Kevin Dolan AKA
joins me to discuss the drive for sovereignty as a generational project, building parallel institutions with the EXIT group, doxxing and digital resilience, the perils of modernity, the limits of incentives in shaping human behavior, the existential crisis of demographic collapse, the Natal Conference, the social cost of depopulation, Korea’s demographic time bomb, fertility as a lagging KPI, IQ Shredders, the absurdity of treating people like meat robots, cultural survival in an era of decline, the challenge of scaling without losing coherence, the delicate nature of reproduction, pandas and human mating habits, the intersection of tech and tradition in reversing demographic decline, and more.Excerpts
On wanting sovereignty
“And we realized that what we were really , what we were really about, the reason that we were insisting on, running our mouths on the internet and refusing to do these things. The thing that was behind that was that we want to have grandkids, that we want to instill our values into our kids to have sovereignty over our families. Because we saw the acid of modernity just eating anything that was not, anything that was not protected that had no defenses... “
On the Risks of Depopulation
“ And what that cashes out to is that basically the Koreans, there's gonna be four great grandchildren for every hundred Koreans. It's that's essentially the extinction of a coherent Korean culture.”
“ It's not it's not like population growth in reverse where it's oh, the economy slows down a little bit or it gets a little bit harder. It's it's like the thing flips upside down. It, it stops working fundamentally.”
On Pandas, Human Fertility, Meat Robots and Incentives
“I think that is very instructive in terms of the comparison that I've drawn. is to like, the pandas. If the pandas are not having sex, and you say I know what we'll do, we'll hook them up to electrodes and every time they fail to mate, we're gonna zap them with these electrodes, or we're gonna dump some if they, if he tries to go mount the female we'll dump some kibble on him.”
And it's that kind of crude incentive system just really fails to understand the dynamics of why people do things and we are not meat robots that can be incentivized that way. And we in particular sex and reproduction is like this. It's very delicate and very open process. It's this thing where you have to get loose, get pre rational, get a little crazy and a little drunk. And to, to get people to do that for some money or like for these really pecuniary pedestrian reasons I think just completely misunderstands human nature.”
On KPIs
Do we know if EXIT is doing what it should be doing? Is it fertility? Is it kids?
I think it's grandkids because grandkids, and that's a terrible KPI right, because you don't know until you have one and it's not in your hands, right? It's in your kid's hands, but yeah you don't know if what you did worked until 20 years later!”
Links
Interview Transcript
(I recommend listening to the conversation as the medium is the message. Apologies in advance for minor transcription errors and inaccuracies.)
Introduction: The Drive for Sovereignty
Kevin: And we realized that what we were really , what we were really about, the reason that we were insisting on, running our mouths on the internet and refusing to do these things. The thing that was behind that was that we want to have grandkids, that we want to instill our values into our kids to have sovereignty over our families.
Because we saw the acid of modernity just eating anything that was not, anything that was not protected that had no defenses...
Current Events and RFK Discussion
Leafbox: Hey, Kevin, how's it?
Kevin: It's good, man. I'm good.
Leafbox: The news is flying so fast. I can't even keep up. I just saw that RFK was I guess he passed. So that will be interesting.
Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. On the whole, I am. I am pro RFK, so it's good news.
Meet Kevin: Background and Initiatives
Leafbox: Before we go to talk about RFK... Kevin, how do we even introduce you, man? Maybe tell me about what you're up to, who you are, and maybe we can go into a little bit of your background too.
Kevin: Yeah. So I run a fraternity called EXIT that that Robert's part of, and am running the Natal Conference, which is a conference on demographic decline, basically trying to get the smartest people that we can get together in a room to discuss, what's causing it, what can be done about it in ways that are both, acceptable to normal people and that actually address the problem and analyzing the the challenge itself and the attempts that have been made to fix it and why those have not worked. So yeah, those are my two basic main things these days.
The Birth of EXIT
Leafbox: So Kevin, what made you start EXIT and let's start with that.
Kevin: Yeah. Okay. I got so I had a decent size Twitter following in 2021 and I got doxxed and fired over it. Basically there was a, an Antifa, a group that was doing some open source intelligence and trying to like round people up to report them to their HR departments. And I got rolled up with a bunch of other sort of conservative Latter day Saints, and after I got fired, I was I had lots of people reaching out to me being like, hey, how can we help you?
How can we do you need a job? What, it was probably like 30 or 40 people. And I thought, if I go back into the corporate world, I'll just be looking over my shoulder the whole time for this process to repeat itself. And I, most of these people did not have jobs for which I was qualified or that it made sense to take.
And I thought instead of, me just using one of these opportunities, what if we just got everybody together and made it so that this was not a problem? And , in the beginning, it was focused on this very narrow problem of like corporate coercion specifically to do with doxing and the vax mandates and just the ways that the ways that the state uses your employer as a, as an instrument of social control.
But it quickly got bigger than that. And we realized that what we were really like, what we were really about, like the reason that we were insisting on, running our mouths on the internet and refusing to do these things. The thing that was behind that was that we want to have grandkids, that we want to instill our values into our kids to have sovereignty over our families.
Because we saw the acid of modernity just eating anything that was not, anything that was not protected that had no defenses. And so it became a much broader sort of quest for sovereignty. So we have entrepreneurship calls, we have investment calls, we were doing some real estate projects together, some startup projects together.
And it's basically just about like, how do we become more sovereign? How do we become. Yeah. More robust to these forces, harder to intimidate and and better connected. So that was how EXIT got started. And basically I was hanging out with some EXIT guys in California back in early 2023.
And we were watching Tucker Carlson's documentary, the end of men, where he's talking to RFK and basically it was like RFK and Shauna Swan and a bunch of my friends from Twitter and it was about, the sort of health angle on endocrine disruptors and declining sperm counts and what's causing this and is it psychological, is it spiritual, is it, just pollution?
And I thought, we could. This is actually a bigger problem than just the health angle, this is this has ramifications for dating and getting married, and the economics of having kids, the economics of raising them, and what if we brought, so I knew that I had these friends, and I had I knew this was important to like, Tucker Carlson and Elon Musk, and I thought, What if we got together and shone a light on this issue of a demographic decline, like Holistically, why is this happening?
So that's that's in March. We're gonna be talking about that in Austin.
Personal Impact of Doxing
Leafbox: Kevin, before we jump to NatalCon and that project, I wanna just, what was the doxing experience like for you personally? Were you, what was that, what did that entail? Were you traumatized? Just, what was that like?
Kevin: Will say there, there was probably everybody that I've talked to who's gone through this has described roughly two weeks where it's really hard to eat or sleep. And that probably goes with any time you lose a job. But I think in this case it, there, there was something very intense about being targeted by people with the imprimatur of the state.
Being, being targeted like finding out that you didn't have rights that you thought you had, and that there was in fact, no recourse. No no severance, no, like none of the things that you would expect from a normal just losing a job. And I had people calling my house. And like breathing into the phone and saying weird shit to my wife.
And and there was a time when, so we lived in a rural area. So like you had no reason really to even get on our, on a, on our, like the road leading through our valley, let alone our driveway. And there were these. two young people walking up and down my driveway, which is a quarter mile long.
And, my wife is crying and she's like fumbling for the gun and what's happening, what are they turned out, it turned out they were like kids from my neighbor's church. And it was like, I didn't, we didn't have a confrontation or anything, but but it was, it was, yeah, the paranoia was really that, that was a challenge.
And, we got through that though. One of the things that really meant a lot was how much my wife was. on my side for that. I've heard of stories and I've talked to guys for whom their wife was like, why couldn't you just keep your mouth shut? You're making problems and now we can, like, how are we going to eat and just piling onto him.
And that was a really hard thing for them. But my wife actually stayed up all night that night, like being mean to my haters on Twitter. So that meant a lot to me and and was a huge part of getting through it.
Leafbox: And then tell me about your move.
Relocating to Texas
Leafbox: Why Texas? Why do you move to Texas?
Kevin: Yeah. For Natal Conference 2023 we had several people here in Austin throw us after parties. And I got to meet just incredible people in AI 3d printing. And it was like being in, a Silicon valley type environment of people, young people working on exciting, cool, interesting stuff.
Who were also, values aligned and wanted to be, wanted to either had kids or wanted to have kids and, understood why you might want to live in an environment that was safe and clean and, your kids go to good schools and that kind of thing. And were living out in the country.
Like I said, it was beautiful. We loved. Virginia, we love the people. But like our street was, and our church was like mostly older folks. And they loved us. We love them. They loved our kids, but it was like, our kids were starting to develop their own dialect because they only ever talked to each other during the day.
And so we were like, yeah, we need to have more opportunities for our kids to, do things and make friends and enter the next stage of life. And so Austin made sense both professionally and personally.
EXIT's Structure and Operations
Leafbox: And then in terms of running EXIT day to day, tell me about the structure and then how how it runs
Kevin: Yeah. So EXIT is basically it's, we got, I think we got 235 guys now and we get together, we have 12 calls a week on a variety of topics. So we talk about. Some of the guys are working on startups. So we have an entrepreneurship call.
We have a real estate call and investing call content creation for guys who are writing things. We have a homeschool call AI and tech and crypto. And fitness and the purpose of all these calls is, checking in with somebody who has high expectations for themselves and high expectations for you and who shares your values.
And it's what are we, what did we do last week? How's it going? Do we need to, do we need to course correct? If you sign up to do the same thing twice in a round doesn't get done, it's then what happened? Let's talk through it. Let's actually confront why this isn't happening.
And that in itself alone can be really valuable for people. It's certainly valuable for me. It keeps me chugging on. Cause I attend these calls and I report in like everybody else. We also have meetups on the regular up until recently, it's been like, I would get on a plane and go visit.
The guys and I still do that. But on top of that, we've got monthly meetups in a number of cities that are happening without me. So we've got guys who do that in Dallas, Salt Lake, Nashville Seattle Houston. There's a, there's several and we're working on like DC, New York. So it's it's starting to be something where I'm not the the sole switchboard.
Each guy in the group has a file leader whose job is to be his camp counselor, make sure that he is encountering the people that he needs to encounter to to meet his objectives and so that file, he doesn't charge seven or eight other guys with little micro networks, usually regional and yeah that's that's how we've grown organically.
I didn't have a an organizational theory in mind when we got started, but it's just been trying things and testing things and letting the guys. Tell me what they wanted. And yeah. And now, the guys know each other and they run things together and they start things together and it doesn't have to include me, which I think is a really important thing.
Future Vision for EXIT
Leafbox: So Kevin, where do you see EXIT in five years from now? What's your vision?
Kevin: Yeah. So the next step is we're going to be building together. We've talked about real estate. We've talked about investing together, venture fund type things. And we've basically settled on manufacturing. We've settled on we need to get our guys building things in the real world together.
And so we are assembling the documentation for that. We've done a talent inventory, seeing who we've got in the group. And we've got, we've got that's really the killer asset that we have is we've got dramatically underpriced, underutilized talent in the group. People who one of these names alone, if I put their bio on the pitch deck, I could get people to, I could get people to fund this project just on the basis of if that guy's on it, he'll make it happen.
Got like 30 guys like that, 40 guys like that. And and then all kinds of other people who, even if they don't have the resume. Are just incredibly smart and dynamic and could do it. And so basically we're interested in these businesses that are currently in the hands of older folks who are trying to retire, don't really have a succession plan. Like they're not trying to keep this business humming for their kids because their kids are doing other things or they don't have kids. And in a lot of cases, these businesses are dependent on illegal labor. And so with the kind of change of paradigm under the Trump administration, we're trying to get our hands on some of these businesses is basically find somebody who needs to sell and then do the modernization for them so that their companies can operate more in like a Japanese style labor environment, which is what we're leaning toward as a country, it needs to be much more automated. It needs to be much like, a cleaner, safer, better place to work. And, labor costs are a lot higher. So capital expenditures become a lot more a lot easier to justify. So that's but you said in five years, so that's like the immediate next step.
That's what we're going to do next in five years. I want to see this thing in every major city in America. And I want to see it be people's primary the way that they connect to the type of people they want to connect to. Like I, I want to see a situation where you're, where our kids are growing up around each other and are have different expectations of each other than they have of like other kids they might meet in the neighborhood or at school where it's this is a, this is something special that we have.
And that, that probably means 10xing the size of the group in the next five years. And and basically, I think it's already become for a lot of people this is where their deepest intellectual conversations take place. It's where they look first. If they want to try something ambitious and difficult this is where they look for the team.
And so it would just be like expanding that and making it making it something that's accessible to guys who don't live in our like big hub cities, which we have maybe eight or nine of those.
Leafbox: So do you model it like a rotary club or what would, my second question would be, how do you, if you scale that large, how are you going to keep the philosophy consistent?
How do you get it from glowing or from being infiltrated by different philosophies?
Kevin: Yeah. Fundamentally I'm a believer in human judgment. Like I'm not actually looking for an algorithm. Because I think I think that's actually how big organizations get hacked they develop procedures and then they fall victim to people who excel at manipulating procedural outcomes So I think it really is predicated on trust between individuals which means And I think this goes this is this It's bigger than just this group, but once, once you've accepted that procedure or policy is not actually, like the rule of law is not really a real thing.
Like people govern people and like to the extent that there's procedure to the extent that there's rules, it's more like a religion. It's more the constitution mattered because it was. Alive in the hearts of some powerful people, and they actually cared about it, and they would actually hold each other accountable for essentially moral, spiritual reasons.
And as soon as that moral and spiritual core was lost, the procedure just becomes an obstacle course for people who want to accomplish good things. And to, come back down from the abstract a little bit, in terms of how we scale this thing. I think instead of trying to craft the perfect procedural puzzle box that can't be hacked, it's really just a question of cultivating and identifying and cultivating and developing the right people and then putting them in positions of authority.
There, there will certainly be chapter heads, and those are already developing. It's it has been important to me not to jump in with a system and impose that and insist upon it. It's been important to me to let leadership emerge. And then facilitate it like figure out I'm frankly, I was surprised that Seattle became like a city where we had really strong guys.
And it wasn't my like intent to develop Seattle, but it just happened that those were the guys who, they really had their heads on straight and were really interested in building network. And so they did. And, it's less about like, how do I make that happen? It's more like gardening.
And yeah, so that's my approach. And like the direct answer to your question is some degree of infiltration is like number one, inevitable, like people and it's like also what does that even mean? Like how, like you must be this values aligned to ride the ride. That's a tricky conversation. But in terms of preventing that infiltration from being a problem, it's you just need people who are in positions of authority to make judgment calls and be like, I don't think this guy is here in good faith. And I don't think that he and so instead of giving him procedural rails that he can like weasel around.
It's just no, this, the guy in charge of this said he doesn't like your face. And not literally, but we're we're not going to tolerate the kind of chicanery. So that's my answer. It's human judgment.
Leafbox: How do you on the extreme side, how do you avoid the potential for any cult dynamics?
Kevin: Ah, what do you mean cult dynamics?
Leafbox: Just you brought up the allusions to religion. I would bring it more to maybe a mythology in terms of having a mythology on the EXIT group and having a ethos versus kind of a dictate, if that makes sense. Which I feel it's very loose and decentralized. I like how it's run in very decentralized way.
I just worry that if it becomes more centralized, there's always the potential for, just group dynamics occur.
Kevin: Yeah. Group dynamics are the point, right? So so that's why why I'm asking what you mean, because we actually do want people who are very high morale and very high trust acting collaboratively.
And I think that there is, there are things about I guess it's the way that people describe cult dynamics. Sometimes when people say that, just what they mean is like a group of people who believe in something and like actually believe in it and so are willing to make sacrifices and are willing to do hard things together and have expectations of one another.
So in terms of avoiding cult dynamics, I'm going to like. Guess at what you mean there like weird sex stuff is that the
Leafbox: no, I think it's just one of the other calls. You went to the Network school and yeah, some of the, there was some great feedback that I read or talked about with another member from EXIT and he's one of the weaknesses of the network school is that they didn't define what the participants were as whether they were customers, citizens, members. So each of those different roles has different dynamics. So with EXIT, because it's a fraternal, we're all members, right? We're not citizens. We're not really customers. So I don't know how to define the members. Whereas a network school, any conflict would be you're a customer, then you have certain complaints, right?
If you're a citizen, you have certain responsibilities. And if you're certain members, there's just different roles. And how do you define the members and what their responsibilities and also what their rights are?
Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. That's a good question. I guess I would say I definitely default to their members and they are, of the difference I would say between this project and network state.
Is, we are not maybe defining sovereignty as as literally as Network State does. Network State is positioning itself explicitly as, An alternative to, and the successor to Westphalian nation states. And conversations about citizenship. That's really complex because we're talking about a model of human organization that has never existed before.
And so I can see how that would create tensions. Whereas in this case everything is pretty much it's a very high value room in which to pursue objectives that we all pretty much agree are good objectives, and so there's an element of serendipity to it, there's an element of looseness to it, and I guess I just I don't.
Leafbox: Yeah, Kevin, I'm less worried about it. I would say that the reason EXIT works may be better than Network School would be that it's more voluntary in the sense that there's no expectation. That's what I'm getting at. Yeah. It's more anarchy. It's like an anarchy type product. Voluntarism versus from what I've heard of Network School.
There's some great ideas there, but there's more of a top down feeling.
Kevin: Yeah. Yeah. It's a place it's a place where you can pursue your objectives. And I guess. Having, you need rules when there is values dissonance, I think, like the reason that, it's illegal to steal is because there's a certain subset of people who don't see anything wrong with that and will just do it if you're not if they're not punished and so a lot of the a lot of the alignment takes place just way upstream from that and I think when you are trying to when you are trying to achieve alignment with people who are like Techno libertarian slash digital nomad slash ayahuasca artist collective types.
You got to hammer out all sorts of things that like my guys would never have to explicitly hammer out. Cause we would just all understand. Does that make sense?
Leafbox: Yeah, for sure. I think there's too many. Yeah. You're not trying to include everyone in the world under your umbrella, whereas you're just not pulling from so many different groups to have members join.
Kevin: Yeah. And I remember meeting people. Where I was Oh, you and I need to have like a first principles conversation. Like we need to get, like for us to find the common thread that unites us, we're going to have to go way, way down to the fundamental questions and then work our way up from there.
And that's, it's hard to, it's hard to build a community that way.
Leafbox: Yeah. It would be interesting as you grow it though, that, that will be very interesting to see how, what the new challenges are, right?
Kevin: Yeah, absolutely. And that's going to be. I don't mean to downplay it, but I just, I think that I think that fundamentally, because I'm not interested in infinite scale, I'm hold this at the scale at which human connection remains possible.
And if we find that becomes too shaky or too difficult to maintain, we'll just stop. We won't grow past that point. Like we're going to, we're going to, the point of this is the cohesion. And and that's the guiding star.
Addressing Demographic Decline
Leafbox: This I guess is a good point to switch to your other project because I feel the Natal Conference is pulling from a larger potential breadth of people.
So how is that? Let's talk about you can tell me the history again about why you wanted to start this and what it is and who you're pulling from and what the problem is and what the solutions are that you, are discussing.
Kevin: Yeah. So again, we were watching that documentary. We realized that this was just something that was in the zeitgeist, that we didn't see anyone organizing around concretely.
And I was talking to one of my, actually, co founders of the conference. This was pretty early on. And he was like, what's our he's a startup guy. He's what's our KPI? Like, how do we know if we're winning? How do we know if EXIT is doing what it should be doing? And he was like, is it fertility?
Is it kids? And I said, I don't think so. I think it's grandkids because. Grandkids. And that's a terrible KPI, right? Because you don't know, you don't know if you've number one, it's not in your hands, right? It's in your kid's hands, but but number two, you'd don't know if what you did worked until 20 years later.
It's not, it's a massively lagging indicator, but in terms of our thinking about what the objective is, it's like I don't just want to have kids because lots of people have kids who are not going to have grandkids. Lots of people raise families that don't iterate. And and this, I think is a huge.
It's a critique of all sorts of systems that are like our current ecosystem crop of systems, ways of living. And so they don't iterate, they don't you're the freaky deaky artists collective, when they could draw from a population that was reproducing itself and just pick, pick the freaky deakies out of that group and, do the artists collect thing with them.
It could maintain itself. And that was all right. But now that sort of that assumption of having endless exogenous people to bring in is starting to break down. And so it's what actually what is actually internally like endogenously survivable? What, what's actually going to make it through this bottleneck that we're all passing through, which is, it's deeper than the black death.
It's deeper than the only comparable selection effect that you could point to in recorded history. Like you could either go to stuff in the ice age where, humans were maybe cut down to a thousand people or something. But in historical time, it's basically the Columbian exchange.
That's the last time we've had a selection effect that was this dramatic. And partly I'm like, I want to find these interesting people. I'm I spoke about it a little bit dismissively, but I'm a fan of Freaky Deaky artists collectives and like I would love for those people to iterate.
I would love for those people to have kids and keep that vibe, keep that temperament keep those priorities in the mix. Cause I think that they're interesting and beautiful and valuable. But it's like we have to admit that it's not working. And so yeah, we decided to get together.
I already, I had, like I said, these friends from Twitter who I could already invite, a built in audience. And I hoped to get some attention from some of these big names that were concerned about it. And as it turns out April, 2024, after the conference, Elon Musk posted my speech in full from his X account.
And that was huge. Led to a bunch of attention, a bunch of new speakers. It was really exciting. But yeah, so this year we're going to be getting back together. And originally it was like. Let's just circumscribe the problem. Let's explain to people why they should be concerned about this.
Because there's, I think it's pretty, still pretty common among just not that online, normal people to think of. Population is like a problem in the other direction. It's too many people. And that like those days are over that that hypothesis is like conclusively disproven.
And pretty much anybody who looks seriously at the data is Oh no, we've got a, we've got an actual deep growth problem on our hands. And and people need to be encouraged to to raise families. And we, we just
Leafbox: give us a framework for how bad let's say someone's listening who doesn't know any about this demographic problem. How would you describe it? Maybe give Korea as an example.
Kevin: Yeah. And Korea and Japan are actually like gold standard in terms of if you're not going to get your people to have kids. How are you going to handle the consequences of that degrowth? And so you should hold in your mind, Korea and Japan are actually like best case scenario and it's pretty serious The Japanese, I think, are having 1. 1 children per woman lifetime. And the Koreans, it's like .6, .7, it's really low, and it's just, and it keeps dropping like a rock. And what that cashes out to is that basically the Koreans, there's gonna be four great grandchildren for every hundred Koreans. It's that's essentially the extinction of a coherent Korean culture.
Like those four great grandkids those are not going to be they are not going to instantiate Korean culture as we understand it. They're gonna, number one, they're gonna, they're selected from a weird population of Koreans, probably conservative Christians. That's the default mode of sort of family values fertility in Korea.
And they're probably going to be very much, drawing on influences outside Korea because just the infrastructure to maintain a coherent culture just won't exist anymore. And so if number one, if you just like Korea, like everything about Korea, anything about Korea then like you should be worried that it's going to evaporate and go away.
But in like practical terms, the consequences of having to deal with the the fiscal challenges of race, of of supporting an aging population, the challenges of infrastructure as so you look at Detroit city, like Detroit, a huge part of Detroit's problems is that their tax base has evaporated.
And so you're living on a street. Where half the houses are abandoned and number one, that makes your investment fall through the floor, become undesirable. You're still having to pay for the infrastructure, the electric, the sewer, the water, all that stuff is built for a much larger population and you get a much bigger slice of it.
And so it's this accelerating phenomenon where the people who did the best in Detroit were the people who got out earliest. It's just this continually sinking investment. And so it gets worse as it gets worse. It would take literal revolutionary change to save Detroit.
And that's in a state that's solvent, in a country that's still solvent. But if you imagine that happening to every city in America, and the federal government having these fiscal problems and infrastructural problems, like that's where things are headed in China, Japan, Korea, Europe.
To some extent here now, Europe and the U S have different problems because we are papering over this demographic challenge with immigration, but that's got a whole different set of difficulties. So it's basically our whole economic system is predicated on reliable growth. Like capital markets, real estate markets, the value of the dollar.
It's all predicated on people lending out money because they expect. And there's only two ways that an economy can actually grow in the aggregate. It can either, you can either get more productivity per worker or you can get more workers. And as long as there's more workers that, that assumption of reliable growth is really easy to maintain.
But when that assumption fails, things freeze up. It's not it's not like population growth in reverse where it's oh, the economy slows down a little bit or it gets a little bit harder. It's it's like the thing flips upside down. It, it stops working fundamentally.
And so that's the sort of scope of the problem. And, we're currently up against that with the social security and Medicare, a huge part of the reason those are failing is demographic. And then in China, it's the real estate bubble. They, their seniors don't have social security, so they put all this money into real estate.
And those houses are, no one's ever going to live in them. Those investments are going to zero. What does that mean for those old people? And that's the scope of the problem.
Leafbox: Kevin, could you give me a little framework for why Chile, where my mom's from, now is the second lowest, I think, FTR in the world, particularly rate per woman.
It dropped from two before COVID per mom to now like 0. 77. Yeah. And no one, all these sociologists in Chile are talking about and no one can figure out what it is. And, it's the same thing, Chile's like a small country, like Korea, 14 million. And they're like by 2060, it'll be 7 million, and the same, it's just accelerated so quickly.
So why do you think they're all saying, Oh, it's the economic reality. Women work so much and all this is a change that happened in three years. Yeah.
Kevin: Yeah.
Debating Degrowth and Environmental Impact
Leafbox: So what is your member? Are you pulling people like, and then my other question is aren't the Malthusians happy about this or 50 years of degrowth strategies and what's the effect of that?
Kevin: It actually is not going to work the way they think, even on the terms they care about, like the part of the massive deforestation and and just destruction of the Great Plains and the American app Appalachia and all those places. A lot of that took place in the aftermath of the Columbian Exchange because, instead of having these efficient scaled mechanisms for food production and energy production, people still had to produce energy and food even back then. And build things like there were efficient mechanisms that broke down and then you were stuck with like really inefficient mechanisms. And like it, it was not on the whole environmentally friendly and that would be much worse today not to get too like graphic, but if the big ag the big scaled methods of food delivery break down in the United States Then you're talking about no more dogs and cats and squirrels and deer and frogs and like basically just the landscape being like stripped bare by people trying to eat.
You saw that in you Yugoslavia in the nineties where it's just like people were burning their furniture and eating their pets and like that is not. Environmentally sustainable. That's not good. That's not good for the planet.
Fertility Rates and Societal Control
Kevin: Yeah, in a country like Chile, like it's my, my hypothesis which has so far, it's at least in my mind, it fits better than the other sort of models that I've considered is that it has a lot to do with people's sense of control of their own lives and people's the condition of breeding and captivity. And so it does not surprise me like at all to hear that, a country goes through something like COVID and comes out with a substantially diminished fertility rate. Because people's sense of just ownership over their lives changed so dramatically in that period.
And because, the investment that you make in raising kids, the effort, the time, the money, it's not it's not a, it's not a purely hedonic utilitarian we raise kids because it's so fun type of decision. It's a decision that has to do with your legacy and
your psychological involvement in the life your kids are going to lead. And when that sort of architecture breaks down, and people feel that either their kids belong to the society, they belong to the state, they belong to their friends, or even like in, in a liberal individual paradigm, they belong to themselves, and they're going to go live a life that has nothing to do with you It's hard to put in all that work and make all that sacrifice so that your kids can go have their own utilitarian hedonic experience.
It's it's about values. It's about what you think life is for. And and so the people who get that tend to still have kids. And the people who are trying to move toward pleasure and avoid pain, those people are correctly from within their framework saying, if, if my, if I'm going to raise this kid so that they can go make money and go on vacation and have, fun, why don't I just go have fun?
What, why does the cycle need to continue endlessly? What justifies this? So yeah, that's a long answer, but I think that is That's fundamentally why it's happening in places like Chile.
Cultural and Economic Factors in Birth Rates
Leafbox: And then what are the other sociologists arguing for? What is someone in Sweden's or Korea or Japan, what are their main arguments?
Why is the birth rate dropping?
Kevin: Insofar as a lot of people come at this from, the real problem is whatever my hobby horse is, and the solution is to give me money. And so you get like social conservatives who will say it's porn, or it's it's promiscuity, it's it's birth control, it's women in the workforce.
And then you get some a demographer in Sweden, I imagine, depending on who they were talking about, right? If they're talking about their home country, that's probably a little more complicated. But if you ask them about America, they'll be like it's so expensive to have a baby and there's no social safety net and there's no, you don't have enough programs.
If you had programs, then people would have kids. And that's, facially absurd when you look at, the fertility rates in countries that do have those kinds of programs. But the social conservative argument is silly too, because Korea and Japan, they outlawed birth control in the 90s.
Or, sorry, they permitted birth control in the 90s. And and gay marriage just basically happened. And, they've had women working for a while. But their fertility problems precede all that, basically comes out of the post war era, and it's very susceptible to being sucked into these kind of pat culture war frames.
Leafbox: Yeah, it seems like from the left they'll just think it's economic and from the right it's a cultural issue.
IQ Shredder Theory and Urbanization
Leafbox: Are you familiar with Nick Land's IQ shredder theory?
Kevin: Yes. Yes, I am.
Leafbox: Do you have any thoughts on that? Could you summarize it? , what do you think it is?
Kevin: Yeah, so the idea is that like basically the cities hoover up all the talented people and put them in conditions where they can make a lot of money but where it's impossible to breed.
Very challenging to breed. And so de facto, what these cities are doing is they are killing the golden goose. They're like using up these very high IQ people who would make excellent parents and raise very bright and dynamic kids. And I think that's basically accurate. His sort of classic example is Singapore who were by the way, like Singapore is a fairly, they have all the right policies that, they're pretty conservative, but there's also, some social programs. Like it's not it's not the kind of city where you would go ah, it's this obvious right winger left wing, hang up of mine. That's what's causing it.
I think in Singapore, it very much is this question of. What's it all about? What's it all for? And because Singapore is frankly, mercantile. And so frankly about money and status. And there's also just the fundamental constraints of the environment. It's just very expensive to live there.
And and people go to these places. Where that's where all the economic activity happens, is in these places where it's impossible to breathe. And you can imagine a world where remote work makes this easier, people can congregate, rather than congregating on the grounds of, like, how do I make money, they congregate on the grounds of who shares my values, who do I actually want to live around, and then you maybe have healthier romantic dynamics and healthier family dynamics.
And you raise your kids around other kids who you would like, you'd be excited if they married that type of kid or you could potentially refactor some things.
Conference Speakers and Topics
Leafbox: So Kevin, who's coming to this conference? You have demographers or what kind of people are coming to the conference?
Kevin: Yeah. So we've got a lot of academics. We've also got a lot of just personalities who, who have things to say about it. Like I'm I'm opposed on a pretty deep level to credentialism. So I'm looking for just people who have had insightful and smart things to say about this.
But it happens that like many of those people are, people who, studied this academically and now. And now study it professionally. So we've got Catherine Pakaluk who wrote Hannah's Children. We've got Peachy Keenan who wrote Domestic Extremist. Jess Flanagan who wrote The Ethics of Expecting.
Malcolm and Simone Collins who run Pronatalist. org. And are very interested in this question. Dr. Steve Turley, Dr. Pat Fagan. Brian Kaplan, Robin Hanson. Brian wrote Selfish Reasons to Have More Kids. Alex Peckis, who's a classicist and I just spoke to him recently about things the Romans and Greeks tried when they were having fertility problems.
And the short answer is it was dramatic stuff that's like way out of the ambit of anything we would try today, and it still didn't work.
Historical Attempts to Boost Fertility
Leafbox: So what did they try?
Kevin: Clearly there's a I think it's called Lex Iuliae or something like that. It's Marcus Aurelius, these reforms he tried to make to get to get Roman like Rome Roman like the aristocratic class of Rome to to have kids.
And they tried stuff like, you were first in line for governorships, if you had kids, and you had punitive taxes if you only had zero or one, and just, turning the screws on people to get them to have kids. And they still didn't. Yeah, they still didn't.
And I think that's, I think that is very instructive in terms of the comparison that I've drawn. is to like, the pandas. If the pandas are not having sex, and you say I know what we'll do we'll hook them up to electrodes and every time they fail to mate, we're gonna zap them with these electrodes, or we're gonna dump some if they, if he tries to go mount the female we'll dump some kibble on him.
And it's that kind of crude incentive system just really fails to understand the dynamics of why people do things and we are not meat robots that can be incentivized that way. And we and in particular sex and reproduction is like this. It's very delicate and very open process. It's this thing where you have to get loose, get pre rational, get a little crazy and a little drunk. And to, to get people to do that for some money or like for these really pecuniary pedestrian reasons I think just completely misunderstands human nature.
So yeah.
Criticism and Misconceptions
Leafbox: What is if you do a quick search on this conference, there's a lot of critical hit pieces on this conference. Why are you receiving criticism when on the website itself, it says we have no ideological or political goal other than a world where children have more children. So maybe explain to me, are these all Malthusian people who just want depopulation or what is the problem with your group?
Kevin: I think that they think, or at least they claim that we have a hidden agenda. And they would say that you're actually, just trying to, propagate the white race or something. And which is silly. That's basically all it amounts to is the accusations are, these people don't have the values or the desires they claim to have.
And I lost my job because. I don't do that. I don't I've been pretty forthright I'm pretty wild in terms of how yeah, I'm about as forthright as I know how to be. And I have said my piece everywhere I can say it. So yeah, I don't know that accusation makes a whole lot of sense.
Leafbox: So why do you think, I remember reading the limits of growth and why do you think the mythology of Malthus is so strong? Why do you think people are just, I had a friend and I showed him the demographic data and he just didn't like, he couldn't believe me. He thought we were going to be at 15 billion people next year or something, so how do you get through that? Or why is it so ingrained?
Kevin: It's funny. I learned relatively recently that You're familiar with Paul Ehrlich, who wrote The Population Bomb?
Leafbox: Of course, yeah. He's, yeah.
Kevin: Yeah. That guy went on Johnny Carson 18 times. They kept running him and running him.
There was very clear, like muscle behind that. And to some extent it's just that's what that's what the powers that be wanted back in the eighties. Like basically when our parents were young. So that's one piece of it, I think also.
If you are just in, yourself, in a fundamentally pessimistic or nihilistic frame, it is easy to, I and I don't mean to caricature the other side, but I do think that there's a psychological element, just you extrapolate. your feelings about your own life and the people around you to the bigger picture. And if your feelings about your life and the people around you are negative and anxious, and depressed, and life is an irritant, and hell is other people. And so when somebody shows you a chart that says oh man, it's just going through the roof, we're just piled up on top of each other, and there's no end in sight. You go, yeah, that really accords with my emotional vibe check on the situation.
And so I think that's all it is.
Leafbox: Did you explain to me, Kevin, what this means, the Babymakers versus the Planet Glacers? I know what the Babymakers are, but what are the Planet Glacers?
Kevin: Oh, I'm actually not familiar with that with that construct. Where's that from?
Leafbox: It was one of the articles, I think in the salon piece.
And I was like, someone said that this is for the Babymakers versus the Planet Glacers.
Kevin: The Planet glacers. I can extract, I can assume just based on the yeah there's the baby makers being pro, pro life in the pre political sense in, in favor of human life, human existence.
And planet glassers, that's yeah, this thing has run its course. There's a lot of people who particularly in Europe, the there's a lot of women and a lot of ad budget going to things that's my bloodline ends with me. It's just really hard thing they like to say.
And they feel really cool saying it. I think that, yeah, it really is. And, frankly, like from within their worldview, like I say it's, it makes a certain amount of sense. This hedonic treadmill, this continual search for it's, I don't even think it's pleasure seeking. I think primarily it's harm avoidance.
I think people are trying to make themselves small and hide away so they won't feel pain. Cause obviously like the heights and the depth of intensity of the human experience, like most of that stuff has to do with. Having sex, being in love, having children those are, for most people those are the most intense experiences they're gonna have.
Maybe they have some other stuff on drugs, but if you are high seeking, rather than, trying to avoid lows, then it would make sense to, be, frankly profligate a little irresponsible. But we're a very responsible, button down, pessimistic downside bounding culture right now.
And yeah, so I'm a conservative, for whatever that word means. I'm a religious person. I don't teach my kids to to I teach them, sexual continents and rules and we have expectations for them on that front. But it's funny to be like a conservative religious person and be in the role of telling people to loosen up and it's going to be okay.
And take some risk and make the leap like. And, that's not moralizing, right? I don't when I say that some guys will say you guys need to stop playing video games, and stop looking at porn, and you need to man up. And that's not where I come from at all, because I think people are doing these things for a reason.
I think that like the pandas. I don't blame the pandas. But in terms of what we're trying to accomplish here, it's we need to create an environment in which people don't feel this way. That's the lesson of the pandas, right? It's not about It's about, zapping their testicles if they don't do what you want.
It's about how do we actually get these people to a point where they want to have kids? Cause it's like the most natural thing in the world. Like clearly something has gone fundamentally deeply wrong. If these people are just like, I don't feel like it.
Technological Solutions and Their Limits
Leafbox: What are your thoughts on technological solutions like artificial wombs? If China gets to that, they'll just solve the problem, right? The state will just produce infinite kids on demand. Are you guys pro it or just, this is. Touching a third rail or
Kevin: no, I don't. I don't think it's a solution.
I don't think the bottleneck with child rearing is wombs. The the bottleneck is raising kids like, There are people already who if you want to have kids and you don't have a womb available, you can surrogate you can you can already do that. Like that's not the bottleneck.
The bottleneck is raising them. And the like baby factory where we raised them in cohorts, that was tried and declared wanting in the 20th century and sort of a dystopian Everything that even approached that has been just like a dystopian horror So yeah, I don't think that's a solution.
I mean you look at like the Korean orphanages, right? it's like those are and Korea is not a It's not a unclean, poor sort of barbaric country. It's a very conscientious high IQ, all the good things these tech guys are supposed to value. And very systematic and orderly, but they emotionally devastated a whole generation of especially little Korean girls.
And it's it comes from this like spreadsheet brain, this like math brain, that's we just need grist for the middle. We need bodies. I, yeah, I think that's completely misguided.
Challenges and Solutions for Increasing Birth Rates
Leafbox: Kevin, what do how can people join this conference and how can they find more information about this?
Kevin: Yeah, natalism. org and you can use offer code leafbox for 10 percent off and yeah. Go check us out there and I'll be sending, if you sign up for, if you even just sign up for the newsletter, I'll be sending updates as we get closer, people joining on and perks that are available to the guys.
Like several of these speakers are releasing digital copies of their books for ticket holders. So you'll walk away with. Not just a really good weekend and really good conversations, but with kind of almost like a primer on on this topic and all kinds of good things to read.
Leafbox: And then my last question given is there any country or society has solved this problem?
Kevin: If you open the aperture to societies then it gets a little bit interesting because it's like, the the Israelis seem to have above replacement fertility. That's probably the only instance of a developed, modern state that still has above replacement fertility, though it is declining.
And a huge contributor to their, so even secular Israelis have above replacement fertility, which that's really remarkable. Almost no other secular population has that. But in the aggregate, like the big driver of Israeli fertility is the is the Hasid's who don't serve in the military.
Don't pay taxes. Don't like they're not participating in the society in the sense that matters for these macroeconomic questions that we're talking about so that's a little bit complicated in terms of other like societies that have done this, there's the the seeds in the United States are also above replacement fertility and the Amish and Latter Day Saints too, although that's I'm a Latter day Saint and I routinely hear triumphalism about ah, they got you too.
You guys are headed down too, but we're still above replacement. And and it's a lot of times you're having to figure out which slice you're looking at. Are you looking at Catholics who go to mass every Sunday? Are you looking at just anybody who claims the label?
Like, how are you making that determination? And that really changes. How you look at the numbers. So that's why I say it's complicated with what's interesting. Israel is interesting. Israel.
Leafbox: Yeah. So no, because if you look at India or African countries, as soon as they urbanize, they, it drops instantly. You go to, and so even they're going to have demographic issues for China, which I mean how strong do you think the one child policy was for China?
Do you think that was just brutal on them or what? Did that affect other countries?
Kevin: I think that it so the, probably the biggest lasting impact of it, in addition to the cultural transformation of being expected to to join the workforce I, I do think that's a part of it.
I do think that and not, that often gets framed really like adversarial like battle of the sexes terms, but what it fundamentally is like daycare. If you've got two parents working then someone's got to watch the kids for eight hours a day, nine hours a day. And if you're paying someone else to do that, then you are locked into your two income frame.
Number one. And number two, you are fundamentally just gated at two kids. There's almost no society. It was, it's almost hard to imagine a society in which the average family could. Have both parents working and pay someone else to watch three or four kids in a way where that, where the math checks out.
That, that is certainly a factor. But yeah, it's it definitely has to do with urbanization, it has to do with modernization, and in the Chinese case knocking out because what happened with the one child policy is people strongly preferred sons. And if you have, and this is not to get like too crude about this, but if you have excess women, population growth can still occur normally because the women are the bottleneck, right?
Okay. If you've got ten men and one woman, she can only get pregnant a handful of times. If you've got one man and ten women, it's completely different. So I think that matters a great deal. And and then yeah, they are just I think what it did is it accelerated their transition.
Which was the point to a modern industrial barren society.
Leafbox: And then, Kevin, one more question. Do most of the members, I know there's members from all left but are most of them in favor of a state solution? Or bottom up solution? Or what's your kind of, how do you change that? Even, how do I convince my friends who are women to have children?
Kevin: When you say members, you mean attendees at the conference? Yeah, attendees at the conference. Yeah, so I would say that we were about like half tech and half trad if those distinctions make sense, a lot of people coming on the basis of, Elon talked about it or Malcolm and Samuel Collins talked about it, like Viewing it as an engineering problem and as like a sociological problem.
And then the trads, it's more I want to save my grandkids and I want to get my daughter married. And I want it's much more personal and emotional.
Leafbox: It's still a software it's just a mental software insert, right? And just in a way, right? They want to make sure that the engineering of the social engineering is consistent for their grandkids.
Kevin: And so that, yeah. So that is definitely the tech interpretation of what the trads are doing. And and so there's a lot of alignment in terms of they disagree in how they would frame it, but they both, but they agree on what they want. Which is really good. And as far as interest in a state solution, I actually think that, I actually think that the vibe was pretty open, like everybody was very humble and there wasn't like, it must be this way.
The closest that there was to that was you heard my distaste for the artificial wombs answer on aesthetic and moral grounds, there was some of that. But but yeah, as far as like how to convince your friends. Definitely don't think it has anything to do with fear.
I definitely don't think you can like and a lot of guys online will do this. So they'll be like, you're gonna girl boss now, but someday you're gonna be alone and the cats are gonna eat your face in the nursing home. And it's that's just not, people don't make decisions on that basis, completely misguided.
What I would say. To in particular, young women is you should be barking up the right trees. You should be in environments where are, where there are the right type of guys. And a big component of this problem is that men and women are getting rejected by one another at different stages of the dating process.
Kevin: And so like men, they're just getting swiped left. Just not getting the time of day, completely inaccessible on the dating apps. And ladies in, in, in what's worse for their. the reproductive strategy, for lack of a better word, is that they will get into relationships with guys who have no realistic intention of having a family with them but who like the companionship and the sex and the, all that.
And then they face rejection, four or five years down the road, sometimes longer when they say, Hey man, where's this going? What are we doing here? And then the guy says this is it, you've arrived at what I'm willing to do. And and so that, in terms of
women, women only have roughly 15 years of their life, total, to dedicate to answering this question. And that's not just finding someone, that's actually like You got to find someone and you got to actually have the kids with them. And to de risk that it's like less than 10, it's like maybe eight years.
And so that's, how long do you need to assess a partner? Does that take two years? Does that take a year? So how many shots do you get? And that I think to, to the intent of that is not to scare them. The intent of that is to. a little bit of realism and just say these are the constraints and this is something you want.
Like this is something almost everybody wants. Almost everybody wants kids. There is to some extent unrealistic expectations about how, about what else in life has to be sacrificed to make that happen. But it's proverbial basically that like women have kids and then, when it's time to drop the kids off at daycare, they're just overwhelmed by the pointlessness and the cruelty and the tragedy of having to spend that time on spreadsheets and PowerPoints instead of being with their kid. And the challenge with that is that you cannot inculcate that. You can't just convey that to people. You can't tell them that's what it is. They have to experience it. And that's part of the fundamental problem that we're up against is there's a social infrastructure, a social set of of rails that used to bring people right up to these decisions and make it easy to make those decisions.
And that no longer exists. And this is I know I'm, I know I'm going all over the place with this, but what it comes down to is if I were talking to a young woman about, why I think she, she should have kids, that would not be a 15 minute or a 90 minute conversation. That would take place over months because you have to cover so much ground and you have to understand where they're coming from and what's in the way for them.
'cause it's not the same thing in the way for everybody. And yeah. So it's just highly individual and it shouldn't be, but that's how it is now.
Leafbox: I thought you were gonna gimme a quick solutions to just help my friends, convince them. I have several friends who just, maybe they don't wanna have kids, so I was like, I just try to model it.
I'm so happy being a dad that. I don't even remember my life before being a dad,
Kevin: How do they respond when you try that?
Leafbox: It's always just Oh, the economics, this or that, my career, Oh, I can't do take time off from work. I can't find a guy. It's the same thing. It's it's all the reasons you said, it's all complex some girls dated too much. They can't send out the guy other ones. Oh, I like my life vacation. We don't go on vacation. The parents have, we're just suffering all day, changing diapers. I think that's what they do.
Kevin: Yeah, it's, have you ever just put a baby in their hands?
Leafbox: Usually that will just melt them away, but then, the, some.
The Malthusians are so strong, man. They're like too many people in India or something. They have that image of too many people in New York City. Shanghai is expensive, don't you know? So I'm like, it's just a, it's a hard problem. And I just want people to be like, to me, it's just it's so beneficial.
I don't understand what, I literally don't know what I was doing before I had a kid. I wish I had them earlier. Yeah.
Kevin: Yeah. And now
Leafbox: I'm just like, you should enjoy this. And even if you have to live, I have a Japanese friend who lived in like a SRO, a single residency occupancy with two kids and he's like the happiest guy I know. And he's doesn't care. He's just with two kids in a, like a one in 400 square feet. Happy. And these other girls are worried about I think there's just a lot of fear towards, yeah, it's a complex problem. So I'm interested to know what you guys solve.
Concluding Thoughts and Future Directions
Kevin: And I don't know that they're exactly wrong about their assessment of the difficulties. They probably overstate the the difficulties a little bit, but the real problem is total inability to understand the upside. And and I think they, it's if puberty were a choice and you had to explain to an eight year old, you gotta make the leap and start going through puberty because girls are actually super cool. Like they don't have cooties actually, they're like super cool. And you're going to really enjoy girls and you're going to enjoy fighting. And you're going to like, there's all kinds of stuff about being a teenager and then being a man that you're going to dig so much, but it's like the process itself is the only teacher of that.
And it's this is not a solution, but it's just like life was better. When it was assumed life was better when you just were going to have kids. And or at least, try and now that it's a choice and it's something you have to convince people of, it's an extraordinarily difficult thing to convince them of.
So yeah, and these are not things that I walked into the conference like, I just need to tell the people what the answer is because it's, these are tough questions. And I think a big piece of it is we need to I want to talk to your friends now.
And not because I want to give him the answer, but because I want to like really study what's going on psychologically there. Like what what's the actual blocker? Cause, and it's, I don't think they're lying exactly but I don't think that people, the money thing is a silly argument, like the money thing to anybody who has kids or to anybody who studied history and like the conditions under which people used to have kids, like the money argument is preposterous, but that is the most common thing people say.
And so if there's a way to I wouldn't approach it that way in person, but if there's a way to like non judgmentally interrogate that and be like, when you say it's too expensive, what exactly do you mean? What are you anticipating? What is the difficulty you're anticipating?
Cause I think that's a huge step to solving this problem is we need to really understand what's going on in people's heads.
Leafbox: Kevin, I will report back. I will do my research, anthropological work and report back. What I guess indeed, Kevin, anything else you want to share today? I think it's great work you're doing and fascinating and interesting.
And, hopefully some of the haters come to the conference and learn something.
Kevin: We love our haters. We have the best haters. No, yeah. Natalism. org. That's good. Thanks, man.
Leafbox: Thanks Kevin. I appreciate the time.
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