YouSaid · the spoken record

Katherine Boyle

lines on the record: 214
first: 2025-08-30
most recent: 2025-08-30
sittings or episodes: 1
sources: podcast

Every line below is reproduced as it was said and linked to the record it came from. Nothing here is summarised or generated. Directory · Search · Corrections

“So, I mean, I want to do ops. Like, I wanted to just, but because I was so young. Yeah. But the 22, 23 year olds, like they didn't put, they sort of had a training program, right? Like it was like you do two or three years. It wasn't an analyst program, but they kind of put you in this sort of path, right? 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Failed at anything. You know, I was one of these kids. I was sort of the, I don't want to say I was a trophy kid, but it's like, again, I just worked hard at everything I did. And it was always a view that like if you work hard enough in life, you can get what you want, right? So I just assumed going into that recruitment like, oh, I'm a shoe-in, right? Like I'm top grad out of Georgetown. Like, you know, like I have all these great references. I have these mentors who've done it, right? Like I'll be fine. It's not to say I didn't take it seriously. I did, but I was not prepared for the response I got in 2009, which was 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 know what I'm going to do. I can't believe it.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And like I, you know, go into her house and she had like, I mean, in some ways, it looks like a room like yours, just like just mementos of a life well-lived. Like she had been everywhere. She'd been all over Asia, just had the most incredible stories. 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 really cool. But then also, you know, like just my, you know, I grew up during September 11th too, right? Like it changed everyone's mind about, okay, what are you going to do? And that's why I wanted to go to Washington and kind of work in foreign affairs in some capacity. And I just said, you know, after my dad died, I'm like, I want to do that. Like, I can finally do that. And going back to sort of like, you know, I had an effort.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“That's all you've known is okay, like I have to take care of my family. That's when I really just had this moment of, okay, like maybe I can go do something big now. Maybe I can go do the thing. I don't have to worry about family or have to think about anyone but myself. I can be super selfish about what I want. And a lot of my friends were thinking about, you know, joining the agency. I actually had a really interesting thing happen where I worked all through college and I started walking a lady's dog, like this older lady who lived in Georgetown. 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Which is why I also think kids are resilient. And my mother, again, an absolute saint, she didn't try to keep it from me. She was like, your father's sick. Doctor thinks he's probably going to die. But this is suffering. And he's, and he's going to suffer through it, right? Like he's going to, again, he was such a saint of a man too, where you refuse to take, 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 kind of, if you've had to take care of a parent for a while, you're, of course, sad when they're gone. But like the other thing that happens is you have this moment of just relief. Like that was like the real emotion that I felt was like, wow, like, you know, my mother had been taking care of him for eight years. And like when it happened, I was like, okay, like this is the beginning of my life, right? Like it's because when you.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 is my father got very sick. He was chronically ill. So around when I was 12 years old, he had to retire. And I think that's something where if you're a kid that grows up with a chronically ill parent, like you grow up really fast. Like you start, I'm seeing it happen with my friends now who, you know, their parents are getting older in their 60s and their 70s. And it's sort of like the caregiver caretaker, you know, 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“So, my dad had six kids, and it was sort of a Brady Bench family. So I was the youngest of his. I was an adult by the time I was a teenager.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“And then on Saturday nights, we're going to go to church. The whole, you know, go out to dinner after the whole family with my grandparents who lived 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 going to be the smartest in the room. You know, you're not going to be the best at everything. But like, no one is going to outwork a boil. Like no one is going to outwork you. And I think that was just sort of inculcated in me from early age. So I did a lot of things. I mean, I did piano. I was really into piano as a kid. I played sports. I wasn't naturally gifted, but, you know, worked hard at it. But I just had this sort of kind of seriousness of, okay, like we're boils and we work hard.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“To practice writing penmanship an hour a day. And within like three months, I had the best penmanship of anyone in the class. I was celebrated for it. But it was like, it was moments like that where my parents were just so involved and so good, where like they never need to tell me again not to not work hard or that I wasn't working hard enough or that I was lazy in some way. Like I just kind of 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 as 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes, no, and in not being afraid to be disagreeable. And I think we're a family of disagreeable people, but it was really inculcated in me from an early age. So, you know, I was always just interested in whatever was happening on the news, whatever was happening in the world. I was a very good student. My parents were not, they didn't like really push me. It was sort of a self-driven thing. I always tell the story when I was in third grade. I got 1B 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 and 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 going to sit down and you're going to.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Gosh, I was a very precocious kid. Again, my dad was much older. I was the youngest. And so I was really into the news. I read a lot of books, but extremely precocious. I loved watching things with my parents. I got really into movies growing up. But I was always sort of this very inquisitive kid. My dad coming from the Jesuits kind of 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Other nations followed. When you look at those as inputs into the story as well, it's like there's a reason why the birth rate is so low in these countries. And it's not just an American phenomena. It's a global phenomena. And you have to take into account all of those things. And I just keep coming back to the culture changed. Like there was something about what we prized and what we made high status in America where most people, or I shouldn't say most people, but a lot of people chose to have, you know, only one to two children, whereas their grandparents generation and their parents' generation had three and four. And a society that changes that dramatically in one generation or two generations is unstable. Completely un”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 talks 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 until women, you know, you can control your own destiny. That is a huge part of it. Like all of these declines in the industrial world started at the exact same time that the pill was introduced. So, you know, we're not going to go back to a world that is pre-pill. Like, that's just never going to happen across both Western society and industrial world. But I think you actually have to acknowledge all of 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 healthcare, related to how we, you know, abortion was made legal in 1960.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“You have to make it okay, and you have to take care of the single moms out there. Totally. I think about it It's terrifying. I don't know. I don't know how they make ends meet But yeah, I think Culture change For”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Think it's the culture too. I mean, I think it stemmed from, you know, the feminist movement. You can do everything. Yes, but 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 racing than raising your kids? And then, I mean, And then I don't even know how single mothers do it. I mean”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 to say is, okay, well, we need to make healthcare free, make birth free, 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 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 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, yeah, sperm counts are down, the sort of fertile window for women again cut in half. So there's something about the medical side of this and the health side of this that's also happening. But you can 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yes. Massive rate. Yes. But even counting immigrant and Islamic population in Europe, they're still at countries, I think Italy's 1.2. I think France is 1.5. Everyone always looks at the Nordic nations as sort of the beacon of how we should be doing policy in the U.S. because they pay for free health care for mothers. They 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 there's probably healthcare reasons for it. There's a lot of research.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Know not 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. I think 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 rest of the secular society that doesn't have children. If you have a family of eight and nine and ten, 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, I would say, we have more than Europe, which Europe is really the”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think it'll be a housing crisis. Fewer people. And also our millennial is going to want to, you know, the millennials in Gen X or in 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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, 89% of our parents' generation had children.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 the family young that I think the millennials really caught wind of. It's like everyone needs to go to college, extended adolescence, like use your 20s to experiment and enjoy life. Like you don't really need to be focused on having a family. And what happened is the average age now of a first time, I think mother in America is 28. 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”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“But they recognize it's a massive problem. And probably recognized it before even we did. I think in some ways the conversation sort of hopped from the social conservative sort of church going movement of, gosh, 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. 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 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have extremely short sighted. And I think we're always talking about how dangerous China is, how China is growing in power and importance. The most short-sighted thing they have ever done to their society that will eventually catch up with them is the demographic collapse that they are going to feel because of one child. They're trying everything now too. They're trying to end divorce, right? So there's now a policy, at least that I read about in China, where you have to have a 90-day cool-down period so that you don't divorce. They're trying to encourage young women to have children. Young women don't want to have children.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decline of this too, where it's like it sounds, oh, well, we went from 2.1 to 1.6. That can't be that bad. I mean, in a couple generations, that means that our population has shrunk by half.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Starts crumbling. And then there's, of course, the social ramifications of not having family. 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 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Yeah, so one, it's the economic situation is going to 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 taking 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 are 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, 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's”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, like there's a lot of not only economic reasons, but just like this social fabric of what's about to happen, of not having children. I mean, this is how civilizations die.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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, I mean, 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...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Or that they have no interest in relationships with women, or that they have no interest in marriage. But it was interesting because the article sort of blamed men for everything. And it's like, well, yeah, like next week, they need to have the men saying, why did the women disappear? 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. The last 30, 40 years So it makes sense why you see fewer and fewer people having children.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's fun to read just for opposition research. It's a fun thing to read just to see okay, like you might not agree with what they're saying, but it's like, wow, like they wouldn't have published that five years ago.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“The New York Times is putting this out. Yeah, I mean, they've been putting out some stuff recently where it's like, funniest when the op-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, 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. 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Decades that was under attack. And it's only now that we're sort of moving back to people saying, okay, maybe I should go to church. Maybe going to church is a good thing. I mean, you even have the New York Times. People, you know, on the op-ed pages, I always think like they're a good beacon of sort of liberal thought. The op-ed page is saying, well, maybe we should return to religion.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I think a huge part of the problem is we've replaced America has always been a religious country. And then you saw this decline starting around 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 five, ten 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 whole 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I don't know. Just seem to be moving farther and farther and farther apart every four years for the past, what, I don't know 12 years? Seems like at least 12 years, and it's like, man, like, it's just. 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”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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. It matters for crime. It matters for the sort of.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Have to chase the 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 six who are 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 that, you know, where they can truly be sort of that pillar and that beacon”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“Give you a shot and plank it on the name of Norman Rockwell, like, you know, in the white coat with the stethoscope. But that was my dad. He was just like, 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. 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“It's an incredible story of the stuff you saw. He never talked about it, of course. 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 like 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. It 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 nine or ten o'clock at night and giving him a shot, like the old, what is it, the image of the old timey doctors, you like pull your pants down.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“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 that 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 going to 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.”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“He's still the pride of the city, right? It's like those are the glory days. It's like we're 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...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source
“I grew up in northern Florida in Gainesville, university town, football town. You had our guy Thibault on recently and he's sort of...”
2025-08-30 · a16z Podcast · Katherine Boyle on Shawn Ryan · IDENTIFIED FROM THE TRANSCRIPT · source