The event: https://passage.press/products/steve-sailer-in-chicago-salon-event

A close friend: I have only a few people I consider close friends. These are people I talk to on discord a lot, have a phone number of, and would consider traveling with or have traveled with.

Here are the close friends I have made in the last four years:

I made one new close friend recently at Manifest.

Another close friend I made was from a philosophy meetup in SF.

A third I made at a hackathon at MIT.

A fourth I made at a Crypto hackathon in Chiang Mai.

My thesis is that I will not make a new close friend, because aside from Nick Land stuff, Passage Press seems to be more focused on economics than technology. Most of my friends are into technology and a bit of philosophy. Though all of them are also knowledgeable about history and economics, I think the venue being in Chicago as well implies it is going to be a less tech heavy crowd.

That said, I do have a lot of overlapping interests with the brash free speech say what you want "Out of the Longhouse" conservative/rw crowd. My theory is that they will be too partisan for me and not technologically/scientifically rigorous enough though to really be my new close friends. Interesting datapoint to consider on that topic is that I attend AI conferences as so far have only ever made one close friend from those. So maybe purely technical crowds aren't my thing either.