Katherine Boyle on Building Companies, Families, and Careers

Isn't it a terrible thing that we now live in a society where the only way that things get done is in the private sector? You know, that's an academic debate for academics, but like, we're losing time. The sort of burn it all down approach is not tenable, but the, I'm going to build something and I'm going to show you that it works and you're going to come see it. That is a success story. And we're not top-down telling our best technologists what they are going to build and how they're going to build it. We are letting private competition and we are letting private enterprise build the best companies in the world. One of the most reckless memes that has been delivered is that your 20s don't matter, is that you have time. This is, this is the most dangerous meme, but like, how great would it be if you had your life figured out? How great would it be if you knew who your spouse was? If you knew what you wanted your career to be, how great would it be if you had a 5-year plan where at 30 you would be operating at something that's compounding over time?

Hey everybody. Today's episode is with Catherine Boyle. Catherine runs the American Dynamism Practice, a16z. In this episode, we discuss how the private and public sector relationship has evolved, Why the elimination of the draft contributed to us losing a sense of public service in the US, how the Freudian view of psychology won out, how we're treating our young boys poorly, and how Katherine's religiosity makes her a better investor. Katherine never disappoints. Without further ado, here's Katherine.

Katherine, welcome to Upstream. Thanks so much for joining.

Thanks for having me, Erik.

So Katherine, by, by way of introduction for people who are not deeply familiar, I want you to define American dynamism and more so define the story of how it came to be, because it's not obvious that a style reporter for the Washington Post, later turned Stanford GSB graduate, would come to create or popularize the American dynamism practice in venture capital.

Even just calling me out as a style reporter, that's like full-on disagree.

I'm negging you, yes.

So thanks for ruining my credibility at the beginning. of it. But what is American dynamism? So the sort of traditional definition that we use is it's companies that are actively supporting the national interest. So a broad category of companies in tech companies, aerospace, defense, national security, but also things like housing, education, infrastructure, transportation, any company that technically touches something that deals with government. So whether they're selling to government, whether they're regulated from day one because they have certain restrictions of who they can sell to outside of the US, Or whether they're a company that touches all citizens' needs. There's a variety of different companies that we would put into that bucket. But the reason that we started the practice actually goes back to sort of a lack of Silicon Valley understanding, I think, in the last 10 years, how important these companies are for a functioning society. There's a variety of reasons why Silicon Valley and Washington kind of stopped working together. When you think about the origins of Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley was built by the Department of Defense. It was built by defense contractors. It was built in conjunction, hand in hand during the Cold War with Washington. And then sort of, I'd say like post-2001, 2002, things started really kind of going in opposite directions. Probably a variety of reasons for that. Maybe it's because California is so far away from Washington. Maybe it's because there was sort of a division of the types of jobs that elites were going into versus the types of jobs that people were going into in Washington or the types of interests, probably a variety of different reasons. But something happened where Silicon Valley and Washington sort of lost touch. And I'd say that in probably 2015, 2016, we started noticing, and I personally started noticing companies that started saying things like, oh, well, I care about national defense, or I care about the country, not speaking of things in terms of needs of the entire world, but things that are very specific because of physical reasons or because of regulatory reasons that really anchor around America. And in 2016, 2017, that was sort of a contrarian, controversial thing to say. And here we are in 2023, where this has become a category of company that many, many founders want to build, realizing that the needs of the country are unique and are important. And in a time where history has begun, where there's a land war raging in Europe, it is no longer controversial to say that a strong America is important.

And you recently had an article where you talked about why it's critical to invest in America and how VCs should approach American dynamism, but also how VCs shouldn't necessarily— how VCs should be approaching China. Why don't you unpack the argument you're making there?

Yes. I mean, the argument we're making is that Silicon Valley has to be involved in this conversation that Washington has on the important needs of— like, serving the needs of citizens, but also thinking through our place in the world. And for a long time, Silicon Valley sort of stuck its head in the sand and said, we don't really want to be part of this political conversation. We're building things over in California. We're doing our own thing. Please leave us alone. And that's not possible anymore. And I think like you kind of have to go back to like 2010, 2011 and kind of realize, you know, the last decade has been fundamentally transformative for tech as an industry, but also for, for the country. Where tech is no longer this little kind of thing out in the shadows. It is American dynamism. It is the way that we build things now. Like the venture-backed model is how we build new companies in America. And increasingly it's how we build companies in the world or in the world, you know, in capitalist countries. And so it can't be divorced from our regulatory sector. It can't be divorced from the way that we provide citizens with civic goods. And there has to be, I'd say, a stronger partnership and a stronger relationship between those 2 entities, and also an understanding of what we're good at. Silicon Valley, and I use Silicon Valley broadly, I don't mean— it's no longer a place in California, that's changed. One of the things I talk about in the article is that I've been— we launched this practice 18 months ago. I haven't made a single investment in San Francisco, which I think is shocking to people, and San Francisco, Silicon Valley broadly. I mean, I've made investments across the country, in various states. And I think that is new. And so, you know, in some ways it's like tech has sort of finally achieved its promise of being able to kind of, you know, be anywhere. A kid in Kansas can build a company in the same way that a kid in Silicon Valley or New York City can. And so that's fundamentally a good thing. But we still have this sort of issue of Washington being deeply skeptical of what Silicon Valley does and Silicon Valley being deeply skeptical of what Washington does. And I think ultimately they're going to have to come together in order to solve some of these big civic problems.

What do you say to people who say, actually, we should be working with China and being much more collaborative, and maybe we can convert them into an ally? Uh, you know, more the carrot versus the, the stick approach.

Yeah, so I think that was, that was what we tried 10 years ago. You know, that, that was, that was certainly an approach that, that people believed in, and, and that was why, you know, a lot of You know, a lot of companies, a lot of firms, but also just a lot of leaders across industry and across government believed that that was possible. And I don't hear anyone reasonable saying that anymore. People aren't— there are people not saying things. There are people who are quiet, but no one is saying, oh, we can work with Xi Jinping. Like, no one's saying that. No one's saying the CCP is going to be a great partner for America. China's not even saying that. You know, the new ambassador to the US spoke publicly yesterday to American citizens, and it was probably the most flamboyant and sort of hardcore message to Americans. Like, we're not— like, there's— we're sort of— the ship has sailed on sort of that philosophy. And I think everyone kind of realizes that. But I do also think, like, you know, American dynamism isn't just about sort of the relationship that we have with other nations, the relationship with China, or defense. Like, American dynamism is fundamentally about, like, how do we improve America? How do we stop stagnation? How do we solve the problems that we all know exist? Things like housing, things like access to education, access to good education that actually helps you get a job. How do we, how do we use technology to solve these core problems, knowing that for— there are unique reasons why we have these problems in America that don't necessarily translate to other countries? They could translate to other countries and to allied nations as well. But I think it's really sort of a Put your head down and sort of how will we solve these problems that are unique to us from first principles? And the exciting thing is the founders that we've worked with, that message really resonates. And it's not a message that we necessarily came up with. It's a message that we were hearing constantly from founders, particularly post-COVID. And it feels like now is, we're at the early end of a 10, 20, 30-year sort of story of people really using technology to solve these core issues. For their communities.

Those are easy to get behind. But over the past few decades, people have used the term national interest to justify foreign interventions in the name of exporting democracy. So what's the American Dynamism perspective on foreign policy, or what it means to think about the national interest outside of the US?

Well, it's interesting because, you know, we like to say we don't have a State Department at Andreessen Horowitz. Like we're not trying to craft foreign policy. Like that, like it's sort of like leave unto Caesar what is Caesar's. Like the government will do what it wants with that. And they should. Government's really good at making laws. Government's really good at representing the citizens and crafting foreign policy. I actually think the big problem we got into, Silicon Valley got into, you know, 10 years ago was thinking that we could craft our own foreign policy and that we could work with various countries and do certain things that the US government didn't necessarily like. And now we're sort of realizing that that's not possible. The thing about American dynamism is that it is deeply focused on founders who ultimately want to solve problems for their communities and want to focus on things that are affecting them, that they see firsthand. And so it looks different than a lot of other practices or a lot of other categories of technology for that reason. We've invested in multiple veterans who've served their country, who've come back and said, you know what, I really would've liked to have when I was at war. Or, you know, we've invested in former FBI agents who have built software products because they weren't using software, they were using thumb drives when communicating with large companies that, you know, that are building the software of the future. So the types of companies that we're investing in are really, really, they're specific problems that people have experienced as they've worked for government or as they've served their country, Or as they've been in their community saying, why doesn't this exist? And they're solving it and they're solving it in different regions than before. They're solving it in different ways than before. Oftentimes they're tied to the physical world, which is a huge part of this. For a very long time, investors in Silicon Valley didn't like hardware. They didn't like investing in things that were tied to physical constraints. And I'd say that has been upended. That's now no longer an existing meme.

Some people hear your response and say, yeah, Silicon Valley and DC have disentangled. And what we need to do is get Silicon Valley talent in DC. And there have been these organizations to try to get people to work for government with kind of middling success or mixed results. Why is that the wrong approach? Or why is that the wrong framing for the problem?

So I don't necessarily think it's the wrong approach. I actually think we need a more know, a more technical workforce in government. That's actually one of the reasons why I'm excited about the trend line showing that the vast majority of young people going into colleges now are doing more technical degrees. We need those people to go work in Washington in the bureaucracy and have an understanding of how technology works. So I am all for sort of these tech transfers between, you know, East and West and kind of bringing that together. But it's not going to be how we build the next SpaceX. The next SpaceX will be built by people who are radically convinced that their view of the future and of their methodology for building is going to result in a massive company and a massive sea change in how a sector is built. And we know what that looks like in Silicon Valley. There's a certain type of profile that builds these extraordinary companies. They're a little quirky. They're very serious. They're seen as off, as we've talked about in the past, Erik. They're seen as very off in terms of, they're not normal people. And they're able to corral a group of misfits together that have both technical and just superhuman abilities in terms of how they build and how fast they move around a mission to build an extraordinary company. And that's all— we've done that in America for a very long time. That's how we build. Yes, there are examples in previous generations of when the government has been able to put massive amounts of money to work around a key mission. We haven't done that recently. In my lifetime, we haven't done that. And the way that we've achieved extraordinary things since I've been born as a millennial, born in the '80s, was through companies, using either the venture capital model, which has become more common over the last few years, but people coming together and building things outside of the bounds of government. And so I think we need to continue doing that, but I think we need to continue doing that in a way where government is working hand in hand with Silicon Valley, and ensuring that the critical needs, whether they be defense needs, education needs, housing needs, are met. Because this is the only way that we're going to meet the needs of citizens in this country.

It's the only way because the private sphere has the right sort of incentives, basically, to acquire the best talent. The best talent needs to be incentivized in a proper way and given the room to run.

So I think there's a number of reasons. But yes, I think the division between the public and the private sector And the delta between not only the economic delta, the status delta, the fulfillment delta, if we're going to use a millennial term in terms of what young people are looking for in their careers, all of that has gotten wider and wider and wider. I think Mad Men sort of explains a lot of what the country is today. And there's a scene in Mad Men where you're watching sort of these high-power ad executives who the equivalent would be hedge fund managers, investment bankers, very elite Manhattan jobs. They're leaving their swanky restaurant to go back home, and Don Draper gets in his Cadillac, very fancy car in the '60s when it was filmed, and he goes home to what seems like a very nice, an extremely nice middle to upper-class house, but there's no helipad.

Hey, we'll continue our interview in a moment after a word from our sponsors. Hey everybody, I want to recommend a couple other shows that we also run. One is Moment of Zen, which I co-host with Dan Romero and Antonio Garcia Martinez. We talk about everything from tech to history, philosophy. We've also featured Marc Andreessen and Balaji on those podcasts, so I recommend you checking them out. My other show is Cognitive Revolution. It's an AI show that I co-host with Nathan Labenz.

I recommend listening if you want to stay up to date with all things AI.

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He lives in a neighborhood, you know, he, he doesn't live in a compound. And it would've looked very similar to what someone who worked at the CIA, someone who worked at the White House, someone who worked in Washington, if they were coming back from a fancy meal in Washington, DC, they would've gone to the suburbs of Northern Virginia and gone to a similar house. Which is to say that there wasn't as big of a delta between the most elite high-status jobs in Manhattan in the '60s and the most elite high-status jobs in Washington in the '60s. And now there is a massive, massive difference between if you work in government and if you work in private sector. And that change, I think, is fundamentally why you see young people who go to terrific schools and major in international studies or government or politics and They have sort of the ability to go into the bureaucracy. And vast majority of those young people decide that they want to go work in the private sector, and they ultimately go work in the private sector. So this is not a new thing. It's not something that is even that controversial. In the late '80s, actually, Paul Volcker was the chairman of a commission that he deemed a quiet crisis, which was, why is the bureaucracy being decimated in this country? Why is it that we cannot recruit young people to work inside of government? for long careers. And that was in 1989, 1990. So where are we now? Things have only gotten worse. And so the idea that government can do these things without the help of the private sector, or that government can decide how things are going to be built and sort of keep the private sector at arm's bay, as has been the case for how government likes to work, it's just not tenable. There's going to have to be a deeper partnership, and there's going to have to be an understanding that the people going into technology Um, and particularly the young people who are very equipped in understanding how technology works are going to have to be a part of all of the solutions, um, that government, that government needs to provide its citizens.

So some public-minded people hear this and they, they think something is really lost by the idea that much of our, um, sort of services that used to be, um, given by the government are now better served by the private sector. And I remember when I was in college, there was this book we read called The Rise of Neoliberalism that lamented the rise of privatization across everything. I'm curious why, uh, how one would respond to that. To me, the mental model is either something has to be controlled by an individual person like SpaceX and Elon, you know, CEO, or it's this kind of unaccountable bureaucracy that is neither accountable to the market nor to a voting base. Like most government agencies, um, you know, they don't, um, they can't either can't get fired or many people can't get fired and we don't vote for them. Um, and so there's this kind of myth that, uh, it's all democratically elected and democratically accountable. Is that your read too, or what's the right way of thinking about the trade-offs between privatization and, and, you know, the opposite?

I'm more interested in the question of who gets results. So I think a lot of the people who are most focused on who has the power in that situation, you know, it's a very academic question. It's something that people like to debate. You know, Washington's always very interested in who has the power. And that's sort of, you know, I'd say sort of a feature or a way that Washington thinks. But like the thing that most citizens care about is, am I getting these services delivered on time? But that's like that's that's what people care about. Like and and and so I you know part of the reason why tech has you know such a high favorability rating if you look at all of the Pew polls on you know what do you think about various companies and sort of how do you interface with technology by and large most Americans love technology because it means that their packages are delivered faster. You know people love 24-hour shipping. It means that they're getting great content delivered to their phones. It means that they can keep in touch with their grandkids. Like, people love these magical experiences. And I think, you know, there is a conversation to be had of how government and tech work together that is important. I'm not diminishing it. But in terms of, you know, arguing, well, who should be making the decisions? Or isn't it a terrible thing that we now live in a society where the only way that things get done is in the private sector? It's like, that's an academic debate for academics, but we're losing time. People really want to solve these problems, and these are problems that get worse by the day. So I think that's a less interesting question than the how question of how do we solve these in the least amount of time to make sure that the most people benefit from technological innovation in these categories?

Education is a fascinating sector to look at this problem with because And we've both invested in a company that enables school choice. But education is a sector that largely hasn't had a lot of private sector innovation because it's been disallowed in the name of sort of, you know, like broader societal flourishing or sort of equity. And yet the education system is so broken on so many levels. And yet innovation has just been slower than we wanted the past couple of decades.

There's so many different ways to look at education, whether we're talking about higher education, whether we're talking about vocational education, whether we're talking about COVID sort of raised the concern of early childhood education, which is totally different than even sort of elementary education. I mean, these are various stages in life where things have completely broken down. You mentioned education savings accounts and a company that we're both investors in, Odyssey. I do think that COVID woke people up and people now, particularly parents, now recognize that the sort of promise of, well, I went to a public school or I went to a parochial school and had a great education and didn't have to think much about it. And I just went to the school that was closest to me. That is just not a privilege that parents have today. They have to think through, how am I actually going to be active participants in my child's education, just given the degradation of education broadly in this country? Particularly because, and I think this is something that's often left out of the discourse, you know, elementary education in this country was developed in the late 19th century. The focus was on literacy. The focus was on, can we make sure that the vast majority of Americans in this country can read? Not like read Kant, but just like read normal things. And it actually was very successful. Getting a country to be literate was, in the late 19th century, it was a successful methodology. But we now live in the 21st century where a couple months ago, the world kind of woke up to the idea that the world that we previously lived in before widely available artificial intelligence, you know, like, like, like the world is now different. It will look different going forward and how people interface with intelligent systems will, will look different as well. And so the idea that we need to have the exact same curriculum that our grandparents had in elementary school, and that we have to have the exact same curriculum that our parents or grandparents had, because this is how teachers have been educated and this is how they like educating their children, their students. There needs to be a broader conversation of how we are going to change education for the 21st century. And we've never had that happen. It started with COVID out of necessity. But I actually think now we're going to have sort of the technological sea change that's going to cause people to say, this is not how we should be educating kids. That the subjects, the division of subjects, the methodology of learning, that is for a bygone era. And it has been for a bygone era for a long time. So I'm hopeful that there will be, you know, changes in that regard. You mentioned that it's very difficult to make changes on any type of education, particularly elementary education. But I think something like ESAs that gives parents the opportunity to choose how they're going to spend the dollars that would have been allocated to school, you know, to educate their child, gives them the opportunity to decide how they're going to spend the dollars. I think that is probably the most fair way for parents to decide to take bets on their children's own education and to also know the needs of their child. Parents know better than anyone right now, given what they had to go through in COVID, how their children learn and what their children learn and what they're interested in. And so getting them more involved in the process of education, I think, is a net good for society.

You've talked about how one of the reasons why there was a status decrease in working for the government is that is because of the— when we took away the draft, the mandatory draft in the '70s. What do you think is something we should do to reinstill a greater need for public service or make working in government higher status again?

Yeah, and I don't know that it was even the status thing. I think it was more of an understanding of sacrifice for your country, an understanding of sacrifice for your fellow man. And to go back to Mad Men, I know I'm talking about Mad Men a lot, but it really is, I think, the show that sort of encapsulates American stagnation and sort of American change and sort of does it in a very great way. There's this epic scene in Mad Men where Roger Sterling is talking to Honda, which was a, you know, it's a Japanese company, and it's 20 years after the end of World War II. And he refuses to be in the meeting. He's very rude to them. He gets kicked out of the meeting by Don Draper, who's the protagonist, because he says, I served in World War II, and it's still very raw. I lost friends. I think that's the quote. I lost friends there. And Don Draper has to say, you fought? You fought this war so that we could be in a safer world, and now we are in a safer world, so move on. And that was sort of the view of how— and Don Draper fought in Korea. It was like you looked at all of these executives that were at the height of their careers, and they had all served in live wars. They had all sacrificed for their country. They had all seen horrific things, and their country then told them, thank you for your service, now get back to work. And everyone had that experience. And now it's been completely divided where the vast majority of people who go into the military are not elites going to top universities. It's not as common of an experience. It's become more of a— I think there's something like 7 states account for more than 51% of enlisted men and women, and it's not necessarily even the biggest states by population. The military has become a much more siloed experience in this country, and the military used to be a proxy for serving your country. So we've lost sort of the thing that, one, creates binds between people of different regions, socioeconomic class, different belief systems, where when you're serving and fighting alongside someone who's different than you, but you're fighting for the same beliefs, that creates a camaraderie that this country had until 1973. And so I think in some ways that can't necessarily be replicated by other types of service organizations or by the college experience that excludes people based on income in many ways in this country or people based on class in this country. So how do we replicate it? I don't know. I think there's been lots of ideas about, oh, well, can we create a national call to public service that would— they're pipe dreams. No one would ever vote into law a system that says every American between the ages of 18 to 20 has to serve in a certain capacity. It'd be nice, but that's just not going to happen. We don't have the will for that. So I don't know how we replicate a system that forces people to believe in something greater than themselves and to sacrifice something that's greater than what they have. We don't have that experience anymore that's universal across the country. Um, and it's probably the biggest change in the last 50 years that no one talks about.

And, and it has a lot of sort of secondary effects that we may not appreciate. Like, we've been talking with our friend Antonio, or he's claimed that Israel's, uh, mandatory conscript— conscription, uh, maybe even inspires things like, uh, you're keeping their birth rate high because people, you know, settle down early or become adults sooner in their lives and start to think about the future. Uh, and, uh, maybe that leads them to take their 20s more seriously and have kids earlier.

Well, no, I mean, there's probably a lot of downstream effects, but it also, I mean, I'd say the sort of immediate effect and anyone who served in the military and even in the all-volunteer forces is very much the case that you meet people from different walks of life. It's the most diverse organization in the country. You meet people who have different experiences, different viewpoints, and you're forced to work alongside of them. Whereas you can't say the same thing about Google. That's not the same. You can't say the same thing about Harvard. The institutions that have sort of replaced, for pockets of society, the institutions that would've replaced this experience at the ages of 18, 19, 20 do not offer the same sort of rigor, but also the same sort of, you have to work with people who are different than you, which I think sets you up very well for the rest of your life. And most Americans don't get that anymore.

Shifting gears a little bit. One thing I've reflected on is Elon taking over Twitter and then just like a whole regime change and making it a new kind of act like a startup again, in terms of being able to ship new products and sort of reinvigorating. And of course, when you're a startup, things are messy, has shown me that that could happen at a massive institution. To which Balaji says, yeah, it could happen in a company, but it can't happen at a government level. But it seems like FDR did that to some degree, or it seems that there have been some presidents who've been able to implement kind of a— I don't wanna say a different regime, but just a wholesale reset of some institutions that were 100 years old or many decades old. And some people are calling for things like that in certain agencies. Do you think that that is potentially practical or potentially where things could go, or what do you take even from that idea?

I think SpaceX is a better example than Twitter because Elon Musk was seen as this sort of crazy guy who said, I'm going to kind of reshape the launch industry and we're going to go to Mars. And it's a perfect example of Washington ignoring him for a very long time until it became impossible to ignore that he had built the best rockets, that he had made them reusable, that he had completely transformed an industry. That would not have been able to transform itself with insiders. And I'd say actually that is the best example of an American dynamism story, an American dynamism spirit where you don't have to, you know, like, like the sort of burn it all down approach is not tenable, but the, I'm going to build something and I'm going to show you that it works and you're going to come see it. And ultimately then you are going to work hand in hand with me on these problems. That is a success story. And it's a success story, not only for the private sector and for companies like SpaceX, it's a success story for the American government. And one that should be touted across the world. Look at what we were able to build. Look at the companies that we've been able to foster and look at how we're now working hand in hand. And we're not the CCP. We're not top-down telling our best technologists what they are going to build and how they're going to build it. We are letting private competition and we are letting private enterprise build the best companies in the world. And so I actually think there's many success stories. There's gonna be many more success stories because SpaceX has been so successful, because companies like Anduril and the defense space are following in their wake. But I don't think that it's, we need to burn everything down and not, and sort of exit everything. exit what we've built because some things aren't working.

To that end, we're certainly not China, and we do things differently. But one thing you said we can learn from them is how close their private and public sector works together on some of the most important problems. Why don't you say more about exactly what we should do that reminds you of what they do?

Sure. So, I mean, I think the DOD is probably the place where we have the best, I'd say, technology has the best relationships because there is a procurement regime. There always has been a standing defense industrial base that is supposed to work hand in hand with the Department of Defense. So there is sort of laws that have already been built. Yes, there are companies that have been around 100 years that get 40%, you know, there's 5 companies that get 40% of the procurement budget every year, which is sort of insane given how old they are and given that they, you know, that they aren't sort of modernized in terms of their approach. But there is at least a methodology for procuring technology. And, you know, what we've seen that works, and it's very different than the CCP model, is you are going to be told exactly what to do. And if you don't comply, there will be consequences. That is an authoritarian model. And sometimes you could make the argument, actually, Palmer Luckey, who's the founder of Anduril, makes this argument. It's probably an easier way to oftentimes make companies and make technology. But we have a different model that should be and should be prized, which is capitalism, which is let the best technologies win. Let there be robust competitiveness and real competitiveness, not faux competitiveness of innovation theater, where then the contracts all go to Lockheed Martin because they've been around the longest, which is oftentimes what happens. But real competitiveness, like who can create the best rocket? Whoever can create the best rocket gets the contract. It's a very simple thing. And I think that That is what we need more of. And honestly, that's where we're moving more towards. And I actually, I'm hopeful, maybe I'm naive, but I'm hopeful that we're seeing the Department of Defense sort of wake up and have been over the last few years and saying, okay, AI is very different than battleships. Having autonomy in a lot of our systems and building next-generation capabilities is going to come from new companies. And therefore, we have to be able to make decisions fast and we have to be able to award real contract dollars.

You mentioned earlier about America being a great place to come build a family and a life for your family. You have a quote here. You've said previously, I've always believed that much of American life and history is experienced through the rise and fall of families. How is that true for your family? And unpack that quote.

Yeah. And I'll have to say, it's not my quote. I mean, that quote has been repurposed in so many— it was the Hallmark quote of The Departed, which of course is one of the greatest mafia films ever created. Nathaniel Hawthorne, you know, said something similar, like these, the, the, uh, not an original thought at all. I think a lot, you know, it's interesting, like I was reflecting actually with you and a few others on sort of the life extension movement in Silicon Valley. And I think that is a very specific Silicon Valley millennial movement where people only think about their lifespan. It's like 0 to 80, 100, maybe 120 if, if, you know, all this stuff works out, whatever. And they don't think about it, you know, they don't think about it through the life of their family. Other cultures, I think, are much better at this than the sort of American individualist experience of, I exist on this earth as part of a long story of the family. And my life is not, you know, over at whatever age I die at, because I have, you know, children who carry on the legacy, carry on the name, carry on the experience of the family. And these family stories actually matter. And I very much come from a tradition like that. Oftentimes you only hear people talk about bringing shame to their families if they're first-generation Americans or whatnot. I'm not. My grandfather was an immigrant from Ireland. I say in some ways the experience of my family comes from their beginnings as very poor. The 2 things they had in common, my paternal grandfather came from Ireland at the turn of the 19th century, ended up in the coal mines, fought in World War I. My maternal grandfather fought in World War II, grew up as one of 12 children, graduated from 8th grade but didn't have a high school education, and drove a truck his entire life. And so when you look at 2 generations to go from that experience in America of driving trucks, coal mines, fighting in wars, coming over on boats, to sitting here and having a conversation with you, that's an extraordinary American story. And again, it's a story that's becoming less and less true for people. And there's reasons why very ordinary men were able to benefit from hypergrowth, strong public and private investment in technology, a strong investment in education, all of these things that I think were the hallmarks of the 20th century. Very ordinary people and very ordinary families were able to go from working class, working poor to middle class. That is changing. And that, I think, is probably the question of my life, the story of my life. how I ended up escaping that. There's probably some reasons for that, luck being a huge portion of that. But I also think there is sort of this question of believing the memes that society gives you. And for too long, for the millennial generation in particular, there has been this meme that you cannot escape your past, that everything is sort of set in stone. There has been sort of an epic focus on the culture war versus on actually doing things and building things. And I look to those generations of people who didn't know that much or think that much, but they did a lot. And they believed that they could escape their past. And I think that meme is really powerful and important. And it's one that we have to kind of reignite as a society, that you can escape and that you can kind of carry on and better yourselves versus what your parents had or what the previous generation had. and see that sort of betterment as a success story in and of itself, versus like, oh, well, where am I in my individualist life? This little thing that is such a kind of tiny moment in time. So that's sort of a convoluted way of saying that I think the family is far more important than the individual, and that it's an institution that's understudied, underutilized in many ways, and that the status of it, um, or people seeing it as something that can help them achieve what their goals are in life. That's sort of been memed out of, out of the story of why it's so important.

So much of society seems more so than it was a few decades ago kind of anti-family or less excited about the family or anti-parent, you know, less excited about parenting or being a mother even. Is that just because of the rise of the celebration of the individual? This sort of, you know, everyone's got this trauma they've got to work through and work is never done and they just have to, have to do that work and that's an individual task? Or what, what's your kind of a, you know, broad assessment as to why the rise of, of, uh, of anti-family or anti-parenting like sentiment in the culture?

So that's, that's a huge portion, I think, of it. You know, like you and I have talked about, you know, Triumph of the Therapeutic and sort of books that have said, you know, there was this movement of looking outward. And I think it goes back to the conversation we just had about The draft and public service. But, you know, there used to be sort of this— society had expectations of you, and there was suffering, there was sacrifice, and it was sort of outside of the bounds of your control. And that sort of shifted. And when it shifted— there's arguments about when it shifted— but this sort of movement towards, we are going to look inward and we're going to look for fulfillment in ourselves, that's sort of a modern American conception. Yeah. It's not, you know, I think people often talk about sort of the individualist American sort of sentiment. I think it's different. I think it's a variation on that theme, but it's more, I'm going to look inside myself. I'm going to know myself. I'm going to focus on trauma, focus on the things that have happened in my history. And that's going to be sort of the unique sort of identity that I put forth to the world. I don't think that's been a very helpful philosophy. In terms of building things. In terms of being an interesting person, having stories, being really focused on yourself, maybe, but it hasn't actually helped people achieve more than their grandparents achieved.

I've heard it be described as the difference from honor culture to dignity culture, whereas honor culture is much more external and are you serving your family and your community and your society, and dignity culture is kind of are you being recognized in the way that you want to be recognized? Right? Like participation, participation trophies. So you mentioned this is sort of a kind of— you mentioned this somewhat of a distortion of an American value. But you also, I believe, read a bit about how there was some influence from Vienna on this worldview. Is there anything worth sharing about what that influence was?

I recently mentioned I had a hard time getting a job out of college, actually out of my master's program. I did everything wrong in my 20s. That's a longer story. But I didn't have any skills. I graduated into the Great Recession. And my first job was actually au pair. I was a nanny. And it's so funny because it's not something that comes up in my current line of work, but I learned a lot from taking care of children when I was 23, 24. And I did it in Vienna. It was one of these things where it's like, I can either sit at home or I can do grunt work. I'm a huge believer in grunt work. I think not enough young people do grunt work and sort of understand that not everything is a salaried job with healthcare, that sometimes you have to work, you know, like not everyone has that experience. I was really fortunate looking back to have that experience at the time. Was not fortunate to have that experience, but decided that if I was going to go, you know, do this type of grunt work and have a job, that I needed to do it in a place where I could learn a new language and that sort of So ended up in Vienna. It was a place that I've always been fascinated by. And I lived about a block away from Freud's house, which I thought was really interesting at the time. But it's like, if you spend time in Vienna, you realize that it is an underexplored, understudied city in world history, but also the impact that that tiny little pocket in time of the late 19th century, particularly when there were writers and dreamers and artists and, and philosophers, and frankly, like, psychology was born in these coffeehouses that has now been exported across the world as the only way to understand your mind. Like, the dominant theory of mind is the kind of Freudian psychology of what happens to you in your childhood, that you need to dive deep into the depths of your soul through talk therapy. This was seen as an extremist philosophy in the 19th century and sort of the experiments that were done. And, you know, it's like, living next to Freud's house, I went to the museum a lot. The experiments that were done on what were known as hysterical women at the time, hysterical rich women, were frankly very cruel. You know, a lot of the kind of history around sort of how this, this, this, you know, kind of practice developed is actually quite raw and quite cruel. And, and so my experience in Vienna was, was sort of seeing this kind of niche pocket of history having this extraordinary impact on American society when there's a whole other sort of theory of mind and many other theories of mind that could have taken kind of precedent? And so that's a question that I have. I don't have an answer to it as to why some sort of very extremist doctors in a time, a very precarious time, in a city that was going through tremendous change in advance of World War I, why that is now the dominant sort of theory of mind. sort of way that the Western world views our story. I don't know. I don't know if you have an answer.

Marc Andreessen has this quote he said publicly about how capitalism absorbs dissent and converts it into a luxury good or something. And I wonder if there's something applicable here where, to the extent that Freud is like the— or this idea is like the satisfaction of one's desires, and capitalism in some ways is about the satisfaction of one's desires. maybe with a, you know, more— if society has a bunch of religion, um, or religious fabric, or certain traditions that kind of channel desires or suppress certain desires, um, that, that can work. But when that kind of erodes over time or gets muted among a certain elite class, or a certain class, and it's all you have is the satisfaction of desires, and, you know, individualism is very, uh, sort of, you know, simpatico with that, maybe it's, uh, it works in conjunction with a with our modern economy and our lack of shared religious fabric?

Yeah, I don't know. I mean, my view is that memes are powerful. And part of me is like, well, Freud must have been the best at making memes because you had Adler at the same time. And if people haven't read The Courage to Be Disliked, it's a great book on what could have been a totally different philosophy of how to overcome things like anxiety, how to overcome things Like family history or family trauma, but operating in the exact same time. You often think about, we're living in a time where a lot of the most powerful and most interesting technologists all know each other. And 200 years from now, many of them will be forgotten, and some of their theories will be 100% dominant in terms of how people view how technology should be built. We don't know who those people will be. And you could say the same thing about kind of, you know, 19th century Vienna, where there were a lot of different philosophers and psychologists and doctors and people practicing and writers. And some of those theories turned into memes like everyone needs to go to therapy, which is a Freudian meme. But Adler must have been really terrible at marketing his ideas like that. That's sort of my takeaway is that like there were lots of people operating at the same time, but some of them were good marketers. And what would have been if we had gone with the exact opposite theory, which, you know, the Adlerian theory is it doesn't matter what happened to you in your childhood, that every day is a new day. Like, focus on the future, don't focus on the past. Actually, don't dig deep into your past because there's nothing you can do about it. And I do think that for a while that was sort of the dominant American philosophy. People came here from other countries to forget about the horrors of what had happened to them and their families. And it was going to build something new, we're going to hit the frontier, and we're only going to go forward because the past was so horrific. That is not the culture that we have now.

Yeah. We've also talked about 2 books that describe the different poles here. One is The Body Keeps the Score, and discovering trauma you didn't even know you had, this kind of thing. And then the other is The Mind Is Flat, which is a lot of the trauma is invented and reified by us continuing to believe it exists, and a lot more is up to us than we think. I mean, those are both, uh, kind of physiological books about how, how the body works that say, say and imply very different things.

You don't want to talk about my nannying experience? Your nanny experience?

I do believe in grunt work. The, the— I was a manager for the men's basketball team at Michigan, University of Michigan, and also at IMG Academy. And, uh, that was my first job after college as well. Um, and that was, um, you know, a glorified water boy and rebounder and just full-on bitch work. Like, the players didn't even know my name, like I might as well not existed. But I, um, but I never worked harder in my life. And there's just something about just like being on the total bottom and just 100% grinding. And, um, that is just really inspiring and, uh, you know, uh, edifying and codifying and, you know, formative. Um, and so—

Why did you choose to do that? Like, I actually, I actually think this is probably one of the biggest problems with our generation is very few People, like, I love asking people if they ever waitressed. Like, I waitressed in college. Like, did you do that? Why did you do it? Did you do it because it seemed like a fun job? Did you do it because you had to do it? What did you learn from it? You know, like, those are questions that I, you know, oftentimes don't come up in interview situations, but they tell you a lot about people. If you've worked physical labor, if you've, if you've, as you said, if you, if you've been at the bottom where people don't know your name. Or people see you as a shadow. That can be, you know, it can light a fire under you. It can teach you a lot about how society works, can teach you how to work with different types of people, to serve people who think they're better than you. I think those experiences, sadly, are being siloed for various parts of the population. And for the people that we interact with in, you know, in elite culture, oftentimes they haven't had those experiences. Whereas, you know, 50 years ago, It's like, it matters that Jeff Bezos worked at McDonald's when he was in high school. But how many CEOs have that experience now?

No, it's, uh, it's fascinating, this idea of earning your, earning your stripes. It's a, it's a sacrifice, going back to our sacrifice portion of, of, of, and even service to some degree. Related to that, we were talking about anti-family, anti-motherhood. You know, life is tough for the lower-class men these days. Uh, you know, 40% of men, uh, go to college as opposed to, you know, 60% of women. And much of manual labor has been either automated or outsourced. Now, you hopefully are bringing back some of these jobs to the US, but how do we think about— and then that's separate from sort of the value shift from some traditional masculine values that used to be celebrated to now them expecting to be more feminine or shun some of their masculine values. Some of them are even demonized in certain ways. How do we think about restoring dignity and opportunity for sort of the median or lower-class men going forward? How do we think about that?

It's a really good question. I think there's many compounding factors. We're now in a place where I think it's now majority of the workforce is women, majority of the knowledge workforce is women, majority of college graduates. I mean, this was even 15 years ago, majority of college graduates were women. So when they say the future is female, it's not just a catchphrase. It's very much the very people who are able to procreate in society are also the ones who are doing the vast majority of the work. That is new for history. Like, that is new for— like, that has never been done before. So we are in the midst of an extraordinary experiment. In terms of, you know, in terms of the question of how do we support men I actually think it starts earlier, which is how do we support boys? I don't think it's just men become adults and then they're not achieving. I actually think, from what I've seen, I'm the mother of 2 boys, the very little glimpses of this that I've seen is that a lot of boyhood is demonized in our current education system. And there's people who've written far more about this than me, but— Or, you know, it's something that I've just experienced where if you're not sitting in your chair, if you're not reaching certain milestones by the appropriate age, if you're very physical by age 2 but not very vocal, there's something wrong. And I think that sort of medicalization of what is probably gender difference, which that sort of medicalization of it is not healthy for boys. And that if it starts with, you know, the earliest of, I'm in a daycare, I'm in a, you know, a kindergarten where my instinct to run around because I just want to go outside and play is different than the kind of teacher's pet, which I was, which was, I want to sit and read a book. Of course, every adult wants the little girl who's going to sit and read a book or the little boy who's going to sit and read a book. But like, when we look at sort of differences on a wide enough scale, The vast majority of boys want to go out around and play with swords. In that setting, it becomes you know I would say almost an early demonization of the boyhood instinct, which kind of in many cases lasts throughout society. And we see this through through all levels of education where where girls are performing far better than boys, where women are performing. You know there's a new study out actually saying that women women are in in the three geos. of the highest earners. So New York, Los Angeles, Washington, D.C., women under the age of 30 are earning at parity or more than men. So the pay gap is actually being reduced too, which is something that should be celebrated, but also says something about sort of the way that we're educating boys or says something about male performance. It shouldn't be zero-sum. But I don't think there should— I mean, I probably feel the strong— I feel very strongly that the wars of the sexes are not healthy for society. That we should learn to work better together and that we shouldn't have sort of this demonization of, well, girls should succeed. And actually, there's a great book—

Boys and Men, Richard Reeves?

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

So we're not saying bring bullying back, to quote Sam Biddle, in a tweet, I believe, that started Gamergate. But we're potentially saying, hey, maybe we've gone so far on the other side of the spectrum in terms of, uh, you know, cataloging all male, um, or many kind of natural male tendencies as, um, problematic by their very nature.

And definitely, I mean, I don't think it has anything to do with bullying. I think it has a lot to do with recognizing that children learn differently. And it's not even— and it's across children too. It's not just boys learn one way, girls— I mean, that's like very reductive and simple. that there are different ways that people learn. There are like some people, you know, you see it early, like you see it so early when children are young. Like some children just love to take things apart and put things back together. Other children love to sing. Other children, you know, like to read books or like to be told stories or like to communicate with their moms and their dads. And it's like, there's such a variance of how— people accumulate knowledge and how people build and create things. And our current system of education really values one way of doing that. And it's a— and that's often because, and it's no fault of the teachers themselves, you have an overworked teacher who has 35 kids in a class, and it will be absolute chaos if they don't all sit in their chair, or if they don't sit in a circle. The only way you can see 35 kids is to put them in a circle. You know, so it makes sense why we have the systems that we do. But the people who are losing the most are, just based on the studies, and we know this, are young boys. They do not thrive in those environments. And so how can we create environments that allow them to thrive so that they can be promising men who then contribute in society and the workforce? If we do not solve this problem in the next decade, there will be dramatic consequences that everyone knows about and no one wants to say.

Your father-in-law, Timur Kuran, popularized the idea of preference falsification. And this is the idea that people believe things but don't want to say. And this is maybe one of the areas. I mean, the irony, to quote Larry Summers or paraphrase, where he talked about how males are higher variance and that they do the best in society, they're Fortune 500 CEOs, the majority of them, but also the worst in society. And the irony is that That Fortune 500 CEO level will probably continue to be majority men, even if it decreases. But the median and lower class college sort of rate percentage, or just their overall relative to the median lower class women will continue to drop or continue to get worse. And it'd be interesting to see. And but people use the justification of, hey, as long as our president and Fortune 500 CEOs are men, I don't want to hear about the problems of middle class or lower class men relative to women. But it'd be interesting to see if there will be kind of a focus on equalizing that gap as well at the median level and lower level, just like there is at the top level, but reverse gender.

You know, we oftentimes talked about family formation as imperative for children, um, for a lot of different reasons. Like, like, I like saying that, like, families are— like, families are the example of economies of scale. Like, if you have— and in this environment where it is almost impossible to raise a family on one income, if you have 2 incomes, For one, it allows for, you know, a better quality of life. Marriage actually does improve quality of life. Like every study shows that. But it also, you know, it's also a very civilizing force for men. And it's something that people have been very confident saying that for generations. I don't know if we can say that now, but it is very important for a lot of different reasons in society. And so the fact that we've sort of demonized family formation or that we've said it's not necessary Or that we say it's a choice. It's not— it doesn't necessarily have to be the backbone of society. I think there's a lot of reasons why families should be the backbones of society, not only to protect children, not only to give them more stable lives, but also because it's a civilizing force for now the sex that is ultimately going to be left behind in this current industrial revolution. It is imperative. So in some ways, I think we've been studying family formation from a variety of different contexts, and it needs to be studied in terms of how are we going to ensure that men are supportive in this new era.

We've talked a lot about memes in this conversation. You had a quote in an interview, we are in a full-contact, all-out war with forces competing for control of our minds. I want you to unpack that, but also just the idea of What memes in culture do you think are most either misunderstood or most prominent, but we're not paying attention to their effects because you're a student of how these memes influence culture?

Nothing is innocuous these days, but I'll give an example of one that I think is simple for people to understand and how detrimental it can be. And I wrote about it in my piece that I write for the Free Press, that it was basically about time. about one of the most reckless memes that has been delivered, particularly to the college-educated, particularly to millennials and younger, is that your 20s don't matter, is that you have time. And it's one of these things that, like, I think has become more common for people to hear as lifespans have gotten longer, as we've sort of created this, you know, this sort of extended adolescence where, you know, you're 18 and you're old enough to fight in a war. but you're not old enough to really think about career or to really think about what you could potentially do for society. And sort of in the piece, I talk about SBF, for example, who the media consistently referred to as a boy or a wunderkind or someone who was really young and successful. And you're like, he's 30. He's actually in his 30s. And 30 is old. 30 is old by any stretch of the imagination. Even if you're just looking at what is the half-life of the average American man, It's late 30s. It may be a little bit older, like 40 for women, if you're looking at siloing it by various demos. But I think about that a lot. I'm at my half-life, midlife. But society is telling me that I am extremely young. And why is that? Why has that meme been delivered for me? And there's probably reasons for it. One is that certain generations want to hold on to power. That's the more nefarious reading of the meme is that Like, that older people are living longer, therefore they're working longer, therefore they're in charge of organizations longer. And therefore, what would've been someone being at the peak of their career at 30, now that person will be at the peak of their career at 60. That's one interpretation of it. But I also think that it's an example of sort of coddling and sort of this view that you don't have to make hard choices in your life, and you certainly don't have to make hard choices in your life. when you're best equipped to make hard choices, which is when you don't have children, which is when you don't, you know, don't have sort of the same requirements and responsibilities of someone who has people depending on them. And it's just a very dangerous thing to tell children and to tell people who are, you know, entering adulthood. And it is by, like, by and large, the thing that I hear the most often is like, okay, I'm only 25. I don't have to have my life figured out. But how great would it be if you had your life figured out? How great would it be if you knew who your spouse was? If you knew what you wanted your career to be? How great would it be if you had a 5-year plan where at 30, you'd be operating at something that's compounding over time? And we know this mathematically, that the sooner that your life starts compounding, the sooner you stop sort of messing around and experiencing the world and trying new things, the sooner you make hard decisions, the better your life gets because Because those decisions compound.

And I've heard you say this capacity, like, in some way diversifying is a hedge. And hedging is not how you compound. And so, and then the pushback there, they would say, hey, but picking the wrong thing also, either picking the wrong partner or picking the wrong career could also be the wrong thing. And given I'm going to live longer and be healthier, shouldn't I take more time to really— I'm not just dilly-dally, but Really try a bunch of things and travel and experiment with new lives.

So I often point to the best executives know that that's also another fallacy, that by pushing off the decision, it doesn't make the decision any easier. Oftentimes it makes it harder, but there's some cost fallacy. The people who make the best decisions make them very fast. And when they make the wrong decision, they realize it and they reverse course. And oftentimes we have this fear that we're going to make the wrong decision, but that's an unplaced fear. Oftentimes we make the right decisions about life. So the sort of Bezos one-way door, two-way door, there are very few decisions in life that are one-way door, even career. So I went all in on what was 100% the wrong career for me, and I was able to reverse that decision. It was difficult. I wish I hadn't done it. I wish I had been smart enough to make the right decision, but you can reverse your career. And oftentimes people do not want to do that. They don't want to go all in on one thing. They don't necessarily want to commit to a person, to a job, to an identity. And I think the earlier that you make those choices in life and the earlier that you kind of stop experimenting, there's so many examples of success stories. And that's sort of a very dangerous meme that has been given to people. So they won't compete with the other people who are making really difficult decisions. I mean, it's like, this is, this is the most dangerous meme. So yeah, I, that's, that's one example, but I think there's so many examples of people who are at war for your mind. And you have to ask yourself, what are the incentives of these people who are creating these memes? Like, do they want me to succeed? My parents want me to succeed, or the vast majority of parents want to see their children succeed. But like, what about the other people? Do they really want to see me become the best version of myself? Probably not. Maybe this is a low-trust society that I'm speaking in, but I think these memes are far more dangerous than people let on to.

Well, I think about this a lot. Why do people celebrate other people being vulnerable on social networks, like about their failures and stuff? Because maybe they're kind of excited when you fail. Maybe it makes them feel better about themselves, or they can rise up. Why play into this sort of attention game for people who actually would prefer that you didn't succeed? The memes are people should strive for optionality and freedom, and yet they don't appreciate that one, doing things like starting a company builds lots of optionality because— or committing to something like— because lots of opportunities will emerge that you wouldn't have foreseen otherwise. And then similarly, know, pursuing things for optionality too many times, like you, it will, like, if, for example, if people will go be consultants for like 10 years, because they want, they want to start a company. Well, in order to start a successful company, you might need a few tries. And plus, your opportunity cost rises to your point, like the optionality death trap is actually like flawed on its own terms. And then similarly, like the freedom thing, you know, David Brooks once said, what you chain yourself to is what sets you free. Once you commit to a person or a place or a project, you now are free from agonizing over what person, project, or place should you commit to, which will save a ton of brain space.

We know this instinctually. We actually know, and this is why society by and large has organized itself in these ways of making decisions at a certain point, encouraging marriage so that you can have children, encouraging Encouraging staying with a career, encouraging staying with a role, an identity in life. And I think there's— it's sort of a— in some ways, because America has become so prosperous, many more people are confronted with these questions. This used to be a question of kings and queens, of who am I, and sort of these sort of heady questions of how to spend your time. So in some ways, it is a symptom of progress and success. But we need these structures and we need to encourage, you know, encourage sort of structure in society so that people don't lose their minds. And I think if you, if you look at sort of, you know, why does it feel like people are like, why does it feel like people are losing their minds? Like there's no one who's going to argue against that, that we haven't sort of, you know, and it's like, what are the reasons for it? Well, it could be perhaps that there is no structure. It could be perhaps that there is too much choice. It could be perhaps that, that too many people are sort of waiting for perfection on all dimensions of their life instead of just making choices that are ultimately going to maybe not make them happy, but maybe make them content. And when we look back at previous generations, that's what they did and things worked out. And again, I think a lot of the pressure is taken off of those decisions when you're not thinking of your life as this thing that is only you, but you're thinking of your life as one one part of a long lineage of people. It's so much— it's just comforting to know that it doesn't all rest with you. And that your choices, as long as you're sort of moving the ball forward for this group of people that are your family, your kin, like the people you care the most about, that that's okay. It doesn't have to be perfection. We don't all have to, you know, kind of achieve the ultimate dream.

It's this great irony that pursuing what we think will make us happy in the moment, our whole lives in some ways won't make us happy or fulfilled looking back at our lives. Whereas pursuing things, you've talked about the importance of suffering or believing in the value of suffering, things in which involve sacrifice and deep suffering, and hey, we're not happy at that given time because we're engaging in hardship, could lead to a life more fulfilled or happy. The economic growth is really focused on removing, first on removing privation, basically going on Maslow's hierarchy of needs. And once many people have gotten great food and shelter and those needs met, and at some point it's all about increasing utility, but at some point you kind of need to introduce disutility. You need to introduce that suffering. And capitalism doesn't do it easily for us unless we choose to start a company or things like that. But there's this kind of broader layer of this thing that was once the good and the thing to optimize for, which is the satisfying of desires on the lower level of Maslow's hierarchy of need, doesn't help us get to that point, like removing suffering. We want to remove suffering to a point, but not all the way. And so how do we voluntarily introduce some level of suffering to have that level of meaning?

No. And even if we remove all suffering, we introduce synthetic suffering. And, you know, suffering is a huge part of life, and how you deal with suffering ultimately defines you. So this sort of, like, push to reduce all kinds of suffering at the, you know, at the expense of any type of sacrifice or any type of progress, I actually think is part of the reason why we're so, you know, so sad. I mean, if you look at every new poll that's come out, you know, Jonathan Haidt has really good statistics around just depression and rising teen depression and sort of this sort of— the numbers are shocking because it shows that the vast majority of people are sort of entering this world where they feel unhappy just being. And so we have to figure out why that is. It can't just be, you know, like a lot of the hypotheses I think are wishful thinking at not doing the kind of real kind of saying the truths that are hard to recognize, which is that maybe— we're consuming memes that are very dangerous or memes that are just not true and that it's leading people to believe things that are actually harmful for them.

Religions are sets of memes, among other things, and practices that help guide choice or restrict choice. And I believe you're Catholic and religiously inclined, but you're also pro-tech and pro-building. And one stereotype of that group of people or certain peers is they're not as pro-tech or pro-building because they see it as a threat to a certain way of life. I'm curious if you can comment on to what extent is that true? And if so, why are you different in that way?

It's not true because Pope Francis just came out very much in favor of AI. He actually said we should embrace new technologies responsibly and look at— the Catholic Church has a long history of sort of having a weird relationship with technology. sometimes because it was a political relationship. But I think the Catholic Church is actually pretty pro-progress and pro-technology in terms of how we use it to become more human. We have to use it to become more human. Not to make this a theology lesson, but I think there's a— I think people who are anti-technology because of their religion are sort of missing the point of how technology can serve us in sort of this, you know, this sort of constant quest to become more human and kind of more more divine, um, if you're, if you're, um, if you're sort of looking at it through that lens. Um, you know, to your question of like, how, how does— how did I become the way I was, or how has religion impacted my life? I mean, I think it's like religion impacts all aspects of my life. But the thing that I think, you know, reflecting on sort of what— there aren't many really, really religious people, um, or people who believe— like, like, I don't encounter many serious, serious religious people in my day-to-day life. And I think that having grown up in a religion where I've constantly questioned it but never wavered in it, and having that be sort of the pillar of my identity, of who I am, of how I make decisions, it has made me a true contrarian. It has made me very disagreeable because if you're going to live inside of If you're going to wrestle with really, really deep questions from very early on, where people are telling you that you are constantly wrong, or that those religions just aren't relevant anymore, it forces you to kind of have an internal debate with yourself every day. And if you end up on the side of, actually, I believe this, even though everyone around me tells me that it's wrong, it is a lot easier to go into a boardroom and to say the hard thing. It is so much easier for me to go into a room full of people that are saying this investment will never ever make sense, and to basically say you're wrong because I've been told that I'm wrong so many times about so many things that I'm absolutely convinced in that being contrarian on things like investment decisions is very easy. And so I actually think being a religious person in 2023. cultivates disagreeableness. And especially if you're someone who's had to live with that and wrestle with those decisions every day of your life, it is a practice that has led to the ability to build a trait that is very useful in the corporate world. It's something we don't talk about very much. When I say I'm not around that many religious people, I very well could be, but it doesn't come up because people don't bring it up because it's not part of— people kind of keep it to themselves. But I am sure that a lot of very disagreeable people either come from a tradition, maybe it's not religion, but maybe it's a cultural tradition, or maybe it's an experience where they feel so siloed from other people in their life that that sort of identity has allowed them to be disagreeable in every other aspect of their life because they know that the thing that they hold most dear to themselves is true and other people don't believe it. So it's, it's been useful for me, um, in a very both granular way but also in a— this is This is also who I am. So it's definitely a part of not only how I make decisions, but just how I present myself.

In some ways, it's not just pushing back towards people who are telling you you're wrong. It's also pushing back towards people who are telling you, why is it even worth pursuing? Or, haha, irony. It's an antidote to irony among other things. And in some ways, the description you just gave is really similar to your description of seriousness, which we've talked about in the Moment of Zen podcast, of how doing something in the face of people telling you it's wrong, of people telling you it's stupid, of people telling you why you're even doing this in the first place, just deploying every tactic to get you to stop doing something. And someone serious or religious is someone who does it anyways because they believe and they have faith that that thing is worth pursuing and they pursue it single-mindedly.

Yeah. No, I think seriousness is sort of the way in which you pursue things. And it doesn't have to be— it can be any sort of job, any sort of noble goal. It can be anything. But I think the commonality of pursuing something with a serious mindset is that you will be mocked, that the world will come after you, and that you will be seen as, at the most extreme sense, you will be a pariah. Whether we're doing the secular example of that, which is Socrates, or whether we're doing the religious example, of that, which is Jesus, like, you will be seen as someone who is embarrassing at best and dangerous at worst. And so seriousness is actually the quality of that, which just means someone is pursuing an activity that is noble and that is good and that is innately human, but in a way that makes others uncomfortable because of how deeply they believe. I think we need more of that. Like, you and I've talked about this a lot. Like, there aren't many people who see that quality as something they aspire to anymore. And maybe that will change. I think probably the last time where we had a kind of large population of people who were serious about a mission was probably in World War II. And so it could change. But I think we need more people who are resolute in their beliefs and in their values and who are not afraid of the consequences of that.

So gearing back to sort of the beginning of this conversation, Here's a question. Do you think more tech people should run for office? How do you think about that?

Running for office is such a— it takes a particular type of person who wants to put themselves and their family through that. And I think it is a hard thing to ask people to do. We've actually made it very difficult for people who are not career politicians to run for office, just given how much you have to open up your life. How much, you know, it's almost impossible from both a business perspective, from a family perspective. A lot of tech people don't have the same sort of insatiable urge to be in the national spotlight. They just want to build things. So to ask them to then go and be performative, which frankly, a lot of running for office is really more like acting than it is like being the CEO of a company, for better or worse. And so There's a lot of reasons why people shouldn't do it. Would we be better off if more successful people across various fields decided that they wanted to give back through running for public office? 100%. Is that going to happen? No, because these people are rational and they've already been successful in their fields and it's become harder and harder to enter the culture war, to enter these actual political wars. that we're going through. So I don't fault tech people for saying they don't want to run for office. I know I would never want to run for office, even though I think public service is really important. I think it's a really hard thing to ask a person to do unless they've built their life around this goal, which, which is why we have the culture in politics that we have.

Teach for America helped raise the status of teachers by making this exclusive program that more people then wanted to do who wouldn't have been teachers otherwise. That's people in the beginning of their career. But I'm curious if there'll be something like that for public service that will raise the status and importance and maybe even opportunity set for people who go pursue it as a way to get better people.

I would hope so. I think there's been a lot of experiments with how to bring people from various fields into public life. I think the examples of people actually doing it and just the difficulty of it probably keep more people away from it than sort of the the experiments. But I'm hopeful that at some point we can turn the card or completely change the course of America at any point. It's just what is going to be the event or what is going to be the thing that really leads people to say, I want to give back, I want to contribute, and we'll see what that is.

I'm glad we spent the second half of this conversation talking about things like family and commitment and fulfillment and opportunity, because those are implicitly some of the values guiding things like things like American dynamism and why our country is so worth protecting and building for both internally and externally. Catherine, this has been a fantastic conversation. Thank you so much for joining and for building out your American dynamism practice. For any entrepreneurs building in this space, Catherine is the number one person to work with. We're lucky to share a number of companies in common and couldn't recommend the A6Z practice Uh, any more, uh, than I do. Uh, thank you so much, Catherine.

Thanks so much, Erik.

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