Join us as we discuss the recent coverage of Natal Con, focusing on a controversial Wired article that stirred the community. We dive into the misrepresentations and factual errors in the article, the financial realities of hosting such events, and how the prenatal list movement is rapidly growing compared to established movements like effective altruism and AI safety. With insights into the organizational efforts behind Natal Con and a comparison of different ideological movements, this video provides an in-depth look at the current landscape of natalism. We also touch on the motivations and commitments driving both the prenatal list and AI safety communities. Don't miss this engaging and eye-opening discussion!

[00:00:00]

Malcolm Collins: Hello Simone. I'm excited to be with you here. Coming back from Nacon. We've had pieces on us in the past few days in the BBC in the New York Times there's gonna be a CNN one. We know there's gonna be an NPR one, we know that haven't come out yet. One on an Italian station, one of the two major stations in the country.

But Wired did the most unhinged piece. And I am, which is weird. I grew up loving, wired. This is so strange. I did you. I thought of them as like a semi-professional, not a semi-professional. I actually thought of them as like a premium.

Simone Collins: Absolutely beautiful print magazine. Loved their pieces. This is weird.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. But their piece was completely boast. Unhinged and, and non-factual, like they got almost every fact wrong in ways that even your average base camp watcher would know. Yeah.

Simone Collins: I don't know. Even your understanding of basic linguistics would know.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And we're gonna read a bit of the piece and then go over statistics on what's been happening with the prenatal list movement when [00:01:00] contrasted with other movements recently, because we've now significantly passed in terms of like search traffic, effective altruism, AI safety, other stuff like that, which is really cool., so the,

Simone Collins: the title of the Wired article is Far right. Influencers are hosting a 10 K per Person Matchmaking Weekend to Repopulate the Earth. Yeah, so they, they're claiming that it, it costs $10,000 to attend Natal Con, which is.

Isn't that true?

Malcolm Collins: Well, okay, so if you're a watcher of the show, you know, we've been promoting the conference constantly for a long time. We've been promoting it with, with small discounts, but it also means, you know, the conference cost at nothing near $10,000 to go to, I know it was expensive. I think it was around a thousand dollars.

It was

Simone Collins: a thousand dollars. So then 900 with our 10% discount.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Which is a lot I know, but they also did a really good job of making it good and fun, like Yeah. My perspective.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And I do think that that amount of money is needed to screen out crazy people. Oh, plus

Simone Collins: also, like, have you seen how much [00:02:00] any event space charges for food, like one cookie, $10 and they served breakfast, lunch, and dinner.

On Saturday plus snacks, plus open bar at dinner, and then there was dinner and open bar on Friday. I just. You can't use professional venue spaces and basically do anything less than that

Malcolm Collins: these days. I think that what people are thinking when they think of like costs or they're comparing it to something, is they're not comparing, they're comparing it to a con, like a furry con or something like that.

Yeah.

Simone Collins: Where there's an artist alley, there's absolutely zero food. And then there's just some speakers and it's at a bigger event space. Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: yeah. They're, they're not thinking like, okay, they've gotta pay for the speakers, they've gotta pay for the, hotels for the speakers, I don't think any of the speakers are paid, but they gotta pay for the hotels, for the speakers.

They sometimes need to pay for flights. They need to pay for all of the venue space. They need to pay for security, they need to pay for insurance, and then they need to pay for all the meals. And the open bar too,

Simone Collins: because there were protesters out the first night. There were [00:03:00] lots of people trying to get in who didn't have registration.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And it wasn't just like a normal venue, like it was like a really nice venue. Mm-hmm. And then they had the second one where they rented out a museum. So like, it, like, I, I'd say for what it was, it seemed reasonably priced to me. I agree. Just so people know, we donated to this to make it happen because I knew that like last year they were in the red in running it and I wanted to help them.

Not, not risk that again, you know, Kevin Dolan took a personal hit on that. And. So, but we, we weren't organizing it, you know, we weren't personally going to suffer if this didn't end up working out. But the $15,000 thing, 10,000 is insane. Sorry. Yeah. The, the $10,000 in the title of the Wired article being that factually inaccurate Yeah.

To, to literally

Simone Collins: have a title with that egregious of a factual error is wild. This, I just, I don't know. I, I, I knew journalism was largely. Bankrupt in terms of quality, but I guess I, having [00:04:00] loved wired so much, I'm so, I'm still so stunned.

Malcolm Collins: Here's the thing I know, and somebody could be like, well do, how can you be sure that nobody made a $10,000 ticket purchase, like maybe at the last minute or something like that?

And the, the answer is, because we donated $10,000 to the conference that that's what we donated. Yeah. I think someone else

Simone Collins: probably in the media knew that. I think we'd mentioned that to someone or it was somewhere.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, but the point being is if that was the second biggest donation to the conference, so I know they didn't get money from anyone else.

Here's what I assume probably happened because Kevin loves effing with journalists. He probably, and I think he even mentioned he did this at one point when he knew a journalist was hostile, gave them a comically high cost figure. Oh, that's amazing. To to be like, Hey, I'm okay with having you come here and write a hit piece if you pay me $10,000.

F**k no. That's fair. That's fair. Okay. But it, but it would mean that they didn't do any research on like the conference or anything around it. [00:05:00] But anyway go into the piece. Let's, let's read a bit 'cause it gets really unhinged.

Simone Collins: Should I just go straight to the unhinged part or should I Yes, read it.

Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: go to the unhinged part. So

Simone Collins: this is what really gets me. . Natal conference organizer Kevin Dolan, a father of at least sex, according to Politico, has previously stated that eugenics, the belief that white people are genetically superior and the prenatal movement are very much aligned, which is.

The most unhinged definition of eugenics I have ever heard one, I, in case you are one of these unhinged people, eugenics as defined. Look at Wikipedia. And Wikipedia is not a conservative dominated space. There's, this is well documented too. People have actually looked at the backgrounds of all, you know, active profile or, or page editors.

So Wikipedia. Defines it as believing there are good traits and bad traits on a universal level, and trying to maximize the good traits and minimize the bad traits. On a societal level, we don't agree [00:06:00] with that, but that's what the sort of going definition is in society. And when we don't support the concept of eugenics by that definition, for sure, some people also, especially on the tech right, who talk about eugenics and I, I think this is more where Kevin Dolan is.

Are just really going to the, the roots of the word, which is, ew, good Gen X genes, good genes, like having an interest in passing on favorable genes and traits, which really is a culture and context specific thing. Meaning that each group has, you know, things that they wanna pass on to future generations that they should be proud of.

But they, no, they just say that eugenics is quote. The belief that white people are genetically superior, which is, but I would assume, like a lot of people

Malcolm Collins: accuse us of being definition of white supremacism, right? But not, yeah. So I, I and this is something that like presumably went through editors or something like that, right?

What would hope, this is a definition of eugenics that I would assume. A middle schooler, like your [00:07:00] average intelligence middle schooler. Well, even if we ran this through

Simone Collins: Chad, GPT or Claude and ask, Hey, can you just quickly edit this for me? That they would probably point out that a word would actually, hold

Malcolm Collins: on.

Let's do a thing. Can you take that paragraph, copy and paste it into Claude? Yeah. And ask what grade level they would assume the writer is

But while she's doing that. This is wild to me because, you know, sometimes we get called eugenics and I have to be like, actually, we're not technically eugenics.

Because eugenics means that you want to coerce an entire population to do something using either the government or using laws or using social pressure. And we believe in polygenics, which is everyone being able to make the genetic choices that they want. So one, we're not. Even eugenics by like the standard definition, but I can understand how someone can make that mistake.

They hear, oh, they do genetic selection. They understand like, was there vague understanding of eugenics that it means you know, gen [00:08:00] trying to make genes better. In any potential way. And I can understand that misunderstanding of the definition of eugenics if you haven't recently read the definition, just based on like a vague understanding.

However, this misunderstanding of eugenics is so egregious for what is presumably like a science article thing, right? That they could make it, I'm shocked.

Simone Collins: So this is what Claude says when I asked it. What is the grade level of the following paragraph, and does it contain any errors? Claude says, I can analyze this paragraph for reading level and errors.

The paragraph is written at approximately a high school, ninth to 10th grade reading level. It uses some advanced vocabulary organizer, eugenics, genetically, and prenatals, which is this high school. Mm-hmm. Vocabulary now. Because, yikes. Also, we need to not send our kids to high school. That's anyway, and has complex sentence structure with multiple clauses and m dashes.

There is a factual error in the [00:09:00] paragraph. Eugenics is incorrectly defined. Eugenics is not specifically the belief that white people are genetically superior. Eugenics more broadly refers to a set of beliefs and practices aimed at improving the genetic quality of the human population. Often by encouraging reproduction among people with certain traits and discouraging it amongst others.

While Eugenics has historically been associated with race, with racist ideologies, including white supremacy, the definition as presented in the paragraph is overly narrow and inaccurate.

Malcolm Collins: So, but, but it's not just, it is inaccurate in a way where I would like, this is what gets me, this went through editors.

Yeah,

Simone Collins: well,

Malcolm Collins: but what the piece actually ended up being really good for us because some of my friends like Stanford, GSB type people and other like high profile people in Austin, when they saw this piece about the $15,000 entrance fee, they were like, Ooh, this looks. This looks fancy. I wanna, I wanna know about this.

I might wanna go to this. And I

Simone Collins: think that's, yeah, it makes it sound great. It, it's, it's, oh evil behind [00:10:00] closed doors. Matchmaking conference for the elite that are going to replace the hu the future of human like, I don't know. That sounds, sign me up. That sounds great. Right. It's not exactly true, but I mean,

Malcolm Collins: I also wanted to do a roundup on unless there's any other parts of this Wired article you wanna read that you think are fun.

What did they say about us in it?

Simone Collins: Oh, it, it just called us influencers, which is whenever I hear influencer just, I just think of like a makeup influencer or a Mormon influencer. So I'm like, wow. Okay.

Malcolm Collins: But it is kind of sad to see like how many publications have sort of descended into this realm of just like, tabloid mm-hmm.

That, that wired would get like factual errors in both their title and like basic language errors like of scientific facts in their text. Well, it,

Simone Collins: I it's also just, there's just so many unhinged things. Okay. No, I, I agree. Okay. Yeah. Sorry. Which is just like other little details that just show how. It, it's written from a, a, a progressive perspective that's so myopically [00:11:00] stuck in its own ideological bubble that it.

It only sees things through a political lens. And I, I mean that because the, the, the article also criticized the fact that the at t hotel and conference center allowed Natal Con to be there in the first place. They, they included a quote from a representative of UT Austin who just said, we allow anyone to host here.

We support the First Amendment right to free speech. I remember this part. But then. They end with the venue. Also hosted an Ayn Rand conference in February, as in like, as you can see, they're just as you as you can see, they're outta control. Ay Rand, can you believe it? It is just.

Malcolm Collins: It's, it's but, and they just spent the entire piece calling our movement Nazis, like actual Nazis and white supremacists.

Yeah. And then they're like, like the equivalent movements. Like I Rand Yeah. Like, I mean, I Rand it's, they're just like, you're not allowed to have ideas. [00:12:00] Outside of their bubble. Hmm. Whoever wrote this and edited this, and if you do, you are a white nationalist. Like, that's it. Like you go to a conference and the conference is, you know, there were like, like people of all ethnicities there, people of all sexualities there.

Mm-hmm. People of all belief systems. There. There were even apparently there was one homophobic person, which I feel bad about because they, they were not mean, but they were un approving of, one of the, the gay couples that went, and I felt really bad about that because they had come based on, you know, liking us.

And I'm like, you know, you're gonna get that at, at something like this. But from what I heard, there was only one openly homophobic individual at the event, which is saying a lot for yeah, what is apparently a Nazi white supremacist event. But, but what it showed me is just like, you can't say anything outside of their bubble.

Simone Collins: No kidding.

Malcolm Collins: But I wanna go to grass now because I wanna focus on the growth of the prenatal list movement. Which I have found really telling of like. [00:13:00] Which I have found has shocked me. So the first graph I'm gonna put on screen here is the search volume on, on Google trends of tism versus effective altruism.

Mm-hmm.

In the United States. Mm-hmm. Where blue is tism. Mm-hmm. And as you can see, TISM in the past year has jumped to being maybe like five or six times, I guess, on average, the search volume of effective altruism. Yeah. Our sort of interest online. Which is wild to me because, you know, growing up in the Silicon Valley area, I thought of effective altruism as.

Sort of everything, like one of the biggest movements in the world, like the big social scene for smart people. Mm-hmm. And if you look at a map of the United States, a hate, a heat map of where people are searching for these, I found this really funny. Mm-hmm. What you'll see if you're watching this on a podcast is Tism is blue effect.

Altruism is red. The effect of altruism is just California, Idaho, and then a few New England states, [00:14:00] including like in New York and Massachusetts. Yeah, and with the description

Simone Collins: of Idaho it, it seems to be really concentrated around densely urban areas. When you looked at, when you look at the district area, it is clearly also the densely urban areas in California.

The rest doesn't care. And a little bit in the Pacific Northwest and then around Michigan. So basically, I don't, I don't know what's going on in Iowa. But

Malcolm Collins: yeah. What's going on in Iowa? There must be like a big EA thing there or something. Or So Oregon? Yeah. Or a

Simone Collins: wealthy. Donor move to Iowa and like did some YIMBY project there.

That's like my guess. That's it seems like thing. That would be my guess

Malcolm Collins: as well. Yeah. Or maybe they fund something in politics. Well, we can, we can ask. Yeah, I'll, I'll add this in post. Okay.

She meant Idaho, not Iowa, in either a grok search or a Google search could determine why it has this blip. It might just be an anomaly.

But I found that to be really interesting. And then if you look at it on the global level again, you can see that we now have moved from being like well below effective altruism in terms of search volume.

To being [00:15:00] maybe four times larger and, and pretty reliably. So for the past year or so. And I note here that effective altruism has hundreds of millions of dollars going to it. Hmm. We got one 500 K grant a few years ago and made all this happen. Yeah. And, and, and not that we're doing it on our own, you know, like Kevin Dolan is doing a great job, but he's not getting outside donations, you know?

When we gave him the 10 K donation, he was like, this is a huge donation. It means so much to me. But when I gave it, I was like, I'm sorry. We can't do more. We just don't have that much money.

Mm-hmm.

And so I know that he's not getting big donations from other people. And if you look at the, the global map here, this one I absolutely love.

Yeah. Actually, I just,

Simone Collins: just to make a note, I think that the biggest donation made relative to demographic collapse was the one that the Elon Musk Foundation made to. The Dean's demographers, Dean Spears led demography research at the University of Austin. Dean Spears did not attend Nacon. Dean Spears has [00:16:00] said in recent stories, basically like, oh, Elon Musk's donation hasn't affected our work in any way.

He's like trying to disassociate from Elon Musk, if anything. So, yeah, it, it basically like they're one of the least vocal presences in the movement's, public discourse that would be associated with search volume. And I think that really speaks volumes to what's going on here, that this is not a funded public discourse.

It's driven by some very strong personalities and some very strong concerns. I.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if you look at the global breakdown of where people are focused on each of these, sorry, actually we should probably mention what effective altruism is for some of our jurors who may not know. Mm. Effective altruism is a fairly large, or I thought large, like this is why I'm benchmarking ourselves off of IT movement around the Silicon Valley community.

This is what Sam Bank been freed with funding, but it also gets funding. It first emerged

Simone Collins: at Oxford University, though.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. From like, Sam [00:17:00] Altman gives, it, gives it funding type stuff, like a lot of the guy who funded Ethereum gives it a lot of funding. So Vitalic.

Simone Collins: Yeah,

Malcolm Collins: Vitalic. Yeah. Pretty much if you are like an alt productive intellectual and you are progressive coded, or don't wanna like, offend people by being overtly conservative, coded, this is where pretty much all of them have been for a long time.

Mm-hmm.

And, it runs a number of very large organizations. We'll, we'll get to some of them in a second. That, that do get, I think it's 400 million a year is, is what I remember.

Simone Collins: Insane.

Yes, I was right. It's around 400 billion in 2019. They got $416 million. , and that's the first search result that comes up when I Google. How much do they get per year?

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And then redistributes it to various charities that they see as effective. Mm-hmm. Of course most of them won't work with us, but we did get a grant from a Survival and Flourishing Fund, which is technically effective altruist, which I really appreciate.

That was a game changer for us.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: It [00:18:00] was a game changer and it's allowed us to create this movement. And we'll talk a bit about why I think the effect ous money gets. Gets piddled away so much and they really haven't been able to make things like AI safety, which we're gonna compare ourselves to in just a little bit.

Mm-hmm. Take off in the way that Natal has even though they spent millions of dollars on promoting it every year. So here next you see the worldwide map, which I found really effective mm-hmm. Are, are very interesting of where the search volume is strong. So basically across the whole world, you know, the United States.

Central America, south America, all Natm is winning over effective altruism. Mm-hmm. Russia, it's winning. France and Spain and Portugal, it's winning. Yeah. Eastern Europe it's winning. India, it's winning Africa, it's winning. Middle East is winning. So where is effective Altruism vi CA Canada won.

Yeah. Yeah. The UK, Germany. Italy, Norway, Sweden, China, Sweden,

Simone Collins: China, where they've just given up basically China, I

Malcolm Collins: found, well, you're gonna see China is a trend across [00:19:00] here, which I find really interesting.

Yeah.

And Australia, I found that interesting. It, it also looks like Indonesia, which is weird.

I don't know what's up with that, but I assume that they don't really have a population problem. But let's go to AI safety, right? Like AI safety. 'cause people can say, okay, this stuff is just getting big because the trends are in your favor, right?

Mm-hmm.

It's not any effort. You or, and I, and I point out like we're a team.

Like I. Whether it's US or Kevin Dolan or Dan Hess or Katherine Ach who wrote h Hannah's Children you know, we all talk, we all work to coordinate or, or even the people at Heritage. Heritage too. There're,

Simone Collins: there're, while we may advocate for very different styles of tism or be excited about different policies, we are very much all fighting for the same thing.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And if they're doing something, they email us and let us know. And if we're doing something, we email them and let them know. We ask their thoughts. Like there is really like an inter community communication web here, and, and it is a small team and [00:20:00] most of the team is self-funded. Yeah. Like.

Dan Hass gets, I, I don't think he's ever gotten any funding for his prenatal list work. No. He's just like in, in fact, he's,

Simone Collins: he's donated so much money of, of like his own to, to fund things. Like at Natal Con he distributed an incredibly helpful bound fact book. I. Packed with graphs plus a laminated one pager, just summarizing the basic details.

Okay. Can we

Malcolm Collins: create a link to that in the, in the, in the, oh, we can. Yeah. We absolutely should. Yes. So do check out. Dan has AKA's,

Simone Collins: Fact sheet and report on prenatal. It's just like, okay, if you need a primer. Go here, look at everything. It's literally

Malcolm Collins: every statistic on it I've ever seen, like it was, was incredible.

No, it's

Simone Collins: amazing. And, and you know, he did that at his own expense. He, he came to Nacon with that, gave it away for free to everyone who went to make them more informed. I mean, this, this man is so awesome and no one is paying him to do that. He has a date, he works full time and takes care of his family of six and, and, and helps his wife.

And he also does this somehow and is very [00:21:00] successful at it. We don't get any pay from the, the work that we do. We also have full-time day jobs and

Malcolm Collins: other projects. Yeah. We, we, we've spent hundreds of thousands of dollars of our personal money on prenatal list advocacy without ever getting any money for, for it.

So like, this is just like an US thing. Like I think the prenatal list spend a lot of money and make these types of sacrifices on this. Mm-hmm. Because they do genuinely believe this stuff. Yeah. And this is when we're gonna go into the AI safety stuff. Some evidence that the key people in this movie don't.

Movement, don't genuinely believe it. Chin Okay. And that's one of the reasons why it hasn't done as well. But okay. So, and the China thing, I wonder why China is more effective outgrows than Natalist. Do you think they'd be like, freaked out? Right. By the way, for people who are wondering. No, I mean,

Simone Collins: one, I think it, this is one of those things that, this is actually the theme of your talk at NATO Con when you try to impose natal list policies.

On a population, it backfires. They push back. They want nothing to do with it. And that's what's happening in China now. That's, it's all part of lying flat too. You [00:22:00] know, be productive. Go have kids, and they're like, you know what? We're the last generation. Thank you very much. Goodbye. And I think that's part of what's going on.

Malcolm Collins: I'd also note that we'd mentioned this in other episodes, but you can check this out yourself. It, it, the, the base Camp Discord, for example, is significantly more active, I'd say maybe four times as active as the EA forums. So this isn't just like us saying like, oh, you know, whatever our podcast is.

If you go to the podcast. It does better than the best effective altruist podcast by a very, and on that note, large margin,

Simone Collins: huge shout out to everyone from the podcast and from The Discord who came out either to Nacon yes and or to our meetup before it on Friday. It was so cool to see you guys, you know who you are.

Like what, what a dream come true. It was to see some of you for the first time. Some of you again. It, it was, I just, I, we only regret that we didn't have more time to hang out and chat, but it, it was great what we had. Yeah. And it

Malcolm Collins: always. Destroys [00:23:00] us when somebody's not, is disappointed. We had one person who was like, I wanted more ultra rich people here.

You know? He's like, I thought the tech elite, tech elite were gonna come. Like all the founders fund funders now. Where's Andreessen

Simone Collins: Horowitz? Where's Founders Fund? Where's, yeah. And I was like,

Malcolm Collins: all these people have like really interesting startups that are doing well. Is that not good enough for you? And he's like, no, no.

So that was, that was, you know, I always, you know, if you're something there was only, yeah, he

Simone Collins: was the only one person I think who was disappointed in the event, but it's also because he is one of the world's most elite people. And so, yeah, I think it's really, he's only working with people at that caliber, hard to win.

You know, unless we had like the president of five major countries present, I, I don't think we would've really impressed him.

Malcolm Collins: What do you think China being more effective altruist than Natalist is about? Like, that seems weird.

Simone Collins: I think that effective altruism is the philosophy of people who are negative utilitarians, and I think that China is a negative utilitarian country.

I think they want to end suffering. I think they wanna end their suffering. I think they wanna end their cycle. [00:24:00] TISM is a philosophy of expansionist com countries that want to grow and that want to see more and do more. And that's all those other countries I'm looking at.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. Well, by the way, if you, if you wanna recreate this, the way I did this is every time I did this, I tried to compare, like, to like mm-hmm.

So here we have Natal as a belief with compared to effective altruism as a cause area. Mm-hmm. And then in these next graphs we're looking at natal as a belief compared to AI safety field of study.

Simone Collins: Yeah. Because you don't wanna compare search terms because there could be misspellings or something else weird like that.

Malcolm Collins: So, the first graph here I'm putting up is in the world. And you can see that in the last year, natal has soundly beat, but, but, but pretty narrowly as well. AI safety as something people are searching for. You can see EI or Kukowski World Tour as a big spike in AI safety, and you can see our first virality around Natal as a big spike in Natal.

Mm-hmm. Here's a graph of this on the world stage, but it gets more interesting if you look at a map of the [00:25:00] countries. That's this next graph of countries here. Nativism is everywhere in the world. Bigger than AI safety is except for England and China, which is really interesting when, if anyone needs to be freaking out about nativism, it's China, but this is where we are.

Simone Collins: Well, I think that's, that's part of the issue though, right? Is that China has a problem because. They don't care. They're not freaking out about it. If someone's freaking out about it, they're, and some of them are at least trying, and I think that in China only, the CCP is trying.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. And here we've got Quiverfull versus Natal.

I thought this was interesting 'cause I wanted to look at the more traditional like Christian thing. Okay. The qui Fools in red, natals in blue, and you can see Quiverfull has basically entirely died. God. And we're gonna do a separate episode on how the Quiverfull movement died.

Simone Collins: I really wanna do that.

Yes.

Malcolm Collins: But yeah, natal is now maybe a [00:26:00] hundred times bigger than, than Quiverfull is terms of a belief system. I remember when that was, you

Simone Collins: just couldn't not hear about it. It was such a thing. Mm-hmm.

Malcolm Collins: And we look now at Quiverfull versus pro natal list as search terms. Mm-hmm. Because before I was trying to compare like, like to like, so I was like, okay, yeah.

Let's see if we're looking at them as search terms at Quiverfull belief system Natal as the belief system. You can see here Natal has overtaken it pretty soundly but not as soundly, maybe like four X bigger. Yeah. These days. And really only started regularly beating it, I'd say this year.

Which is pretty, no, this last year, like 2024

Simone Collins: year of tipping points.

Malcolm Collins: And now I wanna talk about like why AI safety has done such a bad job at this. So this last graph I had earlier this morning, you, you searched and you find l Zer Kowski being drafted dwarfed by us. I assume it's because you misspelled his name because in reality he's still slightly edging us out.

Mm-hmm. In terms of public attention we, we did

Simone Collins: the search by the way, because on our [00:27:00] flight back from Austin, both of us watched simultaneously on YouTube a, a strange Aons video on. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality, the Harry Potter fan fiction that Eer YOWs wrote. It was, it's just so much fun.

Speaking of effective altruism, speaking of Eer YOWs, to see someone from completely outside that community. Learn about it

Malcolm Collins: and freak out and study it and be like, wait, what's going on here? Yeah. Early in relationships, we, I was listening to the audio book of the Methods of Rationality and, and you got into it a little bit.

We both stopped it because it was like, really,

Simone Collins: you made it further than I did. It just got so repetitive and it didn't deliver on its value proposition. I wanted to see the proposed science or reasoning behind. Magic because that was, that was Harry. That was the, well in this, in this fan universe.

Harry Potter is, you know, this child of like a brilliant engineer and he's a genius and he gets into Hogwarts and says, I'm going to find out the science [00:28:00] behind this and then use my knowledge to save humanity and. Spanned to throughout the universe. And I mean, it, it sounds great. You know, you, you hear this and you're like, this is a great premise.

Like, oh my gosh. And he, you know, like as soon as he gets his green Gods account, he's like, I can play arbitrage with this. Like you're, it starts out so promising. And then it just, yeah. Anyway, definitely check out The Strange Ions video because she's also hilarious and wonderful.

Malcolm Collins: But I, I found a number of things really telling, and I think it's likely LE Iza, Murkowski's influence as sort of the face of AI safety.

I mean, he's sort of the mirroring face to us if we're the face of Tism. Whether the prenatal is like it or not. It's safety. It's gotta be him. Yeah. He's, he's the face of AI safety. Yeah.

Microphone (Wireless Microphone Rx)-4: Fun, , thing. So I asked Rock if, , it could pair any anime character to Malcolm. Like, which character is Malcolm Collins Most? Like, first it said La Luke from Code Gaos, which I absolutely love. And Simone, I told Simone this and she goes, oh, that's no [00:29:00] surprise. , you, you like his character only because he reminds you of yourself.

And I'm like, okay, whatever. , but then the next one was, it said. Light Yakima from Death Note. And I was like, okay, I like that too. And when I asked it, what character would you pair Ellie Eer with? It said L and Simone got annoyed at that. 'cause she's like, but he's incompetent. , but he's also slovenly and an antagonist, which, which works for me.

Malcolm Collins: And he got into this very differently. If you, one of the things she noted is that while he was writing Harry Potter in the methods of rationality he would regularly tell people, oh, I'll put out more chapters or faster chapters if you give more money to our nonprofit.

Well, and this is because he

Simone Collins: co, I, I think it's because he co-founded Miri originally the Singularity Institute, which was supposed to do research on AI stuff, which. But also explain why he became one of the early AI DOR people. And I think because people have, have dunked on MI for not being very productive, that among other things, Ellie Eer was not contributing a whole lot because he was just.[00:30:00]

Messing around and writing a fan fiction. And so I think he felt pressured by the team to write a fan or sorry to, to use his fan fiction to shill. I don't think that's

Malcolm Collins: it.

Simone Collins: You don't think so? They weren't like, dude, you're not doing anything. At least make us money. No.

Malcolm Collins: I think what you and other people don't understand is a nonprofit, especially if you founded and own the nonprofit Yeah.

Can sometimes just be a thing that pays you a salary.

Simone Collins: Well, yeah, and I think he was getting a salary from MI not doing anything, and the other team members were giving him shade for that. I don't even

Malcolm Collins: know if MI had a board back then, Simone, my re Yeah. But

Simone Collins: he still, he co-founded it and he still had co-founders and I think he got shade for it.

Malcolm Collins: Sure. My read is, what was happening is he was begging for money and most of that money just paid for his lifestyle. Yeah. I don't think that much of the money at all was going to AI research. Well, it wasn't

Simone Collins: because Mary. Is is famously unproductive. Unproductive, yes. Like, like, and

Malcolm Collins: she mentioned that in the strange Aon space, that they're, they're known for not getting a lot of papers out.

They're known for not getting a lot of [00:31:00] real research out, which to me further indicates what I think, which is that it's literally just his GoFundMe account for his lifestyle through the lens of a nonprofit. Because technically he's getting the word out about rationality. 'cause technically he's getting the word out about AI safety.

I would bet that if. If, if during that period, if you look at, I would be over 50% of the money that they raised was just paid out to him in salary.

Simone Collins: Oh my gosh.

Malcolm Collins: That's what I think would happen. I wonder.

Simone Collins: Ooh hold on. So we are our nonprofit post his financials on a like nonprofit. Oh. Go to website.

See if you could find out. So I wanna see if they post their financial, how much his

Malcolm Collins: personal salary during that period.

Sure.

And what you'll see if you look at our nonprofits financials is that we take no money from the nonprofit and we put, and when I say we put tons of money towards our nonprofit, there was a, a guardian piece, I wanna say a few years ago, it might have been a telegraph piece where they actually audited our finances to see how much money we were putting into our nonprofit. This was before we got the big grant, and after that we stopped doing this. But before [00:32:00] that, we were putting 45% of our yearly income into our nonprofit.

I. Which is a lot when you have, I think back then it was like three kids where we're just like, no, we absolutely have to make this work. So what you see within the, it's look like they make their

Simone Collins: financials public, which

Malcolm Collins: that makes sense. You have a complete inverse of what's happening was in the AI C oh my

Simone Collins: gosh, their total revenues fluctuated between 1.5 million and 3 million annually.

What, how have we managed to make AI save with expenses, including salaries for its small team of researchers and staff? So in 2019, MIRI reported total expenses of around 2.4 million with roughly 1.5 million allocated to salaries for its 20 to 30 employees. So if I take 1.5 divided by 30 is 50,000.

And I bet some were making more than others. [00:33:00]

Malcolm Collins: Yeah,

Simone Collins: especially if it was just 20 employees. So, oh my gosh,

Malcolm Collins: that is my bet about what's going on with that. Well, and keep in mind, now I point this out, now contrast this with nativism. I, I'm trying to think of any natalist who make money off of their, their, their work with nativism.

Literally justly stone from what I'm aware of. And maybe, I mean, but also like lot that

Simone Collins: much because limestone has that big job as a demographer that like literally helps very large corporations determine how many diapers to produce. Like he, he, he has to work. And then also the, always the demographer in the world.

Also, he also does a lot of work raising money for the Institute of Family Studies, which I'm sure yes, of course pays him as well, but. He is piecing this together. He has, he has a side gig. Yeah, he has a

Malcolm Collins: secondary job, which I think is his primary income. Well, and I think maybe the Institute

Simone Collins: for Family Studies is his side gig, but he also has to raise money for them, so like, it's not, yeah.

Anyway. And

Malcolm Collins: Catherine Alak, her day job, Catherine lic is [00:34:00] a professor of

Simone Collins: economics. So she is a full-time day job and she worked with a publisher. I, I mean, I think her book has been very successful, but. A successful book these days, especially if you worked with a publisher, is not making you a lot of money.

So I don't think she's getting any material wealth. Up at the top

Malcolm Collins: 1%, you should see our video on Nobody reads anymore can earn you 20 K. Like e even if you're, if you're in the top 1%.

Simone Collins: Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah.

So like, I don't think that that's a significant income source for her. And, and this, this matters a lot when you're thinking about this stuff because it now contrast it with the AI safety people.

Every one of the top AI safety people in top effective altruist I know making 50 to a hundred K at

Simone Collins: least.

Malcolm Collins: Making 50 to a hundred k at least their main source of income is donations. And you even saw people like I think it was like Will McCaskill or some of the other people who were running like major a like effective altruism organizations.

I. Write pieces a few years back, especially when Sand BA and Free was big about why people running these [00:35:00] organizations should be able to indulge in luxuries. Remember they did things like, bought a castle at one point. They this is one of the major EA groups. Yeah. They bought a castle. They bought a college at Oxford and they were gonna turn it into, or Cambridge, I, I can't remember which.

And they were gonna try to turn it into like a new college and they ended up for sex parties. Oh. Well, this is what they said. I, I was at, came whatever school this was. I don't remember which one it was, but I remember doing a tour and I was like, whatever happened to that? And somebody was like, oh yeah, it became known for sex parties.

Simone Collins: Well, I mean, it was college,

Malcolm Collins: but well. And effective altruist.

Simone Collins: Well,

Malcolm Collins: you know, they, yeah, but I mean, like

Simone Collins: rationalism and effective altruism as we, we should

Malcolm Collins: see our episode on the EA to sex worker pipeline. If you wanna learn more about the the lifestyles that are common within this community. But I think.

Through action. What we see between these two communities is one community that really believes what they're saying and working on, and another community where it's a performative way to make an [00:36:00] income.

Yeah.

And I think that if you are freaked out about like AI safety or something like that, well also, like

Simone Collins: who's reading these reports that they're making?

Who's reading these things? No,

Malcolm Collins: but look at who's, who's putting their money where their mouth is.

Hmm.

Of, of these two movements. It, it was, it contrast, e ei kowski begging, you know, epi update he made to the book, you know, and, and, and putting out chapters at a whatever pace to us who do daily videos every weekday at 8:00 AM EST on this channel.

Contrast that. It's a wild difference, and we don't ever, I don't think we've ever really begged. We, we've, we've said we would love it if you put us in your will or something. Put the nonprofit in your will, and if you do, this is the promise we have, by the way. And you Oh, no, that's, if you,

Simone Collins: if that's, if you put techno, the techno Puritan Federation.

Malcolm Collins: Oh yeah. This is techno Puritan. So not even this, but if you put techno Puritan in your will and it ends up becoming a big thing. And you send us your genes, we will put those [00:37:00] genes along with like the amount that you contributed in case it does end up becoming a big thing and ends up creating like artificial realities and ends up need for sources on that or ends up cloning people in the future or doing even editing or something.

That you might be one of the resurrected people. I, I feel like that's a fun little thing you can do. But literally no one has told us they're doing that. So like, it's not like we're getting anything from that. And in terms of like active donations the main ones we get are hate donations. For when people get pissed off by progressives and they live in a, like more progressive environment, they donate two people,

Simone Collins: two people donate $10 a month minus PayPal fees.

It's like $9 and 50 cents, so

Malcolm Collins: Oh, they do? That's really nice. So we make

Simone Collins: 20 a.

Malcolm Collins: For daily, for like 45 minute long episodes. But no, I mean, like to those

Simone Collins: who don't, that is, that is like really genuinely kind. We appreciate that.

Malcolm Collins: No, that is genuinely kind. Yeah. I, I really appreciate it. And the money does, like, as I've pointed out, [00:38:00] you are getting much more out of that than you're getting out of like effective altruism and what they're doing.

Right. Like we have so little and yet we've been able to, at the conference. The other thing that really got me at the conference is I've been to effective Altru conference. This was one of the most competently organized conferences I've ever been to.

Simone Collins: Shout out to Luke and Kevin, I mean, my gosh. And, and dogs.

The

Malcolm Collins: quality of the food, first of all was like, good quality food. There was many corn dogs. It was, it was really like, nice. The people I met there were, you know, I had one person who emailed after, after this, and they're like, it exceeded all my expectations. This is somebody who's living in Austin.

You know, people were coming in from all around the world. I was so excited to talk Hong to them. Yeah. Hong Kong,

Simone Collins: Singapore. It, it was pretty wild. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah, and we had a, a lot of like, really amazing speakers and we didn't have last time, like people got in a fight. Like I, I didn't get in a fight with any Catholics this time.

You know, which is really nice. This, this is over IBF versus, you know, non IVS stuff. But yeah I, I think [00:39:00] that it was really like a victory lap for the prenatal list movement, which was really fun. It.

Do you have any final thoughts on this or the wired piece or the recent press we've been getting?

Simone Collins: I think that people who want to see this movement as evil are going to continue to do so, but it seems to be only to our benefit. I. And I and just really happy with how the conference went and how the movement is growing and it, it gives me hope for the future because a lot of the people at the conference were really, like, there was not a lot of cultural overlap and it made me feel less for a cultural mass extinction, which is something that we're really afraid about.

Like we want a lot of different opinions in the future, and. Natal con felt like anything but a monoculture, which was really cool. So

Malcolm Collins: yeah, it was, it was really interesting. And these are not small differences. This is us thinking they're murdering babies. They think we're murdering babies. Mm-hmm. And yet we get along.

Yeah. Like it is [00:40:00] absolutely wild that we're able to get along and progressives have the like smallest difference and they go knives out at each other. And the conference was really good. One of the important things, like if you go to this conference and you're like. Okay. I maybe met some people or whatever, but did the world really get anything outta this conference?

Mm-hmm. And what I would note is I think the biggest impact of the conference isn't like us having people edit it or whatever.

It is. Because you guys go and because you make this happen, you make this like a really packed event. I mean packed, like this conference was so large. Yeah. Like much larger than I anticipated.

And we then are able to have lots of reporters there. And we did have all the reporters as we mentioned, like was a wire, but we did have lot, we had New York Times CNN, we had NPR, we had mother Jones. I, oh no. Mother Jones was kept out. But they did a great piece. I like their piece. But anyway.

Lots of reporters there. They. The reporters only cover the movement when the conference happens. Like they need a forcing function to cover the movement. And we can go out and they can do the profile on [00:41:00] us, but you know, that's gonna die down after a while. They need something new to be scared about.

And you guys making this conference happen, going there, talking with reporters. You all came together and gave them something to be scared about. And because of that, every one of you who contributed to this, you contributed to this press cycle that's happening right now. And this press cycle that's happening right now is going to give us a second boost, is going to help us move things forward and is going to help keep this conversation centered in a way that when people are afraid of controversy or afraid of doing new things like the, you know, effective altruism organization like Big Gala that happens every year and I'm sure they spend tons of money on you know, that that doesn't end up.

Getting less oppressed. It doesn't end up moving any idea forwards. It doesn't end up doing anything meaningful for the world. But just by being at an event like this, you guys did a lot and I really, really deeply [00:42:00] appreciate that. In fact, I'd say like, if you're like, oh, you know the money that I paid for this, like $900 or whatever, right?

Would you have rather I just give you two $900 or a thousand dollars? Categorically, I would rather it have gone to the conference given the amount of press that the conference has generated. Mm-hmm. Like, that's what I would've paid. I probably pay what, $50,000 for a press cycle this big. And I think that that's probably about what went in from our fans.

And that's amazing. I, I have more than that like a PR person. I, I could pay a PR firm hundreds of thousands of dollars and not get a press cycle this way.

Simone Collins: Oh, 100%. Yeah. Yeah.

Malcolm Collins: And that is huge because that's what we need to keep this centered in the public mind. And it's also why, you know, if you look at our video on Hardier versus Dier, we recently started hardier.com which is meant to sort of bring.

Funding to some of the other underfunded cause areas where people are, find founding companies in those spaces. Right now we've drained the amount of money [00:43:00] that we had put in for it. So if anybody wants to like put a big grant in for that so we can do something big, let us know. But right now we've, we've invested in like 10 companies like 10 to 40 k each.

Which I'm really excited about because I'm excited about a lot of the technology that they're bringing, but also it's an investment and not a donation, which means if any of these companies does well, then we'll have even more money to put into this type of thing

Simone Collins: into future companies, which is something I'm really

Malcolm Collins: excited about.

The gift that keeps on giving. Yeah. So thank you all for making this happen. You know, thank you to Kevin Dolan for, and Luke, I, I mean, Luke seems to be the really competent operator that made this happen. But yeah, this was wild.

Simone Collins: Yeah, you guys are amazing. And also Kevin Knight's wife and kids who were there.

Oh my gosh, they were so cute. But yeah. Anyway I love you and I love fatalism. I love the Alcon and it was really good to see all y'all who showed up. So thanks for coming.

Malcolm Collins: Yeah. One funny anecdote I'll give, 'cause this is actually something that I was talking to like, just last week I was talking [00:44:00] to one of the like, leading people of the effective altruist movement.

And I was asking them like, how can we work together? Mm-hmm. And they, they, they just didn't seem to understand like. I was like, look, I got hardier here. I am open to working with you guys. Like we have a, a bigger movement in terms of like members and focus now. Mm-hmm. You know, we've, we've got people in the White House.

You guys have been begging for that for years. You guys have been spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Like if, if you guys can throw a little money our way. We're gonna be able to throw a little attention your way and, and, and help some of your projects or projects that at least we could both agree on, come to fruition.

And they basically didn't understand why they, they were like, I don't, I don't understand. And, and like, like how or why we would work together. And it helped me understand why the movement's gotten as bad as it has.

Hmm.

Specifically what they pointed out was. That the very, very large [00:45:00] EA orgs that get all this money, like open fill mm-hmm.

They're getting money, huge amounts of money from lots of donors and they have to be afraid of doing anything donors. That makes sense. Yeah. They end up taking the most conservative, boring approach, but a conservative approach like that means they're donating to things that would be raising money anyway.

Yeah. And so the money is just completely pissed away, like giving your money to, which runs against

Simone Collins: the fundamental principles of effective altruism because in addition to looking at the severity of a problem and how tractable it is, how, how feasible it is to actually address it, you're looking at how much attention and help it already has.

And you don't want to focus on things that already have help. You want to focus on the things that are overlooked, which is one of the reasons why Malcolm chose to address demographic collapse. Oh, I'm so sorry. So come on. Hey,

Malcolm Collins: love you to death, Simone.

Simone Collins: Love you too.

Speaker: Octavian, what do you want to give Mommy? This flower [00:46:00] right here. Why do you wanna give her that flower? 'cause I love mommy flowers. Mommy, all the time because I love her. Okay. Hey Titan. Where are you going?

Can I see a video? What did you see today?

You've been having fun. Yeah. What were you doing? I was playing, it was rock. You playing these rocks that walked at where? At the creek? Yeah. Hey, rock, mommy. And, and um, did you see a sink? Um, yeah. How did you with mommy, it was very scary. And then you kept everyone safe. Yeah, mom. What is that? I think I don't stole in the garage.

[00:47:00] Do not tap the window as rocks. No. Oh.

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit basedcamppodcast.substack.com/subscribe