing every year, right? It's a massive, massive budget. The product. So a lot of technologists, people who are really, really good at. They've worked at Facebook or Google or these different companies, they come out, they become VCs, and they always want to talk about the technology. How does it work, how does it operate? And those are people who oftentimes they're genius level. We have a lot of them on our team, but they know how technology works and they have a theory of where technology is going. I don't care about any of that. All I care about is the people. And I'm almost maniacally focused on it. I want to know their story. I want to know who they know. I want to know their network, I want to map their network, because I want to know who their first 10 hires are. I want them to tell me who their first 10 hires are so that I can verify those people are probably going to join them. I want to understand sort of the network node of who these people are and how it's going to expand. And I always say, like early stage investing, the best early stage investors are building relationships with someone who's going to build a company before that person even realizes that they're going to build a company. Like, in some ways, there's a lot say that again, the best thing you can do as an early stage investor is to build relationships with people who are director of technology or some sort of, I would say, very good engineer at a company where, you know, in two or three years, they're probably going to leave and start a company, but they don't know that yet. They have no idea that that's on their horizon. But you know, they're going to be a great founder. And so you start building a relationship for them so that when they do leave, you're their first call. And so it actually has a lot. You know, there's a lot in common with intelligence operations where, you know, if someone's going to flip right, after spending years of time with them or months of time with them, right? Like, you know, if someone is going to give you good information even before they know. And it's the same thing with sourcing and reporting. You can spend a lot of time with the source and them give you nothing. And then six months into building the relationship, they have a story they want to give you. The best reporters are like that. Same is true of venture capitalists. It's figuring out who are the people who matter and making sure that they call you first. And so that then became, I'd say after Anduril one. After Anduril, it became clear that Catherine's gonna invest in this stuff, right? Like, it's like this is what she cares about. I started writing very publicly about it. A lot of people weren't even talking about it, right? Like, people were still Afraid of it. There were firms that still couldn't invest in it because their limited partner agreement, the sort of governing docs of how the funds they operate work, said they can't touch weapons. So kidding. There were firms in Silicon Valley that could not invest in Anduril because their limited partners wouldn't let them. But Even after, in 2019, when I made that investment, the number of founders who said, one, you're an idiot, that's a dumb investment. They're never gonna make it. That was common. But there was another class of people who said, wow, you're a fascist too. You're a bad person. You're really on that MAGA train. Just the horrible things people would say. And it's like, I care a lot about my country, that's why I'm doing it. And I think there's a business opportunity here, right? It's not just, oh, I'm a patriotic capitalist and I'm throwing money away. Like, I think this is the biggest business opportunity of our time, and it's sitting right in front of my face and no one's looking at it. And so I'm going to invest in it and I'm going to be the first call of these people who want to work here.

[Unknown Host]

Wow, that's some serious insight. I mean, at that time, I mean, you just brought it up, but there was a strike at Google. I mean, very. I mean, whatever you want to call it, anti Trump, but anti. It seemed like anti us. Like, it. Like it just like nobody wanted to upgrade our defense tech. And I mean, you're on the precipice of that change. What was it that changed? I mean, it seems like Silicon Valley's done a complete 180 now.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes, a lot has changed. And I think it was multiple things changing at the same time. So the first thing that changed is Silicon Valley likes winners. We're very mimetic. It's like VCs will feel very strongly about, oh, I don't want to work with a defense company in 2017. And those same VCs will be begging to get in around three or four years later. So things move very fast in Silicon Valley. People will completely update their knowledge. And so what I think happened is SpaceX became an extraordinary company. Palantir went public, and people started realizing, oh, there are examples of companies that have just really taken off. Anduril changed this for defense. Where in the early days it was controversial, but the minute that Andurl's just started just getting all of the great engineers really just crushing it on the contracting side and just building really cool products. Silicon Valley just loves to be around cool things. And the thing that I think Elon did for the rest of the ecosystem is he made hardware manufacturing, he made space, he made these really difficult things cool again, in a way that no one had ever, I mean, aerospace before him was just like a backwater. No one was majoring in aerospace engineering in colleges. No one wanted to work at those companies. And the first 10 years of SpaceX were hard, but like, by 2015, 2016, they were, you know, re landing rockets. Like they were, they were doing some really cool stuff. They were about to, in 2019, they were about to, you know, start Starlink, which was, you know, kind of this crazy idea that no one thought was gonna work. And look at it now. So it's like Silicon Valley likes winter. And so the minute that they started seeing winners, it's like, oh, okay, you can make money doing this. And so that kind of brought along, I'd say, the rest of the ecosystem, people who maybe weren't as interested in DoD, but they started seeing things change. And then on the DOD side, I mean, I would actually say that this movement was really created by the DoD. Like former Secretary of Defense Ash Carter in 2015, launched Diu, and he was the first person, I think inside it was during the Obama administration. He said, you have all these incredible engineers in Silicon Valley. None of them know anything about the military. Like, they don't see anyone in the military. We're not out there, right? Like in Washington D.C. if you live in D.C. you go on the Metro, you see people in uniform, they're headed to the Pentagon. It's part of your life, so you're not as weirded out by defense culture. It's part of daily life. Silicon Valley, they don't see anything. And a lot of these people, you know, many people are new to America. Like, they have very different views, right? So it's his view was we have to go out to Silicon Valley and actually have an outpost there. So he started Diu as an experiment. It's now much bigger.

[Unknown Host]

What is Diu?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Defense Innovation Unit. So it was the DoD initiative of we have to make again, it was as much a relationship initiative, now it's a contracting initiative. They actually have real budget and the third iteration of how it's structured. But in the beginning it was like, we just gotta go out and introduce ourselves to these people and show them who we are, show them what we care about. These are the things we understand. Again, people on the Ground, understand the technologies that are being built, really create a kind of real communication. And so you had the DoD really focused on this. Then you had winners in Silicon Valley. People who had been at SpaceX for 10 years leaving and saying, well, maybe I'll start a company in deep tech or hard tech or physical world and what should I do? Well, maybe defense is where I want to do it. Maybe I want to do another aerospace company. Maybe I want to build a nuclear company. And so you just had this exodus of extraordinary talent who had all been trained by Elon, and now it's happening with Anduril too. All been trained by Palmer, where they just know how to manufacture things. And it's been extraordinary to watch the number of young people who spend a couple years at a great company. Palantir has this tradition as well where it's like it just mints founders of new companies that operate in the government space. So it's like, one, you have winners. Two, you have the customer has changed his view. And then the last thing that I think really changed was Covid happened. I think people sort of lifted their head and said, okay, something is wrong with America. And people started really thinking about, how do you solve real problems? And then right after that, the Russian invasion in Ukraine, that changed everything for a young generation of engineers who had never seen war again. They're 20 years old. They'd have no memory of September 11th. They maybe had no exposure to military. But like they're watching how FPV drones are being used on the Ukrainian battlefield, and that is inspiring them. Okay, we need to build for this mission.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting. Interesting. Well, Kathy, let's take a quick break. Most parents I know want to plan for the unexpected so they can make sure their family is protected. I rest easy at night knowing my family is secure if the unthinkable happens and I'm not here to provide for them anymore. Fabric by Gerber Life is term life insurance you can get done today. Made for busy parents like you all online and on your schedule, you could be covered in under 10 minutes with no health exam required. Fabric has flexible, high quality policies that fit your family and your budget like a million dollars in coverage for less than a dollar a day. Fabric has partnered with Gerber Life, trusted by millions of families like yours for over 50 years. Plus manage it all right from your phone. Join the thousands of parents who trust fabric to help protect their family. Apply today in just [e-mail] Sean that's meatfabric.com Sean M E E T fabric.com policies issued by Western Southern Life Assurance Company not available in certain states. Prices subject to underwriting and health questions. If you ever feel like the modern world is wearing you down, things like EMFs, artificial light, seed oils, microplastics, chronic stress. It seems like our biology wasn't designed for these modern assaults and it's probably taking a toll on all of us. Armor Colostrum is a bioactive whole food that can help revive cellular signaling and help bolster our health from within. Colostrum is nature's finest whole food packed with over 400 bioactive nutrients that work at a cellular level to help strengthen your immune health, help fortify gut health and help kickstart your metabolism. I've been using armor ever since they sent me some to try and now I have a lot more energy. Energy. It's part of my daily routine. Now I take it in the morning and after workouts. Are you ready to reclaim your health? We've worked out a special offer for my audience. Receive 15% off your first order. Go to triarmora.com SRS or enter SRS to get 15% off your first order. That's T R Y A R M R A.com SRS these statements and products have not been evaluated by the fda. These products are not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent been any disease or condition. All right, Katherine, we're back from the break. We kind of talked about a little bit about the culture over there at Silicon Valley. I don't think we got too into it though. So I am curious, what was it five years ago?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So I mean, five years. I think a lot of things have changed about how Silicon Valley not only views American interest but just the sort of how people view the business opportunity but also the mission. So I think talked about how Ukraine really did change everything for these young engineers. But there was this culture and this is a long standing culture, say from 2000 all the way up until Anduril even existed where there was a belief that you could not sell into the Department of Defense functionally because of the procurement process. It would be impossible for startups again that are working on these 18 month timelines of they take capital, they're supposed to get big as quickly as possible and hire more people and grow, that they would hit the valley of death of the DoD and it would be impossible for them to break through. So you had a kind of a financial class but also founder class that just really didn't think about the DoD. And then it was also sort of this interesting time in Silicon Valley. And I, I think a lot of people look at kind of the old school Silicon Valley. Bob Noyce, sort of the Fairchild Semiconductor, which was one of the earliest kind of venture backed big companies. And then intel, that type of engineer, he was an Iowa farm boy. It was sort of the people who put a man on the moon. Those types of engineers were sort of the old school Silicon Valley. And I always think something really shift. Sometimes people point to like the early 2000s. I think Silicon Valley really shifted for a couple of reasons. The first reason I think it shifted was kind of post Facebook. So Facebook started in 2004 in a Harvard dorm room. Bunch of kids went out, then a bunch of Stanford kids joined it. But what I think Facebook did, it was sort of the first company alongside of Google was they made tech sexy. For a certain type of worker that is not technical, that goes to fancy school. You know, it used to be if you went to a Harvard or Yale, you would go work on Wall street. You would go work in, you know, investment banking or something. And around like 2008, 2009, that's when you started seeing a lot of these really talented, really bright, but sort of indoctrinated, like Ivy League types come out to Silicon Valley. And they brought with them sort of this the same thing that the journalists, you know, have the same sort of activism, the same sort of. I have a certain set of beliefs about how the world works and I'm going to bring that into the company culture. Google was really the kind of, you know, they encouraged it. They were sort of bring your whole self to work. Like, you know, it's like we have laundry here and we have free gyms. All sorts of free perks for you to stay here constantly and work. But it was really like a bring your whole self to work kind of identity thing. And a lot of sort of the kind of, I think kind of radical activism we're seeing on campuses now, but really have seen for like the last 10 years, got imported into Silicon Valley with Facebook, with Google and with these sort of what we call app companies, sort of the kind of Web 2.0, the big companies of the last generation. Twitter. Yeah. The people who were working there weren't sort of the, I mean, yes, they had sort of the cracked engineers, right. But then you also had sort of this keyboard class, this sort of keyboard warrior where it was really, really sexy to work in tech. It became sort of the sexy dominant thing coming out of these sort of prestigious schools. And I think they brought a Lot of sort of the kind of liberal, sort of liberal trends, liberal fads into the companies that looked very different than what tech was in the 70s and the 80s and the 90s. And it was really before it was these hardware engineers, these guys who just really wanted to build things right. And then when you kind of get into post Internet and the app culture, it really, it became something totally different. At the same time, what was also happening in Silicon Valley is. Silicon Valley is about 40 minutes south of San Francisco. So the kind of hubs for Facebook and different places and Google, they're down in what's known as the South Bay. But San Francisco, it really wasn't a Tech City until 2009, 2010. Twitter headquartered itself in San Francisco in 2009 and you saw a lot of tech workers moving to the city and. And San Francisco is one of the most radical, most open, sort of kind of iconoclastic cultural cities in the world. It's its own weird culture, anything goes. You kind of get these radical sort of cult like experiences. There's a great book about San Francisco called Season of the Witch and it talks about how the spirit of San Francisco has always been sort of this people joining cults, the hippie movement. Like these are the most radical people in the world. And you meld that with the tech people who are also sort of iconoclastic and they're also sort of, again, they go to schools like Berkeley or Harvard or places and they get these sort of radical ideas and it's like, okay, we're gonna bring that into the company. And Twitter actually, I think became kind of the iconic example of this where they became so radicalized about certain ideas and viewpoints that they would start completely deplatforming. Please. People who misgendered someone or deplatforming the President of the United States right after the 2020 election. So it's like the sort of radicalization of Silicon Valley I think was happening at the same time that you had this other shift happening, which was things are going radical. A lot of people have their sort of extremist, I would say liberal beliefs, but then you have sort of a backlash to it. And I would say Anduril in many cases was a huge backlash to it where it's like, hey, hey, we just wanna build stuff for our country. We're not Democrats, we're not Republicans, you know, like, we're just a bunch of engineers who wanna build hard things and we wanna put our heads down and work. And I actually think that's kind of the underpinning of the American dynamism movement. It's like people got sick of the culture wars, and particularly the culture wars that were being fought. All of big tech, even big tech, has gotten sick of it. You know, it's like you kind of see Mark Zuckerberg has completely changed his tune on a lot of things. He's kind of gone. You know, he said the culture became too feminized at Facebook. I mean, what he's really saying is we became way too radical. We became way too hall monitor in our views of social media and free speech. And so I think, makes you wonder.

[Unknown Host]

How much it's taken. I mean, how much time was wasted on that kind of stuff.

[Kathryn Boyle]

So much.

[Unknown Host]

And how much more innovation would have happened had they not been so wrapped up in their own ideologies and cultures.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally. I mean, that's why when Elon bought Twitter, I mean, he was saying we could fire 75% of the people at Twitter, and the service still ran. Still ran perfectly. Right. What were these people doing? Well, they were, you know, deplatforming people, or they were the trust and safety team, making sure that things on Twitter were fine. Right. Like, there's still massive problems at Twitter. I mean, like, there was still ridiculous amounts of porn and child pornography on Twitter that they didn't deal with when they were there. Right. It was. But Elon got in and saw. He's like, this is completely backwards. We need one fourth of the people who are here. We need great engineers, and we need to solve the real problems at this platform, and we need to have free speech. So in some ways, it's like a lot of these companies got really fat. The business models were good. They were really bloated, but people weren't working. And what were they doing? They were becoming activists. And I do think there's across. It's not just tech. It certainly was happening at the tail end of my time at the Washington Post. But a lot of these young people go get out of college. They think they're activists. They go work at a company, and they want to be activists. They don't want to do the work of the company, which is to build, you know, to build an app or to write a story. They want to go there and they want to shake up the company. They want to be activists inside the company. And you know, what really changed, I think, in Silicon Valley that sort of led people to say, okay, we can build hard things. 1. And I think that's why there's a lot of people focusing on like, let's build things that are so hard that you don't get these activists into your company. But there was another company called Coinbase where the founder of Coinbase, I believe it was 2020, Brian Armstrong, he wrote a letter called the Coinbase Memo. And he said, if you want to be an activist, and it was during BLM and just after MeToo, and he said, if you're going to be an activist, you can go somewhere else. Our mission is to focus on crypto. It's to focus on ensuring that we have the best customer support and that we serve our customers who are interested in crypto and we expand that customer base. And if you care about anything else at this company, you can walk out the door. And he lost, I think, 6% of his company that day.

[Unknown Host]

No kidding.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And he's like, he'll say it publicly. That's the best thing he's ever done. Because Those are the 6% of people who were causing a lot of problems. And the same can be said about Google and Project Maven. It's only a tiny portion of people inside of a massive company. I think it was like 2% or 1%. Less than 1% of people signed the, the Project Maven letter and walk out. We're not gonna work with the DoD, but that can cause so much damage to a company if a company allows the activist class to control them. So I think the thing that people learn from watching Elon just completely remake Twitter and Brian at Coinbase really say like, hey, like, see the door is. I think a lot of founders are now saying, hey, we can work on these hard problems. We also don't have to be beholden to an activist class. We have free speech now. We can say what we want on X, right? Like, we're not going to get in trouble if you're not going to get reported to hr if you say the wrong name of someone or wrong word. And I think that was happening at the same time, sort of the backlash against all of the wokeism and sort of rigid orthodoxy of how you have to act. And that kind of opened up the way for American dynamism. Because I really think that the companies that are building these hard things in the physical world, they just want to put their head down and build. They don't want to talk politics, you know, they don't want to know who you voted for. They really just want to build hard things and they care about the country and it's like they care about the mission they are working on.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, how long was this process, because like I said, from an outsider, it looks like it was in about a year.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Like a light switch.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes.

[Unknown Host]

To get rid of that rock.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Was it a lot longer than that?

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's a lot longer. I mean, for someone. So I can say, like, you know, there were a handful of us. You've had Joe on, you've had Palmer on, you've had people on who, you know, Sean at Palantir. There's a handful of people who I think have been sort of saying the same things over and over and over again about like, it is okay to build for government. It's okay. My own sort of kind of experience of where I saw just a huge change is I, you know, I, I was having lots of conversations with Marc Andreessen, who's the founder of our firm, about a lot of the issues that were happening in Silicon Valley. And I kind of told him, I said, I think that this category of investment, it's not just one off companies, it's not just going to be SpaceX and Anduril, but there's going to be an explosion of these companies. And this was during COVID So I wrote this memo for him. I ended up joining the firm. My partner David Ulovich and I, we always joked we were sort of competing for the same companies, but there was such a small group of people who were competing to get on the same deals. He called me one day after we had dinner with Mark and he was like, do you just want to come do it here? Like just come here, come here and build help. Like, let's build a practice together around these ideas. And so, you know, I always give major credit to Mark and David for having the foresight of saying, hey, like this is a real thing. Because a lot of people didn't think it was real. A lot of people thought, okay, yeah, you'll have an Anduril, but there's only going to be one Anduril, you'll have a SpaceX, there's only going to be one SpaceX. But all of these other young companies, the Dinos of the world, the shield AIs, these companies, we only need one of each. And our view was like, this is the next 10, 20, 30 years of American innovation. If the first 25 years of the second American century, 2000 to 2025, if that was investing in apps, investing in software, software, eating the world, the next 25 years are taking all of that software and, and building for the physical world. So it's critical minerals, it's aerospace, it's Defense, it's infrastructure, logistics, all of the things that touch the physical world. And so it was actually January 2022. It was three weeks before Russia invaded Ukraine. I just joined the firm. I put out this manifesto called American Dynamism. And I wrote about how the next 25 years are gonna be these categories and named companies like Anduril. We'd already invested in those companies, knew them very well, but I said, you're already seeing and so many extraordinary engineers leaving these companies and wanting to build new versions of Anduril, new versions of SpaceX. Right? Like building the next generation of aerospace and defense. Public safety, like the entire public safety field has been completely transformed by technology. And we have great companies that are operating with police forces across the country doing really important work using machine learning and AI. And we were seeing this, but it was sort of this kind of secret. People hadn't been talking about it publicly. So we announced the thesis. And I've never seen such an explosion. Like, to me, this was like, probably the biggest moment in my career of seeing the number of people emailing me, retweeting it, saying, like, this is where Silicon Valley is going. And within six months, the term American dynamism had become this kind of hilarious Internet meme. It was everywhere. People were using it as a joke. People were using it as, hey, I'm an American dynamism company. Investors were raising funds off of it, saying, we want an American dynamism practice. We ended up raising a very large fund to invest in the category. And it really, like the thing I think I'm most proud of, because it was a huge shock. It wasn't a shock to the engineers, it wasn't a shock to the veterans, but it was a huge shock to the investor class when we said the word America.

[Unknown Host]

No kidding.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And I had been saying American dynamism for a long time. But I said, this practice has to be named American Dynamism. And when people ask us what it is, it is a very clear meme. We're investing in companies that are supporting the national interest, full stop, and we're not gonna be ashamed about it again. It was, you know, it was 2022. It was before Russia invaded Ukraine. We're not gonna be ashamed of it. Like, by their nature, these companies have to sell to the DoD. They sell to the DoD before they sell to other countries. They're not global companies. They are American companies. They are very different than the software that sells all over the world that can operate on the Internet. These are. These are physical, different things. And we have to be very clear with our language that these are American companies. And the investor class, I think, was stunned, mainly because a lot of our rival firms were still investing in China. They had still made so much money in China. And this is a whole other story. But when we said America, it was like we planted the flag of our own country and said, yeah, we're going to build for this country. And it was probably the most refreshing thing to founders because they had never heard an investor they had never heard. And again, having Marc Andreessen say it, it's like, I'm just little old me, right? But when Marc Andreessen, the founder of the Internet, basically, right, like the godfather of Silicon Valley, comes out and he says, we're investing in America, people perk up and they listen. And so it completely changed the game. Later, it became a meme. Other people started raising funds off of it. But the thing I think I'm most proud of is, is within a year, a lot of peer funds, or what's called peer funds, like firms of our size or other famous firms that operate in the Valley, almost all of them had decoupled from their China practices. No kidding. At the same time, like Mike Gallagher and the China Special Committee, that was happening in Congress, and a bunch of people in the D.C. side, they kind of woke up about this. It's like, okay, Silicon Valley is actually, you know, Silicon Valley is saying, hey, we need to invest in America too. Important people in Silicon Valley are saying that. And so they started putting, I think, a little bit of pressure. The TikTok wars were happening, right? Like, people were really starting to say, okay, like, how is TikTok being weaponized against American kids? And it just became too much for a lot of these firms who had been investing for 15 years in China to be able to make a good faith argument that it's fine that we're sending American money, American know how, and that we're making tons of money off of technology that's being used as a weapon against the United States. And so pretty much all of these firms had to divest or decouple themselves. They turned into separate funds where there was no sharing of information, no sharing of carry of sort of the economics among the partners. But I think five years ago, I wouldn't have believed that would have happened. It was too much money. It was too big business. People had way too many entrenched interests in China. And if anything, what it taught me is, is if you speak truth, like if you say, I'm not afraid to Say I love this country and that I don't care about making money in China because I love this country. And if you say that, people will get in line, like most people believe that in Silicon Valley, they just never heard it before.

[Unknown Host]

That's great, man. Kudos to you. That's incredible.

[Kathryn Boyle]

I mean, in some ways, it shows the power of memes, because it really only takes one, Joe, one Mark. Right. One of these guys. Right. One sham, one Palmer, to stand up and say the hard thing. And if you say it enough, like Palmer had been saying since 2017, like, the CCP is our enemy. Right. Like the CCP is our enemy. We should not be supporting, you know, anything with. To do with China. We should not be supporting them. We should not be investing there. And it just, in some ways, it's like it wears people down if people hear the meme large, like, long enough. And in some ways, I feel like the sort of meme of American dynamism is even more powerful than the investing practice. It's not just an investing practice, it's a true philosophy that, like, if we are going to build hard things in this country and go back to an era of the moon landing and the Manhattan Project, like, we have to be clear about what we are investing in. And we are investing in American interest.

[Unknown Host]

So how did you meet Mark?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So it's a funny story. I mean, I'd say there were a handful of people, I think, during COVID who kind of saw the craziness that was happening in Silicon Valley, saw the craziness of the culture war. This has been reported before, but Mark's very big on the group chats. So I met him through. Actually, this is very funny. I met him through. There was an app in Covid called Clubhouse, where it was sort of like.

[Unknown Host]

A. I remember Clubhouse.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. Sort of like Twitter spaces. Yep. But I was very bored. I was also pregnant with my first child. You know, I was kind of locked up in my house. And I always joke, my husband was like, you know, after like the first month of COVID it was great that you had Clubhouse. Cause you could talk to other people. You could stop annoying me. So I was like, you know, I was like, you know, up at the middle of the night talking on Clubhouse. And of course, there were a handful of people there, and Mark was one of them. So I got to know Mark through Clubhouse and through, you know, a lot of these, I'd say, say these kind of chats of people who I think were really interested in these ideas of where is Silicon Valley. Going, what does it mean Again, this was sort of the height of the culture war. And I do think it was forbidden. It was like people were getting left and right kicked off of Twitter. And so there were sort of these underground. It's kind of funny to say now, because all of the things that were being said are being said publicly now. It's not like they were some crazy, you know, conversations happening, but it really was sort of this. You were so forced to sort of falsify your preferences publicly if you didn't want to get canceled, that you really couldn't talk about things. And you could on Clubhouse in some ways, and you could in the group chats. And so I got to know Mark and David and a bunch of people at Ben Andreessen Horowitz, and, you know, I'd say a lot of these ideas were really sort of, you know, talked about and sort of debated on an app that, you know, was sort of this ephemeral thing that was really important during COVID Cause no one had a way to connect. But I also tell people a lot, like, especially young people, you'd be surprised who you can meet on the Internet. You'd be surprised the people you can connect with and have deep relationships with, even if you haven't had lunch with them. You don't have to go to someone's house or office and have coffee with them. You can have deep connections with people just by writing and thinking online. And I spend a lot of time on the Internet, and I live in the middle of nowhere, so it's like, I need to spend a lot of time on the Internet. But that's how I got acquainted with Mark and with a lot of people in Silicon Valley and with a lot of people at my current firm, too.

[Unknown Host]

It's just really incredible that you come from zero tech background into where you are today. I think that's just really fascinating.

[Kathryn Boyle]

But I do think I look at someone like Dino, who I think your conversation with him is extraordinary. Right? Like, in some ways, he's even. He's sped. He's the example of speed running that process even more. Right. Cause it's like he's building. He's the CEO of a massive company, and he had no tech relationships. You know, it's like he knew a little bit about tech, but he's not a cracked engineer himself. Right. Like, he went from being a Navy SEAL to now running one of the most important companies for the Navy in three years. I mean, he went to business school, yes. He went to private equity. But the Things he was doing in private equity are not at all like what he's doing here. And so I think it says something about the culture of tech, which is. And I always tell veterans this because I get so many people saying, how do you transition? It's like it is a very open culture by its nature. People are open about meeting people, talking to people. Yes, it's kind of monolithic, but if you have an idea that's different, There are people who will take a bet on you if you seem to know what you're talking about, if you know the right people, if you have a talented team surrounding you. And so I do think it's probably one of the few places that misfits can go in America. It's like you couldn't go to New York City and kind of crack your way into different parts of finance. It's like there's too many places in New York where they care who your daddy is or what school you went to, what high school you went to. There's too much of that kind of elite culture in Washington and New York. But something about Silicon Valley is you can just be loud on the Internet and get people's attention and have everyone important in Silicon Valley talking about you, making fun of you, mocking you. Right. But you can become the center of attention very quickly.

[Unknown Host]

Interesting.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And so I really encourage young people to do that, especially if they're a talented engineer. You don't have to know anyone.

[Unknown Host]

How does venture capital work? It seems to me like venture capital runs Silicon Valley. And I've had a number of these guys in here, all just insanely smart. But the trend seems to be, go to Silicon Valley, start talking about your idea, start working on it, and somebody is going to invest in it.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And you'll learn a lot. It's not guaranteed someone's going to invest in it. But what's interesting is Silicon Valley used to be. It used to be like. It's like the Florentine Five families, right? You have like five venture firms. They all sit on Sandhill Road, which is like the classic place where all these firms were built. And companies would go by and they'd pitch, and then a firm would pick one company. It's not like that anymore. It is ruthlessly competitive. There is more capital than there has ever been in the asset class. I think there's something like $300 billion of dry powder just raised now. Which dry powder is the amount of capital on the sidelines that's going to come into companies. Something like 1.25 trillion AUM. I mean it is not a, they used to call it sort of a cottage industry. People used to ignore it. It's not. It is how we've built companies over the last 25 years. Now I always point to this graph. I wish I had the graphic where if you looked at the Fortune 100 and then if you even went further down and you said, what are the 10 most valuable companies in the world in 2000? Four of them were American companies. I think two of them were tech companies. If you do that same experiment in 2025, nine of them are American companies, eight of them are tech companies. And the only company that's not a tech company, that's the most valuable company in the world in America is Berkshire Hathaway, which owns a massive chunk of Apple. So tech is the story of the 21st century. It's how we've built companies. A lot of the companies that are now in that the most valuable 10 weren't even founded in 2000. Right? Like Facebook wasn't around. Google had just gone public in 2004. It is extraordinary that we have been able to build companies that big that surpass all of industry across the world in 25 years. But part of that is because of the venture capital industry, which is not this cottage industry of a couple people sitting around doling out money anymore. It is billions of dollars given by what's known as institutional limited partners. So what they are is they're the big pension funds, the big, you know, every state has massive pension funds, you know, nonprofits, university endowments, sovereign wealth funds across the world. So like, you know, every country has sovereign wealth money that they want to put into various things and now they all want to put money into technology. And so when you add all of that up and you say like everyone recognizes that they need exposure to high growth venture capital company backed companies that are going to go public and that are going to be the next Uber, the next stripe, the next Facebook, the next Google. It's just so much bigger than it was even 10 years ago. And it's become, I'd say it's become really competitive because any really talented engineer now that has a group of people with a good idea, it's never been, I don't want to say it's easy, it's easier to get seed capital, it's easier to get someone to bet on you because there's more capital in the industry. And what was a problem five years ago is that because American dynamism didn't exist, because this category of Innovation didn't exist. You couldn't go into a venture capital firm and say, I'm going to build a hypersonics company. People would be like, what? There's no ecosystem of people who are going to invest in that. There's no downstream capital of people in the later rounds. The way venture capital structured is every 18 months, 18 to 24 months, a company will raise an additional round of capital. And if they're successful, it makes their valuation go up, it makes the amount the company's worth go up, and it allows them to expand, it allows them to grow the number of engineers, the number of people working there, number of products they're offering. And the goal is don't go out of business, but grow as fast as possible. And each new layer of investor will come in with a bigger check to fund the research and development, to fund the growth of the company until you go public. And the sort of. It sounds completely. Again, it sounds completely different to any other way that we build businesses. But the kind of speed at which you're supposed to grow, the faster you grow, the better. And so there's sort of a view that that is the best way to build companies. But that did not exist, I'd say, five years ago for this category of building the physical world. There was just, there's no way that you're going to be able to get through the valley of death, get later investors, to put hundreds of millions of dollars into a satellite bus company. And I think the biggest thing that's changed is all of those partners that I talk about, the people who are investing in the funds, the sovereign wealth funds, the pension funds, all of those people in the ecosystem now believe that you can make money off of defense companies, and they want exposure to it. They want to invest in the next Anduril. And so to me, whenever I go to the dod, I'm like, this is the biggest boon for you. This is gonna save us. Because you have capital from all over the country, every endowment all over the world, frankly, that wants to invest in American innovation, American dynamism. And you don't have to use taxpayer money to do the R and D. There's hundreds of companies in El Segundo right now that are all doing the R and D, that are all raising outside capital from people who know that they might lose their money. But that's the business model. You lose your money in some cases, you win in some, you lose in others. And it's like that didn't used to be directed at America. Like it did not Used to be directed at the Department of Defense. It's never been directed at these categories in the way it is today. So it does on the outside look easy, like everyone can just come in and raise capital. But you do have to have a great idea. You have to know the right people. You have to network with the right people. Right. Which is not impossible. Like, that's what I love about Dino's story is, like, he didn't know anybody. He didn't know who Joe Lonsdale was when he took him out to do a workout. Right. He just wanted to do a defense company. And so there's so many stories of just being young and hungry and determined and have a good idea and, like, the right people will find you.

[Unknown Host]

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[Kathryn Boyle]

Health?

[Unknown Host]

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[Kathryn Boyle]

So, I mean, the idea matters a lot. I mean, there's examples where I've invested in people. Pre idea.

[Unknown Host]

Pre idea.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, yeah. Like, I have a great company called Cape that's building mvno, a mobile network for privacy. And the founder, I knew the founder from another company that I had invested in called Manavar Labs. It's working with a lot of the agencies in DoD. He was on the board and he was the head of government sales agency sales at Palantir for a very long time. And so he just knows government sales better than anyone. He had been in the army and then went to Palantir. And I always just said, hey, if you're ever leaving Palantir, please, please let me know. And one day I got the call and it was like, I don't care what you're doing and I just want to back you. And within a couple weeks he told me what he was doing and I'm like, oh, you're building a new mobile carrier for privacy. That's going to be like the hardest thing I've ever heard. Like, you were building the hardest company. But he's done an excellent job and is working with a number of different parts of the DoD to make it possible to basically be on your cell phone and to not be. That's sort of like the holy grail. If you're an operator, if you're part of the DoD or if you're a high net worth individual who's worried about privacy. To be able to travel around the world and to not ping different cell towers so that no one can track you, it actually doesn't exist. All the different carriers can take your data. And so he's a great example of, I didn't care what he did. He knew the biggest problem because he had been at Palantir for so long and I wanted to invest in him and I knew he was going to have have a great team. But on the flip side, most of the time we invest post idea, we invest post people having a story. And I always think you're testing for a couple different things. You're testing for how quickly someone can learn and the depth of knowledge. And you know this better than anyone in the interviews that you do. If you just sit there and ask questions, you can learn a lot about how deep someone's knowledge goes. Right, well, tell me more about that. Like actually, is that how it works? What other companies operate like that?

[Unknown Host]

How do you invest? Somebody pre idea though. I mean, what are you investing in? Where do they put the money?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, well, I mean, so in John's case, who's the founder of Cape, I waited till he had the entity formed and then, you know, then we gave him the company. So when I say like we invest before the company even exists, like there's a company, it's just sometimes he doesn't know what he's gonna do. There are some founders where you don't know what I even say Anduril is a great example of this, where, yes, they started off with Century Tower, but products three and four and five, they had no idea what those products were going to be. And some of those have just been extraordinarily successful. And so a lot of founders, they learn on the job, they're talking to new customers every day, and it's like, actually, maybe we should do this instead. They call it the pivot in Silicon Valley. It's like, it's infamous. It's like, oh, companies pivoting into a different direction. But a pivot isn't seen as a bad thing. It's seen as, oh, they learned something new and they're taking that knowledge and they're building something with it. It's much more common to invest in a company post idea, post team. The pitch deck oftentimes explains the problem and the solution. Oftentimes there's a product built. But for early, early stage investing, which is where I like to invest, sometimes you don't need it. Sometimes it's just about a credible team coming together and you having belief that that team can actually pull it off based on their history. A lot of the teams that I've invested in, it's like the head of manufacturing was doing something at SpaceX, which makes me know that they know how to do manufacturing, or the CTO was at another company where it's very clear that you can reference them and know what they actually built. So their reputation sort of precedes them. It's like they wrote this paper or they did, you know, they built this product at Palantir. Brian Schimf, who's the CEO of Anduril, I mean, he's sort of legendary as one of the best engineers, best coders that's ever come out of Palantir. And so it's like when you hear that about someone and it's like, okay, now they're going to come be CEO of Anduril, you don't worry that much about whether they're going to be able to build just an incredible product. Gotcha.

[Unknown Host]

Gotcha. What are some of the companies that you're most excited about that you guys have invested in?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. So I'd say the, the thing I'm, that's happened that surprised me the most. You know, it's like everyone kind of knows the, the Andurils, the Saronics, the companies that are selling directly to the DoD. But the thing that surprised me the most is how many companies want to build, you know, the tier one supplier, like Basically rebuild the defense industrial base and not sell directly to the Department of Defense, but sell to those Raytheons, the Lockheed Martins and the Andurils. Right. Like they'll work with anyone but really build out the supply chain. And that's where I've been investing a lot. Like we have a company, a great company called Apex Space that's building modular satellite buses and the view in the space industry and space, I mean space is, to me, space is gonna be the next theater, it's gonna be the next space Warfare is something we really have to think a lot about. But you can't be good at, at space warfare if you don't have enough stuff. Like if you don't have the actual platforms to send payloads up to space on the logistics. Yeah, yeah, well, and it's like we have, you know, SpaceX can get things to space. But the biggest problem that the DoD has, and it's a problem that China's really focused on as well, is it can take three years to get a satellite bus, which is just, you know, it's not the payload, it's not the thing that you're sending to space. It's the thing that has the energy, it has the comms equipment, and really every satellite can operate with the same bus. You don't need. The way that again, going back to how the primes do work is the government will say, well, we're sending up this payload and this is how we want it designed. And so they'll design a brand new bus every time they do new non recurring engineering for the product and then they'll send the payload up and it can take three years to get a satellite bus. So this company is building satellite buses in 30 days. Why should it take so long to build the same bus over and over again?

[Unknown Host]

And so it's called, it's 30 days from three years to the.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, they went from clean sheet design to their first mission in 13 months. Like first working mission with payloads in space in low earth orbit. And it's like if a brand new company that at that time had only 30 employees and had raised, you know, tens of millions of dollars, but you know, isn't SpaceX right? But if a brand new company can go from forming a company to putting something in space with important primes in 13 months, you should be able to do the Henry Ford manufacturing line of satellite buses and be able to build thousands and thousands of satellite buses a year for the dod. And that's what China's doing. I mean, China is maniacally focused on space, and they are maniacally focused on how do we build as many buses as possible so that we can own the satellite infrastructure in low earth orbit. And it's something that we're going to have to very much worry about because right now we're in the lead in space. I actually think that's the theater where, where we should feel the most confidence because Elon and SpaceX have done an incredible service for this country in terms of what they're doing with Star Shield and Starlink. But the other companies coming up, they want to be able to build as quickly as possible and as fast as possible. And the big fear that I have is that government's going to say, oh, well, we've written the requirements so that we need this thing on this bus. And it's like, no, we just need the bus that can do 90% of the job and just get it up as fast as possible and make them as fast as possible. We need to produce as quickly as we can.

[Unknown Host]

So this company just, it's a bus brings things to space.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. So they can take any payload to space. You know, they have three, like, in some ways it's like, it looks a lot more like consumer technology. It's like we have three models. We have one for leo, we have one for geo, we have one for, you know, the different orbit that you're going to. But for 90% of payload, that bus is going to be perfect. And because they're only designing something three times versus designing a brand new thing every time they need to send something up. You take out all the design work, you crunch all the R and D and then you build a system that allows you, it's designed for manufacturing, you manufacture as quickly as possible. And that methodology of manufacturing, again, I think people underestimate the impact that Elon Musk has had on the country. He's had an incredible impact on a bunch of companies. But the thing that he taught people again, is the best part is no part. It's you have to make the product as simple as possible so that you can manufacture it as quickly as possible. And if you make it simple and if you make it modular, something that can just be churned out where it doesn't have to be every single time something happens, you have to design something new and you have to change your manufacturing process. You'll have fewer problems with the quality control. You'll have fewer problems with is something going to blow up? Is something going to, you know, malfunction if you're only Designing a system where you don't change it and where you keep it simple, it's going to be far more successful in space, it's going to be far more successful on the road. And like that process, he's now graduated tens, twenty thousands of people out of Tesla and SpaceX. Like these engineers who understand how to design for manufacturing and how to engineer, and that engineering and manufacturing have to be lacking, linked. And for a very long time, that is not how people viewed how you build. I mean, actually, Vice President J.D. vance actually talked about this. He came and spoke at our summit and he said the biggest lie that America was ever told about manufacturing was that you could divorce the design from the manufacturing. And of course we did that. Apple's the best example of this, where if you open up an iPhone, it says designed in California. And there's this belief that you can. And all of the premium jobs are the design jobs and the manufacturing jobs are the cheap jobs, and you can outsource that anywhere. But it's like actually linking them is the most important. That is the most important thing, that design for manufacturing, where you link those roles in a company is how you manufacture things that are simple, good, and you can do it as quickly as possible. And so that's the philosophy of Elon Musk. That's why everything he has done has been successful and a lot of other people who do manufacturing are not. But now there's thousands of founders who've come out of his ethos and his kind of the gospel of Elon. Right? And they know how to build like that. And so they get on the factory floor and that's what they do. And the DoD can just, you know, they can just pick winners. They can say, this is what we need. This one works the best. You have a hundred of them, we'll take them. And there's something about that didn't exist even five years ago. And it's only going to grow.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, now Apple's a wildly successful company as well. And so it did work for them, or is it not working for them?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Well, I mean, it worked for them in that it saved them a lot of money. But this is what's interesting. We were talking earlier about this Apple in China book that came out where I think it's rewriting the narrative of what Apple did. So it wasn't like Apple went to China. And I'm blanking on the writer's name, but he was the Financial Times reporter that covered Apple for like 20 years. And it wasn't like they went to China and they said, oh, these guys know how to manufacture. We're going to give them, they're going to help us manufacture and achieve our goals. Apple trained all of the people in China to do manufacturing. It was something like 28 million over the course of the last 10 years that they've been there, that they've trained, which is the workforce of California. The interesting stat that this writer notes is that Apple invested, I think something like 58 billion per year into China so that they could invest in these manufacturing hubs and invest in these factories. And when you compare it to the Marshall Plan, it's something like 2x the entire Marshall Plan that Apple has invested in China over the last 10 years. And the thing that is shocking about sort of this divorcing the manufacturing and moving manufacturing out of America into a country is like it wasn't like they had the people and the systems and the know how, where they were helping us. It was like we made it an active choice or I should say Apple made an active choice to train those people and to give them the knowledge to give them the know how of this is how you are going to build. And you know, until this book came out, I don't think people really recognized just how much capital that American companies were putting into China to train them on things we know how to do. And so, you know, I think the kind of point of the Vice President's speech was more about like, we have to bring this design for manufacturing manufacturing view back where it's like you design where you manufacture. And that is Elon's view. But it's really the view of, I think a lot in defense tech today.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, how quickly is that shifted.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Back to the US on the manufacturing side, when we talk about what keeps me up at night, it is really, really hard to build factories that compete with the manufacturing production capabilities of China. And Again, this started 10, 15 years ago with Apple. But there's many good examples of companies that were invested in by American venture capital firms in China that are way ahead in terms of production. I always say the biggest scandal, Apple is a good example of us taking our knowledge and our know how into China and teaching them something that was an American secret in many cases. But the biggest scandal of Silicon Valley is that Silicon Valley did that too. In 2008, 2009, venture capital firms that are very large and very successful went into China and they taught them how to do early stage investing. The simple overview I gave of how venture capital works, they went in there and they trained people, and they trained them as though they were training their own associates in Silicon Valley. And they told them how you build these companies. And so I always say that the sort of venture capital ecosystem, it is American dynamism, It is the thing that allows America to be dominant in the global economy. It's how we build tech companies. And we just went over there as venture capitalists, and I shouldn't say we, because it wasn't my firm, it wasn't me, but VCs went over there and shared information, shared limited partners, shared all of the aspects and the functions of how you build an incredible, you know, legacy defining venture firm. And over 20 years, like, you know, Silicon Valley or China has a true ecosystem of tech companies now. And they all work with the ccp, right? Like, they figured out how to build in the kind of confines of how China expects them to build. But, like, this is scandalous. Like, I think it's, you know, Apple in China is scandalous that we invested that much money into another country's manufacturing regime and not into our own. Like, why didn't we do that for the state of Ohio? Why didn't we do that in the state of Florida? What was it about America that Apple didn't want to invest in our own manufacturing capabilities 15 years ago so that they can make 500,000 iPhones in a day? And so that, I think, is the thing that's going to be hard to overcome now. It's happening on the defense side because you have to manufacture in the US and there is this manufacture where you are. But I think it's the thing that keeps me up at night is the production gap, man.

[Unknown Host]

You know, we talked a little bit about Chinese espionage in Silicon Valley at breakfast this morning. And how prevalent is that over there?

[Kathryn Boyle]

It's pretty prevalent. From what I've heard from people I know inside the DOD and various agencies, there are more spies in Washington, D.C. than any other city in America. And number two is Silicon Valley, man. And of course it's, you know, it's mostly Chinese spies, but there's, you know, there's been a lot of stories recently. It's, there's things that happen where it's like, it's clear, you know, it's clear espionage, right? It's like, clearly there's, there's, you know, spies that are in big companies stealing. I mean, the last 30 years of silicon Valley, how has China caught up so quickly? It's, of course, you know, a lot of these people are stealing the secrets out of the companies and Stealing the intellectual property and taking it back. So, like, that's a known story. Story. I think the areas that are even more shocking are how the universities play into this. How there was a story actually in the Stanford Review, which is a student paper at Stanford that was saying there are known agents, basically spies in Stanford campus that are either professors or working with professors, where they are stealing AI secrets from Stanford. And that's happening across, I think all of our great university systems. Like anyone that has serious knowledge, like the Chinese, have been very good at infiltrating those systems. I also think the thing that's sort of misunderstood about Silicon Valley is because it's such an open culture, anyone can come and anyone can sort of have a coffee and learn about things and kind of infiltrate the culture. And so there is also this cultural aspect in Silicon Valley where I was sharing in like 2015, 2016, when I was more open about that. I, I was investing in deep tech and different things. I would always get these emails from random Chinese venture capitalists. Happens less now. But Chinese venture capitalists who had a small venture capital firm and they were from China and you didn't know where the money was from, but they were really interested in your companies and they wanted to learn more. And the DOD was very worried about that because they were worried about cfius concerns, Chinese capital getting on the cap tables of these important companies. But it was more like the bigger danger was it was more of just like completely infiltrating the culture, which is what's happened in Silicon Valley where you can't really divorce a lot of tech culture from that sort of. They understand tech culture, they're there, they're completely part of it. And so it's something where I think we need much, much better security around a lot of these AI projects, in particular, a lot of these AI companies, companies. It's clear that they're being targeted for espionage purposes. It's clear that, like, how did the Chinese catch up so quickly? You know, it's like this is again, a whole of society sort of project for them. And Silicon Valley like this, you know, I'd say it's sort of a Pollyanna view, sort of this. Well, we're sort of this open, you know, we're this open ecosystem and you know, anyone can come here and build. And again, it's part of the reason why it works is like you have an open society where anyone takes a phone call and you get people like me who know nothing about it and they can infiltrate it. But if you're Working on behalf of a foreign government, it's that easy for nobody to infiltrate it with no resources. Right. How easy is it for someone who's been trained to infiltrate a society, to infiltrate a company or infiltrate an ecosystem to be able to capture the intelligence they need? Like it is a very easy target. Man.

[Unknown Host]

You know, I, I told you this at breakfast, but I mean, we were having a conversation at lunch with one of the guys that I had had on the show, tech guy, and he was talking about, we were talking about finding a wife or something like that, and somehow this spun up, I'd brought up that China was setting up all these brothels all over the Middle east when I was there. And, and it would lure people in from state and all these other government agencies that fall in love with this prostitute that's a spy. And the next thing you know they're telling them secrets and they're on camera and all these other things. And he had said, he goes, he goes, this sounds just like Silicon Valley. He's like, you'll get, he goes, you'll get like these beautiful Russian women or Chinese women that come in and they'll find the, the, the startup guys or, or whoever is making it big. And you gotta, you know, you got a tech guy that's normally in his basement, that's probably never been with a woman before. Now he's with a 10 and, and get married, become whatever. And there goes all the secrets.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

You know, and, and he said that that was so prevalent, it's almost like a running joke.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, well, I think there's inside Silicon.

[Unknown Host]

Valley it's like, oh yeah, I mean, she's Russia and you know what that is. But he just made it sound like it was very common for that kind of stuff to happen.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. And I think there's the famous sort of economic security is national security. You hear that all the time in Washington. And it really is like technological supremacy. Supremacy is national security. And so if you really believe that Xi Jinping has said this, Vladimir Putin said this, he who owns AI will own the world. If you really believe that, why wouldn't you be infiltrating every single one of our major research labs, why wouldn't you be just maniacally focused on getting this information out of people? And if you've already set up a 30 year ecosystem where it's sort of a, it's been very easy for Chinese researchers to come to Stanford or Berkeley or places like that, and it's been very easy for the universities have taken funding, I mean they have, there was, I can't remember the name but like Stanford got in a lot of trouble for having this sort of center devoted to Chinese cultural understanding and different things. And it was clearly funded by the ccp and the universities say, oh well, you know, that's just, it's fine, we're taking capital for Chinese cultural understanding. It's like what do you think that's actually being used for? You know, these are sort of the soft power games and the Espionage games that can, you know, over a 30 year period have, have a striking impact on a culture.

[Unknown Host]

How widely known is that? I mean, I gotta be honest, you know, that was one of the things that I was really disappointed in with Trump recently is the negotiation over the tariffs with China. I mean, we came to a settlement. I've heard about Chinese being embedded in our educational institutions for a long time and part of the deal was, yep, we're still gonna take Chinese and put em in our Ivy League schools.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Well, I think there's arguments, the Silicon Valley argument for it is it's like the golden visa, right? It's sort of like what happened after the fall of Nazi Germany and we took the entire sort of physicist class and like all of the great engineers and they made up our space program. That's sort of the argument is if you can get all of these exceptional engineers working in American companies, if you can get them at American universities, a lot of them stay and they're brilliant, then they're working on American interests. And that's the argument that a lot of people make when they say we can't cut off immigration from other countries. Because you want to take, I mean, Palmer says this too. It's like you want to just gut other countries and you want to take their talent so that they can't operate. I think the problem is that, that it's so widespread and everyone, there's no way to defend against it. That these large companies, particularly the apples of the world, Google, I mean, it's like there are just repeat cases consistently of people stealing intellectual property and just the security around these important things just not being, no one's paying attention to it. And I think that the bigger problem is whenever I go to D.C. there was a really good quote that, that D.C. people would say, which is like when we look at China in Washington, we think China is our adversary. When Silicon Valley looks at China, they think China is my customer. And until very recently that was true, right? It was very true that every company wanted to go into China, they wanted to sell around the world. It was sort of this global phenomena. China can help me. I can learn a lot from China. I can manufacture in China, I can potentially sell to China. Even though China doesn't like American companies. Right. Like, I think in some ways that was sort of, again, a Pollyanna ish view. It was sort of a stupid view because, you know, China was protecting its own. But it is only recently that Silicon Valley at all looks at China as a potential threat or adversary. I mean, again, two years ago, American venture capital firms were investing in China and they were investing in AI companies in China. There are still American venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI companies. Companies. And that's legal. Like, that's legal. That's not breaking any American laws. And to me it's like that can be a weapon of war. How are American investors allowed to invest in these companies?

[Unknown Host]

That's crazy. That's crazy. Let's talk about the hypersonic company.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

What is the name of that?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So, Castellan. So it's another great story. A company I met very early in its trajectory. But it kind of again, explains why it's so important to meet people that you. Or to invest in people that have seen it before. So the team was working at SpaceX. So a lot of the team was on the government sales. They were part of starshield, which was selling to the government, working with government on classified projects and different things. And this team, the founder, will tell the story that every time he would talk to people inside the DoD, they would say the biggest issue for America is we have no hypersonic weapons. Our missiles will be depleted. I think Palmer talked about this. If we were in a potential hot war with China, our missiles would be depleted within eight days or some crazy scenario in terms of the scenario running. And so this has been top of mind for DOD for a very long time. And the founder said he consistently talked about this inside of SpaceX. But SpaceX is maniacally focused on going to Mars. The sorts of projects that get done at SpaceX, they have many projects and many types of things that they're building. But hypersonics was not on the menu. And so he and a number of his colleagues, they left in 2023 to start this company, really focused and just from day one focused on hypersonic missiles, long range hypersonic strike missiles. And the thing that I found so interesting about this is again going back to 2019 where Palmer said the M word, he said missiles in a pitch to a bunch of investors and they freaked out. Missiles. You're going to invest in missiles and hypersonic weapons and things that are kinetic. No, no, no. Right. That was crossing the line. And so this was 2023, and I brought them in to the entire firm, and Andreessen Horowitz sat down for this pitch. And I just remember saying to my partner, David, I was like, you know, I didn't ask, but, like, you think anyone's gonna care that we're investing in missiles? Like, really, the first slide is deterrence matters. This is such a serious team. This is a team that knows what they're doing. Like, they built things before. They've studied under Elon. But I'm like, do you think anyone's gonna worry about the M word? And he's like, I don't know. We'll see. And, you know, the pitch. I mean, beautiful pitch. It ends or whatever. And, you know, there's people on the consumer team, the games team, all the teams. Like, not everyone is American dynamism. And, you know, afterwards, it was sort of like, silence. And, you know, I was like, does anyone want to say, everyone think this is cool? And literally everyone was like, yeah, this is great. And it was like. It shocked me because I'm like. I've been so used to, like, okay, there's always one person who's like, like, oof. I'm, like, kind of uncomfortable, you know, or like, I don't know that I. How am I going to tell my friends, you know, at a cocktail party that we're investing in missiles? But there was something about, like, this team. Like, one. They're pros, you know, they clearly care about the mission. They talked about it from a deterrence perspective, right? Like, this is the only way we're going to deter wars. You have to build up your defense industrial base. You have to build up your missile capabilities to stop wars, not start. And I think it was such a compelling pitch and just an honest pitch about, like, this is the state of play. Like, we are not prepared, and if we don't do it, no one's gonna do it. That. I mean, the thing that was amazing for me was, like, gosh, like, how far we've come, like, in just five years to go from, you know, headline risk, like, we can't touch that, to, okay, we're all in on this.

[Unknown Host]

Wow.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And they've just been. They've been moving very fast. Wow. Wow.

[Unknown Host]

And you're a big part of that. I mean, what is that? How do you feel about that just being such a big part of that shift?

[Kathryn Boyle]

You know? I know you've talked about, like, signs and callings, and I think you believe deeply in that. I do, too. Where I'm like, I look at my uncle who, you know, everyone made fun of and kicked out of the Jesuits, and it's like, if not me, then who? And I do think that, like, there's something about God gives you your calling and your mission and it doesn't make sense. Right. Like you say, like, it makes absolutely no sense. That, like, someone who is just good with words. Right. Like, I'm a good writer, I know what I'm good at. But I'm not a technologist. I'm not gonna explain to you how Castalian's missiles work. Like, I'm not gonna sit here and be able to answer any of those questions. But I do think that I've been given a mission. And why me? I don't know, but I'm not gonna question it. And that is. It's someone else's will and not. So it makes me, you know, when Thibaut was on, like, I think Thibaut had the greatest. Your interview with him was incredible. But where he had the 316 moment where he was just so happy for, like, I can't believe I've been able to do what I've done. And then he just remembers, oh, yeah, it's like, not about me. Like, what a beautiful reminder. Yeah, it's like, it's really not about any of us.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah. With the VC firm, I mean, will you guys invest in competitive. Would you invest in Anduril and Anduril's competitor, or do you put your bet all in one?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So, yeah, it's a good question, because one thing is sometimes you invest in a company and they have no plans to build something, and then they end up competing with various companies or whatever. We kind of have a strong rule about it. It actually comes from my partner, Chris Dixon, who leads our crypto practice, where he basically says every company gets to tell you who their one competitor is. But at a certain point, there are some companies that get so large where they're going to do everything or they think they're going to do everything. And so you can't say, oh, a company. You can't honestly make the argument that, say, SpaceX is somehow competitive with a small company that's building satellite buses or a company that's building ground stations because they have a ground station product that works with Starlink. So we try to make it like, it's like, we would never invest in companies that are competing directly head on that are doing the same product. We don't do that, but it's more like sometimes you invest in a company that starts out as one thing and again it pivots into something else and then they're competing against each other. And whenever that happens, we always try to make sure that we sort of silo the information that different partners are working on different things. And it does happen. There's definitely examples of two companies just getting so big and so great. And it's always good when you see two companies winning. But it's like then they realize, oh, like we can each acquire the same company and do something new. And so they compete on acquisitions. It's like it's normal in business that companies will compete, but if we knowingly knew that companies were competing against each other, we would pick the winner. We put our eggs in one basket.

[Unknown Host]

What gaps in the defense tech sector do you see that you think innovators should be looking at?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I mean, it's a great question. I'm spending a lot of time on future of space and space warfare. I think there needs to be a lot more built for the next war being in space. So that means building things on the software side for tracking. There needs to be a lot more on the production side, on the propulsion side to make sure that things can be kinetic in space. So there's a lot, I think, happening in what does the future of space warfare look like? But everything for me comes back to this production issue issue. I recently was with some operators on the ground on the border of Ukraine and I went with a group to kind of learn about where investors should be investing. Where are sort of the major gaps in that war and the kind of takeaway that I took from it that I don't think I really fully kind of understood until I was there was. Russia has built up their own defense industrial base over three years in an extraordinary way. Right. Like they were kind of weak when they first started. Now they've built up their production capacity to really greatly be able to be able to have this war against the Ukrainians. The Ukrainians, to their credit, have built, just in time, manufacturing facilities where they can build drones very, very quickly. They get the information off the battlefield that allows them to innovate on how the drones work. They're doing that on the ground. They have distributed manufacturing capabilities that are tailor made for this war. So in some ways they've built up a defense industrial base as well. So it's Ukraine and Russia have done a great job of building that capacity up and that production capacity. The other player in this is China, who is supplying both sides of the war. So they're greatly supplying the Russians with the dumb parts and the things that they need to build the drones or with drones themselves. And they're also supplying the Ukrainians because the Ukrainians are in a desperate situation. They're building things in the trenches. They'll take whatever they can get and they'll take Chinese infrastructure as well. So the only group of people and the only country that really hasn't benefited from the war, and I say benefit loosely, but really hasn't been able to build up the industrial capacity in the same way that those three countries have, is America. And so the thing that keeps me up at night, the place where we invest is how do we increase the speed of production. And it can be on satellite buses, ground stations, modular things, modular forms of energy, smr, small modular reactors for nuclear. How do we build those as quickly as possible. But it's just the modularization and the production thing that I'm less interested in software or design. I'm much more interested in how do we just rebuild the manufacturing powerhouse that America once was. I think we can do it, but there's a lot of gaps in there.

[Unknown Host]

Where would that fit in? Where would that fit in? Would that be a manufacturing company that attaches itself to an Anduril or a Siron? Because when I talked to Dino, it sounds like all of Sironic is. It sounds like they're from conception of the idea to the end product.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. So yeah, I mean they vertically integrate to where they're building everything. Like they have an in house machine shop. We have another company that I work very closely with called Hadrian that's building these automated machine shops where they build parts for every company you've ever heard of and defense and aerospace, critical parts that have to be built in the US and it used to be that if you needed a critical part, you'd go to one of these massive machine shops. The machine shops are run by someone who's older, usually in their 60s, 50s, 60s. They have apprentices who study them. It can take two to three years to learn how to manufacture these critical parts. If you bring software into the factory, as Hadrian has done, they can teach a former bus driver, a high school dropout. Their goal is they wanna take baristas and train them to make these critical parts in 30 days. And it's because you automate 80, 90% of the process, the quality control, the design aspects, you automate it with software and then the last 10% you can teach a human to do. But that leads to just extraordinary output. So the more factories we can have that are software defined factories where the software is actually making it easier for humans to produce more in the factory. Whether it's critical machined parts, whether it's, whether it's casting, whether it's sort of the tier kind of two to three suppliers where it's the kind of the joysticks or the things that are inside. It's like there's so many critical parts that are actually inside of planes of anything defense related where you just need to be able to produce 10x more of all of those things. Munitions. I mean there's a lot of talk now about how do we just turbocharge, how quickly we can build munitions because we don't have enough. But it really is, I think all of the fears that I have about defense come down to production. It's all how quickly can you build? And yes, Sironic is vertically integrated, but there's a lot of companies that would attach one of those software defined factories to them and say, hey, just build us as many as you can of this one part.

[Unknown Host]

What are you excited about in space?

[Kathryn Boyle]

So I mean in space it really is anything to do with, with offensive space, I think we, you know, SpaceX is the most incredible company in the world. They've done extraordinary work. You know, they do extraordinary work with government. They now have a direct to sell platform. They have Starlink, which I think is completely, you know, it's revolutionizing Internet. But there's still more things that need to be done. You know, I'm invested in a company that's focused on ground stations, Northwood Space. They're building modular ground stations for every other company that needs to get data back to the ground. Our ground station infrastructure, extremely old. It takes forever to send, like the comms take forever. And so if you can just have more modular ground stations across, you know, across the world to get that data back from low earth orbit, that's game changing. So they're doing, you know, they're working with usg, but I think there's again it all comes back to just more. It's like these things are in some ways like, I don't want to say simple, but it's, you know, a lot of the things that I'm investing in are not science fair experiments. They're not things that are kind of going to get you riled up about. Wow. Like that sounds like the future, but it's just okay, we're just going to produce more of the things that we need because the infrastructure is just so lagging or so old.

[Unknown Host]

I'm just curious if you looked at Steve Quast's company Space Built.

[Kathryn Boyle]

No, no.

[Unknown Host]

They're basically doing logistics to where they just you build these things in space. That way it's not such a heavy payload. The satellite parts don't need to be protected with Kevlar and bulletproof vests or whatever the hell he's talking about bringing things up in sections and actually assembling in space so that the payload's a lot less coming leaving Earth.

[Kathryn Boyle]

But I'd love to chat with with them.

[Unknown Host]

I'll connect you.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Thanks but.

[Unknown Host]

But yeah. Fascinating guy but let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll wrap it up. Summer's here and if you're anything like me, you didn't spend the winter just sitting around. You stayed sharp and kept moving. And now it's time your gear caught up. And that's why I want to introduce you to Roka. I've been looking for eyewear that can handle any situation with performance and style. And let me tell you, these aren't your average shades. I've tested them in the real world from shooting to fishing to off roading and they hold up. They're lightweight, don't slide around on my face and can take a hit without falling apart. And the best part, they look good. Good. They're clean and modern. No frills here. Just premium eyewear that performs without compromise. That's something that I respect. And that's also why every time I head out the door, I reach for my Roka shades. Roka is based in Austin, Texas. American designed, no cut corners. The optics are crystal clear, cut through glare and the fit stays comfortable all day long. Need a prescription? They've got you covered with both sunglasses and eyeglasses. Not only does Roka have awesome shades, they also have these that protect you against blue light. I wear these every night when I'm winding down for the day and I still gotta look at my phone or my laptop or my iPad. It just helps you wind down and get ready for bed. They are a one stop shop for eyewear that's built to handle whatever life throws at you. Roka is the real deal. Ready to upgrade your eyewear? Check them out for [e-mail] and use code SRS for 20% off site wide at checkout. That's R-O-K-A.com wearing clothes that actually fit it changes everything. That's what I've found with True Class Classic. Their gear is built to make guys feel good in their own skin. Because when you feel good, you show up with purpose, more confident, more present. Whether you're heading into a meeting, grabbing dinner, or chasing your kids around the yard, what you're wearing matters more than you think. True Classic nails the balance. Soft, comfortable fabric that moves with you. Tailored where it counts and relaxed where it should be.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Be.

[Unknown Host]

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[Kathryn Boyle]

I think it's obvious. At this point, I'd rather people know, but.

[Unknown Host]

But, yeah. What do you mean by that? The attack on the American family?

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. No, it's. I wrote a speech that I gave a couple months ago where I really started talking about how I see kind of all of history as a war between the family and the state, these two big institutions. One is, you know, and it goes back to Plato. It goes back to, like, the republic, the Greeks, right? Where the entire, you know, philosophy of the republic is that perhaps the state can take better care of a society than these institutional families. And so when you look at sort of, you go back through history and you see that especially authoritarian regimes, the first thing that an authoritarian regime does when it wants to take over society is it ruthlessly destroys the family. So you mentioned the one child policy in China. That was an attack, a deliberate attack on the family from an authoritarian regime. And the purpose of it was, you know, it was for national interests. They talk about, oh, we couldn't, you know, we wouldn't be able to supply enough people with food. But what it really was was to weaken the only institution that could ever combat the state, which is the family. And so I'm a pretty conspiratorial person. I think there's been a concerted Attack on the family to strengthen the state, particularly for the last 50 years. But it's been done in very specific ways and legal ways, through the education system, through the medical system. And it is deliberately destroyed. And you see it through the birth rate, like we talked about in the beginning. Fewer and fewer people want to have families. And it's because of this deliberate attack on the family. And I wrote this piece called the War on Suffering, where I've been very vocal about the fact that I think everything in America changed in 1973. Everyone always point there's this website called WTF happened in 1971. And it points to that's when we came off the gold standard. That's when regulation started exploding in America in this year where everything bad in America started from this moment where you just see just complete change in a lot of things around America. And I've always said that that might have been the economic change that happened in America where financialization started and where housing became so expensive, where it became ridiculously expensive to afford healthcare or education. But in 1973, there were two things that radically changed how Americans view themselves, how men and women view themselves. And ultimately what I think is sort of the impetus and start of this sort of unraveling of the family. And I've said this a lot publicly on what I think changed for men, which was 1973, in January, Nixon did the most profound and most popular thing that he ever did during his presidency, which was that he ended the draft. It was unanimous. It was coming off of Vietnam. It was like a unanimous thing that everyone loved, everyone knew what needed to happen. Where he said, we're going to be an all volunteer for and we're going to allow people to choose to serve their country. And of course, this is something that even today, people, our military celebrates the fact that we don't have a draft, that this is part of American culture. But I think what it fundamentally said to young people is that it is a choice to serve. It is a choice. Not everyone does it, only the people who want to. They might want to do it for economic reasons, they might want to do it for love of country. But it is not something that everyone has to do to serve and defend their country. And if you think about it throughout human history, that is the first time that a country has said to young men, your purpose on this earth is not to defend where you live. And it was codified. It was like, that is not the purpose of manhood. And then 10 days later, and it was only in 2023, when I was writing this piece that I actually even realized this 10 days later, the female equivalent happened where Roe v. Wade passed from the Supreme Court. And that had a similar impact on women where it used to be. For all of human history, your purpose on this earth is to have children, is to have a family. And this was the first time. And in Western, you know, Western society, too, a lot of nations copied us after it. But this was like. This was the moment that really changed, where 10 days after men were told, your purpose is not to serve, women were told, your purpose is not to have a family. It's your choice. And so it completely changes the view of how men view themselves and how women view themselves. All in 1973, January, 10 days. And it's like, you know, I would say there's a lot of people who would say, well, these are all good things. It's really good that there's choice in America. Not everyone should have to serve their country. Like, not everyone. Men and women shouldn't have to go to war, or women shouldn't have to become mothers. But what we didn't do in that moment is we didn't provide anyone an alternative purpose. Purpose. We didn't provide men and women anything that says, actually, the purpose of manhood is this, or actually, the purpose of womanhood is this. We just said, go figure it out yourself. Actually, maybe there is no purpose. In the 70s, like, there was this very clear, you know, kind of, I would say, almost like nihilistic culture of, well, nothing really matters anymore. Like, you can do whatever you want. And like that. That, I think, has permeated so much of society where we don't even believe suffering should exist anymore. It's, you know, it's like the suffering for your country is, why would anyone do that? Suffering for your family? Why would you do that? But I think the minute that we destroyed the unique purpose of woman, which for you can't debate that for Millennial, that was the purpose of women, was to bear children and to have family. And then the unique purpose of man, which is to fight. The minute that we destroyed those purposes, men and women stopped relating to each other. They didn't know how to. They didn't know who they. They didn't know what their purpose was. They didn't know how they could relate. And when you look at it from that framework, the family was destined to fail from that moment.

[Unknown Host]

Damn. You think every man should have to serve the country?

[Kathryn Boyle]

No. So that, I think, is the. I don't know that every man needs to go to war. Right. But I think there is something that happens when you say we once were a country where everyone was treated this way. Everyone knew their purpose. Everyone woke up in the morning and knew, at 18, I am going to. There is a chance I will have to serve my country. And that just understanding that that is your purpose changes the way you walk. It changes the way that you think about your life. And the same thing for I don't think every woman should have to be a mother. It's almost, if I talk to nine people or 10 people, nine out of 10 people would say, of course, these are good things, right? These are popular things. But at the same time, when we didn't replace that purpose with something else, and we didn't have a way of saying this is how society should be.

[Unknown Host]

Organized, you're saying that it changed the consciousness of the country.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yes. And the thing that we did instead was instead of serving your country is an outward focused thing. It's focused on other people. It's focused on someone other than you. The same thing with being a mother. The minute you become a mother, you stop worrying about yourself, right? Like, you don't have time to make yourself the most important thing. Like, you have to worry about your children. So in both of those cases, those purposes, they were outwardly focused. They were things where this is how we organize society, and you care about the institution of family, and the men care about the institution of their country. But what we did instead was we turned inward. We started focusing on our own mind. And this is like the moment that we really start thinking about psychology. Like, who am I? What is my purpose on this earth? There's a great book by Philip Reith that was written in the 60s, actually, called the Triumph of the Therapeutic, which is that man really started turning inward in the 60s and early 70s and really thinking about, like, do I have purpose on this earth? And what is this? And the minute that you stop focusing outward and you become very contemplative, which is really what American culture has become, you become very individualistic, become very obsessed with yourself. Our generation is the trophy generation, the me generation of everything about me is interesting. And I'm an individual, and I can achieve anything I want. There's no barriers, there's no limitations. But it completely rips out all of the sort of underpinnings of what makes a society function. And I think in some ways that those were sort of the moments where it's like, then you saw the unraveling of, well, there shouldn't be any Any kind of suffering. Like, you know, it's around the same time that no fault divorce happened. Around the same time that, you know, like, you shouldn't be told who you are, you shouldn't be judged. You know, similarly in the medical arena, you know, this is around the time where ADHD sort of, you know, the late 80s, you know, SSRI started really coming, you know, coming about where it's like, we have to start medicating us because we're thinking too much about ourselves and we have to too much depression. And of course, depression, you know, SSRIs, I think, you know, were seen as kind of a niche thing. And now they're, you know, what is the number of Americans that are on them? You know, the sort of focus on the. The move to focus on the self was a very deliberate action. And I think that the crisis of the family comes from the fact that if you're focused on yourself, you really can't be focused on a family. And you hear this all the time from young people. It's like, I haven't achieved what I wanted. I can barely take care of myself at mid-20s, you know, I don't know who I am. How am I going to be able to take care of a kid? And we'd forgotten that, like previous generations, they didn't have that luxury. They didn't have the extended adolescence where they could say, oh, well, I don't know myself. Like, how am I going to go to war if I don't know myself? Like, the greatest generation wasn't able to say that. They just had to do it. And in some ways, it's like, we can definitely make the argument that things are better now. And in many ways, like, you know, people. People are living longer. You can definitely make the argument that these things were not necessarily good for society, but at least there was a societal purpose and organization. And I think the thing that has really been corrupted over the last 50 years is that we do not know what our American purpose is. And particularly as it comes to the family, Family has become an option. It's no longer the default institution that you build your life in.

[Unknown Host]

Yeah.

[Kathryn Boyle]

And without. Without that default institution, you build your life in. People just. They flail. You have the loneliest epidemic. You know, you have young women and men who.

[Unknown Host]

Depression.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Depression, exactly.

[Unknown Host]

For any men out there that are wondering what your purpose is, it's to provide for your fucking family and protect them. That's it. But I didn't realize there was that much confusion out there about it. But I mean, but then, you know, you live around and where are all the men? Where did they go?

[Kathryn Boyle]

They're quote the New York Times.

[Unknown Host]

Right, right. So, I mean, I wish I would have known you were a conspiratorial person because otherwise we'd be talking about aliens and the pyramids and Machu Picchu and all kinds of other shit. But I mean, so the question is, you had mentioned those were draft ended, pro choice or Roe v. WADE, you know, 10 days apart. I mean, so is this just the result of shitty decision making? You know, and we, the list goes. I'm not weighing in on those subjects, but what I'm, what I'm saying is, you know, it sounds like you think that's where it started. Then we see, you know, all the stuff with the gender stuff nowadays and Washington state, the state will come and take your kid if you don't do the gender affirming care. And there's just a whole number of things. And so is it stemming from somewhere or is this just a result of decisions?

[Kathryn Boyle]

I think it's a result of both legal and medical decisions because I think the medical community has a huge part of this as well. But I think it comes down to the war on suffering has been won, we've defeated suffering, and life is not about suffering. That is what I think our legal system thinks, that's what our medical system thinks. And when you think of the opioid epidemic, what started the opioid epidemic in the 90s, it was the belief in the medical community that suffering from back pain is one of the worst things that can happen. And that there's a magical pill that you can take that's gonna get you off of back pain. And then there were pill mills across America handing out opioids because people couldn't deal with suffering. And that was seen as a good thing. Like, don't you wanna eradicate suffering? Same thing with adhd. Young boys, you know, it's like they can't focus in school. Here's a magical pill and you're not going to suffer anymore. Your family's not going to suffer, your teacher's not going to suffer. You're going to feel great. And now 23% of boys at 17 years old are on ADHD medication in America. And it's because we just do not believe that anyone should have to suffer. We don't believe in resilience. We don't believe that anyone should have to make a choice that has nothing, that has something to do with society or something that is duty versus what they want to do, do. It's all individualistic. And I think the best example of the war on suffering is what hasn't happened fully in the us but it's happening in the uk. It already happened in Canada, which is if you now suffer from mental illness, you have the right to die. If you're over 18, you are welcome to go to a doctor who will sign off of it and you can end your life.

[Unknown Host]

Suicide machines.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. And that was not the America we lived in in before. So the question is, why are we so opposed to suffering? And I get a lot of pushback from people on this. Well, why are you pro suffering? And I'm a practicing Catholic. The entire story of Catholicism is about Jesus suffering for something noble, for something good for us. But it is a story of suffering and the movement to try to pull the story of suffering out of human life life. That's removing human nature, that's removing the entire Christian story out of how we live. And saying, you are not expected to suffer, which, what happens then you have an entire generation of young people who are no longer resilient. So I think one of the biggest.

[Unknown Host]

Lies is I think it takes drive away, too. Oh, 100% takes personal drive away.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

Which creates less innovators.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Totally. Which is why I do think a lot of these young people, the reason they go to Silicon Valley and they sleep on the factory floor and they work hard and they're building hard things, is because they know that suffering is inherently like there is something good about suffering for a purpose greater than yourself. But I do think that people are confused about how to find that. How do you find that outside of a society that tells you you don't need to get married, you don't need to have kids, you don't need to serve your country, you don't need to do something greater than yourself or your community. You don't need to be a pillar of the community anymore. You can move wherever you want. Just total freedom. And I think without those guard rails or those guides or people who can help you navigate life like people just get lost.

[Unknown Host]

Man. We covered a lot of ground there.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, we did.

[Unknown Host]

We covered a lot of ground. I wish we had more time, but I know you got a flight to catch, but last question, three people you want to see on the show.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Oh, my God. Goodness. Well, I won't volunteer our mutual friend, but I'd like to see him on the show as we talked about in the car. But, Elon, I think I'd love to see you chat with Elon, I think he's. We didn't get a chance to talk about Doge, but I think he's learned a lot about government. And I haven't heard him do a long form interview of kind of what it's like to try to reform government. I think that'd be really an interesting story.

[Unknown Host]

Do you think. Do you think. Sorry, I lied. Not. Last question. Do you think Doge worked?

[Kathryn Boyle]

I do, but for different reasons than most people. I think it worked as a cultural. I think it changed the culture in Washington, but also across the country, where Twitter was sort of the early experiment in doging, and he proved you can cut 75% of people. And then he went to government and he doged different departments. And there was a lot of, I think, backlash, but I think it made people realize we don't need as many people. We can work harder. We need to be more fiscally responsible. We need to be able to understand, like, where the money's going. I think a lot of people woke up and realized we're spending ridiculous amounts of money on things we don't need. And I do think that that sort of cultural change is gonna permeate all industries, all places. I mean, it's happening in the army now. Like, the army doged itself itself with the Army Transformation Initiative. So General George and Secretary Driscoll came out and they said, like, we're not going to wait for Doge to come to us. We want to cut our budget by 8%. We want to get all of these old, you know, old products we don't need anymore. All these defense things that we don't need. They call it the Humvee. They say, why do we have Humvees in production that were built for, you know, pre Desert Storm that we haven't used in 20 years? Like, why. Why do we need that? Like, there's. There's another vehicle that we could actually use that's. That's built for modern warfare. And so they've been very forthright about, like, we want to Doge ourselves. So I think it's caused this sort of cultural change.

[Unknown Host]

I mean, are you upset that it didn't stick? It's not going to stick. Correct. My understanding is that this is for one year.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

The house never got on with it. And.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, well, I think that now goes.

[Unknown Host]

Right back to the same old shit.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah, I would have liked to see the Doge cuts codified. It still could happen, right? Like, it could happen a separate bill. But then there's still tremendous young people we know A lot of them who are working in Doge and doing important work and modernizing the systems. So I'm hopeful that at least that entity will stay. But I think as a cultural movement, I mean, it's certainly changed how companies think about how many people they need. I also think AI is going to change how many people. People think they need. There's other factors that are going to impact that. But. But I. I think it will prove to have been successful.

[Unknown Host]

I hope so, man. I think. I don't know. I feel like our institutions are in shambles and it's. It's going to take this younger generation to really step it up.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah.

[Unknown Host]

And fix that. So. All right, last. One more.

[Kathryn Boyle]

One more. I'm trying to think which founder you should have on. You should definitely have on Elon, the.

[Unknown Host]

Hypersonics guys, I think.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Yeah. Brian Hargis at Castellion would be a good interview.

[Unknown Host]

Maybe you can connect me.

[Kathryn Boyle]

I can definitely connect you.

[Unknown Host]

Perfect. Well, Katherine, what an awesome conversation. I'd love to chat with you again sometime if you'd come back.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Absolutely. Thank you so much for having me. This has been great.

[Unknown Host]

It's my pleasure.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Thank you. Thank you so much.

[Unknown Host]

Jim Rome takes on sports. Why? Because you're not playing me with rapid fire takes and a lot to get to and I'm not sure you're gonna like all of it. Honestly, I don't even care if you like all of it or not. I have a job to do. Scorching debates on any given week, you have have lots to beef about, take advantage of. But get up in here. He's the spitfire of sports.

[Kathryn Boyle]

Smack.

[Unknown Host]

She's not my fault. We will get to all of that. The Jim Rome show podcast. Get up in here and we'll beef later on. What's your beef? Follow and listen on your favorite platform. You've been warned.