Transcript
Speaker: Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
Speaker: Tonight we're gonna talk about natalism and a conference that we're putting together to address this problem.
Speaker: I'm here with Drew Gorham, he's a friend of mine, member of the group, runs innovation workshops for the Department of Defense.
Speaker: He's gonna be involved in helping us to organize and facilitate this conversation.
Speaker: It's gonna be December 1st and 2nd in Austin, Texas, and really excited to kind of show the world what Drew can do and to address this problem together.
Speaker: So welcome to the show, Drew.
Speaker: Hey, Kevin.
Speaker: Good to be with you, man.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about why this problem was a concern to you and why you sort of, I mean, it was you that kind of brought it to my attention to something we should talk about.
Speaker: Yeah, I mean, it wasn't a concern of mine for a long time.
Speaker: I just was not tracking this as like a global issue really at all.
Speaker: I kind of had the assumption that overpopulation was the big crunch that we're going to have to deal with.
Speaker: And then I think Elon maybe started talking about it.
Speaker: And that kind of got me into some other Twitter people who were
Speaker: talking about this as a problem.
Speaker: And the unique thing about this problem is that you can make 20 year predictions
Speaker: based on live births that are going on this year.
Speaker: So it's like extraordinarily predictive and it's like your ability to forecast what's going to happen with the population just in terms of raw numbers.
Speaker: And then as I started digging into it, I kind of realized, wow, how upside down a lot of these population pyramids are.
Speaker: And it's not just Japan.
Speaker: Actually, Japan's like number 20th something in population like emergency.
Speaker: South Korea is number one.
Speaker: I think Italy is close behind.
Speaker: About 60% of countries today are below replacement rates, which is like 2.1 births per female.
Speaker: That's like the minimum to just sustain like a population population.
Speaker: rectangle.
Speaker: What you want is a population pyramid.
Speaker: And yeah, so anyway, it's I was kind of shocked.
Speaker: And the trends for all the countries that are above replacement right now are trending downwards.
Speaker: So it's almost a global problem.
Speaker: We're doing the boomers, bless them, like gave us a nice bump in children after World War II, which Europe did not have.
Speaker: So we're a little better off than Europe, but we're catching up.
Speaker: And there are a ton of economic, social, cultural implications of this problem.
Speaker: And it's also surprising how difficult it is to solve and to isolate what variables are causing this thing.
Speaker: So anyway, that all got me interested.
Speaker: And I think there's a conversation to be had.
Speaker: And it's mostly happening over Twitter right now.
Speaker: And wouldn't it be cool if we got these people together in a room
Speaker: We talk about the problem, all the different dimensions of it.
Speaker: And then if we can also take some time to really try to come up with solutions and design them together.
Speaker: Anyway, that's what got me interested.
Speaker: And I think I brought it to you.
Speaker: It's like, hey, we should see if we can bring people together around this issue and see what happens when you put people in a room.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I want to talk a little bit more about the scope of this problem.
Speaker: It's when people imagine the global population, the UN says the population is going to cap around 10 billion in 2100, and then it's going to start to decline.
Speaker: And you think of population as like one number, but that crest of that wave is
Speaker: is actually going to take place with a dramatically different population than we have today.
Speaker: It's going to be a billion of those 10 billion people are going to be over 80.
Speaker: About another 2 billion are going to be past retirement age.
Speaker: And it's substantially worse in Europe and the US.
Speaker: And it's looking like you're going to have roughly four adult dependents for every elderly or for every working age family.
Speaker: in the U S and that may not seem so dramatic, but like right now there's about four workers for every elderly dependent in the U S. So it's, it's the inverse almost.
Speaker: So we would flip to four dependents for every one working adult.
Speaker: Well, four, four dependents for every couple.
Speaker: For every couple.
Speaker: And, and, and what that's going to, and right now Medicare and social security are already 46% of the federal budget.
Speaker: So it's already this massive, massive expenditure when we've got all these elderly dependents split four ways, each of them, you know, as far as their expenses and their burden.
Speaker: And so to pile this enormous population of elderly people, you know, the U.S. and the U.S., as a matter of fact, is, you know,
Speaker: much better equipped to handle this than say India or China or Latin America where these same population pyramid inversion trends are, are, are predicted to happen.
Speaker: And like here it's going to be,
Speaker: Like you're going to have, I mean, just from like a human suffering perspective, you're going to have people essentially warehoused under really, really bad conditions by people who don't know them, don't necessarily care about them.
Speaker: But in places like India, China, Latin America, it's like there may not be just enough food and enough productive capacity, period, to take care of all those people.
Speaker: And so you're talking about like, you know, saying the global population will cap and then crest.
Speaker: It's like people almost like take a sigh of relief when they see that because they're like, ah, the overpopulation problem is solved.
Speaker: It's like, no, there's this much more serious problem.
Speaker: And, and
Speaker: It's beyond just sort of the task of like feeding and caring for these people.
Speaker: All of our economic systems, the way that we finance debt, the way the government finances debt and services its debt, the way that
Speaker: development projects, the capital is maintained, the machinery to do it.
Speaker: So many things depend on, well, there's going to be reliable economic growth.
Speaker: And even under conditions of the population rectangle, you could imagine a situation where...
Speaker: you know, our population is not growing, but we get a little bit smarter every year.
Speaker: And so we have some innovation growth, right.
Speaker: Uh, in terms of our, our economic productivity and maybe that enables some of these systems to maintain themselves.
Speaker: But when that, that assumption of reliable secular, meaning secular, meaning long-term growth collapses, um,
Speaker: it really, it's almost like a divide by zero situation where it like really blows up a lot of the financing math.
Speaker: And so things like, well, you know, it's just like a business.
Speaker: Like if you can't convince a banker that you're going to have
Speaker: you know, lots of lots of receivables, you know, you're just not going to be able to finance a lot.
Speaker: It's not it's not like you're going to have a high interest rate.
Speaker: They're just not going to lend to you.
Speaker: And so a lot of things just break down.
Speaker: And in terms of in terms of infrastructure, like you look at what's happening in in Detroit and it's like the.
Speaker: It's it's not half as expensive
Speaker: to pump water and electricity and sewer to half the population spread over that area.
Speaker: It's way more expensive, particularly per capita.
Speaker: And, and so unless you like forcibly uproot all of these scattered people and like force them to consolidate closer to the city center, all these services become radically more expensive.
Speaker: And, and, you know, there's also just elements of like,
Speaker: not having enough institutional knowledge around to even maintain the infrastructure.
Speaker: So it compounds upon itself.
Speaker: And not only is the infrastructure delivery more expensive, but it's actually like less.
Speaker: safe and of course when uh it's it's it's much cheaper to for instance uh maintain a bridge than to rebuild a bridge that's collapsed or or you know purge a a water system that's become contaminated like there are so many things that depend on just keeping the wheels on that are going to become so much harder under conditions of of population collapse
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: Just the economic angle alone is enough to raise a lot of alarm bells.
Speaker: And we're not talking about 200, 300 years from now, really.
Speaker: This is coming quickly.
Speaker: We're talking about our children, our grandchildren.
Speaker: or the world that they grow up in and that's, you know, if we're lucky, we'll get to see them.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So this is something reasonably reasonable to expect in our lifetimes to see.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And starting I start with the economic consequences because that's the easiest stuff to talk about.
Speaker: It's really uncontroversial.
Speaker: And that's also where I want to kind of open the conference.
Speaker: Day one of the conference is going to be like, let's talk about the scope of this problem because we can all come together and agree that like we can all look at the same Social Security numbers.
Speaker: Every millennial in America knows they're never going to see a dime of Social Security.
Speaker: And, you know, you watch your hundreds, thousands of dollars every month come out of your paycheck and you know it's not going to be there for you.
Speaker: And so that's a conversation that we can start with.
Speaker: But I also want to move into like, and, you know, obviously the sort of humanitarian catastrophe that's coming.
Speaker: But I also want to move into like,
Speaker: I actually think that Italy is a good place and the people who built it and the way that they think and the institutional memory and the, and the, the aesthetics of that country and of South Korea and Japan, that those should continue.
Speaker: And it's, it's just not obvious to me that like, even, even if you stipulate that like,
Speaker: immigration like solves this population problem.
Speaker: First of all, it doesn't.
Speaker: The developing world's fertility is collapsing at the same rate.
Speaker: Latin America is already at 2.1 and falling.
Speaker: So you're not going to solve this with immigration.
Speaker: But even if you stipulate that you could, it's like all of this culture and folk ways and all these things would be lost.
Speaker: And, you know,
Speaker: they can talk about it like, well, like anybody can be an American, anybody can be a British, anybody can be Italian.
Speaker: But the fact is there's, there's like no effort to actually inculcate that culture into the emigrating population.
Speaker: And it's actually viewed as like a bad thing to do to like try to make Italians.
Speaker: And so it's like, let's just be honest about what we're saying.
Speaker: It's, it's, it's like, we don't care that those, that those folk ways in that culture and that aesthetic will vanish.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah, and that's the thing that I've been sort of picking up on in this research is that the policy think tank people are quite aware of this problem.
Speaker: They talk about population collapse.
Speaker: They talk about immigration as a way to solve it.
Speaker: And they also admit that immigration will not solve it.
Speaker: And of course they do not talk about within the immigrating populations, like what's the breakdown of where the immigrants are coming from, what are the birth rates of the different populations of immigrants and the birth rates of the native born citizens.
Speaker: Uh, so they, they definitely stay away from that topic.
Speaker: They try to keep the conversation more of like a human is a human.
Speaker: We're just talking about biomass here.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And fungible economic units, fungible economic units.
Speaker: Uh, it's makes their models much cleaner.
Speaker: And, uh, and so they, so they definitely don't get into, uh, uh, yeah.
Speaker: Who like,
Speaker: What are the birth rate breakdowns by cultural background, by ethnicity and so forth?
Speaker: But even if we assume they're human biomass, economic unit, you know, a fundamental neuro conformity assumption, it's still a very dire picture.
Speaker: Yeah, the math still just doesn't work.
Speaker: The math still doesn't work.
Speaker: And it's even worse when you look at it more nuanced and looking at culture by culture, the breakdown there.
Speaker: Yeah, and I mean, I think even on the microcosm level, I think about my family and the way that people can look at my kids and they can go, ah, yeah.
Speaker: Those are those are Dolan kids.
Speaker: Those are Dolan boys.
Speaker: That's what they look like.
Speaker: And the way that we argue and the way that we tell jokes and like the little traditions and the memories that we have as a family.
Speaker: It's like.
Speaker: And so I actually actually did a little of a little study, a little demographic study of my own high school graduating class.
Speaker: And I looked at because I'm getting to the point where at least for the for the ladies in my high school graduating class, the fertility window is just about closed.
Speaker: And so I thought it would be interesting to take a look at who has started families.
Speaker: And
Speaker: it's it essentially so a guy um Stephen Shaw is demographer um who I've been in touch with um uh he mentioned on Jordan Peterson's podcast that like it's not the case that you know uh we used to have three kids per family and now we have two or we used to have two and now we have one it's more like
Speaker: The same number of people or the same families that were going to have two or three kids, they're still having two or three kids or four or five.
Speaker: What's actually happening is a huge swath of the population is just realizing zero fertility.
Speaker: And so you look at like just the dramatic selection effects.
Speaker: And I mean, I remember most of these people.
Speaker: And as I was going through the list, it was like this big Facebook group.
Speaker: It had like 550 people in it.
Speaker: And my graduating class was somewhere on the order of like 1,700.
Speaker: So it was like a pretty good sample.
Speaker: And just thinking about like how many of these people like their whole
Speaker: where they come from and all the things that their family like was about and the little like, cause they, they're, they're, their memories and their traditions, their culture, just as real as mine.
Speaker: And it will just be gone.
Speaker: And, um, and that seems like a tragedy to me.
Speaker: That seems awful.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And, uh, and, and it's, and, and when you think about, and even that is, even that is, is maybe a little too like,
Speaker: little too like quanti because like you think about the what it will mean to all those people to not realize that fertility um because something like 95 essentially all psychologically normal people want children that's uh when you ask them when you ask them yes
Speaker: Um, and it's the, the realized fertility is, is about 60%.
Speaker: And that's, that's more or less borne out by what I saw in my little, you know, non-scientific study.
Speaker: Um, yeah.
Speaker: And I, I think the, uh, to bring it down from the family level, even more closely to the personal level with, I've kind of noticed that.
Speaker: Tell me if you think I'm right.
Speaker: When you, when I had kids, it, I felt like my, I changed my,
Speaker: I'm almost like at a biological level.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: It was, it was akin to puberty.
Speaker: I would say in terms of like a dramatic shift in my brain and body.
Speaker: And, uh, so if we look at that, that rite of passage of having children is like a second puberty and it's, it's even more dramatic for women.
Speaker: I think, uh, you look at all these people who are kind of missing out on this,
Speaker: I don't know, the second puberty analogy.
Speaker: I think it carries.
Speaker: And it's one of those things like when you were before, thinking back to when you were a kid, before you went through puberty, were you like, oh man, I can't wait to go through puberty someday.
Speaker: I'm like really looking forward to that.
Speaker: No, you were just having a good time, living your kid life and not really thinking about that too much.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And then once you go through puberty, how do you explain that to a kid?
Speaker: Like, hey, you like going through.
Speaker: It's like, great, I feel better now.
Speaker: I feel like I'm growing as a human being, more complex.
Speaker: So I think it's interesting for the people that are going to have zero kids, how can we...
Speaker: Think about what are their experiences, you know, what are they really going through?
Speaker: Do they know they're going through it?
Speaker: And then what are the implications, you know, in a society where one person, one vote, we all have equal voice.
Speaker: And the number of childless people, I think is, I'd be interested.
Speaker: I haven't seen the exact numbers, but I'm curious to project that out and see as a percentage of our
Speaker: democracy, what percent are going to be childless in the coming years?
Speaker: And what that does to your, your orientation toward the future, what that does to the way that you make like policy decisions.
Speaker: Like, I think even, you know,
Speaker: let's say that the biological change of, of like sort of rewiring your brain as a result of having children, like, let's say that's woo and it's not true.
Speaker: And it's just like, you know, you have this rational calculus that changes even under those conditions.
Speaker: It's like you having this little person who's, who's, um,
Speaker: whose fate you are even less in control of than you're in control of your own fate, right?
Speaker: Because they have this whole layer of decision-making that they do.
Speaker: It dramatically changes your attitude toward the way society ought to look.
Speaker: And it also changes, I mean, I think you just observe, especially if you have two or three,
Speaker: you start to observe like, oh, I really tried to raise these kids all the same.
Speaker: And they're working with a very similar deck that they were shuffled from.
Speaker: But they're still dramatically different.
Speaker: You can't maintain the blank slate hypothesis.
Speaker: It's impossible.
Speaker: It completely shatters them.
Speaker: I've known lots of progressive parents
Speaker: who have been like, I had girls and I had boys and I really tried to get them both to play with trucks.
Speaker: And I really tried to get both of them to play dress up and it just didn't go that way.
Speaker: And like, just the observation of humanity under conditions, like you're never gonna care more about another person.
Speaker: And like, you're never gonna look more carefully.
Speaker: and, and be more invested in like, what is actually the truth here than you are with your own kids.
Speaker: And yeah, it's, it's, it's a tremendously, it's a tremendously, it's a transformative, uh, experience.
Speaker: And I think it also, um, it also closes like a lot of psychological loops.
Speaker: It, it, it, it allows you to, um,
Speaker: not relive your childhood but get like a triangulation of your childhood if that makes sense like a second point of observation that gives you like this almost like depth of field maybe that's a weird analogy but like yeah it it gives you different angles and a richer perspective on like what it was like growing up and and what your experiences
Speaker: felt like and what maybe the truth of those experiences was, you know, cause that's not always the same.
Speaker: And, um, and then even beyond that, like, you know, I think, I think you and I are talking about kind of the experience of little kids, but that's because that's what we have.
Speaker: We don't have bigger kids yet.
Speaker: Um, but beyond, uh,
Speaker: again, going back to the, the, the Shaw episode on, on Jordan Peterson, he talks about surveys of, you know, the surveys of like, do you want children, but also the surveys of like, what's the most important thing in your life after age 30?
Speaker: And like,
Speaker: almost everyone becomes disillusioned with the, with the idea of career at age 30.
Speaker: Like almost no one is that their top priority, like their primary source of meaning in their lives.
Speaker: It doesn't mean they don't enjoy their job, but it's like, Oh, I've, I've been doing PowerPoint long enough that I recognize that life is probably not about that.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: So what happens, I think in a lot of cases, is sort of the fertility decision-making has to be made prior to that realization.
Speaker: And so a lot of people spend their optimum sort of child rearing time working with some really bad memes about like what life is for.
Speaker: And then by the time they have this realization, it's like a scramble to get on the kids train.
Speaker: And, you know, I have a lot of sympathy for that.
Speaker: And I want to try to...
Speaker: get people together to like.
Speaker: You know, it's Twitter and and just sort of the the like online discourse in general.
Speaker: Really lends itself to like facile solutions like.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Like is is is hypergamy a truth about the way men and women work?
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: But like, is it the case that the solution is like, you know, these chicks need to stop being so spoiled and just, you know, marry me, the fat slob with the Cheeto dust?
Speaker: Like, no, that's not the solution.
Speaker: And so what I want to talk through is like, and I'm trying to make the conversation like
Speaker: We've invited a lot of women to come and commentate on this thing because I want to really engineer a solution where we all get iLock and we all go like, yes, that's the pain point.
Speaker: That's what it is.
Speaker: Here's how we...
Speaker: here's how we fix it together.
Speaker: Like there's, there's just no, there's no top down.
Speaker: There's no like sermon you can preach on this.
Speaker: It's, uh, and then like, even just from my perspective, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm a guy, but observing the way that the, the way that child bearing affects women is,
Speaker: And the way that it, like a woman in her 20s is at her like most socially desirable and she can kind of, you know, if she's like high value in general, she can like write her ticket during that period and it's like a limited time only kind of a deal.
Speaker: And so to tell that woman like I want you instead to write
Speaker: dramatically alter your body and dramatically like abandon
Speaker: a lot of like hedonic experiences of travel and sort of self-care and having lots of leisure time.
Speaker: And like, I don't want to, you know, it's hard for me to even say the word self-care without sounding a little bit contemptuous.
Speaker: But like for real, that's a real sacrifice.
Speaker: That's a real thing to ask somebody to give up.
Speaker: And, and so you're like your, your life, your story about yourself has to be about a lot more than sort of in the moment utility or, or pleasure.
Speaker: That's a tough, tough thing to ask.
Speaker: You got to figure it out.
Speaker: What you're pointing out is like, okay, that,
Speaker: that's where we are in the conversation.
Speaker: We, we need to make the case.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Because you better have a good story for why you're foregoing all of those.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: All that power, social capital.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Spending it.
Speaker: And I think the, you know, it's, it's more like an investment approach rather than a consumption approach to your social capital.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: But there,
Speaker: But anyway, that's you're pointing out where where we need to come together.
Speaker: And yeah.
Speaker: And I mean, another another even dimension to that is like.
Speaker: Let's assume that you make all those sacrifices and you have those kids.
Speaker: And like, what is to stop your spouse whose social capital is not changing on the same schedule as your social capital is changing?
Speaker: you know, what's to stop him from trading up once he's like that, that I think was fundamentally the, uh, the argument of like second wave ish feminism about like why women needed to be in the workforce.
Speaker: It was like, yeah, it was like, you have to protect yourself against defection against being betrayed.
Speaker: And, um, you know, it's like, is, is, uh,
Speaker: is a paycheck or a trip to Europe or like, you know, being able to, you know, uh, go to a spa day anytime you want to, is that like better than, you know, the love of a little baby or, or like domestic bliss?
Speaker: Not obviously, but it's the check clears.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: Like it, like you, you can, you can sort of guarantee that for yourself in a way that you can't guarantee the, uh, the, the domestic dream.
Speaker: And so we should ask, we should ask the effective altruists.
Speaker: They can solve this problem for us.
Speaker: Oh man.
Speaker: Well, we might invite some effective altruists, so I can't say too much, but, oh boy, watch out.
Speaker: Everybody's invited.
Speaker: Big tent.
Speaker: Big tent.
Speaker: But like there's this huge issue of trust.
Speaker: There's this huge issue of we have to.
Speaker: We have an existential problem that we cannot solve in like an adversarial or trustless way.
Speaker: And so you like you got to either and I think I think individuals can do it right now just by.
Speaker: The sort of combination of individual goodwill and successfully communicating that goodwill in a way that another person will believe and and the sort of kismet of like two people finding each other who who.
Speaker: Neither intends to defect and they want to take care of each other.
Speaker: And that's a beautiful thing.
Speaker: But I want to live in a world where like less of that, it like it didn't used to be the case that it had to be this, this very like a miracle, essentially, for that to transpire.
Speaker: And like, not to overstate it, like I think lots of people find happy, happy families and happy marriages, but they're harder to find.
Speaker: They're a lot harder to find.
Speaker: And they're going to be harder for our kids to find, I think is the other piece of this that caused us to care more about this problem.
Speaker: And we were kind of talking about how, you know, reflecting on how we met our wives and how the environment has changed so much today, 2023.
Speaker: I met my wife in 2007.
Speaker: And then how, how dramatically harder it would have been to meet her today.
Speaker: And then the implication for our kids, you know, 15 or 20 years in the future, meeting their spouse.
Speaker: How's it going to be for them?
Speaker: And what, is there anything we could do to help increase the odds that they're going to find someone they love and
Speaker: want to have children with.
Speaker: I think what, what we're experiencing essentially like the, the sort of boomer generation to, to like not be too hard on them.
Speaker: Like they really expected that the infrastructure of finding a family getting, and, and even, even like just the economic infrastructure of like,
Speaker: It'll be easier for my kids than it was for me in this sort of like all boats float.
Speaker: Like I don't necessarily have to do a ton to make that happen for them.
Speaker: And therefore, like anything that I do to either like impose or even suggest
Speaker: like what their solution ought to be is like a little bit arrogant on my part.
Speaker: Like that's the, my, my, my kindest interpretation of what like our parents and grandparents generation was.
Speaker: And I think this is actually how they perceive themselves is like,
Speaker: I just wanted to let you spread your wings.
Speaker: I wanted to let you be exactly who you wanted to be.
Speaker: And I didn't want to, like, I felt that if I, it was such a fragile, delicate beauty.
Speaker: And if I even touched it, I would mar it.
Speaker: I would mar the beautiful snowflake that's you.
Speaker: And I think what our generation is facing is like,
Speaker: if I don't get involved in a pretty serious way, I'm going to have to watch this devastatingly horrible, lonely, miserable outcome transpire.
Speaker: And so it's like the risk that I sort of in my zealousness make the wrong call
Speaker: I'm willing to pick up that risk in a way that maybe it's important.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And I think my intuition is like the best way to start addressing that is just to get together with other problem-aware people and talk about it.
Speaker: Because honestly, I don't have the solution.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: I don't fully understand the problem.
Speaker: I'm seeing dimensions of the problem.
Speaker: And, uh, and that, but that's what we're hoping to flesh out in this conference is, yeah.
Speaker: What are all those problem dimensions?
Speaker: Can't, is there anything that can be done solution wise?
Speaker: Like what's causing this problem?
Speaker: What can be done about it?
Speaker: Um, that's where we're hoping to get.
Speaker: And we have two days.
Speaker: Well, two days to start.
Speaker: Two days to start.
Speaker: Open the conversation, open the lines of communication between these people who, you know, all of whom, a really encouraging sign that I'm seeing like across the sort of,
Speaker: dissident political spectrum or, or even like dissident cultural spectrum, just the like non mainstream I'm seeing the, the, the increasing awareness of the problem is making people more inclined to cooperate and more inclined to talk to one another.
Speaker: And, um,
Speaker: I'm more careful in their approach to, to, uh, different ideas because I think everybody's kind of like, well, I'm stumped.
Speaker: So, you know, let's, let's talk, let's try to, let's see if we can figure something out.
Speaker: And I think, you know, why are, why are we the people to do this?
Speaker: Essentially, I think the answer is like, we didn't see anybody else addressing it in any kind of organized way.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: I happen to know a lot of people with good takes on this topic.
Speaker: We saw the End of Men documentary by Tucker Carlson, which is about a topic that we haven't addressed at all really so far, which is the potential neuroendocrine component to this, which is like, are the foods that we eat and the ways that we're living, are they making us actually...
Speaker: less capable of fertility or even like even less capable of pair bonding, even less capable of like attracting a spouse.
Speaker: Um, you know, uh, like there, there, there's definitely the element of like, Oh, you're, you know, you like your sperm counts too low to, to realize, you know, fertility, but like, yeah, there's 60, 62% drop in sperm counts in 50 years.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: And even, yeah.
Speaker: And like, and like the, the average, uh, the average like Gen Z, like 18 year old has the same grip strength as like a 70 year old man.
Speaker: It's, uh, it's, it's crazy what's happening.
Speaker: And I think there's also this element of like, what does, what does that hormonal change do to people in terms of just their like will and vitality and their, and their desires?
Speaker: Um, who does it, who does it,
Speaker: encourage them to bond with both as friends and as potential mates and like, like what is that doing to us?
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: And it was a fascinating episode.
Speaker: And I basically realized that I knew like almost all of the people who were being interviewed for that segment.
Speaker: And I thought, these are people who should be part of this like more formal, deeper conversation.
Speaker: You know, like in a documentary, which was great, was very like problem awareness.
Speaker: It was like, let's put this on TV so that people can go
Speaker: oh shit.
Speaker: And I think maybe what we're doing is like the next step, which is like, what's to be done about this?
Speaker: How can we, how can we get consensus?
Speaker: And I want to talk a little bit about why, why I think you're the guy for the job.
Speaker: I've seen you do some of your, your workshop facilitation professionally, and you've got just some great tools for,
Speaker: building consensus.
Speaker: And I don't mean like group think, but like getting everyone's voice heard in a room and allowing, uh, what you say, the term you use is to, to allow the best ideas to rise to the top and the bad ideas to like die a quiet death so that, um, so that, and, and then by the time you've, by the time you've reached that, that best solution, um,
Speaker: everyone's had their hand on it and everyone feels like their voice was heard and they were respected and they got to be part of the solution.
Speaker: So tell me a little bit about like the tools that you use to run these workshops.
Speaker: Sure.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: So I've been doing a workshop facilitation now for about seven years and it kind of came out of this frustration personally with like group brainstorming sessions.
Speaker: Aren't those the worst things ever where you basically have a bunch of people sitting around a table talking, you know, usually one or two people talk the most.
Speaker: And they, those people also tend to not have the best ideas.
Speaker: And I just really hated that style of collaboration.
Speaker: And so I started searching for other tools, you know, especially out of the Stanford design school and this design firm called IDEO and a little bit of Google too.
Speaker: Yes, Google had come up with some of these things.
Speaker: But basically it's a methodology you can use to guide a group conversation that leads to decisions and challenges.
Speaker: like real solutions to a problem.
Speaker: And you can do it in a matter of a couple of hours.
Speaker: It involves not a whole lot of talking.
Speaker: It's a lot of getting, instead of trying to get ideas from a group, groups come up with terrible ideas.
Speaker: You get ideas from individuals and then you kind of, kind of vote on those, those ideas, the best ones rise to the top.
Speaker: And then you can,
Speaker: form teams, small teams, we're talking like seven to 10 people who are most interested in bringing that idea about.
Speaker: And so that's what we're looking at for day two of the conference.
Speaker: Smaller group, about 70, I think we have 75 tickets for day two.
Speaker: And we got 300 tickets for day one.
Speaker: So it'll be a smaller group, closed door sessions, phones off.
Speaker: And we're going to talk about solutions and try to get realistic about what are some projects that we could spin out out of this.
Speaker: Now, we've talked about all the dimensions of the problem, the
Speaker: the endocrine and environmental issues, the cultural issues, the male-female dynamics, economic issues.
Speaker: So we want to kind of break that apart and pull out small pieces of those problems that we can form teams of about seven to 10 people around and then go through this workshop process to come out with some solution ideas.
Speaker: And we're not talking about the solution ideas like,
Speaker: abolish female hypergamy, just the outrageously difficult, high effort solutions.
Speaker: We're looking for kind of the lower effort, higher impact, quick win type of deals.
Speaker: The hope is that by getting together, we can actually form lasting projects that continue beyond the conference.
Speaker: And that was part of the impetus of the conference really is like the solutions are not going to come from Twitter.
Speaker: I'm sorry.
Speaker: These projects don't get off the ground in the virtual space.
Speaker: They require face-to-face.
Speaker: You have to show up.
Speaker: You have to look people in the eye.
Speaker: You have to size them up as well as allies.
Speaker: So if you're coming to this conference, you're looking for allies to help deal with this problem both at a personal level and kind of a societal wide level.
Speaker: And you're also looking to potentially attach yourself in some way to one of the solutions that comes out of it.
Speaker: And there's lots of ways you can engage in that, you know.
Speaker: But the point of day two is to come up with those solutions together and to let the entrepreneurs in the room kind of rise to the occasion and lead the charge on multiple solutions.
Speaker: Yeah, we didn't want to have like just another confab where, you know, people sort of get up and preach and you sort of, you know, hang around at the snack table for the speeches you don't want to listen to.
Speaker: And you listen to the ones you would do and you sort of network and like good things come out of those conferences.
Speaker: But they, in my experience, they like emerge accidentally.
Speaker: Like you're sort of you buy the tickets that you can like be in a room with other people who care about this problem.
Speaker: And then it's like sort of your job to build the the the terms of collaboration.
Speaker: And while we're still going to have and you're still going to have the freedom to do that at this conference, we're going to be creating like.
Speaker: the framework for specific things to emerge that are actionable and, and that, that, that yield essentially like a, a, a viable prototype by the end of the conversation.
Speaker: And so the, the hope is that we're, we're, we're introducing something a little bit different to this space.
Speaker: And I want to talk a little bit about,
Speaker: Obviously, what can be done about this problem?
Speaker: The answer is we don't know.
Speaker: That's why we're hosting this conference to try to get smart people together.
Speaker: But I want to talk about some possible categories of solutions that we've identified.
Speaker: It's like there are ways to help you just sort of survive the consequences of what's going to happen, right?
Speaker: like, are there, are there ways you can invest that are, that are different than the way that the mainstream is investing?
Speaker: That is, this is sort of like a, this is sort of like a climate change type of thing where, you know, the, the, the models show people what they think is going to happen, but they're like, they're still kind of living in oceanfront property.
Speaker: There's still like, you know, lots of interest in like Florida and the Maldives.
Speaker: And, and, and it's like,
Speaker: how can we embrace the consequences of what's going to happen in our like personal investment strategies or projects that we build that are going to reflect the future that we see coming?
Speaker: Because like you say, like we know exactly how many one-year-olds there are going to be, you know, we know exactly how many five-year-olds those one-year-olds will be in four years.
Speaker: You know what I mean?
Speaker: Like it's, it's, it's priced in.
Speaker: We know exactly what's going to happen.
Speaker: Also like,
Speaker: how do you build tighter local community?
Speaker: Are there novel ways of getting together either as families or even potentially under dating and matchmaking type circumstances so you can find other people who want the same things that you want and maybe who are trying to inculcate the same
Speaker: values that you're trying to preserve as, as, you know, like we say, these, these, these traditions become thinner.
Speaker: I sort of view it almost as like, almost as like a conservation project.
Speaker: Like if you had an endangered species, you know, how do you get them together and under like,
Speaker: You know, because like you can bring the pandas together, but if they're in this really artificial environment and they sort of finicky at the best of times, it can be really hard to create fertility under those circumstances.
Speaker: So like what's the most natural way that we could get men and women together who care about this to build something, to build a family?
Speaker: And the second category of possible solutions is like, how could we actually disentangle ourselves from this problem?
Speaker: And that gets into like maybe a little bit, you know, bigger picture, wilder ideas about like network states or expat opportunities or like how can we make ourselves more mobile and more flexible so that we're able to connect with people
Speaker: people all over the world on this problem.
Speaker: And then the third category of what we want to look at is like, are there ways that we could actually like reverse this trend for everybody?
Speaker: Like right the ship.
Speaker: Are there, are there cultural artifacts that we could create?
Speaker: Is there art or entertainment?
Speaker: Are there policy solutions that we could propound?
Speaker: You know, a lot of, a lot of really basic things have been tried.
Speaker: Um,
Speaker: that are, that are well within kind of the individual liberal Overton window.
Speaker: Um, but there are things that haven't been tried and, and, uh, you know, not, it makes me feel like something.
Speaker: So Malcolm and Simone Collins on, on this topic, they're going to be involved in the conference.
Speaker: Um, they mentioned that like, we have to, we have to solve this problem voluntarily or else authoritarian governments will, will solve it forcibly.
Speaker: And, uh,
Speaker: I'm actually skeptical that governments would be able to get their act together to even do that if they wanted to.
Speaker: But I do think that there are more voluntary policy incentives that have not been tried yet.
Speaker: So that's like the scope of... And I realize all of those are very vague.
Speaker: And it's sort of because we're not...
Speaker: you know, this is, this, this conference is not going to be us like pounding the pulpit.
Speaker: Like let's tell you what the solution is.
Speaker: This is very much, we want to hear from you and, and benefit from your expertise.
Speaker: Speaking to all those solutions, you know, we're basically going through this great filter right now.
Speaker: There's a whole lot of second order effects that we also want to consider.
Speaker: Like the people who are having kids today, right?
Speaker: They're unique in some way, or at least their bell curve is going to be shaped differently on certain dimensions.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: And and so it's not just planning for how to weather this storm, you know, demographically as the numbers go down, but also what is the future population going to look like?
Speaker: there's this intense selective pressure against certain cultural memes are basically acting as, what would you call, contraceptive.
Speaker: There are certain memes out there that are highly contraceptive.
Speaker: And are those memes gonna be around in 20, 30 years?
Speaker: Are they going to find the hosts, the genetic hosts to carry those memes on?
Speaker: So there's lots of implications.
Speaker: And that's going to inform all the different solution designs that we kind of look at.
Speaker: And I think we can only talk about and ideate on those things in a closed room.
Speaker: Yeah, yeah.
Speaker: And I wanted to, I wanted to strike the right balance between, like, I want everybody to have a good time and feel, feel comfortable.
Speaker: That includes the people who want to feel comfortable expressing unorthodox opinions, but also the comfort of people who, who, who find some categories of unorthodox opinions to be really like kind of accusatory toward like them and people like them and, and, and, uh,
Speaker: We're focused on making the dialogue as honest and as full of goodwill as it possibly can be.
Speaker: And one of the ways that's going to be facilitated is, like you said, because these groups are going to be small, it's going to be a much more personal setting than, for instance, a shouting match on Twitter.
Speaker: And there's going to be people going to be selected into...
Speaker: or they're going to select themselves into the genres of solution that they find the most compelling.
Speaker: And so it'll be sort of in the micro, in the conference, you'll be able to kind of identify.
Speaker: Because, like, for instance, we've talked about, like, the...
Speaker: the babies in bags and surrogacy and, and, and lots of like transhumanist solutions to this problem in the past.
Speaker: And like, that's not where I think the solution lies.
Speaker: So like, I probably wouldn't jump on to like that team, but if there is enough people who think that's a good idea, they'll go form a team and they'll go work on that.
Speaker: And then we'll bring it back and we'll all talk about it.
Speaker: And and I think I think you have to when you're in a situation like this where you don't know what the solutions are, you have to create a little bit of a of an ecosystem.
Speaker: And so that's that's kind of we're driving at with with the structure of the workshops.
Speaker: Yeah, you have to be open minded to be closed minded kind of thing.
Speaker: Cool.
Speaker: Well, I want to I want to close with just like what happens if we don't do anything about this?
Speaker: Like what happens if we don't try to find these solutions?
Speaker: And what that amounts to for me is I have to make a bet that.
Speaker: I mean, like, I feel lucky that I found my wife in the same sense that lots of people feel lucky that they found their their spouse.
Speaker: But you said that on your LinkedIn post the other day.
Speaker: I read that.
Speaker: But but I also feel like there was an element of the circumstances in which that contact happened were extraordinary at the time and much more.
Speaker: Scares, more rare now.
Speaker: And, you know, because of, you know, my my religious faith, you know, I had I had people to.
Speaker: We had people volunteer to run our baby shower, so we didn't like we didn't buy baby clothes until like baby number four.
Speaker: And.
Speaker: You know, we had people helping us with like the early stages of being a married couple.
Speaker: under conditions of like instead of them saying like you know because the the support that people tend to get in their relationships often is like you're so great they don't deserve you this is like i'm so on your side like basically
Speaker: acting in the interests of that one individual in this like fiercely loyal, which, you know, there's something admirable, admirable about that.
Speaker: But like we had people who were like,
Speaker: you're both pretty good kids.
Speaker: Let's try to help you stay married.
Speaker: Like, let's try to help, like, let's figure this out in the interest of this bigger thing that you're trying to accomplish.
Speaker: And so like, just, just the fact that I went to BYU, which is like this essentially like breeding program, sucking up all of the, all of the sort of high GPA Latter-day Saints all over the world.
Speaker: And, and,
Speaker: and kind of putting them in a jar and shaking them up.
Speaker: That in itself is this incredible like social technology that like exists almost nowhere else nowadays.
Speaker: You know, my kids will still benefit from some of that, that sociocultural infrastructure in ways that a lot of people don't, but they're going to have to be at least as lucky as I was probably a lot luckier.
Speaker: to close the deal as far as me having grandchildren.
Speaker: And it's going to be harder for them to find me.
Speaker: It's going to be harder for them to afford children because they're going to have this wild inverse dependency situation.
Speaker: They're going to have much more economic uncertainty.
Speaker: And unless I build it for them, they're going to h ave a much smaller support network.
Speaker: than I had because my extended family was enormous at the time and their extended family would be quite small.
Speaker: And so, yeah, if we don't take action on this,
Speaker: we're going to be leaving our kids in a, in a much more challenging situation in a way that's going to have really serious ramifications for them.
Speaker: So like we're obviously bought in where, I mean, we're, we're, we're literally bought in invested on this project because we're, we're, we're putting up the capital to make it happen, but excited to get some of these other folks involved as well.
Speaker: Yeah.
Speaker: I can't wait to see who shows up and what the, you know, how our circle of allies on this issue can grow.
Speaker: So, yeah, we're looking forward to it, man.
Speaker: December 1st.
Speaker: December 1, Austin, Texas.
Speaker: And it's natalism.org.
Speaker: You can get your tickets there and also sign up for the newsletter.
Speaker: So we'll be having updates from now until the conference.
Speaker: So, yep, natalism.org.
Speaker: All right, Drew, it's been great talking to you.
Speaker: Thanks a lot.
Speaker: You too, man.
