In this episode of the podcast, we talk about the importance of defensibility and why we intentionally court controversy. We talk about why we believe that we should all be more defensible, and why it's important to have defensible corners.
00:00:00.000Now, this issue, because it counters the mainstream narratives around what people should care about, is considered a right-wing issue.
00:00:06.880That's not, I think, necessarily because it's a right-wing issue.
00:00:10.440It's because the left control all centers of power today.
00:00:13.400So if you are saying anything that challenges the dominant narrative within society, you are considered a far-right activist within today's informational ecosystem.
00:00:21.800So we're like, okay, we can use this to our advantage.
00:00:24.720In fact, the negativity the press shows us, in a way, vets us with conservative and moderate audiences.
00:00:32.860They see press skepticism about reasonable causes as validation of those causes' realism, efficacy, and grassroots nature.
00:02:05.480So you love views of an area where you have, you know, a lot of food and likely, you know, so much of human aesthetics and human preprogramming is just around defensibility and the things that would have caused her.
00:02:19.420Like, will I survive here, and yeah, and that includes both, will I survive if someone tries to attack me, and also, are there natural resources here that will sustain me?
00:03:01.040We've been called, what was that Sony documentary on us?
00:03:03.480It was like they're human memes or something.
00:03:06.880Oh, yeah, like walking internet memes.
00:03:11.220A lot of people, just for a bit of background, if you're watching this channel and you're looking at the subscriber count and you're like, you know, I feel like I see these people in the news a lot.
00:03:19.460Why isn't their subscriber count higher?
00:03:21.260It's because this channel was dormant when most of our media coverage happened.
00:03:26.160So, obviously, if you look at this channel, you'll see stuff from, like, 15 years ago, right?
00:03:31.000Simone used this a lot when she was younger.
00:03:32.660We had a period where we revived it for a bit, but it hadn't been used in, like, three or four years when we were, you know, whether it was on Piers Morgan or whether it was on Chris Williamson or whether it was, you know, had the front page piece on us in the Telegraph or the front page piece on us in the National Post or that big viral insider piece or the elite couple breeding to save mankind piece.
00:03:51.520All of that happened when this channel was dormant.
00:03:54.500If this channel had been active during that period, we would have caught all of that.
00:03:58.600And this got us to a stance where we're like, okay, well, we need to reactivate the channel again so we can catch all of that.
00:04:03.300But we have had multiple periods where, to an extent, for different ends, we needed to court a level of controversy to promote something that was of short-term utility to us.
00:04:16.160The first time we really went viral that a lot of people are familiar with is the Reddit Proposal, which, what was the old internet magazine that rated it the most romantic moment of the year?
00:05:23.940But that was something where we were like, okay.
00:05:25.740And that was also in part an experiment for us because we had somebody who had told us before, as people know, we go to a bunch of secret society things.
00:05:34.080And at one, I was like, well, you can intentionally create a viral event.
00:05:56.380But there was an element of pride in doing that as well.
00:05:59.500Well, this is all because someone told you you couldn't do a thing.
00:06:03.940Well, you got to learn that with our kids, Simone.
00:06:06.800Don't tell them they can't do things, okay?
00:06:10.780Because they will desperately try to do all of those things.
00:06:14.340But then there's the second thing, which is the second more recent pronatalist virality that we've had.
00:06:19.720And I'd point out that literally the human being on Earth with the largest platform, the largest platform of any human on Earth, more wealth, more power than probably any human has had in human history, Elon Musk, has been pushing for people caring about birth rates long before we did, okay?
00:06:41.800He created almost no sustained buzz around this.
00:06:45.620People were like, oh, it's weird that he's talking about this.
00:06:49.400And a VC here or there began to care about it.
00:06:52.220But it did not enter the mainstream narrative.
00:06:55.340We came at this in where we created a website around this.
00:06:58.460And we're like, so a lot of people don't know how the website actually came to be.
00:07:01.560We had this one year where we're like, okay, we are going to blue sky how we can change the world in a positive direction.
00:07:09.460And what we were looking for was arbitrage areas.
00:07:12.160So we were looking for areas where we could do a project where no competent people were working, but that were either like real big and real like severe human problems or, yeah, that was it.
00:08:02.480Like it's the diversity of ecology that gives it this intrinsic value.
00:08:06.000When people are like, I'm mad that species are going extinct, they're, I mean, there's idiots who are like, I want to freeze all species in their place in the world today, right now, and nothing can ever change or evolve.
00:09:57.620Like, that would do much more because each new planet you seed with life is an entirely new biome that's evolving that's as equally rich as Earth's biome.
00:10:04.700Like, almost nothing we do on Earth would be meaningful in contrast to that.
00:10:08.080You save one pitiful species, one pitiful ecosystem, we've created an entire new biome.
00:10:13.860And so we looked at the cost of doing this.
00:10:15.460And because you can get little capsules on satellites, you can pay, like, $50,000 to get a capsule on a satellite, which is most of the cost of taking a planet.
00:10:22.940Then you can use a serial evolution chamber.
00:10:25.240This is a chamber where you're incrementally changing the conditions within the chamber to create, you know, a form of bacteria or a form of fungus that's resistant to, like, the type of radiation you would see on Mars by slowly changing the amount of radiation that it's facing.
00:10:37.520Slowly changing the heat variation that it's exposed to.
00:10:46.380And this seeding would eventually lead to, no, lead to a whole biome growing there.
00:10:52.860Now, what would be better, and one of the reasons why I went against doing this, is if we had more funding to do this than the amount that we would probably be looking at as doing this, is we could probably do seeding with gene-engineered organisms instead of just serially evolved organisms.
00:11:07.140And through that, seed biomes with bacteria, whatever it is, it turns out to work best, that are programmed to create an atmosphere that humans can live with in.
00:11:18.020And if we do it with something that's not programmed to create that, then you're going to get, like, local optimization beforehand.
00:11:23.520And then if you tried to later seed it with something that was optimized around doing that, it wouldn't be successful.
00:11:29.240And that would put our species back the thing that to us matters the most.
00:11:33.240I mean, our long-term goal is an intergalactic human empire.
00:11:36.860But whatever becomes of humanity, not like, you know, again, just like the environment.
00:11:42.440There's no point in freezing humans in a revolution that somewhat defeats the purpose of what makes humanity great.
00:11:49.120So that was the one project that didn't.
00:11:51.840But we had created pronatalist.org, and we were basically, like, seeding it.
00:11:55.960We had reached out to a few reporters, but nothing really came of it.
00:11:58.740And then the piece came of us because of our embryo selection.
00:12:02.000And that was actually promoted by one of the companies that we were working with.
00:12:05.020And that got us a platform, and then that platform was picked up by the Insider article, and then that created the initial virality around this.
00:12:13.160Now, that was very useful to us because after that, we sort of became the faces of perinatalism, and we're like, okay, like, this actually is an existential issue for our species.
00:12:24.520Let's move forwards in how we address this.
00:12:27.220And you guys are getting, like, a way too honest history of how we got into this, but it is useful in terms of understanding.
00:12:32.100So then we began to do some experimentation around this, and how we engaged with reporters.
00:12:37.880Like, do we edge the reporters with controversy, or do we actually try to convince the reporters that this isn't a controversial issue?
00:12:44.860When we did that, we got a piece on us in the third most read newspaper in Canada, the National Post.
00:12:50.640It was a front page piece on us, and it was very popular.
00:12:54.340And it was a very balanced, very positive on perinatalism and our advocacy.
00:12:59.240I think it literally got, like, seven Twitter followers.
00:13:02.100Like, if you're measuring, like, how much people liked this from Twitter followers.
00:13:05.380I don't even know if we got any Twitter followers on that or if anyone really got any – like, what I'm looking at when I look at, like, is one of our articles here a success?
00:13:14.460I'm looking at, like, is there – are people talking about this online?
00:13:19.900Like, are people encountering this and actually learning about the problem and discovering that this is an issue and then maybe changing their behavior about it?
00:13:27.980Or maybe they'll change their voting patterns because of this.
00:13:31.580Yeah, that got basically no interaction.
00:13:34.560And then in contrast, the first article about us that kind of framed us as pronatalist that, as Malcolm said, framed us in that way because of previous coverage we got because we worked with the company Genomic Prediction on Polygenic Risk Score Selection, which we just – we did that press for them or, like, we did an interview for them with Bloomberg because we really were excited about their tech.
00:14:00.300We wanted to shout this from the hilltops.
00:14:01.620No one else is willing to talk about it, so, okay, fine, we will.
00:14:04.940But, yeah, so this paywalled insider article about pronatalism and us that, like, most people couldn't even access got tons of engagement and was really, like, many people's first encounter with the concept of pronatalism, like, outside of just religious groups not being –
00:14:21.940Well, it was literally the first public push for pronatalism other than Elon Musk.
00:14:26.700Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, and the thing is, like, when Elon Musk talks about anything, it could be immigration, it could be pronatalism, it could be cats, someone is going to cover it because he's, like Malcolm said, the most powerful person out there.
00:14:39.240So, like, yeah, again, like, what we want to see is can advocates in the space get people talking about it independent of a person or independent of why this person has to carry everything?
00:14:51.560And so what we realized pretty quickly was that the controversial pieces were actually the pieces that were doing well.
00:14:59.760Specifically, and this is our thesis when we look at the internet today, I mean, I consider myself a terminally on – I am a child of the internet.
00:15:26.480I didn't see the light until I was already a man.
00:15:29.920By then it was nothing to me but blinding.
00:15:32.380The shadows betray you because they belong to me.
00:15:45.140I was raised – the first generation raised was in these ultra-online spaces.
00:15:50.400I made all of my early friends through the internet.
00:15:52.880This was in an age where this was considered an insane thing to do, to, like, reach out to random people on the internet to make all your friends.
00:15:59.300So I understand this culture, I think, much more intuitively and innately than most people was in my generation.
00:16:07.600And through that, I am able to engage and direct the currents where I want them to go much more easily than the mainstream iterations of our group.
00:16:17.980And what I've realized is that if you unironically say that I support something within online spaces these days, like if you're on 4chan or something where, like, actual internet culture happens, and you're like, I unironically support this, you are a shill.
00:16:45.760If you look at right-leaning influencers that have taken off in the last 10 years, every single conservative or right-leaning or even moderate online influencer that has gained prominence in the last half decade to decade has done so through specifically controversy.
00:17:05.460All of these individuals, it was their controversy.
00:17:08.360It was their fight with the media that rose them to prominence.
00:17:11.340Now, this issue, because it counters the mainstream narratives around what people should care about, is considered a right-wing issue.
00:17:18.560That's not, I think, necessarily because it's a right-wing issue.
00:17:22.120It's because the left control all centers of power today.
00:17:25.080So if you are saying anything that challenges the dominant narrative within society, you are considered a far-right activist within today's informational ecosystem.
00:17:33.120So we're like, okay, we can use this to our advantage.
00:17:36.740And we began to push this narrative of us as human clickbait, you know, being as juicy of a story as possible for these individuals who wanted to create these memeable, shareable stories.
00:17:52.640And a lot of people then look at this and they're like, no, that's just people laughing at you, not laughing with you.
00:17:58.660That's not you, you know, that you have to know your meme page about the elite couple breeding to save mankind.
00:18:03.100And it's like, this is just objectively not true.
00:18:05.980We see this both from our follower count, from the people who positively reach out to us about funding things that we're doing to the people.
00:18:11.920Like, they almost always hear about us from negative articles.
00:18:13.880In fact, the negativity the press shows us in a way bets us with conservative and moderate audiences.
00:18:21.580They see press skepticism about reasonable causes as validation of those causes, realism, efficacy, and grassroots nature.
00:18:34.160I will add, just like as a sanity test, if you read something like a clearly negative and against someone article about them,
00:18:43.400you're probably not going to think that anything positive that you think about them was untrue.
00:18:50.200Like, if there are still some things that you like about them, it's not going to be because someone was writing a puff piece and you fell for it.
00:18:57.360You know, it's because you yourself decided that despite all these bad things about them,
00:19:01.800there are some things about what they're doing or who they are that you kind of like.
00:19:34.640For example, so people will think, okay, this works with right-wing people, but it doesn't work on converting left-winging people to your ideas.
00:19:47.280I first discovered the two of you from your, quote,
00:19:50.380Meet the elite couples breeding to save mankind, end quote, article that went viral.
00:19:54.600I laughed it off at the time, but soon I started to feel miserable for the nihilism and general depressive nature of the antinatalist thinking that seems so pervasive everywhere.
00:20:03.840I remembered your article and started digging into your philosophy a bit more.
00:20:07.620I've listened to most of your podcast episodes and have read The Pragmatist's Guide to Life, and I plan to read more of your books.
00:20:12.920I really like your approach to life and to the future of humanity.
00:20:16.480I like that you are hopeful and optimistic about building a better world for your children, and I want to be part of that better world also.
00:20:23.900And this is something that we see all the time.
00:20:26.060You know, this is not like an isolated type of outreach we get from somebody.
00:20:29.840The idea of genuine, like, just being a genuinely wholesome, positive person.
00:20:36.100One of the things that I always say that I'm trying to be that I got from a review of one of our books is that we were like the mirror world.
00:20:42.700If people know, like, the mirror world.
00:21:55.160From, like, Star Trek, where, like, everyone has mustaches and is evil.
00:21:58.500We try to be, like, mirror world Mr. Rogers, right?
00:22:01.680Like, try to be as almost oppressively wholesome as possible in the way we approach things
00:22:08.140while still constantly edging on controversy.
00:22:11.020And through that confluence, the controversy pushes people in, and then they see who we really are,
00:22:20.460and they're like, why is no one else I listen to, like, an actually healthily, happily married couple?
00:22:27.360Why is no one else I'm listening to, like, actually optimistic about the future of the world and happy and working to try and create the world a better place
00:22:35.940instead of running around with a bunch of chickens with their heads cut off and yelling and trying to build random followings?
00:22:41.760It is, you use, you create, you bait the trap with the ridiculousness, and you reel them in with the wholesomeness.
00:22:54.160That is the way that we exercise everything.
00:22:57.520And the idea of baiting political traps was something that I personally really learned from Trump.
00:23:04.240This wasn't something that I had always seen as a really effective strategy.
00:23:07.480What he would constantly do is say things that were uniquely controversial to the media.
00:23:15.000Like, the media would see this and be like, how could anyone ever say that?
00:23:18.020Because they were so leftist, they were so in a bubble that they were brainwashed,
00:23:21.260that they didn't understand that your average citizen hearing this would be like, oh, of course.
00:23:25.400And so they then signal boost those things, and through signal boosting them,
00:23:29.680but with the negative context attached to them, they endeared people to him.
00:23:35.000A great example of this that I always use is when he was like, well, we don't want to be like those shitty countries in Africa.
00:23:39.380And the media was like, how dare he say we don't want to be like shitty countries in Africa?
00:23:43.020And your average person is like, I mean, but I don't want to, would you attack me if I said that?
00:23:52.380Does this mean that I'm not part of this cultural group that I thought it was?
00:23:55.240Does this mean that Trump is telling the truth about things?
00:23:59.780And this is something that Trump constantly did very effectively in the early days.
00:24:04.840I, you know, I'm not like a full Trumpist or anything like that.
00:24:08.360I definitely have my consternations with his moral character and some of the directions he takes things.
00:24:12.760I do think he was a pretty good president.
00:24:14.100But I do want to point something really important out because basically what we're saying here is like, oh, just like allow yourself to be made fun of, have unflattering stuff about yourself, float around online, you know, have, you know, be court controversy, etc.
00:24:29.880And then, and then of course, people will just see the truth and then they'll, they'll disproportionately, you know, come over to your side or like, no, no.
00:24:39.060So really what this does is still tons of people make fun of you.
00:24:43.760Tons of people think you're absolute monsters.
00:24:45.340And then like the few, well, basically we had this earlier philosophy that I think this came out of, which was, it's good to be completely transparent about who you are, because if someone is going to like you, then they're going to like you sooner.
00:25:02.260And if someone was never going to like you anyway, like why would hiding that thing that you knew they wouldn't like, like you're just prolonging the inevitable.
00:25:11.020They're never going to be on your side.
00:25:12.580So basically we're, we're, we're definitely never going to be liked by a lot of people.
00:25:17.340And now a whole lot more people who didn't know we exist now just don't like us because they were never going to like us.
00:25:25.920There are people who, and I think a lot of people right now, and this is fair because I think a lot of people don't have the same kind of autistic thick skins that we do.
00:25:33.640Like we just really don't care, especially about the opinions of people who we think are being completely illogical.
00:25:39.240So, and you care enough to angrily rebut them in email.
00:25:43.300Today she got this really, really bad antinatalist argument and it just angered her so much.
00:25:49.080Well, it's just when, when an argument's that bad, I, I, yeah, I can't help myself, but like, I don't care if people are like, oh, you're evil and, and, and whatever.
00:25:56.360And, and ugly and all the other things people say, I'm like, yeah, sure.
00:25:59.760But there we have, people are very sensitive about their reputations online.
00:26:05.100A lot of people won't even act like be online or show their face online or be themselves online, like their real names and their real faces, because they're so concerned about their reputations.
00:26:14.240And that means that we have lost a decent number of friends who just don't want to be associated with us, who literally do not want to be seen with us because we are controversial and because they fear that any association with us is going to tarnish their reputations.
00:26:33.420They're, they're, they're interested in personal vanity.
00:26:36.040They're interested in a reputation of, as an, a wholesome, totally good person who, because they see our wholesomeness and they're attracted to us because of that.
00:26:44.480But when they see that the public, not everyone in the public sees it, they want to utilize, they're like, oh, I like that aspect of you.
00:26:52.500Like, I like who you really are as a person, but I don't like how that could affect my reputation.
00:26:57.240And I understand this, you know, a lot of people live for personal vanity.
00:27:01.020And so of course, if they are living primarily for personal vanity, rather than the betterment of the human species, rather than to save a species at a perilous point in our history, they're not going to understand why we do things that lead to, because it's an instinctual human drive to not have the tribe reject you or anything like that, that this can be utilized to slingshot you.
00:27:23.520You know, it's a bit like in the current context, that famous Apollo mission, where they utilize the moon gravity to slingshot them back to earth because they didn't have enough fuel to get back on their own.
00:27:33.620We're utilizing that to slingshot us is to them an anathema and against the natural order.
00:27:39.360And they're like, no, I just care about, you know, and I get it, I get it.
00:27:42.460And so it has had a cost to us, but I also believe that we are well on track.
00:27:47.280So this is one thing that's really important.
00:27:48.940As I pointed out at the start, Elon Musk has been hampering on this issue forever.
00:27:52.700He has infinitely more power and money than we do.
00:27:55.500And yet he was unable to pierce the mainstream veil was this.
00:27:59.040This year, New York Times did a front page piece on demographic collapse.
00:28:02.780This is something that when I talked to your average citizen on the street about, they now have an opinion about.
00:28:15.480This is part of Trump's reelection campaign.
00:28:17.640It's like one of his core platforms where he's like, oh, you men, you're going to have so much sex now because of me, because he's going to put in such prenatalist policies.
00:28:25.520And this was due to us using meme ability to pierce that veil because that what is me mobility is a viral idea.
00:28:53.700And then they look into this and they're like, oh, they seem weirdly wholesome or they seem like demographic collapse.
00:29:01.080When I look at the numbers, seems like a real issue.
00:29:02.920The important thing is to properly make fun of us, you kind of also have to understand what we're fighting for, which means you kind of have to understand demographic collapse, which is why now a lot of people are like, oh, yeah, let's have this conversation.
00:29:15.980Plus, you know, like, so I think the big takeaways we should share is, one, courting controversy, definitely, I mean, and this is a known tactic.
00:29:26.340Like, people have written PR books on how, like, hate spreads faster than love.
00:29:30.640Now that, you know, Vice has gone bankrupt, a lot of people who were previously, like, held to all these non-disclosure statements have just decided to break them.
00:29:39.080And they're like, oh, yeah, Vice would tell me to, like, send my story to someone who is, like, clearly opposed to it and have them make fun of it.
00:29:45.680Because they knew that the hate shares would be way more effective at driving clicks than hate positive shares.
00:29:51.860And so, one, yes, hate is very effective if you want to raise awareness about something, doing so through controversy, through unflattering angles, through all sorts of stuff like that, that is, or getting your enemies to cover it, or the enemies of that cause, the opposition to cover it, is very effective.
00:30:11.720However, there is a real cost, especially if you're using yourself as the conduit for that.
00:30:19.440But that, you know, at least this explains why.
00:30:21.580Like, we get so many more people who would never otherwise engage with this idea to engage with the idea of pernatalism and demographic collapse by throwing ourselves under the bus.
00:30:35.780Well, I mean, we started this movement, like, less than a year after we started this movement.
00:30:38.900We had front-page piece in the New York Times and a conference being held that we didn't put together on the concept of pernatalism, like, our iteration of pernatalism, not, like, the religious kind that existed before us and stuff like that.
00:30:53.020The amount of success I think we've had is undeniable within the public sphere.
00:31:01.440Like, this could be, if you look at how big a problem demographic collapse is, this could be what saves our frigging species from going extinct.
00:31:10.200It is worth sacrificing one family on the altar of new ability, especially when that family doesn't mind so much.
00:31:30.920I am so glad that you have taken the risks you did with me, that you have worked to keep this movement one of positivity, to keep it from going in the ethnocentric direction that we've seen with European iterations of this movement.
00:31:44.160And I think that we can spread this to something that can really pierce the veil of a lot of people who have had reality in the statistical reality of the world that we live in, hidden from them by both the academic system.