Based Camp - Inside The First Natalism Conference： Gossip & Impressions With Diana Fleischman

00:00:00.000 Hello, everyone. You may see a familiar face with us today because we are rejoined by the

00:00:04.720 one and only Diana Fleischmann, who we saw in Dallas recently. Austin! Who we saw in Austin 0.94

00:00:11.680 recently for the Natalism Conference, the first really major non-national-based pro-natalist

00:00:18.900 conference out there, which we did not organize but thoroughly enjoyed. Now, if you can't remember,

00:00:23.920 Diana Fleischmann can be found on Twitter as a sentientist. She posts a lot and really

00:00:30.560 interesting, thoughtful stuff, a good mix. So definitely check her out on Twitter. Also, 0.65

00:00:35.760 you can go to dianafleishmann.com or check out the podcast interviews that she does with Aporia.

00:00:40.360 But we are here to talk about the Natalism Conference, all the gossip, all the fun,

00:00:45.420 because it was interesting. We didn't know what to expect, right?

00:00:47.840 I can say I went to it with a lot of apprehension because I know the brand of pro-natalism that we

00:00:54.240 push on our show. But, you know, when I look at the articles that are attacking us, they're always

00:01:00.960 saying, oh, you know, the pro-natalist movement's just like a bunch of like crazy racists and like 0.69

00:01:05.760 great replacement theorists and stuff like that. And I assumed going to the conference, like there 0.79

00:01:11.740 was a part of me that was like, oh, it's just going to be like a bunch of like crazy people who 0.60

00:01:17.420 are primarily motivated by race politics, who, you know, are just extremely, extremely,

00:01:22.940 extremely off the reservation or like classic. So sometimes when you go to a conservative event,

00:01:28.920 they'll just be like a bunch of hucksters, like trying to sell you on stupid, whatever scams or 1.00

00:01:34.500 whatever. I saw neither of that at this conference at any sort of large level. It was predominantly like 1.00

00:01:40.480 if people were like, what's the category of people? It felt very much like the early effective

00:01:45.540 altruist movement, but much more religious. And I literally couldn't have asked for a better thing

00:01:51.680 in terms of what I saw there, but I'd love to hear your thoughts. I was also a little apprehensive

00:01:56.380 when I joined because, well, I think it's fine to say this. It was not beautifully and competently

00:02:02.740 organized from the beginning. Like they originally reached out to me and Jeffrey, and then Jeffrey and

00:02:08.160 I were not thrilled with the lineup at that point. The lineup got totally shuffled around. There's a lot

00:02:12.000 of people that changed at that point. And unsurprisingly, they invited many women who

00:02:16.900 ended up not being able to come because they had all children that they had to take care of.

00:02:21.460 So I also asked them if they would be able to provide childcare. And they said,

00:02:25.440 you know, we have no plans to provide childcare. As a side note, they did end up providing childcare.

00:02:30.140 And I can understand their apprehension, given that the conference is running at a pretty big loss

00:02:33.900 for the first year. I thought that that was kind of short-sighted. Although Kevin Dolan

00:02:37.900 later said that he didn't see a lot of interest from other people and he left his six kids with

00:02:42.800 a flex at home. I also was a little apprehensive from going because I'm kind of a poser in this

00:02:47.580 space. I only have two kids. I may only ever have two kids. I donated eggs a lot, which is kind of

00:02:52.040 like being a cuckoo more than anything else. But I mean, doesn't that technically mean you've had

00:02:56.540 more than two kids? Yes, it does technically mean that, but it also means that I have refused to care

00:03:01.480 for them in the way that trads would appreciate me doing. I still, it's very prenatalist, very 0.95

00:03:06.180 prenatalist. It is prenatalist. It's also narcissistic. So that's another reason. And then

00:03:11.360 when I saw the hit pieces that came out about it, I was thinking, you know, are we going to have

00:03:16.160 Antifa show up? And there was a little bit of information security. They didn't tell anybody,

00:03:22.680 even us until the very final minute, what floor things were going to be on. There was a lot of

00:03:28.020 security. But, you know, what I found out going to tons of conferences over 20 years is that if

00:03:34.060 you invite smart people, it doesn't actually matter that much what else you do. If smart people come,

00:03:39.600 it doesn't matter. I mean, the amenities were really good and the scheduling, just because the

00:03:43.780 schedule didn't really finalize until the very last minute. And I met a lot of cool people. Again,

00:03:48.960 you know, when we were there, you guys are more tech focused. You guys are more kind of effective

00:03:54.220 altruist and tech focused. And I was also thinking, you know, like, for example, our mutual friend,

00:03:59.540 Ayala was saying, well, I would come to a party there, but I wouldn't be welcome. And it's true 1.00

00:04:04.520 that she probably wouldn't have been welcome. There were people there who disliked her.

00:04:07.740 Yeah. Well, I mean, it was interesting. There were some, one of the really interesting things was

00:04:14.760 seeing how unwelcome. So there were some people who went there that were like old school style racist.

00:04:19.920 Like there was a, this white nationalist, famous, whatever guy. But they seem to be pretty,

00:04:26.480 what's the word I'm looking for? Like sad guy in the corner that no one's really interacting with.

00:04:31.160 They had some people like, I know that they, they, they just were not, I think they went,

00:04:37.380 and it was a really interesting thing. I noticed where if I looked at people who were there by age,

00:04:41.940 the, the old people were typically operating on older ideologies that they thought would get them 1.00

00:04:49.900 a lot of followership among the young people, but the young people were much more interested

00:04:55.120 in messages, like the messages that you had. Yeah. So like, let's, let's try and divide it up.

00:05:00.680 Let's think about, so, so Brit, Brit Benjamin, who was there with her four-year-old, by the way,

00:05:04.880 there were only a handful of kids there. There was my daughter. There were surprisingly few,

00:05:09.460 right? Yeah. There was an, there was a one-year-old who was getting into everything.

00:05:12.500 It was very cute. There was a four-year-old and then Emma Waters brought her eight-month-old,

00:05:17.200 which made me really grateful that my daughter is not yet that age. Cause it's very hard to keep

00:05:21.160 them entertained. She had her hair small. Yeah. As far as the divide, you know, you guys were saying

00:05:26.280 you thought it was going to be more 70% trad, 30% techie, and it ended up being more like 70% techie,

00:05:32.400 30% trad, right? Yeah. And like deep techie too. Like I, you know, I have a tech BC background

00:05:38.820 and the companies that they were working on were actually like really impressive often.

00:05:44.960 Yeah. There were a lot of Mormons and a lot of Jews there. What other, I mean, I didn't know.

00:05:50.660 Like a decent number of like Baptists, but not, not, I expected to see a bunch of tradcasts and there 1.00

00:05:55.440 weren't really that many. There were some tradcasts. I was surprised that I didn't see any ultra

00:05:59.800 Orthodox Jews. But see, the thing is, I don't think, so my definition of pronatalism is that like

00:06:08.860 it exists independent of like a religious background. Like if your religious imperative

00:06:14.060 is to like have a lot of kids and you're just doing it because it's part of your religion and

00:06:18.120 part of that culture, like sort of by default, then you don't get credit for that. But if you're

00:06:21.740 doing it because you have also thoughtfully thought through it and you may be really religious and you

00:06:27.020 may have a religious imperative, but like, for example, we know some Orthodox Jews who I consider

00:06:31.540 to be very pronatalist because they talk about like, well, there's, you know, the most impactful

00:06:35.500 thing we could ever do with our lives is have kids. We really care about our kids. They're not just

00:06:39.140 like, oh yeah, you know, like, you know, God decided we should have kids and you know, God has given us

00:06:43.720 this many kids. So I think that we didn't see that many ultra Orthodox Jews there because

00:06:48.180 many of them are only pronatalist by chance, like, or they have a lot of kids because they're also

00:06:55.460 very religious, but they're first and foremost religious. Does that make sense? Yeah. I disagree.

00:07:01.560 That's definitely not what I've seen. I mean, I've noticed a lot of ultra Orthodox Jews really 1.00

00:07:05.440 get the pronatalist message. They get what we're aiming for. And I would have like, like when I go

00:07:11.120 to other pronatalist events, like if we're putting together and this may be biasing me because most

00:07:15.140 of the events we've done in the past have been in New York, it's very common to have ultra Orthodox

00:07:19.420 Jews be at least 30% of the people coming. And yet I didn't meet a single one at the entire event.

00:07:26.180 I met lots of Jews, but not ultra Orthodox Jews. Yeah. What's your take on this, Diana?

00:07:29.740 I mean, there's a, there's an Israeli and Jewish saying that says children are joy and you know,

00:07:35.200 they are really into children. And if you go to Israel, Israel is really pronatalist. There's

00:07:39.120 playgrounds everywhere. Even when I went to a conference and went to a sex differences concert

00:07:43.240 with my baby. And there was a, there was quite a few Jews there because the organizers were part of

00:07:49.660 the community here in New Mexico, the Jewish community here in New Mexico. They were making 1.00

00:07:52.900 such a fuss over my baby, which is not, not even that Jewish a baby. So yeah, I, I don't know, 1.00

00:08:00.120 but I did meet, you know, like there's the guy I was giving a talk and a very sweet moment happened

00:08:05.220 where I couldn't get my baby to settle down. So they moved my talk back a little bit. And my baby

00:08:09.660 was sick. She's generally pretty chill. And this father of six, who was also somewhat Jewish came, 1.00

00:08:15.680 swooped in and got my baby to sleep, not only just during my whole talk, but she slept for like an

00:08:20.000 hour after that on my shoulder. He had some magical, you know, effect on her. And so I did,

00:08:25.100 I did meet a lot of fathers of a lot of kids. I do think also, I wrote about this on, on Twitter

00:08:30.240 that I was really struck at the warmth between men and women at, in this conference,

00:08:36.660 cause I've never been to a traditional, I mean, I've been to church and I've been to synagogue,

00:08:40.340 but this actually seemed like people were really paying attention to women in a way more than I'd

00:08:45.260 heard about before. Maybe it was because women are underrepresented and they recognize that women 1.00

00:08:49.980 there were taking time away, valuable time from their children. You know, Peachy Keenan was a huge hit.

00:08:55.480 So I do, I'm curious what you guys think about, about this dynamic between men and women,

00:09:02.360 as opposed to at academic conferences. Well, I think part of the stuff at academic conferences

00:09:07.080 is there's so many rules against having sex. And there are a lot of people there who want to have

00:09:11.560 sex. And I don't get the feeling that this conference was at all people who were in any 0.64

00:09:15.840 way interested in hooking up. Yeah, that's interesting. A lot of people went there explicitly

00:09:21.140 and they told me this and we're looking at seeing how we can handle this in a follow-up,

00:09:24.780 looking to find a partner or someone to marry. And this was true of both men and women. I want to be

00:09:29.920 clear about this. Fewer women went, but I noticed among the women who went, more of them were single. 0.92

00:09:34.560 And if you want to get an idea of how many of the people at the conference were single,

00:09:38.000 I think like our initial read is around 50% of the people at the conference had zero kids.

00:09:43.160 And this is something we often see with reporters where they'll be talking about the

00:09:46.880 pronatalist movement. And they're like, I want to talk to young people in the pronatalist movement.

00:09:51.420 We have a ton of kids. Like, that's what I want for our article. And I'm like, the movement

00:09:55.680 started like a year and a half ago. Where do you think we're going to, these people

00:09:59.760 don't have fricking time machines? You know, this takes time, especially in today's environment.

00:10:04.740 Yeah. There's just that one couple that has 22 kids and like what, 10 of them were in one

00:10:09.260 year or something like that.

00:10:10.600 Yeah. So I do think you're right. I think that there, it was unusual when I contrasted it with

00:10:16.740 other events that had a similar feel. Like it really felt similar to manifest. Did you go to

00:10:21.040 manifest this year? So this was like the best EA party I've been to recently.

00:10:25.500 Just for context, manifest was, this was the inaugural conference essentially of the manifold

00:10:32.540 prediction market. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. Like Yad was there. Scott Alexander was there. Robin Hanson

00:10:37.680 was there. You know, typical A-Lev was there. And it manifest they had on day one, like a betting

00:10:43.660 market for when the orgy would happen or if an orgy would happen. And it ended up happening like the

00:10:48.840 first night. Yeah. I think it was when it was not even it because why? It was so odd. Like I think

00:10:55.840 when people are like, Oh yeah, I mean, academics go to conferences, one idiot laid, but is that really 0.99

00:11:00.480 like top of mind? Yes. It's really top of mind at a lot of academic conferences, even back when I was 1.00

00:11:06.080 an academic and I was single, like these are people who are culturally similar to me, everything like

00:11:11.620 that. There do happen to be within the traditional EA community, lots of orgies and stuff happening.

00:11:17.180 This is not rare. And it was notable. And I think it made it easier for men and women to interact,

00:11:22.700 as you said, that this was not on anyone's mind. It was too wholesome for that. But here's the other

00:11:28.360 thing is, is I feel even differently from that. I think at many different types of conferences,

00:11:32.940 including conservative conferences. And I would also put this on like the ARC conference,

00:11:37.040 like ARC conference in London, which is like a conservative Davos. That's what they're trying

00:11:42.820 to do. Can you spell out the acronym there? The Alliance of Responsible Citizens. Jordan

00:11:47.260 Peterson, Louise Perry thing. I often feel like when there are women speakers, it is because they're 1.00

00:11:52.880 the token female speakers. They're not like, you're kind of like listening to them and you're 0.95

00:11:57.660 like, Oh yes, the female has spoken now. That's good. Let's get that out of the way. Cause I want 1.00

00:12:01.440 to listen to the guys speak. Cause those are the ones we all came for. Like there's not really this

00:12:05.200 much like respect for them. And they also don't really have them that much. That's interesting

00:12:09.000 to say. So like, in other words, I feel like in many of these cases, the women who are selected

00:12:13.080 to speak at many conferences are selected as a diversity checkbox and not as actually good

00:12:19.720 speakers. And what was really interesting is that some of my favorite speakers, including you,

00:12:24.280 Diana, including P.G. Keenan were totally my favorite people, like hands down, you know,

00:12:29.480 they had really, really interesting. Yes. No. Oh God. Yeah. But Benjamin's talk was amazing.

00:12:34.060 Yeah. So like this, I was like, wait, Whoa. And like, so this was, and I did not expect this

00:12:39.080 because one, it was a trad conference. And two, like, I'm so used to like any female speaker being 0.99

00:12:44.380 a diversity checkbox and pretty boring and not that substantive and not that unique. And this was

00:12:49.060 totally not the case. And then there was also just this like very big level of respect.

00:12:54.700 I think part of this was just that the arc speeches weren't as good in general. And the reason why they

00:13:00.140 weren't as good as general is because they were broadcasting them and there was a fairly large

00:13:03.700 audience and it was more speaking to the audience. So it was a chance for people to pick up more

00:13:08.240 followers. It was a general audience. So they defaulted to their stump speeches. Whereas with

00:13:14.160 this one, because nobody knew, I mean, this was a oversight and planning. Nobody knew what speeches

00:13:18.300 everyone else was giving. So it meant that everyone had to veer as far away from their default

00:13:24.100 pronatalist stump speech as possible. If that's what they usually gave or move towards a pronatalist stump

00:13:30.000 speech if they weren't used to giving pronatalist stump speeches. So like Razeeb gave a very,

00:13:34.540 like, not generic at all. It was weird and interesting and I liked it, but it was like

00:13:39.060 a pronatalist stump speech, but that's because he typically doesn't give one of those. Whereas

00:13:42.820 like Britt Benjamin, you know, at Hereticon, she gave the pronatalist stump speech. So she ended up 0.69

00:13:48.420 giving a speech on no-fault divorce and how it makes it harder to form good relationships.

00:13:54.900 And I didn't know this about her. So Britt Benjamin is Patry's ex-wife. We've had

00:13:59.020 Patry on the show before. He's the guy who does charter city stuff. And she is, has been a long

00:14:03.420 time sort of pronatalist advocate. And she did a speech. We should have her on the program. 1.00

00:14:07.280 An artificial womb advocate too.

00:14:08.540 And she is, is a divorce lawyer. That's what she does for a living. So she was able to talk about 0.92

00:14:13.520 that in sort of like really interesting details. So I think that that was another reason why the

00:14:17.940 speeches were uniquely good. But then I also reflect on the women's speeches at events like ARC, 0.91

00:14:23.740 right? And they were speeches on like why we should ban pornography or like, you know,

00:14:29.040 still sort of almost a form of female mate guarding behavior. Like they were like, 1.00

00:14:33.660 if I'm going to be honest, like a lot of veiled female mate guarding in the guise of conservative

00:14:40.240 value systems. Whereas here it was more like functionally, how do we solve this?

00:14:46.120 Yeah. I think it's a big tent in the natalism movement. So there's people who are advocating for 0.52

00:14:50.680 things like artificial wombs. There's somebody like Emma Waters, who has been beefing online with 1.00

00:14:55.900 Richard Hanania about things like surrogacy. There's you guys who are very tech focused and

00:15:00.520 interested in embryo selection. There was Pat Fagan, who's a very well-known sort of evangelist

00:15:05.700 there who was back to back with me, which I never thought I'd be sharing a stage so closely

00:15:10.300 with an evangelist. And what I was reading about is this guy called Charles Haywood, who was there as

00:15:15.960 well. He came up with the slogan, no enemies to the right. And so I do think that conservatism has

00:15:21.560 become less prone to criticizing other conservatives or other people who are value aligned. So in my

00:15:28.500 tweet, I said, you know, maybe people were being nice to me because I'm value aligned. And

00:15:31.820 Dolan, Kevin Dolan said, well, you know, people are not that value aligned with you. You are

00:15:36.580 definitely less trad than everyone else. But in some sense, I was value aligned because I showed up with

00:15:40.840 the baby, which, you know, is more value aligned than, than many people who were there.

00:15:46.040 Yeah.

00:15:46.280 Than many of the childless people.

00:15:47.720 So I think that's the idea that like, if somebody's value aligned with you,

00:15:50.540 with the message that you're espousing at that moment, that, you know, you shouldn't be critical

00:15:56.320 of them. And, you know, given, you know, my, my interaction with Emma, for example, who's at the

00:16:00.760 Heritage Foundation, I would have never expected that she and I would differ so much actually on what we

00:16:05.540 think are some, some good ways to go forward. This is kind of at the, putting the beginning at the end,

00:16:10.320 but let's talk about where this conference was and what it was like. So the whole first day was

00:16:14.620 back-to-back speakers. And unfortunately, maybe for you, Malcolm, the best rundown of this is

00:16:21.240 actually at American Renaissance, which is a white nationalist website. Yeah. So the best rundown of

00:16:27.440 the whole conference, maybe somebody will post something else that's more comprehensive, but that

00:16:32.180 was a summary of each of the talks. And, you know, to our credits and the natalism conferences credit,

00:16:37.420 the American Renaissance writer said, well, natalism doesn't want to be associated with

00:16:41.980 white nationalism. Yeah, that's right. We don't really want to be associated with natalism. Thank

00:16:45.760 you. Yeah, please and thank you. And then the second day. I did, my, my experience with him at

00:16:52.100 the conference, the guy who was affiliated with him was interesting because I did feel kind of bad for

00:16:55.920 him because I felt like a lot of people didn't want to talk to him or engage with him. And so it's

00:16:59.820 always sad to see somebody being ignored at a conference like this, but it was really exciting to see

00:17:04.760 that they genuinely, you had some leaders of that movement show up thinking that their fanboys would

00:17:10.580 be there or that this would be a way to recruit more people. And it didn't serve as that for them.

00:17:15.940 And that was very heartening to me. Yeah. The second day was an unconference essentially. And like

00:17:21.960 they, they had on, on the founding team for the natalism conference, someone who was really familiar

00:17:26.760 with Stanford D school sessions with working sessions. So it was broken into this sort of like

00:17:31.940 people propose working sessions or people go into all day thematic sessions. They were all suggested

00:17:37.320 by participants and then just dig deep on ideas. The three of us floated around short, like 30 minute

00:17:43.880 rapid fire unconference sessions. The subjects ranged from like, how do you create a renegade group of

00:17:50.600 people to help solve academic problems to how do you keep your family and your religion? How do you

00:17:57.560 innovate in education? How do you arrange marriages, summer camps? Yeah. Yeah. There was a guy who

00:18:05.660 wanted to make a, a pro natalist romance novel. Yeah. This lovely woman there who was watching the

00:18:11.620 children who got a free ticket to watch children. She told me that she has actually read pro natalist

00:18:16.480 romance novels. I think there's Amish romance novels. Oh, there are a lot of Amish romance novels.

00:18:21.500 Yeah. Yeah.

00:18:22.180 She told me about one that she'd read recently where this woman falls in love, she gets married

00:18:25.120 and then she has a child with Down syndrome and she runs away from her maternal responsibilities

00:18:29.920 because she's so overwhelmed by having this child with Down syndrome. And then when she goes out into

00:18:34.400 the real, you know, on non Amish world and everybody tells her, why didn't you kill your baby? She 1.00

00:18:38.800 realizes how far the outside world has fallen. And so she goes back to her home and her husband

00:18:44.200 to take care of her baby. And that's the romantic. I think that sounds fascinating.

00:18:48.680 That's a fascinating story. Yeah. So, so it was pretty well run, but one of the things,

00:18:52.760 one of the reasons I think it was like, this second part was well, like it actually was fun

00:18:56.220 the second day, like engaging. One of the guys who was organizing the conference was one of the

00:18:59.760 people who used to run the Singularity Institute. So people who don't know the Singularity Institute,

00:19:04.240 and I keep mentioning, it felt very much like the effect of altruist movement from like 2010.

00:19:09.480 And I'm, and I keep asking myself like, why? Like we were talking at one event, like, like,

00:19:13.900 and this is really promising because the EA movement went on to be a very powerful movement in terms of our,

00:19:19.520 our society. And somebody was like, well, I think the way the EA movement did so well is they

00:19:23.360 disproportionately attracted, uh, autists. And then like five people, when somebody said that was

00:19:28.320 like, raise their hands and somebody peeped in the room perfectly at that moment being like,

00:19:32.440 did somebody say autists? And, and that's when I realized that, oh yeah, this movement is really 0.99

00:19:37.500 disproportionately autistic. And I think the way it's attracting a very similar audience,

00:19:43.440 it is a movement tied to an obvious truth or problem in society that is for whatever reason,

00:19:51.640 socially, you're not allowed to talk about it. So it's the type of thing that's going to draw the

00:19:56.920 iconoclast and the autist disproportionately, you know, with the EA movement, it was most charity is

00:20:01.820 actually pretty ineffective and meant for self vanity. And that was just an obvious thing. Now everyone

00:20:06.760 says that, but back then that was a controversial thing to say. And now it's population rates are falling

00:20:11.860 really fast and this is actually a problem. And we probably should find a, like steer society in a

00:20:17.100 direction where it can handle this. And so it's acting as sort of both me and the early EA movement

00:20:24.560 without all the orgies. Without all the orgies. Only with pro-natalism is starting to sort of dip its

00:20:31.220 toe into not pro-natalism at all, but I know many effective altruists who I thought would never have

00:20:36.720 children who've decided to have children. And as much as effective altruists talk about, you know,

00:20:40.780 facts and evidence, it actually is because of peer pressure and because effective altruists are

00:20:45.560 getting to know other people who have children that they've decided. So Toby Ord, who wrote The

00:20:50.600 Precipice, wrote a essay with, with his wife, I think, her name's Bernadette about, you know, how they

00:20:57.240 decided to have a child and how it was going to reduce their effectiveness somewhat, but that it was, it was

00:21:03.200 worth doing. And that was a long time ago. That was like, I don't know, 10 years ago or something

00:21:07.880 like that. And so now I know a few other effective altruists who are now either having children. So

00:21:13.460 what I'm saying is that people are not immune to peer pressure. Even the most rationalist people

00:21:17.560 are not immune to peer pressure. It's so interesting though, that even doing it, they thought that it

00:21:21.920 would reduce their effectiveness when like, I honestly, it like from a hiring standpoint, when we

00:21:28.440 look at like potential employees, a combination of, of at least some proven competence and then being a

00:21:34.280 parent is such a good combination because they, they're less flighty, they're less flaky, they're

00:21:38.760 more consistent and you know, they're motivated, you know, and there's a lot of people who in EA I

00:21:43.100 would never hire, even if they're really intelligent because they're incredibly flaky people, like

00:21:47.860 profoundly flaky and in parenting really creates more reliability in people. So they're probably more

00:21:54.740 effective in odd, odd ways. But yeah, I, what, another thing in terms of like autistic, weird

00:21:59.260 populations that were discussed is at one point in one of the unconference sessions and there was a

00:22:04.160 discussion of like, well, but like what segments of society should we target with these messages who

00:22:09.400 are not already part of this movement and who are not like, you know, obviously like conservative

00:22:13.640 religious and someone, I'm not going to name them, but they're like pretty well known was like, well,

00:22:18.760 I mean, you know, furries are like a great example of a population that could, you know, that is

00:22:25.340 untapped and overlooked. And I, it like, it kind of blew my mind at first to think about it, but he's

00:22:30.280 like, no, listen, like he, he had recently gone to some like really conservative, more like higher

00:22:35.860 profile conference, but right before it was a fur con in the same like venue. And so he met and spoke

00:22:40.640 with some furries and asked them like, for example, about their, their costumes and what they did for

00:22:45.020 work. And the costumes are, you know, like 15 to $20,000. Like you can't, to be a real good furry,

00:22:50.280 like you gotta, you gotta have money. You have to have some level of competence and you have to be,

00:22:54.480 I guess, heterodox and clever enough to be like, I don't care what society thinks.

00:22:59.460 So you're saying being a furry is like being a parent?

00:23:03.960 Simone, I really do not think genuinely, they're not a good community to target because

00:23:07.680 honey and furriedom is hedonism. And so yes, it has a similar filter in that it's frowned upon by

00:23:15.680 society to talk about, but the honey is different. And so even if you're drawing competent people,

00:23:20.540 you're going to draw the people who are not, as you say, are flightier or less effective.

00:23:25.520 And furriedom I think is infantilizing. I think that parenthood is, is, is just a super grownup.

00:23:32.120 I think before you become a parent, you don't know if spending time with your kids is going to cut

00:23:36.240 into your, you know, video game playing movie watching time, or if it's going to cut into your

00:23:40.240 work time. And for some people it does cut into their work time and they never, you know,

00:23:43.880 regain their, their effectiveness again. I certainly am not as productive as I was

00:23:47.820 with two kids now than I, you know, as with, with one. And I'm, I'm, I've been listening to you guys

00:23:52.960 talk about how you manage your lives as a way of trying to figure that out. So yeah, the, the

00:23:57.380 natalism conference, yeah, it was, it was really, it was better, much better than I expected.

00:24:02.300 People were extremely warm and, and generous with their time. I don't think it was just because I

00:24:07.880 was carrying a baby, although I think that helped a lot. And I don't know. 0.54

00:24:11.900 So cute. She's adorable. I can cameo with her in a minute if you want.

00:24:17.120 Well, and it was really easy to talk to new people there. I was also surprised by that.

00:24:21.580 Sometimes at conferences, there's these conferences where people are like, why are you talking to me?

00:24:25.140 We don't know each other yet. Or you feel some apprehension about approaching groups.

00:24:29.580 And I noticed none of that was in this conference.

00:24:31.860 There were no cliques. I couldn't, I didn't see people who were just hanging out together

00:24:36.380 in a way that was glommed together the whole time. I didn't notice that at all. Even,

00:24:40.400 you know, the, the group of extremely tall men in conservative politics were, were, you know,

00:24:45.620 sometimes I feel like, if we're sitting down, it's fine, but I can't, you know, but they were

00:24:50.020 very, very, they got, they got down to my level. Hold on. I'll bring the baby out for a minute.

00:24:54.440 I want to see Stella. I want to see Stella. I want to see Stella.

00:24:58.760 No, Stella.

00:25:00.000 So we're going to wrap up this one to start on the next one.

00:25:03.120 Hi. Oh my goodness. Look at you.

00:25:06.800 Oh.

00:25:07.200 Oh, hello. You were so awake. Oh, did we just get a little wink? We kind of got a little wink.

00:25:15.580 Oh my gosh. Hello. Oh, she kills me. She kills me. She definitely like charmed everyone at the 1.00

00:25:23.700 conference.

00:25:24.060 Oh, let's see if we get a little smile from you.

00:25:25.420 Oh, there we go.

00:25:31.980 Anyway, the conference was fantastic. We'd love to see people in future years. And I really do hope

00:25:36.960 that it can grow in the way the EA movement did historically grow and people were like, but then

00:25:41.580 it's going to burn out and sell out. I'm like, yes, that's what happens when something's successful.

00:25:44.800 And then we'll start something else new, but I'm really excited. And thanks for coming.

00:25:49.800 So yeah, it was a wonderful time and it was wonderful to spend some time with you guys as

00:25:54.200 well. Yeah. Yeah. That was one of my favorite parts. Not going to lie, but I think that's a lot

00:25:58.240 of what like these conferences need to be. And I think that's the one last point that I will end

00:26:02.180 with is that, you know, when, when you're building a movement, yeah, it's about sharing the ideas and

00:26:07.060 the unconference sessions and the brainstorming and stuff, but it's also just about showing people

00:26:11.100 that they're not alone and showing them other facets of the community and hanging out. And it was

00:26:14.780 great for that too. So I'm glad we got to see you.

00:26:18.340 Bye.

Based Camp - December 13, 2023

Inside The First Natalism Conference： Gossip & Impressions With Diana Fleischman

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