Mom Is Working for Moloch | Guest: Kevin Dolan | 9/14/26

0:00Good things come in force. Like ukulele strings, boy band members, Oh yeah! And PayPal Pay-In-Four. No fees, no interest, no impact on your credit score, just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you. Strument, hum it, pay it in four. Download the PayPal app to get started. Subject to approval. Learn more at paypal.com-pay-in-four. Pay-paling, NMLS 910457. Hey everybody, how's it going? Thanks for joining me this afternoon. I've got a great stream with a great guest that I think you're really going to enjoy. We've been talking a lot recently about family formation. I think unfortunately the stark realities of the Lindsey Clancy trial have really made everyone think twice about how men and women are ultimately relating to each other in the United States. The importance of family formation, the roles that we all have in those different organizations,

1:03the family, the church, the community. We're all thinking more and more about the social fabric that's been torn apart. And once every six months or so, my buddy Kevin Dolan writes an article that just kind of blows the hinges off everything. It's remarkable how consistently he does this. And he just had a fantastic one about social coordination and kind of why we are more or less creating a society through manager or liberalism that has to kind of dissolve families as we understand them. So I thought I'd have him on to talk about today. Kevin, thank you so much for coming on, man. Great to be here, man. Thanks. So your article is titled, Mom is Working for MoLock. And obviously you are someone who has thought a lot about the fertility rate, about family formation. You've held multiple conferences on the subject of having more children, encouraging people to have more children. A lot of times when we talk about this issue, it's people kind of wish casting saying,

2:04well, it'd be great if moms could do this or if we had this thing kind of just throwing whatever against the wall, but having not really thought deeply about the issue, not looking at what's actually worked. You are not in that position. You're somebody who has thought about this issue a lot, taken active steps to organize conferences to discuss this issue. So this is not something that you're just a tourist on. So I thought it was very interesting in your article because it hit on a number of things I'm actually currently writing about for a book. But you put it in this game theoretic terminology, which I think is extremely helpful for people to kind of understand the frame with which you're approaching this. So there's a lot to go through in this article, but I want to start at the beginning. You point out the fact that basically a lot of what's happening here is the eternal revolution. We know that leftism in many ways just modernity in general seems to work on this kind of principle of an eternal revolution where you constantly are changing everything.

3:07This empowers the state to constantly be growing, you know, accruing more and more options to itself. So can you talk a little bit about why the destruction of the family is ultimately fuel for this kind of eternal revolution? Yeah, so you can look at it as the state, sort of the pre-modern state existing to kind of defend us against them, right? There's an inside, there's an outside. And what has happened basically, you could argue about when it happened, but basically what has happened now is that the forces of liberal modernity, the states that are the liberal modern states, are so powerful relative to the outside that it's sort of the hard line you could say is like 1945, right? That's when the liberal modern post-modern states own everything. They control the whole planet. And so it's like, well, what's their justification?

4:09If there's no outside to protect us from anymore. And basically it's like, well, now we got to look inside. We got to look for conflicts internally that the state can insinuate itself within, find oppression, find tyranny, which basically means you think of the state as the biggest fish, and it's looking for smaller fish eating even smaller fish, and sort of taking the side of the week against the strong, interposing itself in all these relationships. And as long as the state is interposing itself in hierarchies that strike us as unfair or sort of arbitrary, sort of contrived things like class systems or caste systems, I'm not arguing that those are actually arbitrary or contrived. But that's how they're interpreted, right? Is that it's sort of pointless and inefficient. You're sort of leaving smart people, leaving talent on the table when you sort of maintain these

5:12these artificial hierarchies. And so the state is said, no, we're not going to do that. We're going to break that down. We're going to, you know, you're not allowed to have the old boys club. You're not allowed to exclude people from this and that. And so basically what has happened is having torn down all of those sort of arbitrary constructed hierarchies, it's like what's left. Well, what's left is sort of the biological substrate of hierarchy, which is the roles of men and women and parents and children, and the most natural hierarchies that exist, that's all that's left. And so the state basically is like, well, now I got to eat this. This is what there is left to eat. And you see, like with Lindsey Clancy, it's like all of the legal explicit distinctions between men and women have either been eradicated or reversed in terms of like preference or financial or legal subordination, all that's gone.

6:13But feminism still has to exist. There's all kinds of money in feminists, sort of institutionally, activists and lawyers and fundraisers. And so, you know, you sort of all of these movements, whether it's the gay rights movement or BLM or feminism, it's like all of these movements can either sort of declare victory and abolish themselves, which they're not going to do, or they can find goals and aims that are fundamentally like irreconcilable, unattainable, so they can have this eternal revolution, so that it can go on forever. And that's what you see in all of these different sort of left wing movements, is that they've sort of had to go to war with God almost. They've had to go to war with like fundamental reality, because that's all that's left. That's the only enemy they can still claim to be the underdog against.

7:17So, when we have this scenario where obviously, as you say, like basically, we reach the end of history, and therefore the state can only turn on basically its own, its own charges to kind of legitimate its power. When you have this scenario where we constantly have to be trying to destroy everything about hierarchy and the natural order, obviously, feminism, gay rights, all of these things are kind of a tendrils of this revolution that work their way into every aspect of our lives. But the question, I guess, for a lot of people, then, is, okay, wouldn't you want your society, even if you understand that you're gaining more power by kind of wedging all of these things apart, by getting between men and women, getting between parents and child, ultimately, don't you understand, as an apparatus, that you're kind of eating the seed corn that you're tearing up the roots,

8:19wouldn't the leaders, wouldn't the people who ultimately manage the regime, who are trying to accrue the power, wouldn't they realize they're kind of killing the golden goose as they attempt to take that last bit of power? Doesn't it occur to them that there is ultimately a limit, and they will kind of disassemble their own thing as they're doing this? Well, if there were a guy who was like or a gal, who was the boss of managerial liberalism, then it, number one, it wouldn't be managerial liberalism. But also, they would have an incentive to keep the whole structure alive, but that's not what we have. We have all these different competing interest groups and feasts, and you know, Curtis Yarvan's favorite example is like virology, and how in the domain of virology, the way you win is by making virology super important, and making it really salient, and drawing a lot of

9:20funding to the field of virology. And if you fail to do that or refuse to do that, then you will sort of, you won't get published, and you won't get media attention and all these things. And so the people who rise to the top and people who are willing to do that, and the best way to make virology really, really sort of politically relevant and salient, and get a lot of money thrown at it, is to engineer a plague. And so it's that phenomenon, if you can think of that as like a symbol or a metaphor, it's all of these little feasts trying to make their things salient and relevant. And yeah, there's, the thing is not a person, it can't see in that sense. And I sort of, there's a lot of like, there's a lot of like, dooming on these topics, and people saying like, what's kind of hopeless, it's sort of this headless monster that we can't defeat. But one of the things that's

10:21really important to understand about this monster is that it can't see basic things like that, like the fact that it's sort of headed for a cliff, and there's no breaks. And it also can't, like it can't assess threats the way a person can. And so you can build all kinds of capacity that that system can't read as threatening. And so it's less about like, you know, it's less about how powerful that system is, and it's more about like where are the vulnerabilities, where like what doors are left unguarded. So yeah, that's why it's, it doesn't see those things because it can't see those things. All right, so let's get to the core problem itself. The article is largely about fertility rates, family formation, like why this isn't happening. As somebody who has looked at this extensively held conferences on it, written on it, I think you kind of come to the early conclusion, the article that the reason that we have low fertility is obvious, and absolutely

11:26no one will talk about it. So Kevin Dolan, what is the obvious and incredibly offensive answer to why we have low birth rates? Well, yeah, so I introduced it kind of as a troll. The strongest correlation between fertility and any other sort of social science variable is educating and employing women. Like, and what I sort of talk about in the article is, I think there are a lot of people on the right who sort of view that problem unseriously because they have this sort of like why I ought to like we ought to put these broads in their place and like, and what they're sort of failing to recognize is that it's not like we have this fertility problem because women are like getting too many PhDs or there are too many female C-suite executives. It's like this correlation exists at the level of like being taught to read and escaping subsistence agriculture and like, you know, not sort of losing your teeth at 30. Like it's the only countries that have escaped

12:34this sterilizing trend are places where none of us want to live, places where and there's no there's no conceivable serious plan to like replicate those circumstances. It's sort of like it's sort of like the way they way they they way they got on Mitt Romney's case for talking about self deportation that we just we just make life harder for these people until they all leave. It's like you can't make their lives harder than they are in like Cameroon. You can't make their lives like without without destroying the country without making your life like it is in Cameroon and or like it would be. So so basically it's it's this sort of thought terminator for a lot of people as soon as they sort of it was tons of people talking about fertility who like just won't see this,

13:35can't see this, don't want to talk about it period. And so they come up with all kinds of like stupid like polishing the brass on the Titanic type solutions for this problem. But then there's another set who like they sort of either either it's it's tends to be either leftists or like you know pretty right wing guys where they say well the thing is it's it's it's women's education and which generally means like either shut up stop talking about this or it means like I don't know like it just sort of becomes this vague like We're at some point we're going to turn into the Taliban and like yeah you know keep women at home and and make sure that they never walk outside and interact with a book but like realistically these are not you know this is not anything that's coming right like that that tends to be the the terminating on the right now. You do talk about some of the attempts that nations have tried right like there's direct bribery by the government there's

14:36you know tax incentives you know built-in you know things for for childcare all of that but you're you're pretty dour on that. Why don't these managerial solutions solve this problem? What seems to be the issue there? We know why we can't go back to Afghanistan but why can't we just pay women more to have kids? Well number one the math just doesn't pencil out like like the the the sacrifice that you're asking of people to have these kids is enormous and the kind of person who would have a kid for a thousand bucks is like not necessarily the person that you want raising kids like it's like those incentives are not good incentives. But also and this is this is sort of like where I try to get to with the with the women's education and employment thing the reason that women's education and employment is correlated with declining fertility is not

15:38that like the moment a woman learns to read she goes like anything's better than having kids like I'd rather do literally anything and you could use you number one if you just have contact with women period you know that's not true if you look at history it's obviously not true but what it does correlate with in terms of being employed being educated it's a proxy for being integrated into sort of the global marketplace right it's you know you get your smartphone and it's not necessarily it's not the smartphone itself it's being connected to this infinite marketplace where there are zero costs for defection where nobody has any leverage and so you can't interact in this this illegible relational social domain that women in particular are sort of deeply adaptive to and so what that means is you think about family

16:43life family life involves enormous amounts of placing a bet on another person like you know you you sort of have to a woman has to marry a guy before he's really come into his own before he's like you know become who he's going to become and she's got to stick with him through that like sort of difficult period where they're broke and then you know her sort of looks will fade and she will get older and he will stay sort of reproductively viable for a couple decades after that and he's got to stick with her sort of in acknowledgment of the fact that she stuck with him and there's this big coordination problem this big and we used to solve that with reputation we used to solve that with like you know you don't get a girl in trouble you don't run out on people and you know and and and most of the most of all of your economic and social activity took place with other people who

17:47you had always known and were always going to know like your your social universe was in a sense closed uh which meant that reputation mattered and there were costs for defection real like costs and one of the things I talk about is like you're your your mother put all this work into you and there wasn't like it wasn't like the sheriff would come or sometimes but like usually it's not like the sheriff would come or she'd sue you for your you know you could just supposed to carry your mom when she's older right instead it was just like culturally expected and everyone around you would uh call you a dirt bag if you didn't take carry your mom right and and we sort of now regard those reputational illegible things as sort of uh toothless but they were not toothless in any other period of history they were extremely like concrete and they had real consequences uh and so it's the it's the evaporation of that relational bond which is what again

18:51is what managerial liberalism is just designed to eat to chew up and and and deconstruct um both in terms of the relationship between parent and child and the relationship the lateral relationship between men and women and families um my conclusion basically in the pieces that there's no like human beings won't raise families unless they can do it in this deeply high trust relational contextual frame and if you try to make them do it as a transaction they will just not do it they do you know it's pandas at the zoo they just won't breed and so uh in in one sense that's a problem for all these institutions because like you know we got social security and we've got all these got all these uh expectations that define the value of your checking count and the dollars and your stock market portfolio and your real estate portfolio all these things are determined by expectations of steady economic growth which you can't have if the population collapses and so

19:53uh the the case I'm making is like you know that's why they care about it that's why like are they should care about it that's why you get all these think pieces about it from uh sort of liberal publications and so trying to wrestle with this but the reason we should care about it is like oh we've created we've created a world that humans don't want to raise families in like that's just a fundamental like a spiritual indictment of the world that we live in we got to fix that nope go ahead oh sorry good uh what I was going to say um let's talk a little bit about how this transition took place because I think that's what catches a lot of people off guard when they're having this discussion uh you know we we are constantly hearing from you know older generations well just you know go out and meet a woman at the bar you know you know shake shake the boss's hand uh you know look him straight in the eye he'll offer you his daughter as you know in a and a dowry you know like this we get that kind of advice right and so you have this moment where it's hard for them that they look at the money in people's bank accounts or they the economic activity and they

20:56say look you know you have more money or you know you have more luxury than previous generations it should be easy it should be fine to you know make this happen and one of the things that you talk about uh in the piece is that integration into the global marketplace that I think is so important because uh you know the other way to say this uh you know when when I'm when I'm stealing a terms from uh you know crazy Marxist is your deteriorating right like you you're moving things out of the realm of the sacred out of the realm of social capital and tradition and hierarchy and bonds and you're moving it into the marketplace and so what we've done is we have commodified every aspect of this familial relationship that used to be the building block of society instead of a woman taking care of her children you hire someone to take care of the children instead of a woman taking care of the home you hire someone to clean the home and organize things instead of having uh you know your parents educate their children we pay a teacher to educate your children every

22:01interaction whether it's taking care of your parents or you know being responsible for a woman you impregnated these are all now functions of the court economic functions they can all be quantified placed into dollars packaged and resold and this creates a serious problem for what you call the molok trap so can you talk a little bit about uh that kind of liquefying uh the you know the the kind of social capital that once existed in this familial relationship turn it into globalization and how that creates a coordination problem yeah so Johan Kurt sort of really really good piece on this I don't know if you've had him on the show you should I did yeah yeah that piece was phenomenal yeah awesome yeah so uh it's a phenomenon that I I've started calling dark poverty it's like dark matter or uh it's it's this invisible poverty uh because yeah like all of the the sensor apparatus of liberalism says you know GDP's up and household incomes up and houses are bigger and all this stuff

23:01you think about um good things coming for us like ukulele strings boy band members oh yeah and paypal paying for no fees no interest no impact on your credit score just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you strum it hum it pay it in four download the paypal app to get started subject to approval learn more at paypal.com slash payin four paypaling NMLS 910457 uh the best example I could think of is like uh I grew up in north Texas and like every house had a pool and um you can see from like satellite images it's just the lines of pools and and and most of these pools are like barely ever used and uh you know why is that the case is it because we're just so uh wealthy that we just prefer to have our own pools like no it's because all of the common spaces are completely unlivable we've we've made it so that uh you you can only own you can only control

24:07property that you as an individual control you can't you can't collectively own property uh the way that you could have in the pre sort of pre 1964 regime and so everything gets uh you sort of funnel everything into the the domain that you can actually protect in gate so you get these big homes with all the amenities packed inside and it's incredibly overpriced and you have to you have to compete for uh what it's a great book uh two two income trap by Elizabeth Warren of all people right which where she talks about uh the competition for positional goods so uh you know you you can make more cars you can make you know better food etc you can't make more of the best school in town school district right uh and so people will engage in this extreme like zero sum competition for these positional goods in order to escape things that used to be like

25:09unthinkable so like you know the idea that you're the idea that your uh kid would be the victim of a violent crime at school was like just not on most people's radar 50 years ago 100 years ago and now it's like no I have I have to pay a $250,000 $350,000 premium on my home value in order to escape that very real possibility in a lot of these cities and so it's like uh you have to pay for that you have to pay like so much of like the the you see these women on these dating apps who are like yeah a man should spend $500 on our first date and uh you know that's kind of an extreme example and like you know there are of course women who are more reasonable than that but like what is causing that phenomenon what's causing that phenomenon is that in the absence of any kind of reputational capital in the absence of any kind of binding common culture it's uh you know I have

26:15hundreds of thousands of uh swipes to do and there has to be some kind of a gate and so we're just going to turn into like a cash transaction a commodity which you know is kind of an distinguishable from prostitution but like it's that's that's what everything is like everything is commodified in that way and so people can sort of on paper have more material goods but it's at the cost of burning all of this illegible so it's like you know like if you grew up in the in the 60s and uh you know you were in like a two bedroom house and there were like four kids in the house well yeah you'd bunk up and it was a little tight but like the kids had the run of the whole neighborhood and like that was that was their space and it was completely safe and it was completely functional and and so yeah you just come home and sleep and that's not a big deal now it's like well you got a bigger house but like you're stuck in the house and that's uh you know they've done like those

27:18studies where it's like yeah his grandpa would walk 10 miles to the river and his dad would you know walk to the corner grocery store and he you know cps might get called if he's alone by himself in the yard like it's everything is becoming more confined and constrained and I think there's a very real analogy to like breeding and captivity like people just won't do it. Can you specifically explain the mollock trap definition because I think that game theory really helps people understand what the issue is here otherwise they have such a hard like you know we've talked about social capital actually had Johan on to discuss that exact article and of course you touch on it very much there and it's important but specifically your your point about social coordination and why it fails when we're in this mode I think is critical for people to kind of get over the threshold and understand the issue. Yeah so um Scott Alexander right it's a great blog slate star codex and he's got a essay called meditations on mollock and it's from that Alan Ginsburg poem talks about mollock and it's

28:22mollock is this personification of coordination problems so it's the idea that we all are in a situation where our individual interest is served by doing something that's bad for the whole and if there's no one to coordinate us then we're all going to do what makes sense for us and we're going to burn the whole system down basically. So an example of that that he gives is like you know there's there's polluting a lake or something and you know it's in everybody's interest to pollute the lake they get you know x percent of more productivity if they pollute the lake but eventually the lake gets so polluted that it's unusable for anybody in the whole system crashes and so you kind of you need a top down you need somebody who's got like a god's eye view who can see the whole system to say actually we're not going to we're not going to pollute the lake that was going to do that and uh in this atomizing liberal frame where everyone it's sort of the individual is the only dimension of analysis that matters um and and sort of nobody has the right

29:28to coordinate people at a broader scale than that well you get uh like like dating apps to this classic example of of uh where where everyone's interest is to sort of transactionalize and commodify what they're doing and nobody's happy like i think a lot of guys think of the dating app situation is something that's like really working out for the ladies and it's like not at all like like nobody's happy uh but it's still in everybody's individual interest to sort of and a lot of it's because uh you know if if there is no uh reputational capital if there's no coordinating mechanism of of of culture or expectation then uh yeah you sort of everything gets converted into like raw transactional uh power relationships like that's what counts and so men and women are pursuing this like really raw uh transactional uh relationship uh mode of forming relationships

30:36and it's just completely unworkable for everybody involved so you've kind of hinted at at multiple times but one of the issues that we're facing here is that women used to work primarily in the domain of uh social capital right like they they were doing incredibly valuable work uh but it didn't show up in GDP numbers it doesn't produce economic activity and so uh you know the the manager regime that needs to quantify everything that needs everything to be a global market they they want to rip this up they want to you know kind of package it into uh discrete units that you can label with a price tag uh it needs to destroy all this and you know uh it it's funny because a lot of people in our space talk about trustless systems right like I want a trustless system uh and you know the thing I I always say that makes them very angry is actually you need we we have to destroy all in human systems like that the actual like what when you say trustless society what you mean is an inhuman society a society in which uh people no longer have to relay relate to each other

31:41rely on each other um yes there used to be friction in all those moments guess what that friction's called humanity like actually when you're removing for uh uh you know that that friction that economic friction which you're removing is the human element uh you know as as as good as good as good students of Niklai and we'll recognize you are you are feeding uh you know quickly into that uh that loop that uh self-exciting feedback loop that will develop capital into something entirely different and leave humanity behind uh that that's what that's what this process is and so in many ways uh you know ironically you know part of the thing that kind of half of the new reactionaries want is the very thing that's defeating the other thing that they really want uh and so we're stuck in this very serious situation because as we've destroyed that social capital we destroyed the ability of women to operate in this world of social capital uh we have made a lack of honor a lack of duty a lack of loyalty uh kind of a feature instead of a butt it's now the optimal

32:46strategy with which to operate and so I guess my question to you is um how do we ever get back to a place where this social capital is viable again because it seems that without that as you say people simply won't breathe if they do not see a future in which there is a positive aspect of cooperation where they can build real actual capital but in maybe a a way that is not tangible on a balance sheet they simply will not participate in the mating process so I mean what do we even do to begin to approach that issue because it seems like this is basically like the skeleton that defines our entire a world right now then the liberal managerial regime is uh you know the culprit but it's also the bedrock of what most people want to perpetuate when they want to perpetuate our current society so how do we address this yeah well I mean uh humanoid robots is basically the uh that's that's that's

33:48what um all of the people I know who are like fans of managerialism fans of where things are headed their answer basically is just the slow replacement of all human activity with machines and um I think that's unworkable um for for a lot of reasons but I think our solution the the solution for people who who value humanity is uh number one I so I I wrote a piece a couple a months ago this fertility collapse is the good news like it is actually really good news that like human beings won't live like insects and they like they they they won't tolerate uh this profoundly dehumanizing mode of living and interacting with each other like uh basically the what the message there is that the uh the the the parasite is going to destroy its own ability to survive before it

34:56can actually kill the host and so what I see is the answer is I mean I see it is basically human judgment human institutions are coming back one way or another like like this this uh system is unsustainable on all kinds of axes the security access the the financial access because no there's no incentive to sort of uh uh save for the commonwealth of of the United States because what's what's happening right now is like if I don't spend this money that's what you got with like the five thousand dollar dividend right uh you know whether or not you think that'll happen whatever it's like uh the the the political incentives on both sides are uh yeah we need to loot the treasury and distribute it to our clients as quickly as we possibly can uh because if we don't then we'll lose and then the other side will do it right and um that's sort of the race to the bottom zero some game on the on the financial side there's no there's no plan for the deficit none

35:58whatsoever and so uh you know you basically like do you believe that is sustainable on an infinite timeline I don't similarly I mean uh sort of the burning down of the social capital and the uh the the intensification of the fertility crisis it's very it's a very analogous phenomenon it's kind of the same thing it's it's uh we are all incentivized like burn down this commons until it's completely non-functional and so what's going to remain in my view is like the fundamental substrate of of human relationships which is uh your your your family and the people that you know and love and have a shared history with like it's gonna be it's gonna stop being these like abstract ideological teams and it's gonna be you know who's actually gonna make sure that I get to eat who's actually gonna make sure that my family's safe it's it's gonna be people you know and care about and so everything that I do is about building those human relationships in that shared history uh that's

37:02that's what that's what exit is about my fraternity it's it's it's about uh getting people together to build things with stakes so that they can you know place bets and have those bets pay off and then they've got this shared history so that when things get much more complicated and much more difficult they sort of know who their friends are and uh one that's one of the things that we're changing about the um about the conference we're gonna be doing the natal con three uh early next year and the first two were very much like let's look at the charts and graphs let's talk to the think tank people let's talk to the academics see what they have to say that was good it ran its course we sort of we sort of got the picture of like what what this what are the shape what's the shape of this problem and realized it's gonna be just human connection like the you you're not gonna solve this for for the system at scale you're gonna solve it for like your kids and your friends and so the next round is gonna be much more about like much more like low ticket like let's just connect like

38:06minded young people and families so I largely agree with that but I'll play devil's advocate here this sounds like accelerationism right well things will get worse and then things will collapse and then my thing will arise and uh the thing that you know people often point to when it comes to accelerationism is actually just worse as worse right there there are still shit lives in South Africa so uh ultimately um you know is it good that the entire society will more or less eat itself alive uh you know is that ultimately actually gonna solve problem won't the vast majority of people actually just crash and burn and destroy themselves and they'll kind of die alone at 80 with no one to watch them as they eat you know whatever dog food is brought to them by uh you know a Haitian immigrant uh in in in the welfare home you know what like they ultimately uh you know we're we're looking at a scenario even as you describe it where the problem kind of solves itself we're only a very

39:09small number of people actually make it through to the other side yeah yeah worse is worse um like it's it's gonna be hard I think and I would say uh what you're observing now uh you don't have to believe that like there will be like I think I think the fundamental uh error of accelerationism is that there will be and there will be a reckoning and awakening and and and people will rise up as one like that's yes that's stupid but there are you you observe even in South Africa um the people who are doing the best are the people who are building direct human ties and and direct relationships and who are acquiring optionality and uh another thing I would say about the whole like there there are no there you know there's still Lib Tards in South Africa is uh a lot of that is held together by the bigger system South Africa doesn't exist in a vacuum South Africa exists in a world where

40:16there are 11 American carrier strike groups and uh the the not not to get too far a field but like the South African private security industry is like I don't know six times the size of the South African military with like and depending on how much of that you've actually how much of like the South African military's budget actually goes to like war fighting capacity uh they actually dramatically overfund them as well so it's like uh there's clearly something holding that disequilibrium together and uh and I would argue that's gonna change uh in the South African case in particular but so so what does that mean for for for the broader picture we just look at like what is happening can the system hold together under these circumstances and you know uh good things come in force like ukulele strings boy band members oh yeah and paypal payin for no fees no interest no impact on your credit score just the flexibility to pay the way that works

41:22for you strum it hum it pay it in four download the paypal app to get started subject to approval learn more at paypal.com slash payin for paypaling nmls 910 457 if you're looking for if you're looking for um things to get worse in a way that generates the political appetite for change yeah you're gonna be disappointed like that's not a real thing it doesn't happen if you're looking for things to get worse in a way that like uh the the the sort of basic functionality of these big like the way these systems deliver value deliver uh what is necessary to people that that breaks down it's like well that's already happening and you look at like you look at uh these these Somali enclaves or you look at sort of what you look at this this late unpleasantness in uh in texas with the uh with the the migration situation um the people who are the best placed to uh exploit that situation are

42:29these sort of illegible uh tribal groups you know people who people who know each other personally and who also are sort of aligned in the abstract and uh they are they are playing a pre-modern game and it turns out that playing that pre-modern game under these conditions is like super adaptive so i basically what what i would argue for is like you just need to understand it like Mediterranean times call for Mediterranean solutions like you just have to be you have to learn how to play that game a little differently so it's yeah it's not accelerationism it's just like look at what look at the read not not like where it's going look at the reality on the ground right now and like adapt to that so one more question before we go to uh the superchats here but one of the things that i have been observing is of course the rush to AI um every state recognizes the need for it at the moment uh largely driven by warfare obviously artificial intelligence

43:32already is and will continue to play a large role when it comes to the defense industry and your ability to uh kind of project power and protect your country but also because they recognize that AI might be a solution for the liberal managerial class uh to the kind of the destruction of their their way of life right like right now manager manager liberalism is kind of collapsing under its own complexity if you want to go with the church and model like you know you're getting uh you know a a a drop in marginal utility when it comes to each layer of complexity and so the men that on top of the fact that managers are basically being promoted because of their you know skin color and you know sexual proclivities and not because they have any level of talent means that the kind of the the labor structure that once undergirded the managerial regime is falling apart you know that we they simply cannot squeeze any more utility out of the bureaucracies

44:32that they're creating and this means they're they're kind of failing to meet their obligations for the miracle of progress that's kind of put them in charge that's been their legitimating uh you know political formula previously AI offers them the opportunity to create a something that will bear the large amount of the manager load but never you know degrades because you're only selecting for people who are part of some kind of molecule you know like it it avoids a lot of the you know human problems with the managerial regime and gives it an option to kind of buoy itself beyond its previous capacity and I know that artificial intelligence can be a disruptive agent in many ways a lot of our guys are going to use artificial intelligence to disrupt things like uh you know the the movie industry the gaming industry uh they're going to be able to disrupt all kinds of entrenched interests because uh AI kind of gives you a possible advantage that you did not

45:36have previously uh in those asymmetric fields however it could also just become the thing that makes total control by the managerial regime possible right giving giving them a capacity that they previously lacked in the same way that the state by adopting managerialism was ever able to expand you know rapidly by bringing to bear a a power of scale that never existed previously so my question would be what are your thoughts on AI perhaps extending this regime well beyond what would be its natural life cycle what if it doesn't collapse because AI props it back up so I would say it basically that I see it as like two possibilities one is that AI really can do all the thinking that we can do um and if it can then you know all bets are off maybe you'll be a brain in a jar in 20 years like who knows um and I view that possibility as sort of comparable to like

46:40what if uh what if a cosmic ray burst like fries the atmosphere tomorrow and all human life is eradicated so there's no way to plan for that like that's a that's sort of a meaningless possibility nothing you can do about it so stop thinking about it but but the other possibility is that there are like sort of fundamental limits to it and what I observe is that yeah it doesn't seem to be centralizing it doesn't seem to be uh increasing their ability to control in fact I mean what what I observe at doing in sort of my domain is the things that I keep an eye on is it's making all of these organs of narrative control that uh that that system used to depend on just completely clogged with slop like nothing's knowable like everything's falsifiable and so uh I see that as

47:44only intensifying the importance of human connection and human relationships I see it as as uh making it more essential for me to like have individuals I trust who are like seeing things rather than accepting sort of what's delivered to me narratively not if you're talking about like does it make it easier for them to analyze the output of security cameras or to operate swarms of drones right and so like you get the sort of dystopian like they're going to control us by just watching our every move and killing us if we step out of line uh that I would say uh is is the more realistic possibility but when I think about the vulnerabilities of that system it's like uh I have a I have a friend who's um deeply involved in in like the drone space and he's like yeah the Chinese they just they make more drones they make better drones and so they're going to control the world because the future is drones but what I've uh talked to him about and

48:49I haven't gotten a satisfactory answer is like how are you going to gait because a drone is a relatively simple thing it's like some rotors and some batteries and guidance system that they're like now we can we can operate that with like a raspberry but I mean you look at like the Russians they're like putting together with duct tape and bailing iron obel gum like it's very uh it's once you have sort of the raw uh components it's very difficult to control that technology and um all kinds of infrastructure that produces this technology is vulnerable to that technology whether it be you know a cyber attack or whether it be you know bombing a fiber optic cable or bombing a factory like all of the like I I see uh it's uh what's that you know you say um well the stirrup and and the composite bow is how the Mongols conquer the Chinese and it's like well the Chinese could make more bows and more stirrups and more horses and more horsemen so why didn't they win and it's like

49:51well it's just it's a fundamentally decentralizing technology like it fundamentally does not reward scale the way that an aircraft carrier rewards scale and so I see it as like I can do all kinds of things now that I used to need the sort of sufferance of a multi-billion dollar multinational corporation to get done it's basically it's we've taken a a Tomahawk cruise missile which only like a handful of countries even in theory had the industrial-based to build and we've made it something that like literally anybody can make and so that's that's sort of how I see it I currently like as it stands right now it seems like a fundamentally decentralizing technology. So there is a way in which you know we are already we've already seen this when it comes to the media space obviously uh you know used to be that if you wanted to speak to millions of people about your political views you had to play the game and get on CNN or MSNBC or Fox news those were

50:54the only options available to you now you know anybody with a microphone and uh you know a decently okay web camera can put something out and possibly reach just as many if not more people. Of course in a lot of ways you know people will say that podcasters are ready terrorists so there's no big difference between that and building the military technology to do the same thing but but there is a you know but there is a real you know a point where ultimately you know these systems that were built on that kind of hegemonic advantage of scale simply cannot survive the disintermediation they simply cannot survive the fact that people can completely disconnect themselves from that economy and still compete or even outperform in many ways we're already seeing you know Hollywood having going through this cycle where everything you know they built themselves into the blockbuster model you know every studio needed to make a $300 million $400 million dollar film and that's where

51:58all of their revenue came from and if it you know went bust well then there was just no money and now they're quickly realizing oh well actually we could just hand some youtube or a million dollars and if you make 20 million dollars well the 20 x star investment in a way that the Marvel film is never going to do and so if we just you know do that so we're already seeing adjustments you know in spaces that are not as serious you know not not arms manufacturing that kind of thing but the principles hold you know these are similar problems that are being addressed you know that scale is still I think having that impact so I think that you're right and I've said this multiple times I'm still very worried about you know kind of the centralization that's going to incur the meantime like these these people might not be able to build the system but they're sure going to try right like that's why we're doing this we're doing this because they all think this is the solution even if it isn't and so ultimately they are going to try to implement this and in the meantime I think it behooves us to be very careful about how we allow this technology to be

52:59implemented but I think you're right that ultimately a system built on that level of technological control is really you know it the foxes will eventually lose to just a single lion walking in and knocking down their they're very carefully constructed edifice and so it doesn't take very much but a few a few strikes somewhere could easily knock out that entire apparatus and make it very difficult to govern well Kevin this is a very fascinating conversation it's something I've been thinking a lot about and you're at our article on this was absolutely excellent so before we go to the questions that people can you tell where tell everyone where they can find your article and everything else you do yeah so the articles on our blog blog.exit group.us that's the that's the website for the fraternity excellent all right to the questions of the people chair coke Nixon says Clancy is a symptom of OF oh Clancy is a symptom like OF is a symptom

53:59we're experiencing a crisis of radicalized and entitlement by women fueled by thirsty men so you know what we'll just get into the gender discourse for a moment here Kevin we didn't spit a lot of time and it is this men's fault is it's women's fault do we just need a few good men to tell women what to do oh you know I think the obvious answer is both but you know where does most of the fault lie critical critical good men's scarcity yeah so I think what they're getting at that's this absolutely true it's like it's just there's infinite buyers and sellers for anything that you want to buy or sell and so there's no point at which you know an attractive 22 year old girl does not find someone willing to put up with her nonsense like because there's just an infinite supply of men and you know conversely if if if you sort of are a man who's got

55:06a lot going for him there's an infinite supply of women to defect against and it's just there's no that's it's this weightless there's no consequences for any of it and it's impossible to impose consequences at this scale so so yeah I mean they're kind of right I anything were like you know a hundred million people have suddenly started behaving badly I have a hard time defaulting to like oh all hundred million of them like got worse for all of it like what was China inherently a dictatorial opium or was there an effort you know to perhaps encourage you know that behavior right yeah there's like something else going on Sean Wyland says always good to hear positional goods Fred Hirsch be referenced in this regard likewise I keep going on about a post materialism Ronald Englehart and illusions of post-industrial society Sean has many

56:11references there some which I recognize somebody don't any thoughts about that uh yeah I mean it well I guess what he's getting at I'm not familiar with him either but I guess what he's getting at is like there will always be something to compete over like there's not there's no such thing as post-scarcity because some things are inherently scares right good things come in force like ukulele strings boy band members oh yeah and paypal payin for no fees no interest no impact on your credit score just the flexibility to pay the way that works for you strum it hum it pay it in four download the paypal app to get started subject to approval learn more at paypal.com sash payin for paypaling NMLS 910457 uh Nixon says Islam is right about women no Christianity is right about women and as christian turned into the west we are paying the price for secularism yeah there's nothing inherently weak about Christianity when it comes to the role of women or how a

57:15society should be constructive guys sorry to break that too uh you know any one of these societies uh as soon as they get cracked open by a bandurna and he has the same problem I'm trying to remember uh that engineer guy on twitter uh who was talking about Christianity and how it failed society devin something or other uh like the guy in general he makes a lot of good points but I think I think he just has this incredibly wrong like sorry but this is a modernity problem not a Christianity problem uh and and it doesn't get any better when you look at any other religion it's just a universal solvent like it's not yes has nothing to do with that Nixon also says of the last five emin I went to dates with three himded at straight up ask for money to cover various bills I doubt this is a unique experience that is kind of an incredible thing you know it's it it's very funny that before uh obviously when marriage was kind of the implicit social norm uh you know we had all these feminists talking about uh how basically a woman was

58:18slaved her husband because she was dependent on him and basically this was like transactional but we just wouldn't agree with it or we wouldn't say that loud and now the thing that's actually occurred is not like well women get you know liberalized that they they're uh you know freed from these bonds and they become self-sufficient now they just become explicit more explicit about the transactional nature of the interaction it becomes even more craft it's kind of amazing thing to behold yeah I mean I and again it's like if if there's no expectation that there will be a long term relationship if there's no there's nothing holding that together and and requiring you to well like and things things can bind you and also liberate you right like if if uh if you know that everyone shares a common expectation then you are liberated to to follow that expectation and it's uh yeah that's that's the mole-lock trap that's what you're observing and Sean says when

59:22women take uh provisioning and protection for granted men will drop out of those roles like Atlas Shrug men are quietly going on strike uh but at the end of the day right it's kind of your assertion Kevin that it's the man that don't go on strike that will probably you know be on the other side of this right or at least I guess uh require a higher perhaps a higher level of commitment before providing those uh you know those things but ultimately we'll have to continue to provide them for society to function yeah I mean you you just have to find a counter party that you can work with like uh yeah I do think a lot of guys are checking out and I think it's really that's really unfortunate for everybody involved it's not like it's not like a viable long-term strategy for anybody right right like you can't like that's not gonna work but I get what people are doing it yeah it's the same you know it's the old uh what if women went on strike tomorrow thing the feminists are always doing right like well and then you know then you would all

1:00:24recognize how much you miss it like no that never works and it's not gonna work the other direction especially since there's literally no sympathy for men at least where women you know their tears mean something sorry guys but uh you know the the tears of men mean absolutely nothing like it will it will never get you anything don't let anyone lie to you about that negative value actually yeah actually uh Nixon says this happens on the first date don't even know them yeah man that's that's wild uh that is an incredible uh yeah the dating market is as bad as everyone says it is there's just there's no arguing with that one all right Kevin well once again it's been fantastic speaking with you everybody should go read his article it is very good and you can actually just listen to it on sub-sac which I'm very glad you did that you know it's at this point it's mandatory if you're gonna write an article of that size you have to let people be able to listen to it we got things to do man we got things to do uh that's though if it's your first time on this channel uh please go ahead and click subscribe bell notifications all that stuff so you know when we go live if you want to get these podcasts as podcasts you need to subscribe to our Mac and Tire Show on

1:01:26your favorite podcast platform thanks everybody for watching and as always I'll talk to you next time