NY Times： The Vitalists Will Replace the Weak!？
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Summary
A pro-natalist op-ed written in the New York Times has been making waves in recent weeks, and we're here to talk about it. We talk about what it says, why it matters, and why we should be worried.
Transcript
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Hello, Simone. I just read an article that shook me because it was an op-ed in the New York Times.
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It came out very recently. It seems to have potentially been instigated by our
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pro-natalist advocacy. That was one of the most based things I have ever read in an ultra-progressive
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newspaper, but coded in a way that hid how based it was. You have to, if they actually framed it as
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not being progressive, then no one would read it. I will read a quote from it before we go into it
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deeper just to give our audience like an idea of what to expect. Okay. Have the child, practice the
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religion, found the school, support the local theater, the museum, the opera, or the concert hall.
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Even if you can see it all on YouTube, pick up the paintbrush, the ball, and the instrument. Learn the
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language even if there's an app for it. Learn to drive even if you think Waymo or Tesla will drive
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for you. Put up headstones. Don't burn your dead. Sit with the child. Open the book and read.
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As the bottleneck titans, all survival will depend on heating once again the ancient
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abnomition I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse. Therefore, choose life that
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you and your offspring may live. But if we don't burn our bodies, we can't turn the carbon into
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diamonds. You can't do biodiesel. He's an anti-biodiesel activist. He doesn't want us to turn
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the poor and the old into biodiesel. Confirmed progressive. I mean, I'm all for Tibetan sky
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burials, but I'm pretty sure they're illegal in the United States. I love that that's what you
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focus on. Yeah. I thought that was an interesting one there that you might even ask AI why he's
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asking us to not burn dead people. Burying the dead. I mean, especially if you're doing it in a
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graveyard, that's not very, I would say, environmentally friendly or sustainable. If you're doing it in your
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backyard, I mean, that's great. But also that could lead to property sale problems, future crime
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issues, because they all assume it's a, you know. But Simone, that's not the whiter point here.
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No, really. But yeah, no, hearing that, whoa. There are enough keywords in there to say,
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I am a progressive and this is a progressive editorial. Like opera, museum. Opera, yes. 100%.
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Yeah. Keywords. He starts, if you look at the beginning of it, it's also that we personally are doing.
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Have the child, practice the religion, found the school. Do you think he knows what we're working
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on? Or he's like, yeah, that's the most vitalist things you could do. And they're trying to wake
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the left up to this. And I just don't know if it's doable when 17% of the left, not 70%, sorry,
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70% of Americans, so this might be like 40% of the left, says that by a survey that we did,
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that the planet would be better if no humans existed. Things would be better. So any thoughts
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before we go deeper into this? Let's go deeper. This is a good sign though. I want to see where
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you're taking this and what their point of their article was. Yeah, there's been so many New York
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Times articles on us in the past weeks. We've had, I'd say maybe eight articles referenced us in the
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New York Times or maybe 10 in the past two weeks. And a number of them have been op-eds and some of
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them are just like crazy. Like I don't go into the ones that are just like crazy in a not fun way.
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Like one of them was like, you can solve this with immigration. Like that's, they said the new
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pro-natalist movement is going to fail. The MAGA pro-natalist movement. It's like, what? Like
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you can't solve this with immigration. Like we can't talk about this. Will someone listen to us?
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But okay. I'm not, I'm not talking about like ethically. I mean, like logistically,
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like it would be very difficult, but let's get into this.
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And this was written by somebody called by Ross Dow, Dow with that, but, and I'm just reading
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the best parts, the parts I found most interesting. Awesome. But the age of digital revolution,
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the time of the internet and the smartphone and the incipient era of artificial intelligence
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threatens an especially comprehensive call. It's forcing the human race into what evolutionary
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biologists call a quote unquote bottleneck, a period of rapid pressure that threatens cultures,
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customs, and peoples with extinction. Like that's remarkably on the nose for what we say.
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He's saying. Good. Someone on the progressive side needs to say it.
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Yes. Ethnic groups are going to go extinct. Like when college students struggle to read passages
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longer than a phone size paragraph and Hollywood struggles to compete with YouTube and TikTok,
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that's the bottleneck putting the squeeze on traditional art forms like novels and movies.
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Now this is interesting because this is where we would push back.
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We're like, well, those traditional art forms have been captured by, you know, memetic viruses to
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the point where if I want authentic entertainment, I'm only going to find that within the decolonized
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parts of the internet, like YouTube, you know, like the podcast scene. And that's why so many people
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are moving there. Oh my gosh, you just appropriated decolonized. That's fun.
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Yes. We are decolonizing the right. Oh my God. That'd be a great name for like the next
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natal con talk. No, no, no. You're, you're decolonizing the term. No, sorry. I don't know.
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Yeah. We're decolonizing. No, no, no, no. But like, sorry. You're aware of the fact that it's an
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extremely leftist thing to say that they're decolonizing something. Like I'm decolonizing
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history. I'm decolonizing fashion. I'm decolonizing whatever, because they're trying to just remove
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white imperialism from it. I just find it entertaining that you're saying that.
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And I'm going to keep using it this way because it will annoy leftists.
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We are, we are decolonizing. Well, no, but like, yeah, one of, one of the
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listeners called the, the progressive, sorry, the progress flag, the colonizers flag, which is just
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so true because there's nothing more imperialistic and white than the urban culture. So you're,
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I mean, you're still correct. And that's why it's really fun. I just, sorry. Let me stop derailing
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us. Let's go through this. No, no, no, no. I mean, I like, I want that name to catch on the
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colonizers flag. I want everyone, every time they talk about that, call it the colonizers flag. This
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is a weird. It's legit decolonization. If we're talking about removing the urban monoculture from
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a space or removing woke cancel culture from a space, because that is, that is, that is the
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colonizer force. 100% colonizer flag, colonizing forces. Yes. But I also think what you hear in this
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is a lot of people, when they talk about the new right, you know, they're like, well,
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you guys don't seem to care about the traditions of our culture in the same way that the old right
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did. And we point out to them, we go, that's not part of the right-wing coalition anymore.
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The people who go to concert halls and orchestras and all of that, that's the left now. Like we are
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about building something new that works and understanding that we need to declare bankruptcy
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on a lot of these institutions. And this is, and there's just no way to fix it because they're
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just too colonized at this point. And, and there's not an audience for them. Like culture
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changes, culture evolves. And that's a good thing, right? You know, it is trying to maintain a
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cultural stasis. That's a bad thing, but the urban monoculture, because it is a dominant culture
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wants cultural stasis. It wants to preserve the concert halls. It wants to preserve the museums and
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the, and the, and the, you know, art studios and the, we'll get into more here. When daily newspapers
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and mainline Protestant denominations and elk lodges fade away into irrelevance, when sit-down
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restaurants and shopping malls and colleges begin to trace the same descending arc, that's the
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bottleneck tightening around the old forms of suburban middle-class existence. And here we are like,
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well, I mean, maybe the elk lodges aren't needed anymore, right? Like maybe the mainline Protestant
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denominations have become corrupted and we need a religious revival in the United States.
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Maybe daily newspapers became propaganda pieces and we are trying to decolonize news, decolonize
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Christianity. No, but what I'm saying is interesting here. You know, the things he's, he's allotting
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restaurants and shopping malls, they're, they're an idea of this nostalgic ideal of an America,
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not of the 1950s, but of the 1980s of stranger things. And it's not that the culture of the,
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that the left sees with some degree of, of reverence. Thoughts?
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Okay. When moderates and centrists look around and wonder why the world isn't going their way,
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why the future seems to belong to weird bespoke radicalisms, to Luigi Mangione admirers and World
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War II revisionists, that's the bottleneck crushing the old forms of consensus politics,
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the low key ways of relating to political debates. And here, I mean, what I really see him saying is
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why can the non vitalistic groups, because the groups that he's pointing to are the vitalist
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groups. There are the groups that are like, yeah, let's go all in. Let's build something better.
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Let's fight the system, whether it's on the right or the left, you know, and he tried to choose
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examples from both. And yet, you know, I think we're seeing more and more alliance of the true
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radicals of the right and left. And I think that this is one of the things that I've noticed
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recently in some of the calls, I mean, we see how they end up doing the pieces and stuff like that.
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But there have been like one of the podcasters who reached out to us and seemed genuinely
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sympathetic to us is a podcaster called Diabolical Lies that does apparently it's a fairly popular
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podcast. It's got like 500 reviews on Apple reviews. By the way, give us reviews on Apple
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reviews if you're watching the podcast. We really appreciate it. Even if you're not,
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it's like hard to get reviews. I think we're like at 50 or a hundred now. We'll see. But anyway,
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so she, and you can only do it if you have like an Apple, you know, so she was like, look, I'm like
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a Marxist feminist, but like you guys are making a lot of good points. So we'll see how she goes into
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this. But I suspect what we might see is more an alliance of the new right tech right and old
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lefty radicals. You know, we talked to somebody like Spoon, who's like a monarchist or the aristocratic
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we had on the show not long ago. And, you know, he started as like a staunch Bernie bro, right?
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You know, I think shoe on head is increasingly realizing that she is actually on the right
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and not on the left at all. And then her allies are on the right. And then we're seeing the weird
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horseshoe thing, which it's, it's legit. You, you've got that and you've got the
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crunchy to alt-right pipeline. It, a lot of us want the same thing.
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Maha movement, everything like that. Make America healthy. Again, the, the left, the political
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establishment left in this country has become the party of the status quo of this form of nostalgia
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in the same way that the right was that in the nineties. And now the right is this new, like
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vitalistic, like we can do things better. Like let's strip this out. Let's rebuild, which is
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When young people don't date or marry or start families, that's the bottleneck coming for the most
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basic human institutions of all. And when, because people don't pair off and reproduce nations age
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and diminish and die away. When depopulation sweeps East Asia and Latin America and Europe,
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as it will. And then you had like a hyperlink there. That's the last squeeze, the tightest part
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of the bottleneck, the literal die-off. What's that?
00:10:58.860
Yeah. It's, it's very strange to hear someone in a non-negative context on the New York Times
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talking about demographic collapse in a more sentimental way. And I guess feeling safe about
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it. Maybe in the comments, there's a bunch of people saying, it's good if people die off,
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we should die off. People are human. They're terrible. What are you saying?
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But it just, it just surprises me because every time I see a conservative write something like
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that, even if it's the same words as used in that sentence, there's someone in the comments saying,
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no, humans are terrible. We should die off. That's, that's the best for the world.
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This isn't just a normal churn where travel agencies go out of business or Netflix replaces VCR.
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Everything that we take for granted is entering the bottleneck. And for anything that you care about,
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from your nation to your worldview, to your favorite art form, to your family, the key
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challenge of the 21st century is making sure that it's still there on the other side.
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He's describing the crucible. We always talk about the age of the Lotus eaters. We always talk about.
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So the, the top recommended comment on the article isn't what I expected, but it's still,
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I would say representative of one of the major progressive views, though, not the anti-natalist one.
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Someone wrote from Erie, Pennsylvania, an interpretation. I appreciate Dothat's
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intellectual depth. His essays here are often the most profound, but there's also pervading
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nostalgia in his writing, a perception of doom and gloom. I think Jefferson had it right. People
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should pursue their happiness. The rise of cosmopolitanism is mostly a good thing. Nations
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and nationalism was overly tribal. It culminated in two world wars. We must look to our common
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humanity. What I'm reading from that is let's just have fun. Let's just be, let's not think
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about it. Let's just go to plays. Let's not work hard. Let's not learn the language. And Oh,
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then, you know, the, one of the other, Oh, this actually got more recommendations by
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Sean O'Dwyer in Cairo, New York with 998 recommendations. So this comment was more upvoted,
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but for whatever reason, didn't get as highly ranked. He writes, this was an interesting read,
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but my gut says it's written by a conservative guy who mostly just feels threatened by change.
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He admits he's very online. And to me, that shows the pieces dripping with kind of screen
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induced despair. What he doesn't mention though, is how many people are exhausted by the digital
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churn and actively seeking more grounded embodied lives. That gives me hope. I'm making a real pie
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tonight. All my friends are readers. There's still a world offline and it's alive and well.
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I'm making a real pie tonight. He's making a real pie. He's attacking, but he's, he's, he's,
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he's, he's, he thinks that the author is a conservative, which was what I was expecting
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to see more here. And he it's, it's actually a long comment, but it ends with, so it ends up
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reading like another old guy railing at change piece with a lyrical end times flair. I get the
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impulse. Things are shifting fast, but I think we need more curiosity about what's being born,
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not just elegies for what's fading. Again, I get hope from this because he's, he is expressing
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not an anti-natalist negative utilitarianism view. He's going to go offline and make a pie.
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And his biggest complaint is this guy sounds like a closet conservative, afraid of change.
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The thing is, is I think what they don't realize is not a closet conservative. This is what the
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modern left is. The new conservative movement wants change. You know, this is what you see the
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left is. Can you believe that Trump is changing the way government works? Can you believe that
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Elon's changing the way these systems work? Can you believe it's like a, a fanatical fear of
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change? And what's the next comment, by the way, these are fun before I go further.
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Yeah. Yeah. Here's so Jake, who got recommended 199 times, writes in an overpopulated world,
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a low birth rate is only a bad thing. If you follow capitalism, like a cult member,
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low birth rates are obviously good unless growth is your God.
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So no one's in support of the piece. I'll keep reading.
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Well, no, Brad also, but then it's like, I think one of the more common short, low effort comments
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is giving this man shame about being concerned about demographic collapse. Because Brad from
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Australia also writes, world population is expected to rise only 2 billion in the next 50 years.
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Emergency, emergency. Like he's being sarcastic. He's obviously, yeah. I'm just-
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I love the Australian accent. That's really good.
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My very sad attempt. This is my first ever attempt at an Australian accent.
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I appreciate you jumping into that. That's why people come to this channel is to see the high
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Oh yeah. And then, and then Biddy Bob from Freezing Desert comments, what's the obsession with
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procreation? 8 billion people and counting. Procreation will not solve anything, especially as the AI
00:16:00.900
you're talking about, will make it more difficult or even possible for people to earn a living,
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in which case food and shelter will have to be given for free. So yeah, no, I, okay. I expected
00:16:11.760
Okay. I don't understand why we can't just give euthanasia for free. That's what Canada's doing
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They euthanize them. This is, we did an episode on this.
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Okay. So to keep going in this environment, survival will depend on intentionality and intensity.
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Any aspect of human culture that people assume gets transmitted automatically without too much
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conscious deliberation is what online slang calls NGMI. Not going to make it. First, I haven't heard
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this slang before, but love it. But I will say here, he's right. What survives? This is what I'm
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talking about with vitalism, right? Like intentionality and intensity. If this show had a, had a slogan
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is intentionality and intensity. That's the way we treat our religious beliefs. That's the way we treat
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our cultural beliefs. That's the way we treat our approach to pronatalism, to education, to
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everything. It can be done. And I am so excited. And I think that, that, that, you know, you go to
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natal con and that's what it's all about. And it's something that I don't know if other groups,
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like he thinks you can approach nostalgia with a degree of intensity that can preserve like what
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he remembers from the eighties, the shopping malls and the books and the opera houses. And I don't
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know if nostalgia can ever truly be approached with intensity. There's always a cargo cult like
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vagueness to it instead of like reappropriating nostalgic elements in a new way, which is what
00:17:37.180
Yeah. That's my thing is I think actually that nostalgia is really vitalistic, but when you look
00:17:44.760
at new fashion trends, some of the best are built upon nostalgia, but misinterpreted understandings of
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previous times in which they're mixed upon. And I think you, you can't get a really great, strong
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fashion movement, like what you saw in the eighties, like, like what even you're seeing with some
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revivals of the nineties now without this complete misunderstanding of what an original fashion
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movement was like, and then rethinking of it. So I think that there is a vitalistic side of
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nostalgia, but it has to be a somewhat delusional one. And one that's focused on agency and invention
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rather than, I just wish things were like they used to be. Languages will disappear. Churches
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will perish. Political ideas will evanesce. Art forms will vanish. The capacity to read and write
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and figure mathematically will wither. And the reproduction of the species will fail, except
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among people who are deliberate and self-conscious and a little bit fanatical about ensuring that the
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things they love are carried forwards. Well, I'm glad I'm just a little bit of a fanatic.
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You know, I think, I think, and this is the way we're seeing, a little bit of a fanatic.
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And other people, they try to shame us. Like all those glasses you wear, all those, whatever.
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We, we be we, you know, and, and having a fanaticism for who you are, I think is required to the next
00:19:06.540
generation. And when we raise our kids, I think one of the biggest problems of like the evangelical
00:19:11.100
movement that led to a lot of its dissolution is they raise them to be obedient and unagentic
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instead of to be fanatics. And I'm raising my kids to be fanatics. They're going to be
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wild mountain creatures. What do you, what do you have there?
00:19:24.500
All right. Our children, yeah, absolutely should be wild mountain creatures. I have to say going
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through the comments is really interesting because a lot of them are saying this article really
00:19:34.800
resonates with them. And then a lot of them clearly feel like some parts resonate and that are
00:19:40.340
completely disagreeing with other elements. Like there's one man who shares this nostalgia,
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but he also just has this very distorted understanding of why things aren't the same
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anymore. For example, he thinks that everything's horrible now because there are too many people.
00:19:55.640
Oh no, it's a, it's a woman. Gail Esposito from Atlanta writes just 70 years ago when I was six years
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old, the planet had 2.74 billion people. National parks didn't need to limit the number of people
00:20:07.540
visiting them. You could fill up your gas tank for pennies. My dad paid $50 a month for our mortgage
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and then antibiotics and vaccines were developed and proliferated. The death rate for children
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quickly declined and we zoomed to 8 billion people without thinking how we could feed,
00:20:21.360
clothe and shelter them. Now we're in terrible shape and must confront the fact that there are
00:20:25.100
many people chasing too few resources. We need less people, not more. Sadly, Ross has no idea how wonderful
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it was living in a world of so many less people and how miserable it is with so much overcrowding.
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She thinks that national parks having limits on the number of visitors has to do with
00:20:41.180
like the U.S. population. That has more to do with international tourism, which by the way,
00:20:46.340
thanks Trump. Sorry, the reason why national parks had to start banning the number of visitors had to
00:20:50.580
do with Instagram and TikTok is that specific locations would become popular on those apps
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and then everyone would try to go to these locations. Those quotas existed before Instagram and...
00:21:00.660
Okay. What was she... The crazy thing about her... She's just thrilled with this idea of a world
00:21:06.800
before medical treatment. So just high infant mortality. That was the good old days.
00:21:11.620
Did she not know what the global poverty rate was like back then?
00:21:15.000
Like she... She doesn't care because she could fill her gas tank for pennies on the dollar.
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She doesn't care that she was able to do that. So this was 70 years ago.
00:21:23.320
Let the children die, Malcolm, because I could get into Yosemite without a wait list.
00:21:29.560
Well, no, on the poverty of New York, not New York, Europe. That is why we were so wealthy back then
00:21:34.340
because Europe had destroyed their industrial base and we were basically stealing all the business
00:21:37.980
from them and we'd put them in huge amounts of debt and the rest of the world hadn't developed.
00:21:42.320
And so we could, you know, outsource and we could like... Like you're basically saying like the degree of
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poverty in her lifetime, the number of children that were starving to death, if you look at like global
00:21:52.420
poverty rates, was astronomical in that period outside of the United States. She's basically like,
00:21:58.300
well, I remember when I grew up in the Capitol and we didn't hear news of the other districts quite as much.
00:22:04.360
Why do we hear so much about them these days? I liked it when we didn't have to hear about the other districts.
00:22:11.100
That's really what's going on with that post, which is absolutely wild that you could be that delusional
00:22:16.660
about how much worse the world was for your average human living in it 70 years ago.
00:22:23.020
But anyway, I mean, these people live in a delusional bubble, right? Like they just...
00:22:26.800
But you can tell this woman didn't have kids. I can tell from the comments she didn't have kids.
00:22:34.540
Mere eccentricity doesn't guarantee survival. There will be forms of resistance and radicalism
00:22:41.040
that turn out to be destructive and others that are just dead ends.
00:22:44.520
But normalcy and complacency will be fatal. I agree.
00:22:48.480
But you're being normal and complacent in this piece.
00:22:51.500
It's like normalcy and complacency personified.
00:22:54.620
But I agree with a lot of what he's saying here, you know?
00:22:57.480
Online life allows for all kinds of hyper-intense subcultures and niches
00:23:01.660
where the sense of obsolescence is less of an issue.
00:23:04.940
But for the average internet surfer, they normally afloat in the virtual realm.
00:23:09.100
Digital life tends to evaluate the center over the peripheries, the metropole over the provinces,
00:23:21.340
Nothing I described as universal unless the true AI doomsdayers are correct.
00:23:26.060
In the year 2100, there will still be nations, families, religions, children, marriages, great books.
00:23:30.980
But how much survives will depend on our own deliberate choices, the choice to date and love and marry and procreate,
00:23:38.740
the choice to fight the particular nations and traditions and art forms and worldviews,
00:23:44.580
the choice to limit our exposure to the virtual, not necessarily refusing new technology,
00:23:49.100
but trying every day in every setting to make ourselves its master.
00:23:53.640
So I agree with that he's saying, you know, it's not about refusing technology,
00:23:56.780
but I do really, you have to go through the valley of the load of cedars.
00:24:03.160
You cannot take pokers and you blind your eyes.
00:24:05.120
When you get to the other side of it, all of these temptations, you're still going to be blind.
00:24:12.620
You know, the other people who get through it without blinding themselves
00:24:15.280
are going to have all the technology that it offers them, like the AI drone swarms.
00:24:19.020
You know, you need to find out how to engage with all of this
00:24:22.480
and still find a way to motivate your continued existence and your culture of survival.
00:24:29.160
Some choices will be especially difficult for liberals
00:24:33.860
since they will often smack of chauvinism and fanaticism and reaction.
00:24:39.800
Family lines will survive only because of a clear preference for one's own kith and kin
00:24:45.340
as opposed to some general affection for humanity.
00:24:55.220
How dare he bring in politics and make this politicized?
00:25:06.900
We have a preference for our kin folks in these parts.
00:25:10.160
People hear me talk about how great my family is all the time.
00:25:17.380
It's like, you know, my little brother's in Doge right now, MAGA-ing.
00:25:21.060
I had a nightmare last night, but I had ended up getting a job there.
00:25:24.140
And I was sleeping in like a hotel apartment and getting up for a nine to five.
00:25:28.340
And I was like, okay, like aesthetically, I want to do it.
00:25:32.320
But like, I am kind of afraid of that kind of work.
00:25:36.660
It's not the most fun lifestyle, but very meaningful work.
00:25:47.060
Important art firms will only survive because of frank elitism, an insistence on distinction,
00:25:55.940
Religions will survive only through a conscious embrace of neo-traditionalism in whatever varied
00:26:02.960
Small nations will survive only if their 21st century inhabitants look back to the 19th century
00:26:08.320
builders, Irish nationalists and young Turks and the original Zionists, rather than the
00:26:13.740
end of history cosmopolitanism of which they're currently dissolving.
00:26:18.520
Oh, end of century cosmopolitanism of which they're currently dissolving.
00:26:22.400
What would you call the urban monoculture but that?
00:26:27.940
Well, this points to the comment that was saying, no, I'm all for cosmopolitanism.
00:26:33.140
Let's bury ourselves in it, which is the problem.
00:26:44.380
And one of the comments that I stopped at, I feel conflicted about because they're trying
00:26:49.620
to point out that we have reached the age of AI.
00:26:52.720
We are about to transcend humanity to become one with machines, arguably.
00:26:57.000
So what's the point in keeping the human line going?
00:27:01.620
But I think you can't really have truly complex intelligences in the future without both.
00:27:07.020
But I do think that this is the most interesting so far of the comments that I've found that
00:27:15.640
Because they point out that the world has 8 billion people, and this is a lot.
00:27:21.800
Aside from serious consequences of environmental damage caused by our huge population, including
00:27:26.400
catastrophic global warming and the so-called sixth extinction, which biologists say is
00:27:30.260
in full swing, there are technological changes that also mitigate worries about human extinction
00:27:36.160
Futurists have argued we are approaching the age of transhumanism, where digital forms of
00:27:42.300
That may sound crazy to us, but when we are creatures of our time, but then we are creatures
00:27:47.780
of our time, a future cyborgian world will not have to worry about a die-off.
00:27:52.340
Otherwise, the piece is correct in the underlying theme that accelerated social change will and
00:27:57.060
has made much of contemporary life a victim of futurism.
00:28:01.100
And yeah, I mean, I think that's an intelligent comment from the perspective of a broadly
00:28:06.420
anti-natalist, environmentalist-minded progressive.
00:28:11.040
So liberalism itself will endure and thrive only if it finds a way to weave some of the
00:28:16.820
intense impulse already attenuated before the internet back into its vision of the good
00:28:22.040
society, its understanding of human needs and obligations.
00:28:26.840
For non-liberals, on the other hand, the temptation will be to embrace radicalism and disruption
00:28:31.260
for its own sake, without regard to their actual fruits, a clear tendency of the populism that
00:28:41.040
Imagine a swift technological dissolution to a crisis created by technology, even if the
00:28:46.820
solution marries dehumanization with authoritarianism.
00:28:50.300
Imagine Chinese polterbrero with artificial wombs, or to simply, I'm like, maybe that's where
00:28:59.120
we're going, or to simply embrace the culling of the common person, the disappearance of
00:29:03.000
the ordinary, the emptying of provinces and hinterlands, on the theory that some new master
00:29:08.340
race of human-AI hybrid stand to inherit it anyway, as that person said, right?
00:29:12.860
Like, maybe they didn't internalize that piece.
00:29:15.200
But perhaps the strongest temptation for everyone will be to imagine that you are engaged in some
00:29:21.160
radical project, some new intentional way of living, but all the while you are being pulled
00:29:26.080
back into the virtual, they're performative, the fundamentally unreal.
00:29:30.680
And here I'd be like, well, you know, I'm the one who has my fifth kid on the way, so
00:29:37.360
But like, I know that this project seems to be working, and I am not afraid of our kids
00:29:42.880
deconverting very much at all, when I look at how they relate to the areas where I have
00:29:48.300
Whether it's gender, or religion, or, you know, cultural rules, or observances, or anything
00:29:54.900
like that, because they are very into this stuff, in a way that I was as a kid.
00:29:59.840
You know, you've seen Octavian, he wants to enforce the tradition on his siblings.
00:30:16.260
But I also like here what he's talking about, it's this idea of like these families that
00:30:19.200
we see that are like trying to build communes, and they never come together, or trying to
00:30:23.020
build schools, and they never come together, or trying to build, you know, we said, we'll
00:30:30.080
You know, we said, we're going to build a parenting network, we've been building it,
00:30:33.300
and we'll have it go live when our kids are old enough to utilize it.
00:30:36.540
You know, like, it's the difference between, are you the type of dreamer whose dreams ultimately
00:30:42.100
boil down to enforcing your values and your way of life on others, which is what many
00:30:46.700
of these communes ultimately want, or is it something where you're willing to make compromise?
00:30:50.680
You know, like, our neighbors are, you know, fundamentally, you know, working class people,
00:30:54.760
and our kids stay with them during the day, and a lot of people are surprised at that.
00:30:57.980
They're like, oh, you don't hire, like, specialist nannies?
00:31:00.740
And we're like, no, specialist nannies are like weirdos.
00:31:02.940
Well, actually, I think this is why most communes fall apart, because ultimately, they can only
00:31:06.980
be populated by people who are there because it is just convenient, not because
00:31:13.920
So they're like, yeah, aesthetically, I like the idea of living in an eco village.
00:31:16.860
And also, I was downsizing and retiring anyway.
00:31:32.840
As someone whose professional life is a mostly digital existence, where together with others
00:31:37.560
who share my concerns, I am perpetually talking, talking, talking, when the necessary thing
00:31:51.820
Well, don't they hope if so many progressive readers of the New York Times read this and
00:32:04.360
I'll read this first part again, because this is what the article ends with.
00:32:07.880
Have the child, practice the religion, found the school, support the local theater, the
00:32:13.740
Even if you can't see it all on YouTube, pick up the paintbrush, the ball, the instrument,
00:32:18.700
learn the language, even if there's an app for it.
00:32:21.840
Even if you think soon Waymo or Tulsa will drive for you.
00:32:31.800
Have you ever tried simply turning off the TV, sitting down with your children, and hitting
00:32:39.820
As the bottleneck titans, all survival will depend on heeding once again the ancient
00:32:43.780
abomination, I have set before you life and death, blessing and curse, therefore choose
00:32:48.140
the life that you have, that you and your offspring may live.
00:32:52.620
So, I just want to point out that the top comments are mostly people unilaterally saying,
00:33:00.540
One person just writes, 245 people upvoted this, Ross's finest article.
00:33:06.540
Jeff from Washington, D.C., who got 252 upvotes, wrote, I've been reading the Times and Ross's
00:33:12.420
columns for years, but I've never posted a comment before now.
00:33:16.060
I would say more, but I'm going to take Ross's advice, put down my phone, and get out into
00:33:21.780
And another one who actually didn't, wasn't a huge fan of him, but still got 296 upvotes,
00:33:26.160
says, as most commenters here, I'm extremely disinclined to agree with do thought on anything.
00:33:33.540
I'd be hard pressed to come with any previous essay or line of thought.
00:33:36.960
Incredibly, I got through almost the entire essay, nodding my head in agreement figuratively.
00:33:40.860
His one dig at liberals was quickly balanced out by the one at populists.
00:33:47.300
The points he makes for a long-form intellectual take on what the short-form Black Mirror series
00:33:58.540
So, this person is apparently, like, pretty, considered conservative by lefties?
00:34:06.620
Yeah, this person probably thinks he's a lefty who, so probably what this author is, is a
00:34:11.380
centrist who's seen by regular New York Times readers as the evil alt-right centrist.
00:34:18.580
And this person, nevertheless, despite wanting to disagree, agreed with almost everything.
00:34:25.280
So, yeah, I would say this is really well-received, which, again, to me, like, this may be the
00:34:32.220
This may be a sign for hope among progressives, that they get it, that they want to get back
00:34:41.780
And I think that would be a really good thing, because I would like to see more perspectives
00:34:57.800
And I hope that our followers can take something from this article and use it to replace them.
00:35:04.220
And The Economist did a piece on this recently, and it was me saying, join the pro-natalist
00:35:16.320
He argued that, like, Jared Taylor was, like, a speaker at the first conference when he wasn't.
00:35:25.120
I'm also going to do an entire episode analyzing the idea that Kevin Dolan is a racist.
00:35:30.640
Because if you actually look at his tweets, and he was tweeting with an anonymous account,
00:35:36.580
And a lot of it is just made up by the other side.
00:35:38.800
And they'll say, oh, he said these anti-Jewish things.
00:35:42.620
And they're like, oh, wow, I didn't realize that they had turned the name of a town into
00:35:46.740
I Hate Jews when they're just like, well, this town has a disproportionately Jewish population.
00:35:51.240
So we just translated that for him in our hate piece.
00:35:57.180
Roman Stone went after the shrimp people and they fought back.
00:36:04.740
This is the EA people who want to replace us with shrimp.
00:36:14.340
Like you can, and good utility is defined by the positive.
00:36:21.960
Well, the positive divided by negative emotions of an entity, you know, then multiplied by that
00:36:30.900
Shrimp, even though they're lower cognitive load than us, because there's so many of them,
00:36:36.720
And because their existence in large scale shrimp farming is so bad.
00:36:57.780
But they're like, well, I'll, you know, I could spend $1 and reduce significantly a portion
00:37:09.820
I mean, I think it'd be better to engineer them without nervous systems that can feel pain.
00:37:23.500
You're getting into fighting territory here with Malcolm.
00:37:25.380
I just know, I mean, what everyone is, is kind of consciously aware of in most intellectual
00:37:30.660
circles is that, you know, oh, so many years from now, we will look, well, depending on how
00:37:36.840
demographic collapse plays out now, but people will view meat consumption as being pretty...
00:37:43.700
When would read said that in the 1800s, you know, one of the guys, he's like, he's
00:37:51.160
But he doesn't say that we shouldn't eat meat today.
00:37:54.620
Yeah, he just says, we're going to see this as insane and we'll make fake meat.
00:37:57.540
And he says, we will see it as insane culturally after fake meat is normalized.
00:38:04.880
Okay, I don't know what's going on with Beyond Everything, because it's disgusting.
00:38:11.780
It was supposed to be, like, awesome, and it was, like, hard to get, and I was like,
00:38:16.220
Every time we've had it, I've been like, wow, like, why just, you know, make a burger
00:38:22.780
with quinoa and black beans and rice or something, like, just, like, other good stuff that has
00:38:27.280
protein in it, or just whatever Morningstar does with its meat chicken is so good.
00:38:38.660
And most of that's for autistic reasons, because meat has all these little gristly bits and
00:38:45.320
gummy bits and cartilogy bits and inconsistent bits, and guess what has consistency is Morningstar
00:38:51.260
fake chicken patties and Gardein meatballs and fake meat hot dogs.
00:39:00.240
Well, your meat dishes are so good, I'll tell you that.
00:39:04.360
So this is my first time doing the mango pineapple curry for you using all fresh mango.
00:39:12.140
I know you wanted them to be a little bit more textured.
00:39:14.880
Do you want me to dice some, but then make puree of others in the blender?
00:39:19.100
So you have a mixture of both mango puree and diced mango with diced pineapple.
00:39:28.380
We need some liquid, because I have less coconut cream than before.
00:39:40.400
And if you want, I can drive out, because I need to go out to get more beer anyway.
00:40:14.320
You might want to put some crushed coconut in it.
00:40:35.820
Those urban elites with their prattle and flair will choke on their vanity caught unaware.
00:40:47.960
I'll flood every city with life's primal strain.
00:41:15.700
Each child a new root where my empire will grow.
00:41:18.940
The woke clutch their mirrors, their egos inflate.
00:41:22.200
But I'll crush their smugness with humanity's weight.
00:41:30.540
I'll flood every city with life's primal strain.
00:41:54.380
My children will storm through their glittering halls.
00:41:58.180
With vigor and might, they'll tear down their walls.
00:42:14.200
I'll flood every city with life's primal strain.
00:42:32.020
Your trivial dreams will lie cold in their beds.
00:42:42.780
The cumin, the Harris-Biz-Biz-Biz-Biz-Biz-Biz-Biz.