Silicon Valley elites are quietly appointing themselves ancestors of the longer term.
As American fertility charges proceed to hit file lows — effectively beneath the “replacement rate” from one era to the following — the pronatalism motion has discovered a foothold within the tech world.
Elon Musk — who apparently now has 13 kids — has overtly endorsed the motion, which believes in pumping out infants to struggle societal collapse. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman has mentioned, “Of course I’m going to have a big family” and is investing in experimental fertility expertise.
Based on Malcolm Collins, an outspoken proponent of pronatalism, much more moguls are quietly expressing their assist behind the closed doorways of personal conferences and investor conferences.
Coinbase and Andreessen Horowitz alum Balaji Srinivasan is likely one of the tech titans who will communicate at March’s NatalCon in Austin, the place tickets go for $1,000 every.
“The people who are willing to make the sacrifices and engage with [the movement] seriously are going to be the people who write the future of humanity,” Collins, a Stanford-educated former enterprise capitalist, advised The Submit.
He estimates at the very least half of pronatalists are within the tech world.
Collins, 38, and his spouse Simone, 37, are the mother and father to 4 kids below 5 and plan to have as many youngsters as nature will enable to save lots of mankind. They consider that collapsing beginning charges foretell financial stagnation, a pressure on social providers and general cultural deterioration — and that futuristic fertility tech is the trail to salvation.
They’ve devoted their lives to ringing the alarm bells on inhabitants collapse with their “Based Camp” podcast, 5 co-authored books and The Pragmatist Basis, which they co-founded as a useful resource for details about surrogacy, reproductive expertise and childcare.
The couple met in 2012 in San Francisco whereas Malcolm was pursuing his Stanford MBA. Simone, who holds a grasp’s diploma in expertise coverage from Cambridge, mentioned she by no means needed a household.
“I, having grown up in the San Francisco Bay Area, obviously never wanted to have kids, but instead wanted to start a company and live alone forever,” defined Simone, who talked to The Submit whereas strolling on a treadmill with a child on her again.
Her outlook modified when Malcolm took a stint working at a VC agency in South Korea, the place, he defined, the financial system was “a house of cards about to collapse.”
South Korea declared inhabitants decline a nationwide emergency final 12 months, because it’s projected there can be solely 4 grandchildren for each 100 Koreans alive at the moment. President Yoon Suk Yeol has provided prolonged parental depart and supplied housing stipends to households with newborns.
In the meantime, in Japan, an getting old populace is straining social advantages and elder care infrastructure. The variety of senior residents has quadrupled because the ’70s, whereas the proportion of kids was lower in half.
Malcolm grew to become anxious that the West was not lengthy behind: At 1.6 births per girl, the US is effectively beneath the alternative fee of two.1 kids per girl required to maintain the inhabitants stage.
After failed makes an attempt to conceive naturally, the Collinses drained their financial savings on IVF in 2017.
“It’s so heartbreakingly expensive to create embryos that we lived on a mattress on the floor of a studio,” Malcolm recalled. “People say, ‘I don’t have the money to have kids.’ What they really mean is, ‘I don’t want to sacrifice my quality of life.’”
Simone’s no-kids POV has shifted dramatically. “Putting short-term comforts, like more trips, more vacations, a nicer place to live, nicer food, over the prospect of bringing a human life into the world with their full range of experiences is just ridiculous,” she mentioned.
The couple, who lives in rural Valley Forge, Penn., initially deliberate on 5 to seven youngsters, however now they need a “significantly larger” household to affix Octavian George, 5; Torsten Savage, 3; Titan Invictus, 2; and Trade Americus, 1.
“[Kids] get much easier when you get into higher numbers,” Malcolm mentioned. “You can begin to industrialize the child-rearing process… It’s like a factory farm of kids.”
All of their kids put on the very same clothes, organized in baskets based mostly on age. The presents below the household’s Christmas tree are hand-me-downs from older siblings.
“Everyone [else] is doing parenting on hard mode with one or two kids,” Malcom mentioned.
George Mason College economics professor Robin Hanson agrees inhabitants collapse is a looming emergency and warns that fertility decline might upend the financial system and trigger innovation to sluggish.
“Innovation is the central part of the modern economy, where every generation has more wealth and more technology,” he advised The Submit. “It’s a pretty dramatic idea that subsequent lives wouldn’t be substantially better than previous ones.”
That’s a priority that appears to significantly resonate with innovators like Musk, who tweeted in 2022 that “population collapse due to low birth rates is a much bigger risk to civilization than global warming.”
He has additionally shared footage of NatalCon, the annual pronatalist convention, to his a whole lot of tens of millions of X followers.
Malcolm and Simone Collins are anticipated to talk at NatalCon 2025 in March, alongside Srinivasan, lecturers, and influencers like Uncooked Egg Nationalist.
Convention founder Kevin Dolan advised The Submit he takes nice care to steadiness the gender of audio system however notes that 4 of his feminine presenters dropped out final 12 months to offer beginning.
It’s even turn into a little bit of a singles scene, Dolan mentioned, with aspirational mother and father coupling up. Lillian, the previous 22-year-old director of The Pragmatist Basis, attended final 12 months however didn’t discover a accomplice.
“The natural female intuition is to want children,” Lillian, who requested to withhold her final identify for privateness causes, advised The Submit. “I’m only unusual in that I’ve pulled out of a pathological modern environment that artificially suppresses women’s desire to have lots of children.”
A self-described nomad bouncing between Boston, Austin, San Francisco and Washington, DC, she found the pronatalist motion on-line whereas learning schooling at Harvard.
“If people don’t even think that having children is a good thing to begin with, I think that’s a very, very bad sign for the state of American culture,” Lillian mentioned.
Barely half of younger folks aged 18 to 34 plan to have kids, and 35% of those that don’t cite local weather change as their cause. “The doomerism is quite bad,” Lillian lamented.
Because the pronatalist motion grows, the Collinses have turn into lightning rods of controversy. The couple was criticized on-line after Malcolm reportedly slapped their 2-year-old son throughout an interview with the Guardian in Could.
He later defended himself, saying, “We lightly “bop” the children to reorient them and present a boundary has been crossed.”
Their motion has additionally been accused of flirting with eugenics. Simone and Malcolm implanted their fifth youngster by way of IVF in January, after deciding on the embryo by sending DNA to a number of startups together with the Altman-funded Genomic Prediction, that display for predisposition to ailments like Alzheimer’s and most cancers — which runs in Simone’s household — in addition to psychological well being situations like schizophrenia and melancholy.
“I love it when people come to me, and they’re like, ‘You’re genociding depressed people,’” Malcolm mentioned. “I don’t think I’ve ever met a depressed person who was like, ‘I want more people to have depression, like this is an awesome thing.’”
Additionally they bought details about their kids’s predisposition to traits like mind fog, potential to cope with stress and intelligence.
“People find that very spicy,” Malcolm mentioned. “They ask, ‘Why would you pay to make your kids smarter?’ And I’m like, ‘Why do you pay for your kid to go to SAT prep?’”
Fertility is turning into a pet challenge in Silicon Valley. Some $874 million was invested in fertility-related startups in 2023 alone.
Alife, an IVF device that makes use of synthetic intelligence to pick embryos for implantation, raised $22 million. In the meantime, EctoLife plans to gestate infants utilizing synthetic wombs. An AI-generated promotional video depicts a whole lot of infants rising in capsules in a warehouse.
Sam Altman, CEO of OpenAI, invested in Conception, a startup working to make egg cells out of different cells within the physique, which means {that a} girl with out viable eggs and even two males might make a child.
Skype co-founder Jaan Tallinn, a father of six, even donated virtually half 1,000,000 {dollars} to the Collinses’ charity by a donor-advised fund.
“[Pronatalism] requires you to look at the data and break from social norms, which is what Silicon Valley people love doing more than anything else,” Malcolm defined. “You almost couldn’t have anything better created for them. They get to say something that’s true by the data but also shocks other people in the room.”
The Collinses are so devoted to their technology-forward imaginative and prescient that it’s turn into a faith to them — actually.
The couple expound Techno-Puritanism, a religion they invented and formally registered with the IRS this 12 months. A secular, Judeo-Christian denomination that additionally attracts on Muslim, Mormon, and Zoroastrian traditions, Techno-Puritanism has “at its core … a mandate for intergenerational improvement.”
They’ve additionally made a promise to devoted followers — lots of them childless, male techno-optimists: identify the Pragmatist Basis as a beneficiary in your will, and your genes can be preserved for posterity.
“We will take a full genome sequence of you … and put it in the founding formation of whatever we end up creating as a society,” Malcolm mentioned in a latest podcast episode. “If we’re successful, maybe one day in the near future, people will be using that, either to create humans or to create people in AI environments.”
They usually’re already orchestrating the following era of pronatalists by creating an “index” of pronatalist households who need their kids thus far and procreate with one another.
Their motion may nonetheless be small, however Malcolm believes he and Simone could possibly be the techno Adam and Eve.
“If Simone and I had eight kids, and we built an intergenerational culture… for just eleven generations,” he mentioned, “we would have more descendants than there are humans on Earth today.”
