AUSTIN, Texas—The second Natal Conference attracted 200 attendees interested in addressing declining birth rates, according to organizers. But that unifying factor was matched by areas of disagreement.
People of faith and more secular figures from the tech world discussed one of the hardest problems a civilization can face, with at least one speaker arguing against the very premise of the conference.
Some attendees said they thought that Natal Conference 2025, held March 28–29, would be more of a “tech right” event.
“I expected to see more tech right people here,” Brian Chau, founder of an open-source AI think tank, told The Epoch Times. He said he didn’t see big names from venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz or other tech firms associated with the American right.
“There are more religious people here,” said Crémieux Recueil, a demographer who said he had “been linked to the tech right” and uses a pseudonym.
Describing himself as “completely atheistic,” Recueil told The Epoch Times that the tech right crowd was thinner on the ground than at Hereticon.
Organized by Peter Thiel’s Founders Fund, Hereticon billed itself as a destination for “technologists, entrepreneurs, and every manner of creative dissident.”
Natal Conference organizers said Thiel did not help fund the Austin event.
Alongside the more secular tech right, there were Catholics, Protestants, Latter-Day Saints (also known as Mormons), and other people of faith. The traditionalists formed a second and, at times, overlapping faction among those concerned about falling birth rates across the world.
The religious are generally more resistant to the falling birth rate trend than the irreligious. One notable exception—secular Jews in Israel, who on average have about two children per woman—came up repeatedly.
Charles, a Bay Area software engineer who calls himself both tech right and traditionalist Catholic, acknowledged both the conflict and concord between the camps.
“There’s definitely common ground,” Charles, who did not wish to use his last name, told The Epoch Times.
Andy, who also did not want his last name used, told The Epoch Times that he was uncomfortable with in-vitro fertilization, a practice advocated by some at the conference.
He said he was glad “that everybody’s here to civilly think about it and not fight, not call each other names, not throw stones.”
Political commentator Carl Benjamin, an atheist, said he welcomed those with “a very Christian perspective on why you should have kids.”
“It would be better if more people were Christian,” Benjamin, also known as Sargon of Akkad, told The Epoch Times.
At the opening dinner, entrepreneur and classicist Alex Petkas declared that he was “looking out at a crowd of fellow futurists.”
Social theorist Steve Turley, who also spoke that evening, mentioned Nikolai Fyodorov, a 19th-century Russian whose thought blended science, philosophy, and religion—a bridge of sorts between trad and tech.
Thematically, it was not so far afield from the coffee table talk of Malcolm and Simone Collins, a prominent pronatalist couple.
The Collinses predict that the world will be much more chaotic as populations dwindle. They believe that highly fertile but tech-shy groups will be outcompeted.
“If you don’t have both mastery of tech and a very strong religion that’s inter-generationally durable, you either literally won’t be there because your fertility rate will collapse and you’ll disappear, or you will exist in the world, but you’ll be attacked by the drone swarms of the people who have tech, and you’ll lose your farm,” Simone Collins told The Epoch Times.
Razib Khan, who considers himself part of the tech right, told The Epoch Times that focusing on who was or wasn’t at the Austin event missed a deep point of connection with its beating heart.
“Elon is a pronatalist. That’s all you need,” the genetics writer said of Elon Musk, who is currently a senior adviser to President Donald Trump.
On March 28, the same day that the conference began, Musk told Fox News’s Bret Baier that low birth rates across the planet deeply troubled him.
“Unless that changes, civilization will disappear,” he said.
Challenge of No Children
Pessimism, though not despair, was evident from traditionalists and tech rightists alike.While some attendees brought their children, more than one-third of conference attendees were single. Those who wanted it known that they were available wore yellow wristbands.
The bright bands signaled both optimism in the conference environment and recognition of a grim demographic reality playing out in individual lives and family lines. Many in the modern world don’t want to have families. Some who do can’t make it happen.
Those at the conference acknowledged that there are few—if any—good answers to declining birth rates. Even the ancient Romans once tried and failed to overcome the same challenge through pronatalist policies.
So far, measures to lower fertility—like China’s former one-child policy—have been more successful than attempts to raise it, such as the three-child policy introduced in 2021 by the Chinese communist regime.
“It’s very easy to reduce the number of kids you have,” Recueil said. “Whereas pronatalism—increasing the amount of life and joy and wonder and great things in the world—is going to be a lot more difficult.”
Recueil presented statistics to argue that Mongolia’s policy of awarding medals to mothers has not boosted birth rates. Many pronatalists have celebrated that policy.
Catherine Pakaluk, a Catholic University of America professor, likened children today to horses at the birth of the automobile.
She said technology has replaced much of the work that children once did around the house, the welfare state has taken over much of the care that adult children used to provide their parents, and birth control has made sex less likely to result in children at all.
“Do people have an independent need for children apart from the obvious biological need to mate? We might answer in the negative, just looking at the data today,” she said.
Like others from the more traditionalist side, she sought answers in individual virtue and religious faith rather than economic incentives.
Another speaker, Robin Hanson, had a different perspective. Meager or unclear results of some natalist moves, such as Hungary’s tax breaks for families with children, do not prove that financial incentives are doomed to fail.
“Money will work in the right quantities,” the George Mason University economics professor told The Epoch Times. “If your life is worth enough to pay for it, then you pay your parents enough.”
The figure that he likes is $300,000, the bottom range of unfunded government liabilities per person. An average of $300,000 per child “would actually move the needle on fertility,” the economist said.
Malcolm Collins said economic incentives for having kids should be geared toward the middle class.
“The only reason that we aren’t promoting it directly is we understand that anything that costs money right now is tough,” Simone Collins added.
The U.S. six-month budget deficit is now $1.5 trillion, higher than at any point since early 2021.
Another speaker, Terry Schilling of the American Principles Project, told The Epoch Times, “We’re not going to pay our way out of this.” The fertility crisis began with the 1960s sexual revolution, he said. But economics played a part in the case that he made.
In his conference speech, he argued for “extreme economic support” for family formation, describing it as more important than capital formation.
“We give all these tax breaks to corporations. We have to give families more,” he told The Epoch Times. “Forget the ability to increase birth rates and marriages. What about justice?”
Schilling decried the results of economic globalism on his Rust Belt home turf, the Quad Cities metropolitan area that bestrides Illinois and Iowa, saying that the loss of good-paying industrial jobs was, along with sports betting and pornography, a force against fertility.
‘We’re in a Spiritual Crisis’
Even among the speakers, there was not a consensus that fewer births are a problem in need of a solution.Publisher Jonathan Keeperman, known online as Lomez, argued against pronatalism.
“Let me state for the record that I believe in the goodness of the ongoing existence of the human race,” he said in his speech.
Afterward, Keeperman was swarmed by attendees and speakers in a nearby hall, many of whom wanted to challenge him.
Charles Cornish-Dale, a health and fitness influencer who has written under the pseudonym Raw Egg Nationalist, told The Epoch Times that people should get used to the idea of population decline.
“I don’t think it will be a bad thing,” he said while stressing that he doesn’t support efforts to reduce birth rates. “Having children—it’s a great thing.”
Cornish-Dale gained fame online for linking fertility problems to obesity and toxic chemicals. At this Natal Conference, he traced the fertility challenge to something deeper and harder to solve.
“We’re in a spiritual crisis,” he said. “We’ve created this kind of material and spiritual prison for ourselves, devoid of the conditions that allow us to express ourselves fully as biological creatures. And part of our biological being is that spiritual element.”
A purely economic approach “misses something,” he said.
Benjamin, too, gestured at something beyond economics.
“What I think a lot of young people are afraid of is that in their gut somewhere, that can feel that if they were to become a parent, then their old self has to die,” he said.
The political bent of the gathering, which inspired negative coverage from some media, also raised questions on the ground.
“You could be fundamentally pro-fertility and then looking for political allies to support that, or you could be fundamentally political and then looking at fertility as a way to reinforce or support your political coalition,” Hanson said.
“Their first allegiance was political,” he said of the first night’s speakers, who included Petkas, Turley, Schilling, and political commentator Jack Posobiec.
An organizer said that some on the political left had contacted the conference, although none sought to speak or sponsor the event.
“We are glad to interface and discuss this with all sorts of people,” the organizer said.
In his speech against natalism, Keeperman pleaded with an audience mostly aligned with him on politics to keep politics away from how people make sense of having kids.
“Politics has an inherently destructive nature,” he said.
For convinced natalists, the stakes are high. Victory is not assured in politics, let alone in a war for humanity.
“The point of this conference is, ‘We will replace you, and we’re here to discuss amongst ourselves what happens after that,’” Malcolm Collins told The Epoch Times.
“We don’t mean that as a threat. We mean that as a fact.
“Either start having kids or be replaced.”
