It’s not despair, but pessimism has been hanging into the air as a “right to technology” and tackled challenges that could potentially sink civilization.
Austin, Texas – Questions continued: Was the Natal Conference 2025 a “technical rights” event? Brian Chau sounded skeptical.
“We were hoping to see more tech right people here,” Chau, founder of the open source AI think tank, told Epoch Times. He did not see celebrities from A16Z or other high-tech companies related to American rights.
Demographic scientist Clemieux Lecoille, who said “it was related to high-tech rights,” said they were thinner on the ground than heretics.
Hosted by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Heretion said, “I charged myself as a destination for engineers, entrepreneurs and creative dissidents of all sorts.
“There are more religious people here,” Recueil, who uses the pseudonym, told the Epoch Times. He described himself as “completely atheistic.”
According to organizers, the second Natal conference attracted 200 participants. They said Thiel did not fund the event in late March.
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In addition to more secular technical rights, there were Catholics, Protestants, Latter-day Saints and other people of faith. Traditionists formed a second, sometimes overlapping faction among people concerned about declining birth rates around the world.
Religion is generally more resistant to trends than secularism. One notable exception, the secular Jews of Israel have on average around two children per woman, but have appeared repeatedly.
Charles, a Bay Area software engineer who calls both tech rights and traditionalist Catholics himself, acknowledged the conflict between camps.
“There’s definitely a common ground,” Charles, who doesn’t want to use his last name, told The Epoch Times.
Andy, who doesn’t want to use his last name, said he felt uncomfortable with the fertilization of vitro, a practice that some people advocated at conferences during the Epoch era.
He said, “Everyone is here, not everyone thinks about it, fights, not call each other’s names, not throwing stones, but.”
Atheist political commentator Carl Benjamin said he welcomed people with “a very Christian perspective on why you should have children.”
“It would be better if more people were Christians,” Benjamin, also known as the Sargon of Akkad, told the Epoch Times.
At the opening dinner, entrepreneur and classicist Alex Petkas declared that he “sees a crowd of future peers.”
Speaking that night, Steve Tarly mentioned Nikolai Fiodorov, a 19th century Russian.
Thematically, it wasn’t too far from Malcolm and Simone Collins’ coffee table talk.
Self-proclaimed high-tech elites predict that the world will be much more confusing after the population declines. They believe in something very fertile, but they believe that the high-tech shy group is competing.
“If you don’t have both technology mastery and a very strong religion of intergenerational durability, your fertility rate will collapse and disappear, so you’ll be literally not there or exist in the world, but you’ll be attacked by a pack of drones of people with high tech and you’ll lose your farm.
Rajiv Khan, who considers it part of the technology rights, told the Epoch Times that he missed a deep connection to the heartbeat, focusing on whether or not he is focusing on Austin.
“Eron is a pronatalist. That’s all that is necessary,” the genetics writer said of Elon Musk, now a senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
On March 28, the same day the meeting began, Musk told Fox News’ Bret Baier that the global low birth rates had deeply troubled him.
“Unless that changes, civilization disappears,” he said.
Organizers of the Natal Conference said Musk did not help fund the event.
Children’s challenge
Pessimism, although not despair, was evident from the right-wing of traditionalists and engineers.
Some attendees brought children, but more than a third of the conference participants were single. Those who wanted it, those who knew they were available were wearing yellow wristbands.
The bright bands showed both optimism in conference settings and the harsh demographic realities unfolding in the line of individual lives and family. Many in the modern world don’t want to have a family. Some people can’t make that happen.
People at the conference admitted that against the decline in fertility rates – if any, there are few cases where they have done nothing. Even the ancient Romans once sought to overcome the same challenges through Natalist policies.
So far, measures to lower fertility rates, like China’s previous child policy, have been more successful than attempts to raise it, such as the three child policies introduced by the Chinese Communist regime in 2021.
“It’s very easy to reduce the number of kids you have,” Recueil said. “On the other hand, it will be much more difficult to increase life, joy, wonder, and wonderful things in the world.”
Recueil used statistics to argue that the policy of awarding medals to Mongolian mothers has not supported fertility rates.
Catherine Pacalk, a professor at the American Catholic University, compared children to horses today at the birth of the car.
She said technology replaced many of the jobs children once did around the home, and took over much of the care the welfare state used to provide parents, making birth control less likely to bring sex to children.
“Do people have independent needs for their children apart from the obvious biological needs of mating? Just looking at today’s data may answer negatively,” she said.
Like others from a more traditionalist aspect, she sought answers to individual virtues and religious piety rather than economic incentives.
Another speaker, Robin Hanson, had a different perspective. The slight or uncertain outcome of some Natalist movements, such as the Hungarian tax credit for families with children, should not prove that economic incentives are destined to fail.
“Money works in the right amount,” a professor of economics at George Mason University told the Epoch Times. “If your life is worth it enough to pay it, you pay your parents well.”
His favorite number is $300,000, the bottom of the unsubsidized government debt per capita. The economist said an average of $300,000 per child is “actually fertile.”
The 2025 Economy Strobin Hanson was held in Austin, Texas on March 29, 2025. Nathan Worster/Epoch Times
Malcolm Collins said the financial incentives for having children should be directed towards the middle class.
“The only reason we don’t promote it directly is that we understand that anything that costs money is difficult for now,” added Simone Collins.
The US’s six-month budget deficit is currently at $1.5 trillion, higher than any point since early 2021.
Another speaker, Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, told the Epoch Times, “We don’t pay a way out of it,” and told the birth crisis began with the sexual revolution of the 1960s. But economics was involved in the incident he created.
In his conference speech, he advocated “extreme financial support” for family formation, describing it as more important than capital formation.
“We give businesses all these tax deductions, and we have to give more to families,” he told The Epoch Times. “Forget your ability to increase birth rates and marriage. What about justice?”
Shilling dismissed the consequences of economic globalism in Quad City, his rusted belt home lawn, and stated that the loss of a job in the industry that pays a good salary is a force on fertility, along with sports betting and porn.
“The casino gambling machines are in every major restaurant,” he said. “One of our biggest employers right now is our local clinic.”
“We are in a mental crisis.”
Even among speakers there was no consensus that there was less births, a problem that required a solution.
Jonathan Keeperman, a publisher known online as Romes, opposed Natalism.
“Let me state for the record that I believe in the goodness of humanity’s continued existence,” Kiekiman said in his speech.
The Keeperman then flocked to attendees and speakers in the nearby hall, many of whom wanted to challenge him.
Charles Cornish-Dale, a health and fitness influencer written under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, told the times that people should get used to the idea of declining population.
“I don’t think that’s a bad thing,” he said, stressing that he doesn’t support efforts to reduce fertility. “Having a child – that’s great.”
Cornish-Dale gained fame online by linking fertility issues to obesity and toxic chemicals. At this Natal conference, he traced the challenges of infertility into something that is difficult to solve more deeply.
“We’re in a mental crisis,” he said. “We have created this kind of material and spiritual prison for ourselves. We have no conditions that allow us to fully express ourselves as biological creatures, and part of our biological being is that spiritual element.”
A purely economic approach “overlooks something,” he said.
Benjamin also gestured at something beyond economics.
“What I think a lot of young people are afraid of is that somewhere in the gut, if they become parents, they can feel that their old selves must die,” he said.
The political bend of the rally, which prompted negative coverage from some media, has also raised questions on the ground.
“You can either look for a political alliance that is fundamentally promoted and support it, or see fertility as a way to strengthen or support a political alliance,” Hanson said.
“Their initial loyalty was political,” he said of the speakers on the first night, including Petkas, Tahli, Schilling and political commentator Jacques Posoviek.
Organizers said that part of the left had contacted the meeting, but no one tried to speak or sponsor the event.
“We’re happy to interface and discuss this with all sorts of people,” the organizers said.
In his speech to Natalism, Keekerman begged the audience, who were mainly alongside him for politics, in order to distance them from understanding people have children.
“Politics has an inherently destructive nature,” he said.
For a confident Natalist, the interests are high. Winning is not guaranteed in politics, not to mention wars for humanity.
“The point of this meeting is, “We’re here to replace you and discuss between ourselves what happens afterwards,” Malcolm Collins told the Epoch Times.
“I don’t mean it’s a threat. I mean it as a fact,” he added. “You will have a child or be replaced.”
