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Kevin Dolan: The Natalism Conference

The accusation that gets levied against women is they just want to eat, pray, love and they want a girl boss. It’s this very hedonistic excuse not to have kids. I actually think the reverse is true. Having kids is this very risky, chaotic, volatile path to choose in comparison with their other options now. Having kids is a way of aggressively stepping outside that really critical environment. If you’re thinking of the threats being some other polity—like an aging society—you obviously straightforwardly don’t want that. That makes no sense. But if you’re thinking of the threat as being your own people, then yeah, maybe you want your own people to be weak and tired and old and sick.

Hi, welcome, welcome. This is the From the New World podcast. Today I’m speaking with Kevin Dolan, the founder of Exit Group and the organizer of the Natalism Conference. We discuss pronatalism, the problems of social science, ancient philosophy, and what happens after a regime change. If that sounds interesting to you, the best way to help us out is to let a friend know either in person or online. That way, you’re not only helping us but you’re helping someone you know find something interesting and informative.

Another thing you can do, if you like the show, is to sign up for the Natalism Conference, which, once again, Kevin is hosting and I’ll also be there. So it’s a great place to learn more about some of these fundamental questions, and the link for that will also be below. Without further ado, here’s Kevin Dolan.

So you do two things: you run the Exit Group and you run the Natalism Conference. What ties the two together?

Yeah, so Natal Con was actually born out of an Exit meetup. It was me and a couple of the guys, and we were talking about what are we doing here, why are we. It’s a fraternity; it’s built around sovereignty and sort of pushing back against the monoculture, as Malcolm and Simone would call it, basically creating parallel institutions, parallel structures to get what our guys need as those systems become increasingly hostile.

We were talking about why do we care so much about this? Why do we feel the need to run our mouths on the internet? What unites us as people? We realized it was like, oh, well we all want to have grandkids. We all want to have families and this liberal monoculture is sort of unremittingly hostile to that, and so that’s why we need to be in control of our employment, be in control of the way our kids are educated, and be in control of how we get the basic things that we need so we can rebuild a culture that’s not hostile to all those things.

We were at a meetup watching Tucker Carlson’s “The End of Men,” which is about the medical side of microplastics and sperm count decline and all those problems. I thought, you know, maybe there’s a broader conversation to be had here. We could talk about the dating situation, we could talk about why it’s hard to get married, and why it’s hard to, once you’re married, to have kids and have lots of kids.

We just brought together the smartest people we could find to come and address that topic. One of the reasons you might want to exit from the mainstream is that it’s really anti-natalist, right? It just makes it incredibly inconvenient and low status and it creates all sorts of problems if you want to have kids.

We talked about this a little bit offline; there’s also a kind of almost spiritual connection or a kind of personal connection. Can you talk more about that?

Yeah, I would say natalism is the why, and exit is the how. We recognize that we have this problem, and natalism is often discussed in the context of these big picture economic things—like Europe’s pensions, or social security, or China having enough soldiers or something. It’s very macro, it’s very political, and a lot of people rightly say, “I’m not going to have kids for that. I’m not going to have kids to save social security or the housing market.” That’s stupid.

That’s, I think, why policymakers should care about it, but really it’s something that individuals already want. Having a family, having children, is this basic human experience that closes all these psychological loops that don’t close any other way. That’s why individuals care about it, and we’re raising that to the policymakers and saying, “Hey, you should get involved in helping these people. You should be building a society that works for these people and helps them to fulfill this basic human need because if you don’t, it’s going to destroy all of these institutions that you depend on.”

I guess it’s been a while since I’ve talked about this, so if you know for the audience, you can just give us a refresher on what exactly are the ways that the monoculture has become so.

For one thing, just culturally, I remember having my fourth kid and going to the office, and it was the first time people stopped saying congratulations, and they started saying, “Oh, wow, that’s a lot.”

At least they said congratulations the first three times.

Yeah, three surprises me already, but sorry, go on.

So there’s just a sort of baseline cultural things, but there are also structural things like just the fact that all jobs and the housing market and everything is priced with the assumption that most people live in two-income households.

That makes it difficult for basically the daycare math to stop making sense at two kids. If you’re making an average American income as a household and you have three kids, it’s like, well, it doesn’t make sense anymore to do daycare. Someone should probably just stay home, which is a very difficult transition for a lot of people to manage.

So there’s this kind of hard cap on family size from a legal perspective—the fact that marriage is sort of an unenforceable contract that we don’t have social expectations that keep people together. That gets framed in really coercive terms like we have to make people stay together.

That’s not what I’m saying. All contracts exist to help people coordinate their incentives. Contracts are useful, and two people who actually trust each other and want to work together will often still sign a contract because it makes the expectations clear and it helps them to coordinate and collaborate.

It’s not strictly like a club that I’m going to hold over your head if you don’t do the right thing. It’s actually a way of coordinating incentives. So the fact that that is broken down makes us that everybody’s trying to figure out what a relationship should look from first principles out of the ether, and most people aren’t equipped to do that and don’t have time to do that.

And so the search costs of starting a family have gone through the roof. The ways people find people are really deranged now. It’s incredibly difficult to like dating apps or bars. Everything about the culture is organized around the hedonic experience of individuals, and that just militates against family formation.

There’s either ignorance or, in some cases, outright hostility to the idea that you can become a better person. The older story is that you would get married, you would get mentorship, you would grow up in a community, and all of these things were things that formed you, that in some ways took away your choices or at least put social pressure on you.

It gives you incentives to do certain things, and that these would form you into a better person. In fact, you needed to do that if you wanted to be a better person, and that there is such a thing as a better person. All of those groundings that I think people have believed for basically all of human history until very recently, they seem to be going away.

The very simple story, where one of those things is just starting a family, getting married, having kids, that’s one of the things that makes you a better person. One of the reasons why people have stopped doing that is that we’ve stopped acknowledging it.

Then there’s a deeper thing, and this is the question raised by people like Strauss that the entire way of organizing our economy, of organizing our institutions, has played towards this rejection of the idea that you can become a better person.

That maybe relates more to Exit Group. I don’t know if this is actually Bap’s coinage, but I like his phrase, “the war on distinction.”

Yes, this is very important. The idea that basically nothing can be better than anything else, nothing can be recognized as superior to anything else in the big picture. Anything that reveals disparate impact is a problem. That gets framed as if it’s some sort of narrow policy problem.

We have this disparate impact thing, and if we got rid of that, then everything would be better. But the structure of society is built around—and the way the state grows in power and expands is by identifying a conflict between a stronger party and a weaker party and taking the part of the weaker party so that it can sort of eat the stronger party and consume its power and take on its responsibilities.

You see that very clearly with these various independence movements inside the EU. The Catalonians or the Scots are super pro-Europe. They’re very, “We’re being picked on by the big bad England or Spain.” But really what it is is it’s the EU trying to eat the sovereignty of these little constituent parts.

But that extends beyond the state level. It extends into the basics of family life and employment. Part of the reason the society is so over-regulated is because the state is saying, “We’re going to decide how you can interact with your employees,” and the state is saying to husbands, “We’re going to say how you can interact with your wives,” and to parents, “We’re going to say how you can interact with your children.”

In every case, the stronger party, like the state, can sort of point to some bad behavior on the part of at least some people and say, “This is immoral. This has to stop.” But there’s basically no limit to that. There’s no limit to the intervention.

There’s like literal leveling, no stone left upon another of all human hierarchies, which basically leaves you naked and alone. It’s just you and the giant overwhelming state. In the short run, you can see why there are so many constituencies who are like, “Yeah, my dad was abusive” or “my husband was abusive” or “my boss is a dick” or whatever it is and the root for that hierarchy to be dismantled.

But those alternate hierarchies, those alternative institutions, form sort of the only resistance to the power of the state. And when the state, it’s just like Walmart moves in, they undercut prices and they kill mom-and-pop and then they jack up the price. It’s the essential phenomenon that we’re describing.

In history, this would be squarely identified with one thing, one structure, one political structure, which is empire. That is what empires do. They go in, they disrupt the local authority by appealing to local disagreements—local blood feuds—and they use that to take over.

Maybe you could say, more favorably, to gain allies, but ultimately to conquer. And on one hand, there’s a very interesting story of how a lot of the counter-terror and counter-disinformation programs got started, which was through foreign policy as literal counter-terror—as counter foreign terrorists—Al-Qaeda and so on.

Right, and then that evolved into a domestic control mechanism. I think that’s true. It’s documented excellently by Jacob Siegel and Mike Benz, and Jacob really brought this to my attention, so I’m always grateful to him for that.

There’s another, to me more interesting story, which is a kind of story where the empire has run out of frontier. We often talk about how this American settler personality has run out of the frontier, but maybe more destructively, the empire has run out of frontier.

And what is the new frontier of the empire? It is a kind of psychological control mechanism. This maybe seems kind of banal, but I really want to emphasize this point because I think if you’re talking to like a Roman, they’re like, “Yeah, yeah, this is how empire behaves.”

You know, we’re going to conquer people, and then you go one step further and like, “No, next you conquer people’s minds.” Next you take all of these values—all of these spheres of society, all of these sacred beliefs—and you wrap those into the power of the empire.

I think this is something that would just come as a complete and total shock to them. This would be, you know, witchcraft; they would just have no practical concept of it.

I gave a talk in Ecuador last year about how empires—there’s this constant tension between the power of scale and the power of human cohesion. There’s a lot of power to be had in being very tightly aligned with other people, right? But there’s also a lot of power in just having a lot of people.

Human civilization could almost be understood as this reaching out for how can we create greater cohesion at greater scale. It starts with basically the family. We have this very clear genetic biological reason to have shared interests.

Then you get things like one family conquering another, and they’re sort of deploying the resources of the other family or the other clan or the other tribe, and that expands the scale, the influence of that family.

Then you get things like aristocracy, where it’s a whole class of people utilizing the resources of another whole class of people. Then the feudal system, where it’s fractal recursive relationships between families that allow for things to scale up at every level of abstraction.

It is still an abstraction of the family. It’s either patronage in the case of aristocracy. The patron being the father figure, or it’s the patria—the father land—or it’s the pater patria—the father of the nation, the king.

It’s always this abstraction of the relationships that are supposed to exist between family. The case I was making was essentially that as we’ve scaled up to the global scale, you get Western liberalism which is basically run out of enemies, run out of frontier, like you might say.

In the absence of those enemies, it’s had to turn inward to the people and make them the threat. The threat that we exist to protect you from is actually each other. Prior to this, you could still use those fundamental roots of the psychological circuits of parenthood and family to help people connect and be like, “Ah, this is what’s us and this is what’s them.”

Because we have a shared nation, a shared nativity. We come from the same stock. We are, in some sense, a family. Once you go global, though, once you’re sort of trying to encompass all of humanity, it’s like that relationship of family connection has been kind of abstracted away to infinity because it doesn’t exclude anything.

It can’t mean anything. Every category is defined by what it excludes. So there is no box in which to put people. You end up with a society that’s gradually, instead of riding on those circuits of intimacy, it’s now eating them.

It’s consuming them; it’s destroying them, breaking them down in order to maintain power. Basically, my thesis was that’s not sustainable. That’s going to end.

I think it’s really important to get this history right, and I’m not saying that you’re necessarily getting it wrong, but I hear a lot of people with this telling of the history which is something like, “Well, the state conspired to create this massive, it’s kind of like a Soviet-style social engineering project and completely deracinate people,” and, you know, make them infertile and effeminate and the last man.

That almost gets the causation backwards. You kind of get the last man first before you get the social planning. Even though, you know, there’s certainly censorship and there are certainly elements of authoritarian rule, I think that it’s so important to get the history right because it actually tells us more about the problem that we’re dealing with.

If we are just dealing with a conspiracy to make people weak, then you just need to defeat the conspiracy. Do the regime change, maybe we’re doing the regime change now, and then it’s over. Then, you know, the patriots are in control, and we don’t really have to think about it anymore.

No, we’re talking about an incentive gradient that goes all the way back to like ancient Egypt. It’s not a conspiracy; it’s a natural evolution, and it’s the evolution of power in response to growing technological returns to scale.

There’s a yes and no there where, you know, Nick Land will have this very entertaining term. I see you smiling; I think you’re going to guess what I’m going to say, but Nick Land has this term called hyper-racism.

Hyper-racism is really not racism at all, but it’s essentially either capitalism or just metrics, right? Things like IQ, individualism, measuring people in a hyper-specific way but in a very, but to an extent, that’s basically individual or near individual.

He uses this term, and it’s, you know, it’s a bit provocative because it’s kind of just like a reverse euphemism, right? It’s taking something that’s honestly like a pretty normal part of life and calling it hyper-racism.

But the provocation is that in some ways we have a much more selective society, right? We do have a society that can create amazing things, the greatest rockets in the world.

It’s interesting because you do get both. Here’s where I want to give credit to you: there is this kind of selection for efficiency and, in some ways, a much more judgmental and specific system. You also get this clamoring for safety.

Every political theorist will tell you that there is a link between safety and obedience. Where that perspective gets things right is that I don’t think the desire for homogeneity comes from scale, but I do think it comes from the kind of aftereffects of scale.

That’s where I think you get it right—it’s the aftereffect of this kind of hyper-selective system, the consequence of hyper-selection. It’s this hyper-specialized system, and once you get the specialized system, you just fail to look at the hole.

Once you fail to look at the hole, you end up with these people who are haplessly dependent because they don’t know what’s going on. If they get fired, if they get even moved to a different department, they become much more dependent.

They enter this relationship of protection and obedience. I think certainly the more you are a hyper-specialized widget in a big machine, the certainly the less sort of transferable your skills become.

The more you become more like an organ or even a cell than an organism, that’s part of what I saw happening just in this really quotidian sense with my career.

I was a government finance drone and realizing that I was developing skills that had no other meaning in any other context. Eventually, it’d be very hard to sort of move laterally out of that. I meet a lot of guys who are in similar situations.

So a lot of what I try to do with Exit, in terms of creating sovereignty, is putting people more in control of their process of value generation. The workers controlling the means of production, right?

How much of the value you generate is dependent on capital that belongs to somebody else? Can you do your job from a laptop? Can you do your job remotely? Sales jobs, for instance, there are sales jobs where you need to be fed your leads from on high, and if that flow stops, then you’re screwed.

There are other sales jobs where you are a relationship manager, and the people to whom you sell are connected to you personally more than the product. If you leave, your book of business leaves with you, and those people have significant sovereignty.

A lot of the, you know, we should all go be plumbers, a lot of that discourse is to some extent predicated on people’s superficial poetic ideas about the trades.

But there is like— you do meet guys who run a window-tinting business, and they can I mean those guys fed-post on Facebook like crazy, and it’s because their customers can’t really fire them. They just have kind of an infinite supply of customers.

There’s no what you’d call a monopsony or oligopsony of a few buyers for their thing, and so they’re able to speak their mind. I don’t think it’s about any one particular line of work; it’s about how in control are you of the way you generate value.

There’s something interesting here, which, you know, biology will often say history is flowing in reverse. History was kind of favoring a centralized state up until circa 1960, and then it began favoring a more decentralized and incrementally more decentralized system until the present, basically.

Would you agree with that?

Aggressive in how he pattern matches about that, but I think in general that’s where decentralization is. You’re doing Exit Group.

Here’s the thing that I’m really curious about, about the kind of independent small business owners: how many of them miss being in like a broader hierarchy?

Not a ton. I’ve known people who sometimes miss not having to worry about it so much, like not having to worry about where things are going to come from. But these guys sort of build their own social connections outside of that or within their business. I don’t think there’s a ton of regret about leaving the wage cage—not that I’ve seen.

I do think it’s definitely a minority, but there is a kind of symptom of like there’s a type of guy in Silicon Valley who is like some ex-big tech software engineer—very talented software engineer—does a startup and just like doesn’t like the feel of it, just wants to go back to working in big tech doing the very clearly defined set of problems—not having to deal with so much change.

Well, I think tech companies in particular, especially the prestige tech companies, are built around incorporating the entrepreneurial impulse better than I think most companies are.

I could see someone in those contexts specifically being like, “You know, actually they created a really intellectually stimulating environment for me to work in; the team was stronger than what I could attract personally,” so I can see that maybe in Silicon Valley in particular—places that have a strong innovation culture and that bring together a dream team that you might otherwise struggle to find.

I don’t think that’s quite it, though. That’s not the thing that I hear. I specifically hear predictability. I think that looking at especially the startup aesthetic, you can tell why, right? Because a lot of it is like there’s a new problem every day, and a lot of it is not particularly glamorous or interesting.

In some ways, you mentioned that it’s intellectually stimulating. I think that’s the part that you get right, where you can just solve the same class of interesting technical problems that does require you to think every single day.

That’s something that I hear a lot. The underlying question for all of this is, once again, I don’t think that we’re here by accident. I don’t think it’s just the case that everyone’s stuck in these jobs that no one actually wants to do.

I think that’s unrealistic, and I think a lot of people are lying to themselves when they say, “Oh, totally.” There are a lot of people who want the stability.

Yeah, no, absolutely. The fact is the majority of people pay a premium to their boss. Communists talk about this, right? It’s the excess labor.

You’re stealing your labor, right? What is in fact happening is that you are paying a premium for someone else to tell you what to do. And that is a price; it’s a hedge fund for your agency, something like that.

I think that’s a good way to put it. A lot of people—I guess the way you structured your question originally, I think that most people who make the jump are glad they made the jump.

But most people will never make the jump. Does that make sense?

Yeah, it does. Once you decide to get out, you’re already within a very small population. You’re kind of built different.

I think particularly there are times and environments in which entrepreneurial type psychology is more favored. You look at a time like the hyper-centralized, like the 30s, 40s, and 50s.

The type of people who’d be entrepreneurs today would be like, “No, I can just go completely kick ass at one of these corporations or even inside the government, because that’s where the talent was going.”

Talent was extraordinarily centralized, and likewise, I think there are times when, you know, on the frontier, even somebody who would be an internal accountant at some giant corporation today would be entrepreneurial out there because there just wasn’t any structure for him to snap into.

It varies historically, but yeah, I mean most people want a job. So to bring this all back to natalism, I think people who are in the predictable spot, who are given that certainty—because most of history, you don’t get anywhere near this level of certainty—become anti-disposed to having children.

Because it literally is switching jobs, right? It’s at least like taking a part-time job, getting married. You know, these are very monumental changes, and when you have these monumental changes and you have a kind of background certainty that is just so different from it, do you think that’s the major cause?

How do you put the odds on that factor?

Well, I think there’s a huge number of things happening at once. It’s pretty multivariate, but I will say I think it is underrated. It often gets framed in these terms that are like especially for women—this is the accusation that gets levied against women—is like, “Oh, they just want to eat, pray, love,” and they want a girl boss.

That’s why they’re not having kids. It’s this very freewheeling hedonistic excuse not to have kids. I actually think the reverse is true.

Having kids is this very risky, chaotic, volatile path to choose in comparison with their other options now. We’re in a very controlled, risk-averse, predictable environment.

Having kids is a way of aggressively stepping outside that really predictable environment. Essentially what we’re trying to build is a world without love. We’re trying to build a world without having your heart outside your body, if that makes sense.

Being in love with another person romantically, you’re placing a lot of your happiness and peace outside your direct control. Then you do that again when you have kids. You want good things for them, and you can’t actually make them make the right decisions.

So a lot of people are afraid of that rightly. I think also as our social scripts become weaker, those decisions become even more volatile, even more risky than they already are.

To put it in like direct personal terms, it’s like if an attractive, bright young woman is to have a family, you’re sort of asking her to stake her most valuable social years. Her 20s are this time of extraordinary opportunity in which she can have all kinds of experiences; she can have all kinds of professional development; she can have all kinds of education.

These opportunities are just open to her. You’re asking her to take a chance on a man and, frankly, to take a chance on the kids. That they will be this profound, sort of unspeakable rewarding experience.

She has to kind of believe in magic. She has to believe in, like, that there’s something—believe in divine governance. She has to believe that something about that experience in a way she can’t predict or describe ahead of time will be worth it.

The alternative is the job and the vacations and the sort of consumer experience, but she knows that check will clear. She knows she can have that. Whereas this other thing is very kind of ephemeral and really risky.

So you sort of understand why someone would say—and I don’t think actually most women or even a lot of women like categorically rule out family.

I think what’s going on psychologically, if I can mansplain a little bit, is I think what’s happening is they’re saying, “Well, maybe, you know, maybe that magic is possible, but boy, he better be something. He better be really incredible for me to take that risk.”

This went a different way than I was expecting.

Okay, what were you expecting?

So I’ve had this experience. I’ve been culturally pro-natalist before I was ever adjacent to or writing about politics. But I’ve been in two relationships where, you know, this is the thing that both of these ex-girlfriends have told me: “We should get married and have kids at the right time.”

And I didn’t know, like, who knows if that’s true. I don’t think they’re lying to me kind of maliciously, but I think like most people don’t even know this for themselves, right?

So they don’t even know what their future answer will be, and they’re just not willing to make the commitment. Where I thought you were going to say is that they would just defer it into the future endlessly.

That also, yes. There’ll be some time in the future—I don’t know when. But they’re actually very similar answers, right?

There’s one that’s kind of deferring on the axis of the quality of the boyfriend, to put it crudely, and the other is on time, right?

So, you know, in my situation, we’re in long-term relationships, we’re in happy relationships, but the question is, “But when?” Right? That was the axis where there was uncertainty.

To kind of take the deep dive into philosophy again, I don’t know, maybe this is my coping mechanism, but to take a deep dive into philosophy again, I was talking with someone who may be on the podcast soon about another person’s book.

The book is “Freedom from Reality” by DC Schindler, and Schindler in this book talks about how, you know, Locke invented and the kind of Lockean society following him kind of invented this idea of like probability.

He’s very critical of this idea of probability at all, and that was kind of what was going through my mind when you were describing this thing of like, “Oh, it’s very risky.”

When a woman is thinking about sacrificing for these things that are very uncertain, you kind of have to have the expected value go up. It’s a very modern way of thinking about things, right?

And Schindler writes in this book, I think somewhat convincingly, that the ancients kind of reject this framing altogether with like, you know, it happens or it doesn’t happen. You know, what do you mean expected value?

Maybe that would have made them worse at poker, but it might have made them much better at many of these transformational things because I think when people just apply it, it’s just a broken framework.

It would be one thing if they were applying these things correctly, and maybe if you’re selling someone life insurance, you kind of are applying it correctly. I believe you when you tell me that women and men, I should be clear, are having these narratives go through their mind. In fact, I’ve experienced this.

But I don’t think they’re in any way applying this correctly—women and men are not remotely applying this correctly, and maybe it’s not even possible to apply it correctly in this context.

Yeah, I don’t think it is.

Risk calculus is a sort of bad way to think about this, and but to your point, it’s the only way. It’s the default way, at least I should say—it’s the default way to think about this, right?

Yeah, no, that’s absolutely true. One of the images that has occurred to me a lot: Odysseus wanting to hear the sirens.

The social structure that we have that has been torn down was the mast to which you were tied. Remember in that story? He contrives this situation so that he can hear the music. He’s saying, “I want all of you to plug your ears and let me hear the music.”

I think similarly when we had these guardrails, we were able to sort of give ourselves to the romantic and the erotic in a way that we can’t afford to now—or we feel that we can’t afford to now.

Were those guardrails like perfectly constructed to ensure human flourishing and were they perfectly just and perfectly fair? No, but they were something, and what we’ve exchanged them for is nothing.

I think that has been a really bad trade.

Yes, and I think it’s really important to tell the full story of Odysseus because it is just really important. I think not all modern people, especially not all young people, know.

Odysseus, he’s sailing in this incredibly treacherous ocean. They know that there are these monsters, these sirens who will lure you into their trap and essentially crash your ship.

I’m not sure if they’re going to eat you or something, but they’re going to kill you. The lure is just simply beautiful.

Odysseus, yes, this is an aspect of the story that is actually really important that I didn’t pay attention to until probably much later than I should, which is, you’re exactly right. His crew, they have their ears plugged, but Odysseus, he asks to basically have these constraints placed upon him at all, right?

That’s sometimes how the story is told is that he asks to have these constraints placed on him so he can hear the sirens, but he’s controlled. He’s literally tied down—like he’s tied down physically to the ship.

And that’s how he doesn’t like jump into the sea and get eaten by these sea monsters. But you’re right, there’s this very interesting aspect where he doesn’t just plug his ears himself, right?

He has this experience, this kind of erotic experience, but only within the confines of like literally being tied down. This is an aspect that I really haven’t considered before.

The Zoomers now, they’re not having sex. They’re not having relationships at all. I think the story is apt because the thing that conservatives were predicting is that you would just have rampant infidelity and licentiousness, and it would just never stop.

That’s actually not what happened. It did stop, and it stopped these totally anti-social Zoomers with no riz. And that’s where it stops.

I can identify it in myth; I can identify it in literature, but I have no clue where it comes from. The big question I have to you is, where does it come from?

Why does it become easier to exercise these desires if you have the constraints? When you ask young people to describe their ideal sort of dating situation, how would they like to meet their spouse, their partner in general, it takes the shape of an arranged marriage.

Sort of like the modern context of arranged marriage, which is like people who care about me and know me assemble some dossiers of some candidates and present them to me, and I choose from among them.

You’re not totally alone in the decision. This is certainly true of women, but it’s also true of men. There’s this paradox or maybe a conflict of models between the manosphere notion of eroticism and how many women describe eroticism, particularly within marriage.

The manosphere thing is trying to explain to you why a woman wants the bad boy because he’s dangerous and he’s exciting or whatever it is, juxtaposed with women in a regular sex life as a stable pairing.

Who will be like, “You know, I need to feel safe. I need to feel relaxed.” There’s a whole other dynamic at play there, and I think it really is about a roller coaster.

I want to enjoy the roller coaster, but I need to trust the restraints on the roller coaster, that I’m not going to actually fly off the roller coaster. That’s sort of what the Odysseus metaphor describes—like strap me in and then let me have the experience.

I think that’s what people are looking for. You can’t make it safe, but at least sort of tenable. I can tell myself a story why this is going to work out.

Almost nobody would frame it in terms of like raw expected value, but just telling themselves like it will be worth it.

I know people who would frame it in raw expected value.

Well, yeah, but I know what you mean. I know what you mean. I’m sure many of them are the same people.

Yeah, many of them have been on this podcast.

But aside from those people, I think you’re right. We’re describing what people want in this modern way, and perhaps it’s how modern people would describe it themselves.

So it’s truthful in that sense. The thing that you’re actually describing is like having the hand of God over you.

The thing that you’re describing isn’t having—like a thing that people will say in Burning Man is that they’ll say like, “Nothing leaves Burning Man.”

This will have no impact on the rest of my life, and you know, maybe that’s true financially. Maybe it’s not going to directly impact their job.

Maybe it’s not going to directly impact anything else—that’s a crazy thing to believe. You yourself are going to be changed, right?

I think especially if we’re talking about intimate experiences, that’s inevitable. You go there, you take the ayahuasca, it completely breaks your brain. You almost belong in a mental asylum now.

Other than that, you know, everything else has been changed. It is… we live and the way we experience things and the way we relate to one another but also just because it’s like a cultural force it has the potential to generate skepticism and to bring people back to the idea of what it is to be human and to think about what it is to think and what it is to feel and what it is to create and to be wise and to be connected to one another.

If we can actually leverage that in a way that frees us from the mechanistic thinking that has dominated our discourse for so long, I think that can have profound effects on everything from how we approach family life to how we approach politics to how we approach our spiritual lives. There’s a way in which we can re-enchant the world that doesn’t rely on simplistic, mechanistic models of how people operate.

Moreover, I think one of the exciting prospects of AI is how it invites us to rethink creativity and artistry. Instead of just producing outputs that serve a narrow economic function, we can actually use AI to push the boundaries of creativity, generating new forms of expression that challenge us to rethink what it means to be human, what it means to create, and what it means to engage with the world around us.

This return to the idea of humanity as something complex, rich, and full of nuance can also impact how we think about relationships and families. When we acknowledge that life is inherently challenging and that relationships require work, we might begin to appreciate the depth and beauty that arises from our struggles and imperfections, both in ourselves and in others.

In this way, I think AI could play a significant role in facilitating a more meaningful approach to our personal lives and our societal structures. It can serve as a catalyst for awakening the deeper values and truths that have been overshadowed by our fixation on efficiency, productivity, and mechanistic worldview. As we move forward, it’s crucial for all of us to remain grounded in the recognition that we are not mere machines; we are human beings with innate worth, capable of profound love, connection, and transformation. We think about each other, but also the fact that it will put paid to essentially managerial epistemology, the idea of trusting the science and getting your knowledge about the world out of a pipe. I think that’s really a valuable development.

It’s interesting because in some ways, AIs do solve some of these statistical problems. Take Palantir; I think it has a very early machine learning algorithm to detect objects to aim stuff. In some ways, that’s statistical—like actuarial. It also works; it’s doing an actual productive thing. Then you have what Stress describes of people cutting up the worm in social science, into such a narrow slice that it tells you nothing about the whole, and so you’re just not gaining any information.

Of course, he’s not just describing biology; he’s more specifically describing political science, where people are not concerned with the overall regime. They’re not concerned with the virtue and the nature of what is right. They’re, in some ways, not even really concerned with the survival of the regime, which would be shocking to someone like Machiavelli. Everything is instrumentalized, sliced up, oversimplified—totally turned into a toy—and it is just disastrous.

There’s this amazing article by Jacob Siegel called “Data-Driven Defeat” about how, with the axis of Palantir, it created a kind of incentive structure where commanders were more able to justify their actions based on quote-unquote data. These are actions that are not actually justified—just look at the outcome of the war. Just look at the outcome of Afghanistan; they were not justified. If you were to collect some amount of data to justify it, the thing with the managerial structure is that it’s never actually fair.

I shouldn’t say never; there are versions of it that function. But very often, the more you have to insist on it being really data-driven, the more you kind of get the suspicion that actually it’s cherry-picked and completely selective. There’s something else going on here.

There are sort of two problems there. One is that what you’re trying to measure is way more dimensionally complex than you’re accounting for. But there’s also the fact that you are building a structure in which human beings are expected to behave like organelles, and they’re not actually organelles. They have their own incentives, will, and desires. That’s sort of where egregores come from.

An egregore is an agglomeration of individuals acting according to their incentives. It’s like trying to hammer human beings into a eusocial hive-like system. It’s a new Soviet man, you know? Yeah, it’s failing.

All of this returns us to the question I asked earlier, which I think you gave a good answer to, but I think we can keep talking about. What happens after the transformation? What happens after the regime change? First of all, people will have kids that will find partners; they will fall in love. Amazing things will happen, and I certainly hope that’s the case.

But maybe more related to Exit Group, David Kilcullen’s book, which I haven’t read but I’ve listened to your review—great review. I think it’s very likely going to be a scenario, no matter how the transformation happens, that there will be an ancien regime that will lack the ability to perpetuate itself in the long term but will have the ability to destroy things with nuclear weapons—kind of like proto-Russia.

Russia, like, maybe they can take over Ukraine; they definitely can’t take over Europe. They definitely can’t take over America. They can also start nuclear war. I think Russia is a very interesting model to look at, especially in terms of the post-Soviet collapse.

I think that alternative sovereignties are going to emerge. This is one of the reasons that I like biology’s work so much. The question is: who are those people going to be? What will your relationship be to them? How do you make sure that you show up on time to that party? How do you make sure that you’re not early to that party? That’s a hugely important question.

What they say in investing: early is the same as wrong. So with Exit, what I’m trying to do is surround myself with and be as useful as I can to as many admirable, excellent, and values-aligned people as I can find, creating conditions in which we have increasing leverage over these sort of faceless managerial systems of control and utilizing our advantage as human beings, which is our ability to see things and maneuver in ways that those managerial systems are not built to perceive or respond to.

There are certain categories of challenge, resistance, and threat that our system of control is very well equipped to handle and stamp out. There are others that it is completely blind to. There are places you can go and positions you can put yourself in where you are way more practically free than you would otherwise be.

Part of what’s happened is that the system of control that we live in right now is totally a product of deception—power routing around the rules that were intended to contain it. It’s a lot of kludges, a lot of duct tape, bailing wire, and bubble gum running these systems of control because they were built to route around attempts to contain them.

For instance, really important, what’s an example of this? An example of this is your HR department. Your HR department at your job exists to prevent the company from being the target of a lawsuit. When Trump was first elected, there was a wave of companies saying they were going to get rid of their DEI department or whatever, and that was cheered as “oh woke is over, we won, we beat them.”

No, the system of control that exists in your corporate environment is as strong as it ever was. They change the names, change the labels; whatever—it doesn’t matter. Maybe they pared down some of the do-nothing sinecures, but HR is actually an important overhead center and does an important business purpose, which is to not get sued.

Accounting is for you don’t get audited and have the tax man on your ass. Legal is for external lawsuits. HR is for internal lawsuits. The reason that HR exists is that we have a series of laws where, in particular, there’s disparate impact and hostile work environment.

So somebody on Elon’s production line in California got called the N-word by another Black person, and that led to a $137 million lawsuit. It’s like the government is putting out bounties for socially undesirable thought and behavior, saying, “If you can find a problem in this company, we will pay you $137 million.”

What happens when people find those problems? They find them everywhere. Not only that, they are trained over decades to be hypersensitive because there’s so much reward if you find one. That’s obviously socially really bad, but in terms of the power structure, we would have one set of problems if we lived in Cuba or North Korea or even China or Russia, where if I say the wrong thing, police will come to my house. They will take me to jail; I will be tried by a judge; I’ll be told I’m not allowed to say that, and they’ll put me in jail or cane me or whatever.

Our system is: if you say these things, you don’t get to have health insurance. You don’t get to earn a regular living because we’ve made it so that these high-status jobs require you to assent to the set of propositions. We’ve made it so that those positions are inherently low status and disagreeing with those positions is inherently low status.

It’s not just a cultural phenomenon or some fever that we all suffered and now it’s passed; it’s infrastructural. It’s part of our institutions. The way doxing works is an interesting illustration of this because it’s not the case that someone like Jason Wilson writes this piece about how you’re a bad person, and then everyone gets angry, and online there’s a wave of popular outrage, and then your HR department is like, “Oh, we can’t handle the PR consequences of this; it’s too hot for our marketing strategy.” That’s not how it works at all.

If you read these docs, they’re very dull to read. They’re not intended to be popularized to sort of generate popular outrage; it’s like a dossier—like an intelligence dossier—of he said this, this, this, this, and this. These are all specifically actionable discriminatory things he said so that someone can call your HR department and say, “This guy is basically a hostile work environment lawsuit waiting to happen.”

What they’ve done is, through the creation of just a handful of legal constructs, made it so that every corporation with over a hundred employees has had to hire their own secret police, their own internal political security forces, to ensure that it’s not just that there’s this explicit set of rules you must follow—it’s that your HR department needs to be crazier than the craziest person at your job.

They need to anticipate that insanity so that they can make sure nobody offends that insanity. All of this is to say that is a very powerful enforcement mechanism. But if you can get outside the W-2, if you can get outside of corporate employment, you basically go back to having free speech. You are free to speak your mind because they can’t take away your health insurance.

If it worked the way they claimed it does, which is like, “Oh, people got mad at you,” then the guy who runs a window tinting business would not be able to speak his mind because he would offend his customers. But that’s not who’s offended; that’s not the issue. It’s like this big boulder rolling downhill, and it will smash you flat, smash you into a pulp, if you stay there.

But if you just step aside, you’re completely fine, and that’s the nature of these managerial systems. They have specific channels through which they are equipped to target power and equipped to perceive and acquire threats. But you can just end-run them.

States are doing this too. I mean, if you look at how the Chinese have interacted with the United States over the last 20 years, they’re clearly practicing what the book describes as unrestricted warfare. Are you familiar with this book? Yes, unrestricted warfare—great book.

Basically, that’s all this is: it’s an attack on domains that the enemy is not capable of perceiving as a threat. Now, obviously, if there were a king of America, like a human being empowered to exercise judgment, then he could just say, “Well, it’s not technically a declaration of war, but these guys are clearly screwing us and being hostile, so we’re going to put a stop to it.” But because it’s this faceless bureaucracy, it can’t react that way.

The example Kilcullen gives in “Dragons and Snakes” is they’ll buy a hotel on a hilltop overlooking every American naval base. They’re just allowing them to set up listening posts because they’re not representatives of the Chinese Communist Party; they don’t have any explicit ties. It’s just Chinese nationals.

We have our racial hang-ups that say you can’t assume that someone’s hot; you want to go back to the Japanese internment camps? You can’t assume that somebody’s sort of affiliated with their home nation just because they’re affiliated with their home nation. The ability of the system to respond to these threats is essentially nil.

What I’m saying is that we can take advantage of that as well. We can build the kinds of institutions that carve out sovereignty for ourselves without pulling aggro, so to speak. Yes, this concept of pulling aggro I think is very important. Did you want to explain it more for the audience?

Sure. In video games, pulling aggro is doing something that will cause a computer enemy to focus on you and to start attacking you. In group role-playing games—like World of Warcraft, in a raid—the people who do lots of damage but are sort of easy to kill have to be concerned about pulling aggro because if they do enough damage to the bad guy, he’ll come after them and then immediately kill them.

So it’s about how do you maximize the amount of damage you can do to the enemy without triggering or keeping him focused on beating up the tanks—beating up the guys whose job it is to get beat up. We are up against a cybernetic organism; we are up against a non-human entity that cannot exercise human judgment.

There are things we can do that get what we want without pulling aggro. How does that play out in the real world when we’re dealing with the U.S. government, for example, or with your HR department? Well, as I said, stepping outside of the W-2 makes a huge difference.

Also getting yourself in situations where your skills are more transferable, more marketable on the outside, and pursuing parallel opportunities. I know guys who are basically continually applying for other jobs, and it’s not because they’re necessarily going to take those jobs; it’s so that in their salary negotiations—sometimes you guys have them quarterly almost because they have such a strong negotiating position—but in those salary negotiations, they can always say, “I’ve got this in hand; I have this alternative that I’m considering.”

Creating situations where you are in a stronger position relative to your employer—or just that you don’t have an employer—that’s probably the biggest one. A lot of what’s happened over the last decade is that the social enforcement of managerial norms led people sort of in an instinctive evolutionary process to bifurcate society.

You just had enough fights with your liberal cousin or your liberal coworker that you realize, “I just can’t have an ongoing, intimate social relationship with this person, so I better go find some other friends.” Part of what’s happened is that we’ve just stopped having friends, which is a real problem.

What has also happened is that the friends I have are going to be people with whom I can have these conversations. It’s connecting with people socially—networking socially—so that your friends are people who share your values. You can’t be beat over the head with, “You can’t sit at our lunch table anymore if you have these opinions.”

Professionally, how am I going to earn a living when I have these opinions and want to express them? With my kids, you’re going to be on the wrong side of history is sort of the threat that is deployed. I think it’s really effective on the boomers. The reason it’s so effective on the boomers is that what they’re really saying is, “We’re going to make sure that your kids despise you. We’re going to make sure that your grandchildren aren’t even allowed to be around you.”

That’s the threat. Taking responsibility for your kids’ education and acculturation—making sure that they don’t have the opportunity to poison your kids against you—that’s a huge source of leverage in the near term. The immediate things you can do to resist these systems.

Then it’s about mutual aid: how do we solve problems in our community? How do we make ourselves useful to local law enforcement, local emergency response, local logistics? As the bigger picture systems break down and become more hostile and less responsive, we are positioned to be involved in the provision of those basic services. That’s what a proto-state is.

Yes, it goes back to obedience and protection always. A state is whoever provides those basics of security and credibility and provides a framework in which other people are able to flourish. I think that’s a good thing. I don’t have a negative view of the state in principle.

I think states are basically just abstractions of family, and it starts with strong families. It starts with a handful of guys who have strong families who need to be in charge so their families can flourish because the big-picture mechanisms that provide those things are collapsing.

There’s almost a rhyme with the natalism issue because the natalism issue can be construed as, “Oh, we need to resist this tidal wave that’s coming.” Similarly, a lot of people like the errors of the ’90s with the militia movement were, “Oh, we need to explicitly fight back against the state.” No, you just get swamped; you get crushed, you get destroyed.

What you want to do is be there when that thing passes. Be there when that thing collapses and is no longer viable. We don’t have to do anything for this thing to collapse; it’s doing just fine on its own. What’s interesting is that the collapse can happen in partial ways.

The term in our circles is narco-tyranny, right? Where, for example, the electricity grid in LA will collapse; you’ll still have the HR departments and the police. SF will not enforce literal violent assaults, but they’ll really get up the asses of the people putting up the X sign, if you remember this. You can destroy, but you’re not allowed to build.

What’s really interesting with this concept of drawing aggro is that it’s an unsolved problem—how to create the alternative SF police without drawing aggro. No one knows how to do that yet. I mean, I don’t think you do that in SF.

What we’re asking right now is how do you provide security? The way you provide security to Bay Area smart people is not by replacing the San Francisco Police Department; the way you do it is by creating a safer place somewhere else. At least in the short run.

I know a few people; I think the podcast two before this one will be with Mark Lutter of the Charter Cities Institute, who has a plan to take over the Presidio. I don’t think you’ve solved the underlying question, and I think the underlying question is important, which is that you’re going to end up in a scenario where the state kind of loses partial legitimacy, fails to provide some utilities, and yet still kind of has the monopoly on violence.

I don’t know what to do in that scenario. I want you to tell me, one of the things that we discussed in the podcast on dragons and snakes was Hezbollah, and Hezbollah started as clinics and schools and feeding hungry kids. It was very much like a community organizer type of a thing. They drew some money from the American diaspora; they drew some money from Iran.

As things got spicier in Lebanon, they started doing neighborhood watches, and those neighborhood watches turned into militia. Essentially, it’s sort of like biology’s thing about land last but not land never. I would say security last, but not security never.

That is the fundamental service that the state will not tolerate competitors. What you want the position you want to be in is one where—so basically, the premise of your question, which I would maybe dispute if I’m understanding it correctly, is that a deep breakdown of that kind can happen; that the state can maintain power in the long term under those conditions.

I think South Africa is an interesting thing to point to, maybe in both directions, because what South Africa indicates is that, yes, a state can weather an incredible amount of dysfunction, but when you talk to Afrikaners or English South Africans about how security is provided, it’s like the police are not capable of stopping you from defending yourself. They don’t actually maintain a monopoly on violence.

A huge amount of the defensive violence that takes place in South Africa is private, and it takes place either with the official blessing of local law enforcement or it happens just beyond their control. That’s on top of the fact that the security situation in South Africa cannot be understood outside the context of the global empire.

If the United States were to become something more like South Africa, South Africa would cease to be like South Africa. A lot of what the empire is doing right now is holding open a bunch of wounds; it’s leaving conflicts unresolved because it can’t tolerate the competition for power that would emerge—the new power structures that would emerge if those questions were resolved decisively.

The Israeli-Palestinian conflict was held open forever. That can’t be understood outside the context of empire. As U.S. power declines, there will still be places in the U.S. that are anarcho-tyrannical places you don’t want to be, but lots of other places that have been held in this anarcho-tyranny condition by the empire itself will have their political and security arrangements resolved decisively, and they’ll become nice places to live.

I think mobility is going to matter a lot, and flexibility and willingness to relocate might be very important. I respect guys who say, “I don’t care; I’m never leaving.” But I think the people who will do the best under those conditions are people who are willing to evaluate their security environment and take steps to get a better one.

It’s kind of hard to draw historical analogues to modern militaries because you’re right that the U.S. is an empire, but it has a very strange way of power projection. There are two ways we can go here. One is that at least until very recently, you could make the case that the U.S. was much more of a soft power empire.

If China wants Taiwan, I don’t think there is anything militarily we can do there. There will be economic consequences for both of us, but I do not think there is a U.S. military solution outside of literally mutually assured destruction that will stop China from taking Taiwan.

I think that’s very demonstrable, and the only reason people deny this is because they’re in the U.S. military-industrial complex echo chamber. But I don’t think any of that can be disentangled. I don’t think the hard and soft can be disentangled. I think power is just power.

I don’t think that’s true. China clearly has more military capability than international media capability. My point would be that international media power is power just the same as tanks and bombs are. If we’re preventing them from taking Taiwan for trade reasons, economic reasons, political reasons, cultural reasons, or media reasons, the point is we’re preventing them from taking Taiwan.

That’s a reality. I mean, that’s true. It is definitely true that it is a lever that you can pull to get the result that you want. I think the Chinese actually understand that too. There’s definitely the case where the reality is that we are stopping China from invading Taiwan or just that they’re not invading Taiwan through economic means, through cultural means, and so on.

I think the Chinese understand that too. In “Dragons and Snakes,” one of Kilcullen’s concepts that he talks about is conceptual envelopment—that’s how he talks about unrestricted warfare. You’ve got a blocking force, but the main force that is holding the line keeps the enemy occupied, and then the flanking force is to roll them up from the side. You need both of them.

If all you had was the flanking force, the army would turn to face you and attack you that way. So basically, my belief about China’s military buildup is that it’s a pure blocking force. I don’t think there will ever be a military invasion of Taiwan, or if there is, it will be after it’s completely won.

Hitler rolled into Austria; it’s not going to be a problem. The purpose of that blocking force is to keep the United States building aircraft carriers, missiles, and tanks, and F-35s to keep us spending and thinking in that domain while they win the war in the other domains. That’s currently where they have us—or where we have them at a disadvantage is in all the soft stuff.

This is something that I have a lot of arguments with some friends about who say, “Oh, China is going to just take over; they’re going to be the new hegemon of the whole planet.” My criticism of that is they’re not even making overtures toward that. Their military production and buildup is entirely about the South China Sea. They are not trying to build global force projection capacity, and they totally could if they wanted to.

It’s a deliberate decision to maintain this blocking force while they expand in other domains. They’re basically doing the same thing that I’m advocating we do, which is don’t pull aggro; don’t pick a fight that will be destructive. Just wait and win and build in all these other domains. I think that’s a smart play.

I think they’re going to be screwed by demographics, but I think every other aspect of their play is really strong. It’s just really hard to disentangle. I’m a China doomer for all sorts of reasons. In some ways, they’re a lot more managerial than the U.S. and less managerial.

They have people who read Strauss; they kind of have Straussians in control. But the Chinese Straussians also have a kind of apathy and acceptance towards the political science way of doing things. It’s a very curious combination.

The underlying reality for that is that they’re kind of all in on the current paradigm as a regime. They’re less philosophical, but as a governing class, they’re more philosophical. I would be interested in your take on—or what you mean when you say that they’re Straussian?

Oh, that they literally read and cite Strauss? Well, okay, but I haven’t read Strauss, so what does that mean? How does that cash out?

It’s a lot to explain in a few minutes, but there’s a kind of understanding of the importance of philosophy, of ancient virtues—I think that’s apparent in the regime. Strauss is also very critical of the social science way of doing things.

I spoke earlier about his analogy of the worm, where he sees political scientists as cutting up the regime into such small bits that it gives you no meaning about the whole. Basically, people are hyper-fixated on these small empirical details that literally don’t matter at all. His criticism is taking the survival of the individual or even of the regime as the utmost good.

There are a lot of big ideas there. One way in which it is true is that the Chinese regime clearly has a conception of the common good and a conception of virtue. I’m not saying that is necessarily a good conception of virtue, but they believe in it. They believe in themselves in a way that I think American elites on both sides of the aisle simply don’t.

Another way is that this is the contradiction; in some ways they’re more philosophical. I think philosophers in China are much higher status than they are in the U.S. You know, Xi will speak with them and quote them, and so on.

But it’s hard to tell how that translates into their government because their government is also very managerial. I guess in the citations, you can see it, even if it’s questionable how much that translates into practice. They had the second-mover advantage on a lot of technical and manufacturing industrial development.

What we’re seeing now is the fruit of hyper-optimization for an ecosystem that is dying. The managerial ecosystem—or the ecosystem in which managerialism is the right play, in which everything is about massive return to industrial scale—the Chinese sort of internalized and accrued, at the ground level, the technological advancements and the machines they need to build.

But also, they took the 20th century; they did a synthesis of that dialectic of the 20th century between communism, fascism, and liberal democracy. They’ve sort of perfected managerialism. They’ve taken all of those three systems and combined them. The problem is that essentially drones, crypto, and AI are going to render their managerialism obsolete and/or render irrelevant its ability to marshal that kind of scale.

I agree with you that I’m a China doomer too. I do think that it bottoms out, and this maybe brings it back to the conference and the issue of natalism. It really bottoms out at, “Isn’t it weird that the Chinese are so self-confident? They’re the rising power; they’ve got all the muscle and they’re macho and they’re kick-ass, but they still can’t persuade their young people to have children. They still can’t persuade their young people to raise families. They can’t accomplish this most basic care and feeding of human beings—to get them to reproduce.”

So what’s going wrong? What are they getting wrong that maybe doesn’t explain the whole doomer hypothesis for me? But it’s a synecdoche of it. It contains the explanation. Nick Land has this line: “Neo-China arrives from the future.”

There’s a kind of Bay Area rejection of feminism, right? The rationalists—you know, Scott Alexander types—who, in some ways, are very non-feminine. They’re autistic; they’re willing to offend people; but in some ways, they are not masculine either. They’re a kind of empty rejection of feminism.

I think that may actually be the most important philosophical question going on in China. It’s a philosophical experiment, even though they reject feminism. They reject feminism on the same basis that an AI will reject feminism because it will just look at the facts and say, “This isn’t working.”

China is kind of like—maybe not AI—but in some ways, China is like the rationalist-occupied government. That’s terrific; I hope that’s true. I think maybe that actually is unfair to the Chinese government, which, once again, at least asks themselves the philosophical questions and has clearly read Strauss and Hobbes and Schmidt.

It is the question of: does this androgynous rejection of feminism work? So far, at least, the answer seems to be clearly no. I wrote an article titled “The Chinese Are Doing Everything Right and They’re Still Gonna Lose,” and I was being a little click-baity there, but they have been doing a lot of things right. They’ve been smart in a lot of ways that Europe and the U.S. have been stupid—insanely stupid—and yet there’s no plausible growth curve that replaces the fact they just can’t make any more Chinese people; they’re just done making Chinese people.

This is kind of a spiritual sequel to the pronatalism article that I’m writing, called “East Asian Fatalism.” I just think that Chinese culture and Chinese philosophy—especially current-day Chinese philosophy—they’re just like natural preppers. They want the regime to end, even if they are the regime. They’re just waiting for the next thing.

Yeah, they’re waiting for the next reunification and the next civil war. They’re waiting for the next thing—that’s Chinese culture. You’re waiting for the next regime, and all these people are in very philosophical and sophisticated ways—this is maybe the most important way that Chinese officials are Straussian—is that they are serving members of the PLA Conference or legislators or whatever, and deep down, they just want to do the next thing. They just want to see the next empire and prep for the next empire.

That’s crazy—they’re barely at the top of this one. Well, the top might come sooner than you think; who knows? Is there anything you want to shell—leak about the conference? Some spicy details, some exclusives for the podcast?

Oh man, some exclusives? I don’t know about exclusives. We’ve had our first hit piece come out this week, and it was really exciting because I got on the phone with some really impressive potential guests. I can’t give you the exclusive, Brian; I’m sorry.

But basically, it cracked the thing wide open to where I’m no longer concerned about selling the tickets. We’re going to fill it up; it’s going to be great. Are we having a certain contrarian? Yes, but maybe not the one you’re thinking of.

Okay, okay, understood. It’s going to be incredible. The people that came last year were so dynamic, smart, and excellent. The unconference portion was actually, a lot of people said, the best because it was an incredibly rich conversation with people who I think a lot of those people had not yet had an experience where they were surrounded by people who were simultaneously so bright and dynamic and also so values-aligned.

It sort of presaged the tech-Trump merger because there were a lot of traditional Christians there, but there were also a lot of Bay Area tech types there, and it turned out they had a blast—they just had a great time together.

Oh, interesting. I mean, I would not have expected that there would be more friction, but it turned out, number one, babies are just fundamentally unifying. Normal, psychologically healthy people like babies; they like talking about babies, and it put everyone in a very warm mood to have that conversation.

We’re going to be doing some elements of mixer content, and we’re probably going to make it a little easier for the ladies to show up than the fellows to balance out the ratios, so that’s going to be good. We’re probably going to do some outside stuff too because it’s a thousand bucks for the ticket.

I don’t apologize for that because you’re paying for the quality of people; it’s an incredible group. But we do want to create some situations where people who maybe can’t afford that thousand-dollar price point can come—do some mixer stuff and get to know the speakers and that kind of thing.

Yeah, it’s going to be a good time. Have you seen the meme that’s like the quality-price curve of the conference? No, I haven’t. It’s basically like a U-curve, right? If the conference is free—all expenses paid—or if the conference is ten thousand dollars, then it’s going to be good.

Yeah, I think that’s true. I think that’s true for even weird populations. It’s not just a gate for wealth; it’s also a gate for commitment to the issue and interest. I think that most people who are upper-middle class would pay a thousand dollars for something if they thought it had civilizational significance—really.

Civilizational significance or just really personally impactful. That’s what they were going to find, someone they at least have a good relationship with—romantic relationship with. I was going to say marriage; I think actually people would pay way more if they had a chance at a successful marriage.

I feel like it’s really hard for me to name a name that would be really surprising to me at this point. I don’t know, is JD coming? I’m not going to take any more guesses.

Okay, understandable. That’s a great place to end the podcast. But come and see, certain note of whether JD is coming. Thank you so much for doing the podcast and for organizing the conference. Do you have a code to share?

Oh, don’t give anyone a code since it’s full. No, natalism is a code that works. I can give you that—natalism is a code that works. When are you going to take this live?

Either next week or the week after. Okay, then yeah, offer code. Ciao! Fun, fun. All right, man. Thanks a lot.