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54 - Natal Conference 2023 Recap
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In this episode I summarize Natal Conference and discuss why we started it, what we learned from producing it, and what's coming next.
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Transcript
Natal Conference 2023 Overview
00:00:17
Speaker
Hey everybody, welcome to the Exit Podcast.
00:00:19
Speaker
This is Dr. Bennett.
00:00:20
Speaker
It's been a minute, but we are finally wrapped on Natal Conference 2023.
00:00:24
Speaker
It was a great time.
00:00:26
Speaker
Probably the best compliment that I got was from several people who were involved with Singularity Summit and Singularity University who said that the quality of the attendees and the quality of the discussion and the passion and the intensity reminded them of the early days of that conference.
00:00:42
Speaker
And I remember the coverage of those events from the outside for several years was like, oh, it's just a confab for tech weirdos, and it's never going to go anywhere, and nothing's going to come of it.
00:00:54
Speaker
And now the questions that they were wrestling with are in Congress, and they're on
Demographic Problems and Ethical Interventions
00:00:58
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the news.
00:00:58
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And the initial attendees and sponsors, many of them are occupying positions of influence and leading the conversation.
00:01:05
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Not to say that there's anything inevitable about that.
00:01:07
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Obviously, they had to make a lot of smart calls and risky investments.
00:01:12
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But it really gave me a sense of what's possible here.
00:01:14
Speaker
And I feel the same sense of inevitability about this issue that they felt about artificial intelligence.
00:01:20
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I don't know anybody who's observing this question and taking it seriously who doesn't see roughly the same trajectory that we're seeing.
00:01:28
Speaker
The range of disagreement among informed people is less about is this going to be a problem and more about can anything be done about it, and if so, what's ethical to be done about it, what depth and scope of intervention is realistic, that kind of thing.
00:01:44
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which again is very similar to those early debates about artificial intelligence.
00:01:48
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They all knew it was coming, they all knew it would change the world.
00:01:50
Speaker
The question was, can we intervene, should we intervene, and to what extent and in what way?
Challenges of Demographic Inaction in Business and Society
00:01:56
Speaker
Now in contrast to AI, the problem with this issue is that the consequences of failing to intervene
00:02:02
Speaker
lag the intervention for decades, meaning if you fail to act, you don't see the consequences of your failure to act for 20, 25 years.
00:02:13
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And this represents a huge blind spot in any system that changes hands on a four-year election cycle, certainly like corporate systems that log metrics and hand out bonuses year to year or quarter to quarter.
00:02:26
Speaker
And also there's this perverse phenomenon where the catastrophic nature of the problem actually keeps it from developing a constituency to advocate against it within these institutions.
00:02:37
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And I'll explain what I mean.
00:02:38
Speaker
In another life, I spent a year in strategy at a major defense contractor.
00:02:43
Speaker
And we would have these incredibly narrow, nitty-gritty conversations about going to war in Eastern Europe or in the South China Sea and what that would mean for this radar program, this space program, this missile program, this aircraft program.
00:02:59
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In lots of detail about carriers and land strips on artificial islands, the range of our weapons, the range of our sensors, the range of the enemy's
00:03:08
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countermeasures and weapons and sensors.
00:03:10
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And I remember one time asking, if we're planning to create an existential threat for this hostile nuclear armed government, then why are we building these 72-hour, two-week, four-week, six-month projections, and nobody's saying the n-word, which is nuclear.
00:03:29
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Nuclear is the n-word.
00:03:30
Speaker
And that really puzzled me for a long time until I discovered the way that people respond to this issue of demographic collapse.
00:03:37
Speaker
Malcolm Collins, one of the guys who presented at NATO conference this week, tells the story of how he was a VC in Korea.
00:03:44
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And he would be getting into their nitty-gritty financial and business projections.
00:03:49
Speaker
And nobody was talking about the fact that they were obviously and inevitably going to run out of Koreans.
00:03:55
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And it's not a religious or an eschatological crisis
Narrative and Metaphors in Understanding Demographics
00:03:59
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that they're facing.
00:03:59
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It's this very concrete dollars and cents economic phenomenon that's going to blow up all their investments.
00:04:06
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So why don't they care about it?
00:04:08
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And I realized that catastrophe is a commons phenomenon.
00:04:11
Speaker
If you've gone through Econ 110, you've heard of the tragedy of the commons.
00:04:15
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If we've all got a shared public pasture, then we're all incentivized to send our animals to graze on it because it doesn't cost us anything to have them graze on it.
00:04:24
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But then inevitably, we all do that.
00:04:26
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We all overgraze it.
00:04:27
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It gets eaten down to dirt, and then it's of no use to anybody.
00:04:30
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Similarly, within DOD, within the defense contractors, there are all these little constituencies
00:04:35
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who stand to gain a lot from dialing up the risk of nuclear war.
00:04:39
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And none of them individually are powerful enough to prevent it.
00:04:42
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And if you fail to aggressively advocate for your program on the basis of a big picture, principled interest in avoiding nuclear war, you're not going to stop the clock.
00:04:53
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You're just going to get personally sidelined.
00:04:55
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And because it's a catastrophe, because it destroys everything, you don't really get a prize for being right.
00:05:00
Speaker
So there's no incentive to advocate for that perspective, and so nobody does.
00:05:04
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Now, natalism and demographic collapse are a little bit different in that there isn't an institutional incentive to advocate for these things or to move policy.
Personal and Collective Efforts in Demographic Solutions
00:05:12
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But there are very strong incentives for you to figure this out personally for yourself.
00:05:16
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Stay healthy, find a healthy spouse, raise healthy kids, and then help them to stay healthy, find a healthy spouse, raise healthy kids.
00:05:24
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The upside of being personally right on that is you inherit the earth, assuming that you skillfully navigate the challenges, the short-run challenges of demographic collapse.
00:05:33
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So that was my perspective going into the conference and also informs a lot of my goals for what I'd like to see come out of it, for the people I'm trying to meet, the things I'm trying to learn, things I want to build together.
00:05:45
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But in order to do that and open us up to possibilities that we're maybe not aware of, I wanted to cast as broad a net as possible.
00:05:52
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I wanted to get anybody who in good faith cares about this issue.
00:05:57
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And several of the attendees noted, particularly on day two, that there were sort of two big constituencies, two major groups with different approaches to this issue, one of which was your traditional religious people, your Catholics, your Latter-day Saints, your evangelicals,
00:06:14
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But, and I don't have data to back this up necessarily, but my intuition was that that perspective was the minority perspective.
00:06:20
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And actually most of these people were representative of the tech accelerationist gray tribe wing of the culture war.
00:06:30
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These are people very much very unapologetically taking an engineering approach to the problem, disinclined to moralize either about sort of who's at fault for the problem or like what interventions are too icky or cold or mechanistic for them.
00:06:50
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And this helps them dodge a lot of kind of counterproductive blind alleys that a lot of religious conservatives find themselves in on these issues.
00:07:00
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But I think it also leads them to ignore some important second and third order consequences of what they advocate.
00:07:06
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But what that means is that it's a really interesting discussion.
00:07:09
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It was such a cool time to be with these people and trade notes in this really pragmatic, warm, friendly way, which was exactly the vibe that I was going for with the conference.
00:07:22
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And I couldn't be happier with how that part of it turned out.
00:07:25
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You had people with these very publicly sexually libertine positions, for example, sitting right next to people with extraordinarily conservative, even like radioactively conservative views and having this very pleasant, honest, friendly conversation.
00:07:42
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And I think there's something about the issue of kids and grandkids that makes that possible for this particular issue that's maybe not possible for almost any other subject.
00:07:53
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It's just really easy to relate to the other person's aspirations and to see how you want exactly the same thing they want.
00:08:01
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And, you know, maybe you believe that the way that they're pursuing that will lead to, you know, a sci-fi dystopia or The Handmaid's Tale or whatever.
00:08:08
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but you're at least starting from this baseline of an essentially universal human desire.
00:08:14
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Plus there's actual babies strapped to some of these moms or toddling around, which really just transforms the vibe.
Global and Economic Implications of Demographic Changes
00:08:22
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Okay, so first off, I gave a keynote explaining the global stakes of the problem, the economic consequences, the political consequences of demographic collapse.
00:08:30
Speaker
But then talking about the emotional valence of just millions of people, men and women, who in another time would have had a decent shot, being essentially discarded and denied this fundamental human impulse.
00:08:44
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And not to say that they deserve it or we should guarantee it or anything like that, but basically just that the dating market is a very dark, sad, ugly place, and I don't want my kid to have any part of that.
00:08:58
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So that's why I'm trying to build for this problem.
00:09:00
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That's why I started Exit, because I believe that the institutions that used to get people educated and employed and married and starting families, that that infrastructure should at least exist for my kids and for the kids of the people that I care about, because that's the flywheel of civilization.
00:09:17
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If there's anything that you value about your culture,
00:09:20
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Those four things absolutely have to happen.
00:09:22
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Whatever your culture does, it has to do that.
00:09:24
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And so the purpose of the conference was to get men and women together, get, you know, the tech people and the religious people and everybody that cares about this problem, get them all in a room together.
00:09:38
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Because I'm not a geneticist, I'm not a demographer, I'm not a doctor, I don't know how to do public policy, but I figured I could get those kinds of people in a room together and see what they came up with.
00:09:49
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Now, I'll be honest with you, we didn't solve the global demographic crisis this weekend.
00:09:53
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But I did have a lot of these people say to me like, oh, well, now that I know that you can do it, I'll actually, you know, I'll invite my cool friends and I'll bring the money and I'll, you know, I didn't know what this was going to be.
00:10:05
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I thought maybe it would suck.
00:10:07
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And so, you know, I think next round people will come prepared.
00:10:11
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They're going to come with their projects.
00:10:12
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They're going to come with their...
00:10:14
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investments.
00:10:15
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And also on our end, we know who to call again and say, hey, you mentioned that you were working on this.
00:10:21
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How can we get you in a room with the right people to build that at the conference next year?
00:10:25
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We've also compiled a Twitter list so that people can stay in touch with each other.
00:10:29
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We've got a mailing list that we're going to be using to organize regional meetups.
00:10:33
Speaker
And that, by the way, will be in coordination with the exit meetups.
00:10:37
Speaker
Because I actually think the best thing I can do to move the needle on this issue personally is just unite the
Environmental Impacts on Fertility
00:10:43
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clans.
00:10:43
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Throw up a rally point, let people come together.
00:10:46
Speaker
So anyway, on day one, we had several talks about the microplastics and xenoestrogens problem.
00:10:53
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And while that's having an impact on fertility, I actually believe that it's more influential in terms of how it's
00:10:59
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altering our behavior, altering our desire to mate, altering our physical and psychological sex appeal.
00:11:06
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Like, yes, many of these environmental pollutants are risk factors for obesity and acne and, frankly, things like androgenic body hair on women.
00:11:17
Speaker
But I think there's also a case to be made that in terms of diminishing our sex drive, it's making us less inclined to compromise with the opposite sex, less willing to pursue professional and personal excellence in the pursuit of sex, and also just less capable of the vitality and aggression and adventurousness and risk-taking that make men attractive to women.
00:11:39
Speaker
Besides which, and I think this is maybe the most troubling idea, it appears to be the case that hormonal birth control alters the characteristics in men to which women are attracted.
00:11:50
Speaker
And so not only is it just sort of chemically preventing the act of conception...
00:11:55
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It's also steering women toward romantic partners with whom they will not have a desire to have children even after they're off birth control.
00:12:03
Speaker
It's easy to get really pessimistic about this subject, but Roy Agnationalist and Ben Braddock both spoke on it.
00:12:09
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They recommended getting rid of as much plastic from your life as possible,
00:12:14
Speaker
filtering drinking water, preparing as much food as possible, exercising, particularly sweating, in order to expel some of these contaminants, these endocrine disruptors, losing excess fat because it turns out a lot of these compounds store in the fat and continue to sort of leach out and cause harmful effects as long as they stay in the body.
00:12:35
Speaker
And then probably the tallest order, but a really interesting one, is to stop using personal care products like makeup.
00:12:42
Speaker
I don't know if we'll get to sold on that in my house, but it shows the availability of a market because we would easily pay 3X, 4X, 5X for personal care products that were healthy.
00:12:53
Speaker
And that was one of the projects that did emerge from the conference attendees.
State and Religious Approaches to Demographic Issues
00:12:58
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Someone had a personal care and cleaning supply brand that was PFAS-free, phthalate-free, etc.
00:13:05
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Some other guys who were interested in certifying products
00:13:08
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other brands providing like a, you know, endocrine healthy stamp on the various, you know, gooks and gunks.
00:13:16
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We heard from demographer Stephen Shaw on the need for incentives and persuasion as opposed to coercion, which that might seem kind of far-fetched.
00:13:24
Speaker
But when you look at where, for instance, China is headed, this will be an existential threat to the Chinese state comfortably within the next 15 years.
00:13:34
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And the state, at least, probably will not go gentle into that good night.
00:13:38
Speaker
Governments in the U.S. and Europe might like to try something like that, but they probably won't have the power.
00:13:43
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But they'll import other cultures of people who will have that kind of power and will have a willingness to employ coercive methods.
00:13:51
Speaker
So it's worth talking about as many ways as we can think of to address this problem in ways that we would feel good about.
00:13:58
Speaker
So then we heard from Malcolm and Simone Collins about the role of religion and fertility.
00:14:02
Speaker
Specifically, they made the case that religion was coupled with anti-productive or anti-technological sentiment.
00:14:09
Speaker
And so basically making the case that the sort of sub-tribe that wins will be one that captures the intensity and the fervor of traditionalist Islam or the Amish while leaning toward technology and education rather than away from them.
00:14:24
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I sat on a panel with them and Johnny Anomaly to discuss the future of religious fertility, how questions of meaning and views about the future, optimism about the future, are woven into the choice to have children, and the fact that it takes a level of sacrifice and a level of social trust that doesn't always pencil out from a materialist cost-benefit perspective.
00:14:46
Speaker
And that, from my perspective, was kind of the biggest weakness of the tech crowd.
00:14:51
Speaker
It felt like they were always looking for a way to instrumentalize and solve this problem as a pure engineering problem.
00:14:59
Speaker
But it seems to
Tech and Traditional Values Collaboration
00:15:00
Speaker
me that there's no getting around the pre-rational, non-rational, even irrational reasons that
00:15:07
Speaker
for a person to risk betrayal and humiliation and financial ruin and even death in order to bring new life into the world.
00:15:16
Speaker
You certainly won't do that because you want to make sure that Medicare stays funded.
00:15:20
Speaker
Or even because, you know, like Elon Musk, you sort of value consciousness in this.
00:15:26
Speaker
You know, it's an ethos, it's a values orientation, but it's kind of a little too abstract.
00:15:31
Speaker
It makes a lot of sense for a guy like Elon who has a ton of money and so he can afford to dedicate
00:15:36
Speaker
enormous amounts of resources to ensuring his own fertility without sort of interfering with his professional and personal aspirations.
00:15:46
Speaker
But he's about as radical as that perspective gets, and I don't think it scales.
00:15:51
Speaker
And that comes back to this like tech and trad synthesis.
00:15:54
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I don't think the trads get out of this mess without bringing at least some of the technological firepower and just problem solving ability that these tech people are bringing to the table.
00:16:05
Speaker
But I also don't see a way for these tech people to produce healthy families and communities without somebody from the outside supplying them with some real values because they're trying to make them up as they go.
00:16:16
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And I just don't think it's workable.
00:16:18
Speaker
You can't just believe that having values is useful.
00:16:21
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You have to actually believe.
00:16:22
Speaker
And so I think the real synthesis of these perspectives is it's essentially going to be trads or trad types who seduce the tech people and or steal their tech.
00:16:34
Speaker
It's a lot easier for us to steal their tech than it is for them to crib our values.
00:16:39
Speaker
People often talk about the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, my church.
00:16:44
Speaker
Like, if we could just figure out how to do family home evening and home teaching and two-year missions and BYU, if we could just sort of take all of that social technology and replicate it, then we could have the same kinds of families that Latter-day Saints have.
00:17:03
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And the fact is none of those initiatives are actually unique to our tradition.
00:17:08
Speaker
What is unique is a genuine belief that puts family formation and the maintenance of happy families
00:17:16
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at the absolute center of what it all means.
00:17:19
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Your relationship with your family is literally your little kingdom.
00:17:24
Speaker
You're faithful in a few things, you're made ruler over many things.
00:17:27
Speaker
The eternal continuation and glorification of the family relationship, the love that exists within the family,
00:17:34
Speaker
is literally what Latter-day Saints mean when they talk about heaven.
00:17:37
Speaker
That's what they're imagining.
00:17:39
Speaker
And so they treat that task differently than they would if it were just a nice-to-have or if it were sort of an ancillary thing, an alternative to celibacy.
00:17:48
Speaker
Or in the case of the tech people, if having a family represents sort of an abstract duty to humanity or consciousness or something.
00:17:58
Speaker
And one of the things that I found really powerful in talking to some of these people was that they still spoke about why they were doing what they were doing in these abstractions and generalities.
00:18:09
Speaker
But when you dug down past that a little ways, you found that they were actually having these supernatural or at least numinous experiences, these inexplicable experiences that
00:18:21
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that we're putting them in contact with, in my view, the voice of God.
00:18:25
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And I don't necessarily need to convince them of that, but it was very, very interesting to talk to them about it.
00:18:30
Speaker
And I think the distance between us is maybe shorter than it looks and maybe getting shorter.
00:18:36
Speaker
So anyway, we heard from Michael Anton, who did kind of a fun
Cultural Influences on Family and Relationships
00:18:41
Speaker
one.
00:18:41
Speaker
He took all of these principles from the sort of Hartiste Manosphere pickup artist game, and he talks about this episode in the memorabilia where Socrates deploys basically each one of these techniques in turn to flip things around on this very desirable hetaira type of courtesan.
00:19:05
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which was a nice break from the charts and graphs and doom and gloom.
00:19:09
Speaker
Indian Bronson and Ben Braddock spoke at some length about the selection effects and the type of people that are produced in this soup of endocrine disruptors and fertility decline, the prevalence of autism, the prevalence of morbid obesity, the prevalence of psychiatric disorders, all of these things being epigenetically linked to
00:19:32
Speaker
in particular the hormonal and chemical environment in the womb.
00:19:36
Speaker
Diana Fleischman gave a talk on genetic predisposition and essentially argued that most people wildly overestimate the role of nurture and underestimate the role of genetics, basically making the case that you can go ahead and have kids, it's fine, don't stress about it.
00:19:54
Speaker
She basically was implying that there's a lot of anxiety around having kids, which...
00:19:59
Speaker
There shouldn't be, because you're probably not going to mess them up any worse than you mess them up just by having them, which I don't know if you find that persuasive or not.
00:20:08
Speaker
It seems to me, even from within this evolutionary psychology frame, if nurture didn't matter, then it would be really weird for us to be so intensely incentivized to nurture our kids, both hormonally and socially.
00:20:23
Speaker
Like both your body and your culture are telling you very insistently,
00:20:28
Speaker
That taking care of your kids matters a lot.
00:20:30
Speaker
But you're also just striking at the question of free will, right?
00:20:33
Speaker
Like if you can't influence this child who is so psychologically similar to you and who lives with you and who is psychologically primed to essentially...
00:20:47
Speaker
start from the position of viewing you as like a god and in fact coming to model their adult concept of god on your behavior and your relationship to them and their interpretation of who you were.
00:21:00
Speaker
Like if your actions don't make a difference in that context, then your actions just don't make a difference.
00:21:05
Speaker
They don't affect any human outcome.
00:21:07
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which I guess is the strict materialist position.
00:21:11
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But nobody acts as if that were true, and I don't think they can act as if that were true.
00:21:15
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Next we had Dr. Pat Fagan, who just had some good advice about how to be a good dad.
00:21:20
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He said the best shortcut to the emotional experiences that your kids need to have with you is just to play and to play on their terms.
00:21:27
Speaker
He said if you can find your son's genius and delight in it, then that will be this deep reservoir of confidence and emotional stability that will carry him through the rest of his life.
00:21:37
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So yeah, either that or it's all genetics, nothing matters.
00:21:40
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Britt Benjamin gave the talk that I learned the most from.
00:21:44
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She's a divorce attorney, and she basically made the case against no-fault divorce.
00:21:49
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She talked about having to explain to people who had been openly cheated on that infidelity has no bearing on...
00:21:56
Speaker
the financial awards in the event of a divorce, or determinations of fitness to parent.
00:22:02
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So basically marriage just isn't an enforceable contract.
00:22:07
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There's really no hard terms and no penalty for breaching it.
00:22:10
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And it actually makes a huge difference to marry someone with the shared understanding that that relationship is permanent regardless of what happens.
00:22:18
Speaker
There's also the fact that women have to make the sacrifice of their sexual market value and their energy and their youth early on in the relationship and are strongly incentivized to defect or not get married during that period, whereas men do the hard work on the back end and they have to make the sacrifice of their sexual market value, which can be
00:22:43
Speaker
quite high and growing into their 40s.
00:22:46
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And since it's just this inherently asymmetric incentive structure, you will not have an equilibrium where both parties are happy in the absence of some form of contract, some binding expectation on both parties.
00:23:02
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And she just framed it in a way that was really difficult to argue with, even from sort of modern liberal egalitarian premises.
00:23:11
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It's like it's just bad law.
00:23:13
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So that talk was probably the closest to an immediate policy recommendation.
00:23:19
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It's hard to see how we get there without a coup, but frankly, a lot of things are like that.
00:23:24
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Next, we heard from Charles Haywood on the need for all-male spaces because, as he says, you need all-male spaces to generate the kind of masculine virtues, masculine characteristics and behaviors that generate the kind of erotic energy that you need to...
00:23:42
Speaker
induce someone to make the dionysian irrational passionate choice to start a family and i think that's really true i don't think that you're going to convince a whole lot of people to have kids uh just because it's the smart thing to do or the right thing to do i think at least at this stage of the game
00:24:04
Speaker
when the culture is so unhealthy and the incentives toward loyalty are so deranged the people who still choose to take that bad bet are going to be the people who are consumed with passion it's going to be the kind of people for whom it's not really a choice you do it because you can't imagine not doing it you can't imagine living without it and then of course you find that it's worth it but in retrospect in hindsight
00:24:29
Speaker
The things that make it worth it are not things that you can explain to another person.
00:24:34
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Not with the level of fidelity that it would take to make the decision make sense.
00:24:38
Speaker
And yes, eventually we'll rebuild the culture, right?
00:24:41
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We'll make it not an insane decision to get married and have kids.
00:24:46
Speaker
But if you're going to wait for that, you're going to be waiting a long time.
00:24:49
Speaker
And Zoomers have lives to live.
00:24:52
Speaker
And so I think we're just going to have to dose them with elk testosterone and make them insane and make them make each other insane.
00:24:59
Speaker
Because if they wait for it to be the smart move, they're going to die alone.
00:25:02
Speaker
So yeah, male spaces, toxic masculinity, organ meats, just be adventurous and brave and handsome and convince a girl to make some bad decisions with you.
00:25:14
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So that's Haywood.
00:25:15
Speaker
Peachy Keenan and Amy Therese both talked about antinatal memes,
00:25:20
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Lots of women just frankly being lied to about their sort of mid-career family prospects, lied to about how hard it is to have kids and be a mom.
00:25:31
Speaker
And the fact that so many women need your choices to validate their choices.
00:25:36
Speaker
And therefore, if you are having a family and making it work, it's like an indictment of their choice not to do that.
Policy and Societal Models for Fertility Solutions
00:25:43
Speaker
So it triggers all these mimetic defense mechanisms.
00:25:46
Speaker
Razeeb Khan pointed out the fact that lots of conservative countries that have the sort of abortion laws, marital norms, gender norms that the trads want for places like America and Europe still have rock bottom fertility.
00:26:03
Speaker
In fact, quite a lot lower than our fertility.
00:26:06
Speaker
Specifically, he's talking about Japan and Korea, but also Iran.
00:26:10
Speaker
These are all places that are about as trad as you'd want to be that still can't get women to have kids.
00:26:16
Speaker
And so basically just suggesting, I think correctly, that just telling people to get religion doesn't seem to be working, at least those religions.
00:26:23
Speaker
And next we had our surprise special guest, Balaji Srinivazan, who framed the issue in his favorite paradigm, which is God, state, and network.
00:26:34
Speaker
If you follow him, you know that he sort of believes that those are the three competing visions of the world as far as like what do you believe is the...
00:26:42
Speaker
The supreme authority.
00:26:44
Speaker
Is it is it God, religion, etc., traditional values?
00:26:48
Speaker
Is it the state, which is sort of the Chinese model, the institutional leftist DNC model in the United States?
00:26:57
Speaker
And then there's the network, which is the decentralized crypto tech tribe approach to things.
00:27:04
Speaker
And these roughly map to what Scott Alexander defined as red tribe, blue tribe, gray tribe.
00:27:10
Speaker
He argued that the God approach to fertility, right, is just sort of inculcating the right values and culture.
00:27:16
Speaker
which I get the sense that he would actually incorporate that as part of the solution, but he basically thinks it's sort of oversold by the trads and necessary but not sufficient.
00:27:26
Speaker
The state solution, right, is state incentives, including disincentives like coercion of people choosing not to have kids, said basically if the state can figure it out, if the state is a viable solution to the demographic problem,
00:27:41
Speaker
China's going to figure it out because China's going to throw maximum energy and maximum state capacity into that strategy.
00:27:50
Speaker
And not to speak for him, but it seems like he was arguing that that's sort of the bad ending.
00:27:54
Speaker
That's the bad future that we don't want.
00:27:57
Speaker
And what he sort of seems to think is viable is this alliance between
00:28:02
Speaker
the tech tribe technological approach and the the god tribe red tribe values approach which biology was attending remotely so he didn't necessarily get to see that synthesis emerging at the conference itself so it was really interesting to have him be kind of the bookend the final
00:28:22
Speaker
keynote speaker and describe pretty accurately sort of the crowd that he was speaking to.
00:28:29
Speaker
So that was
Community Building and Collaboration at the Conference
00:28:30
Speaker
day one.
00:28:30
Speaker
Day two was the workshops and unconference.
00:28:34
Speaker
We had a workshop on dating and one on community building.
00:28:39
Speaker
And it sounds like they had a really interesting brainstorm and exploratory conversation there, but there were some limitations just by virtue of the fact that these people didn't know each other, had to get a sense of each other's values orientation, and also the fact that there was nothing to glue them together going forward.
00:28:59
Speaker
So we still want to get people together and building things, but we're probably going to adjust the approach on how we do those in the future.
00:29:06
Speaker
The unconferences, though, were, I think, a big hit because there were so many people in the audience who had great ideas and great things to talk about.
00:29:17
Speaker
And the fact that you could just bounce from room to room and kind of vote with your feet and see what you were interested in, I think that did more to facilitate the kind of coalition building we were trying to do than a structured workshop format.
00:29:31
Speaker
And you had a lot of people, you know, pitching their business ideas, handing out business cards, doing a little market research on some ideas that they were thinking about attacking.
00:29:40
Speaker
It's going to be really interesting to see where all that goes.
00:29:43
Speaker
But we had several people who are in the investment world who came away saying, yeah, my VC friends need to know about this.
00:29:50
Speaker
We need to bring them in.
00:29:52
Speaker
They'd be excited about this group of people and this set of ideas.
00:29:55
Speaker
So we definitely feel like we're on to something.
00:29:57
Speaker
Definitely going to do it again.
00:29:59
Speaker
And in the meantime, it's just going to be wall-to-wall meetups.
00:30:03
Speaker
And I see those in roughly three categories.
00:30:05
Speaker
Number one and two are entrepreneurship and investment on the one hand and community building on the other, which both of those are the objectives of exit.
00:30:13
Speaker
So that's going to be intimately connected to all this.
00:30:16
Speaker
But then the third category is dating.
00:30:19
Speaker
And this is a tough one, you know, kind of the biggest genre of joke, really the only genre of joke around this conference was, you know, where's the orgy, right?
00:30:30
Speaker
Where's the conception bacchanal being hosted?
00:30:35
Speaker
And it was funny because several people who were there were like, yeah, this is actually the only tech adjacent conference I've been to that didn't have an orgy room.
00:30:42
Speaker
And like, that's definitely not the vibe we're going for, but we are trying to get young men and women together to fall in love, to have babies.
00:30:51
Speaker
Like, yes, that involves sex.
00:30:52
Speaker
I don't know if there's a way to frame that that doesn't give everybody the giggles, but like, it seems like it has to happen.
00:30:59
Speaker
And I'm sort of counting on my friends who are a lot cooler and smoother than me to help me set the tone there.
00:31:08
Speaker
Work in progress.
00:31:09
Speaker
But on that note, one item of feedback that I got from some of the ladies was that there was this really warm,
00:31:18
Speaker
positive, collaborative vibe between particularly men and women.
00:31:23
Speaker
And like, we weren't trying to create a safe space where nobody got offended, but we definitely wanted an environment where, you know, psychologically normal men and women would feel comfortable speaking honestly and getting to know one another.
00:31:36
Speaker
And seems like we did it.
00:31:38
Speaker
So running a mixer or two seems like it's in reach.
Collaborative Projects and Network Building
00:31:42
Speaker
And on the subject of exit, I want to take
00:31:44
Speaker
some time to look at this as an exit project as a couple of guys identifying a problem, assembling a team and building something together.
00:31:54
Speaker
The very first thing that I would call out is that we were physically together when we came up with the idea.
00:32:00
Speaker
We'd had a meetup.
00:32:01
Speaker
We were hanging around at Drew's house watching the End of Men documentary and basically realized, like, this is exactly what we're about.
00:32:09
Speaker
We know, you know, 60, 70 percent of these people.
00:32:13
Speaker
We could definitely have a bigger conversation.
00:32:16
Speaker
Second thing that I think is relevant and it's related is that this project required a huge amount of trust.
00:32:22
Speaker
It's the biggest financial outlay I've ever made, including buying our house.
00:32:26
Speaker
It was also eight or nine months of solid work in which each of us had to dedicate cycles to this.
00:32:32
Speaker
that we would have liked to have had for other important things we were doing.
00:32:35
Speaker
Everybody needed to deliver on their commitments.
00:32:37
Speaker
And midstream, we had a cancellation attempt that if I hadn't been working with really high integrity values aligned people, it could have been a real disaster.
00:32:47
Speaker
And I'm not neighbors with any of these guys.
00:32:49
Speaker
We live respectively on the East coast in the middle of the country and on the West coast.
00:32:54
Speaker
It's not the management or the execution of the project that required us to be in proximity to
00:32:59
Speaker
It's the relationship building, the development of trust that has to involve eye contact, handshake, seeing you in your element, exercising human judgment.
00:33:08
Speaker
David and I had worked together really closely for over a year at that point, and he had come to the meetups all over the country.
00:33:14
Speaker
He'd given me thoughts about how to draw the right ideas out of our guys, how to get them connected to each other.
00:33:20
Speaker
And Drew, of course, had his experience at Singularity Summit and workshop design.
00:33:24
Speaker
And so I knew they were really competent, hardworking guys.
00:33:27
Speaker
But I think what tipped this project over from just being sort of something we were talking about to a reality was that when we started to address our known unknowns, started thinking through like, what don't we know how to do to execute something like this?
00:33:42
Speaker
We had a big, long list of people to call.
00:33:44
Speaker
And if you make enough of those calls and each time you find the answer you're looking for,
00:33:48
Speaker
Eventually, you start to trust that like, okay, we don't have to have it all figured out.
00:33:52
Speaker
We know who to go to to get our questions answered.
00:33:54
Speaker
We know enough guys on the outside who we trust enough not to steer us the wrong way.
00:33:59
Speaker
And frankly, we spent a pretty long time in that exploratory space before anybody, including myself, was really interested in, you know, making a six-figure commitment to a particular venue.
00:34:11
Speaker
And so for a good little while, it was just talking once a week.
00:34:14
Speaker
We'd compare notes about the phone calls we made.
00:34:17
Speaker
Sometimes we'd loop in a lawyer or an event planner or somebody who could give us some insight.
00:34:22
Speaker
There were a lot of times when I would talk to a guy and I would say, I probably can't even ask you the right questions.
00:34:28
Speaker
So I would bring him into a meeting with the partners and we would all kind of pepper him and get a much more like three-dimensional view of whatever we were trying to figure out.
00:34:38
Speaker
And like, not to say we weren't all bringing good things to the table, but none of us had ever run an event like this in the past.
00:34:44
Speaker
And I don't particularly think any of us is trying to build a career in event planning.
00:34:49
Speaker
But it seems to be the case that our network has reached this critical mass where all of the expert opinion, the advice, the consulting that we might need
00:34:58
Speaker
is pretty much available to us.
00:35:00
Speaker
And we've got a strong enough core of smart guys to ask those experts the right questions that it seems like we could build almost anything we want to build.
00:35:11
Speaker
In parallel, a few of us are building this AI networking bot, which you can tell it about your goals and your interests and your values and your family situation.
00:35:23
Speaker
And it'll be able to tell you, like at minimum, it'll be able to tell you
00:35:27
Speaker
You have a lot in common with these three guys and in the following senses, these are the things that you have in common and maybe you should strike up a conversation.
00:35:36
Speaker
But eventually I'd like it to be able to say, oh, you want to flip houses.
00:35:40
Speaker
Well, here you might want to talk to a general contractor about which jobs you're doing yourself and which you're subbing out.
00:35:46
Speaker
And you might want to talk to this guy.
00:35:47
Speaker
He's a tax attorney about, you know, when it's appropriate to take profit.
00:35:51
Speaker
And can you, you know, space certain expenditures or sales across multiple years, et cetera, things like that.
00:35:58
Speaker
And I've certainly never built an AI assistant.
00:36:00
Speaker
I've never even project managed any kind of software development, not even a mobile app.
00:36:06
Speaker
But now I know the guys who have.
00:36:08
Speaker
I know guys who can handle the project management.
00:36:11
Speaker
I know guys who can write the code.
00:36:13
Speaker
I know guys who understand...
00:36:15
Speaker
the guts of what the LLM is doing.
00:36:17
Speaker
I know the guys who can help me with the cybersecurity side of it so that our guys are all in control of their own data and only sharing what they want to share.
00:36:25
Speaker
And so again, I'm in this position of building a core of a handful of guys
00:36:30
Speaker
who are working on this with me intensively.
00:36:33
Speaker
And then I have this huge standing army of guys who will take a, you know, 15 minute, 30 minute consult call.
00:36:42
Speaker
And that's the kind of thing that the exit guys are coming to me to do.
00:36:46
Speaker
Like, it's not a special favor to me.
00:36:48
Speaker
It's not an imposition.
00:36:49
Speaker
It's, this is the kind of work that we're all trying to find each other so that we can start.
00:36:55
Speaker
And yeah, you don't want to make anybody work for free.
00:36:57
Speaker
So you figure out, you know, some people you...
00:36:59
Speaker
pay hourly and some people you figure out some kind of equity arrangement.
00:37:04
Speaker
A lot of our guys like this slicing the pie method where you log your time and your financial contributions and keep track from week to week and those contributions appropriately valued are your equity stake in the project.
00:37:19
Speaker
In any case, what I'm getting at is there's a point at which the network has enough depth and breadth that you can build pretty much whatever you want to build.
00:37:27
Speaker
And to be honest with you, it does appear to be the case that imagination is the bottleneck.
00:37:31
Speaker
If you've got a really great idea, there's guys who want to build it with you.
00:37:35
Speaker
And there's guys who want to fund it.
00:37:37
Speaker
It would shock you how many guys there are who are just incredibly smart and they have, frankly, too much free time.
00:37:45
Speaker
And because they don't know how to develop and instantiate an idea like this, they are just waiting.
00:37:53
Speaker
And I know exactly how that feels because I was doing that three years ago.
00:37:56
Speaker
And this extraordinary group of guys just fell into my lap.
00:38:01
Speaker
And I feel like I'm just now figuring out how to make use of something like that.
00:38:05
Speaker
And yeah, there's aspects of it that are specific to me and my situation, but I've watched other guys build things inside the group the same way.
00:38:11
Speaker
So I feel like we're landing on some real generalizable principles.
00:38:16
Speaker
You came here to hear about the conference, but I really believe that if you're not a lobbyist, if you're not a scientist, if you're not a billionaire philanthropist, and you don't want to wait for that class of people to get their shit together and solve this problem for you, then what do you got to do to get married and have kids?
Personal Investment in Demographic Solutions
00:38:34
Speaker
Or what's it going to take to get your kids appropriately educated and employed and married and having families of their own?
00:38:41
Speaker
Like, yeah, the world's having a demographic crisis.
00:38:43
Speaker
The country's having a demographic crisis.
00:38:45
Speaker
But like also your family's having a demographic crisis, you personally.
00:38:49
Speaker
And what's it going to take to solve the problem at that level of resolution?
00:38:53
Speaker
In my opinion, you got to rebuild all that infrastructure, either for yourself or for your kids, which means money.
00:38:58
Speaker
It means revenue streams and professional connections outside the purview of these institutions that are trying to sterilize you.
00:39:05
Speaker
Maybe trying is too strong a word, but they are sterilizing you.
00:39:08
Speaker
They're sterilizing you and your kids.
00:39:10
Speaker
As I was preparing my talk for the conference, I thought about how strange it was that I didn't do anything to protect my safe corporate job.
00:39:19
Speaker
And it was a good job as far as those jobs go.
00:39:21
Speaker
Very little was required of me.
00:39:23
Speaker
It more than paid the bills.
00:39:25
Speaker
And I had plenty of lead time in which I knew that my Twitter account was compromised, that it was associated with my real name.
00:39:32
Speaker
I knew I was being targeted for months and I could have nuked it and walked away and I would presumably still be on that track right now.
00:39:41
Speaker
But instead, I just let it happen.
00:39:43
Speaker
And I was looking over some of the things that I wrote at the time, and the level of despair that I felt about that job and about all jobs like it was just so intense.
00:39:53
Speaker
And it wasn't just that I was bored at work.
00:39:56
Speaker
It was that the whole system was lurching toward this existential catastrophe.
00:40:02
Speaker
And I wasn't thinking about demographic collapse, certainly not in any explicit way at the time.
00:40:08
Speaker
But I knew that things were coming unglued.
00:40:11
Speaker
And that as long as I stayed there with my head down and my mouth shut, I couldn't build for what I knew was coming.
00:40:17
Speaker
I wouldn't have the resources, I wouldn't have the time, and I wouldn't have the freedom.
00:40:21
Speaker
And I would get older and fatter and balder, and the little box that I lived in would get smaller and smaller.
00:40:26
Speaker
And my kids couldn't possibly want the path that I was staking out for them.
00:40:31
Speaker
And I would have no answer when they came to me saying, how can I get an education to support a family?
00:40:38
Speaker
Or how can I get a job?
00:40:40
Speaker
Or how can I find a girl?
00:40:42
Speaker
Because all of those problems in the culture would have just gotten worse and worse and worse, and I would have done nothing about it.
00:40:48
Speaker
The question of whether or not we have the right to speak about this stuff
00:40:52
Speaker
and to associate with other people who care about this stuff,
Cultural Resistance and Future Optimism
00:40:56
Speaker
it's not a luxury.
00:40:56
Speaker
You know, I would sometimes be flippant about what we were all doing, making up goofs, trying to make our friends laugh on the internet.
00:41:04
Speaker
But you look at what they're doing to Doug Mackey, you look what they're doing to Elon Musk.
00:41:08
Speaker
This place, this thing that we're doing, it matters.
00:41:11
Speaker
They care about it intensely.
00:41:14
Speaker
Their ideology only reproduces to the extent that it can parasitize and steal your kids.
00:41:19
Speaker
And it's bad enough that it eradicates and subverts your culture, but it doesn't even perpetuate their culture.
00:41:25
Speaker
It only sterilizes.
00:41:27
Speaker
If I thought that my kids would grow up to vote for dumb politicians and higher taxes and, you know, silly regulations...
00:41:36
Speaker
but they would still have happy families, and they would still have just that basic meaning and peace and joy in their lives, then yeah, all this political talk would be pretty overheated, but it's about sterilization.
00:41:48
Speaker
It's about annihilation.
00:41:50
Speaker
It's about everything I care about and everything anybody else cares about going away forever.
00:41:55
Speaker
And if we can't find a way to resist that, even rhetorically, because we have comfortable jobs, then we may as well hang it up.
00:42:03
Speaker
And so Exit is about taking a rusty nail and just spending like an hour a day digging into the wall of your cell a little bit.
00:42:10
Speaker
See if you can make a hole.
00:42:12
Speaker
And nobody can tell you for sure that there's going to be daylight on the other side.
00:42:15
Speaker
But what I can pretty much tell you for sure is what's going to happen if you do nothing.
00:42:20
Speaker
So if you want to get to work, you can reach out to me.
00:42:22
Speaker
You can subscribe to the sub stack.
00:42:24
Speaker
Paid subscribers are invited to all of our happy hour meetups.
00:42:28
Speaker
Get a feel for the guys.
00:42:30
Speaker
Take a look at what they're working on.
00:42:32
Speaker
And let's see if we can get each other out of this mess.
00:42:34
Speaker
If you want to learn more about that, you can check us out at exitgroup.us.
00:42:38
Speaker
We are already planning Natal Conference 2024.
00:42:41
Speaker
We need to get a handful of outside commitments before we can give you firm dates and location and take pre-orders.
00:42:47
Speaker
But that's coming, and you can sign up to be the first to know at natalism.org.
00:42:51
Speaker
And I just want to say a huge public thank you to my partners, David Moore and Drew Gorham, to our producer, Barbara Williams, to our speakers and sponsors, to the exit guys who helped us workshop the concept, who shilled the conference, and
00:43:05
Speaker
And of course, to those of you who shelled out and got on planes to help us get this conversation started.
00:43:10
Speaker
I'm really proud to know you guys.
00:43:12
Speaker
It's an incredibly exciting time.
00:43:13
Speaker
We're doing an incredibly exciting work and I can't wait to see what's next.
00:43:18
Speaker
Thanks for listening, everybody.