Interview: Kevin Dolan

Kevin Dolan AKA Bennett's Phylactery joins me to discuss the drive for sovereignty as a generational project, building parallel institutions with the EXIT group, doxxing and digital resilience, the perils of modernity, the limits of incentives in shaping human behavior, the existential crisis of demographic collapse, the Natal Conference, the social cost of depopulation, Korea’s demographic time bomb, fertility as a lagging KPI, IQ Shredders, the absurdity of treating people like meat robots, cultural survival in an era of decline, the challenge of scaling without losing coherence, the delicate nature of reproduction, pandas and human mating habits, the intersection of tech and tradition in reversing demographic decline, and more.

Excerpts

On wanting sovereignty

“And we realized that what we were really , what we were really about, the reason that we were insisting on, running our mouths on the internet and refusing to do these things. The thing that was behind that was that we want to have grandkids, that we want to instill our values into our kids to have sovereignty over our families. Because we saw the acid of modernity just eating anything that was not, anything that was not protected that had no defenses... “ 

On the Risks of Depopulation

“ And what that cashes out to is that basically the Koreans, there's gonna be four great grandchildren for every hundred Koreans. It's that's essentially the extinction of a coherent Korean culture.”

“ It's not it's not like population growth in reverse where it's oh, the economy slows down a little bit or it gets a little bit harder. It's it's like the thing flips upside down. It, it stops working fundamentally.”

On Pandas, Human Fertility, Meat Robots and Incentives

 “I think that is very instructive in terms of the comparison that I've drawn. is to like, the pandas. If the pandas are not having sex, and you say I know what we'll do, we'll hook them up to electrodes and every time they fail to mate, we're gonna zap them with these electrodes, or we're gonna dump some if they, if he tries to go mount the female we'll dump some kibble on him.”

And it's that kind of crude incentive system just really fails to understand the dynamics of why people do things and we are not meat robots that can be incentivized that way. And we in particular sex and reproduction is like this. It's very delicate and very open process. It's this thing where you have to get loose, get pre rational, get a little crazy and a little drunk. And to, to get people to do that for some money or like for these really pecuniary pedestrian reasons I think just completely misunderstands human nature.”

On KPIs

 Do we know if EXIT is doing what it should be doing? Is it fertility? Is it kids? I think it's grandkids because grandkids, and that's a terrible KPI, right, because you don't know, it's not in your hands, right? It's in your kid's hands, but yeah you don't know if what you did worked until 20 years later.”

Links

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Natal Conference

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