Tate Brown critiques President Trump's proposed federal fertility benefits, warning that financial incentives like Hungary's may incentivize lower-income groups rather than the middle class. He argues dating apps create a "buyer's market" for women, driving down marriage rates and birth totals despite industrialization or feminism being insufficient causes. While predicting a demographic shift where conservative Americans increase as liberals are "bred out of existence," Brown suggests AI will backfill labor shortages, allowing infrastructure built for 220 million people to suffice for a smaller population. [Automatically generated summary]
We're having a bit of a technical issue again, but we've gotten it all sorted.
We are ready to get this show on the road for this wonderful week of news.
I'm your host, Tate Brown, here holding it down back for you on this beautiful Monday morning.
We are here.
Actually, I don't even need the cans right now.
I don't know why I had those on.
Back on this beautiful Monday morning.
I don't know what's going on.
It's a cold snap.
It's like 50 degrees in May.
I mean, hello.
Like, what's going on here?
Absolutely unbelievable.
But we have some interesting stories to get into.
I mean, look, full disclosure.
News has been pretty slow.
It was slow on Thursday and it was slow today.
I think people are just bored.
I think that's why people are talking about aliens a lot and that sort of thing.
Every time aliens come up in the news, I just assume, oh man, people must be bored.
That's what I would assume.
So, with that, we do have some massive stories for you guys.
Let's see here.
Yes.
Okay.
Let me get this swapped out real quick.
Sorry.
Just some last minute housekeeping.
Yeah, so big stories for you guys today.
Obviously, the lead you probably saw in the title.
Trump is dropping a new fertility program.
Now, this is something that a lot of the pronatalists, you know, people that are very concerned over the birth rate, which is probably everyone at this point, have proposed that, you know, the United States government needs to get active.
They need to start moving or skating to where the puck is going on fertility.
And so Trump has proposed this entire overhaul, really, of the sort of relationship between the federal government and healthcare providers in regards to fertility programs.
They want to partner.
And effectively give Americans much more options when it comes to fertility treatments.
You know, the way our healthcare system, everything is through the private sector, obviously, but the government can sort of create incentives for these companies, for these employers to provide these fertility benefits.
Now, I have some skepticism.
I'm not going to lie.
I have some skepticism, and I want you guys to hear me out.
I think at this point, I'm glad you guys are probably familiar, or at least have heard, that Hungary, Poland, Japan, South Korea, some countries with alarmingly low.
TFRs have pursued sort of these fertility programs, and I'm skeptical that it's even really moved the needle in a meaningful way.
So, this is why I'm inherently skeptical.
And I think in a country like the United States, it could actually have a negative impact again if we start to promote these things.
So, this is why I think this specific angle from President Trump is actually the smart one to make because look, the sort of consensus thus far has been let's just pay people to have kids.
And I'll get into why that is a bad idea and why Trump's proposal is better.
In short, so we have a few more stories we'll get to.
Um, I obviously want to talk about you know, me, I like to talk about what's happening over in Britain.
Um, it's kind of a staple in the show.
I would say half the audience loves that I do that, and the other half of the audience is uh really annoyed and rolls their eyes.
But I think I really do maintain the position that look, whatever happens over there does have you know, sort of demo, you know, some effects on our political zeitgeist.
I'll put it that way.
So we'll get into the big shakeup, the big political earthquake that happened there over the weekend.
In their council elections, local elections, which has kind of turned into the British analog for midterms.
I do think our societies, our civilizations are linked in some way.
Case in point, Brexit preceded the Trump win.
So every time there's kind of this upswell there, typically follows suit in the United States.
So we'll get into that.
A few more stories we'll get into if we have time.
And I'll play it kind of fast and loose in the second half of the show.
We do not have a guest as it stands.
So we have all sorts of things we can get into as the show.
Progresses.
But before we get into everything, I want to play a quick word from today's sponsor.
And thank you very much to PDS Debt for sponsoring this show.
We love PDS Debt.
They're a fantastic partner to have here at Timcast.
With that, we're going to get into our first story.
This one's quite interesting.
There's a lot to talk about here, so we're going to get into it.
From Nick Sortor, the great Nick Sortor, we love him, friend of the show, total patriot.
He put up a clip here, and here was the copy he attached to this clip.
President Trump announced his admin will be creating a fertility benefit option.
For employers to offer outside of normal health care plans.
Quote, this will be a major help for millions of American moms and results in more beautiful American babies.
More babies, folks.
It's so true.
Now, if you recall about nine months ago, President Trump was sort of laying into America's youth and he was saying, Look, America 250 is coming up.
I want to see a lot of America 250 babies.
Obviously, I did not act on that considering I'm not married.
It just seems like, Look, I love President Trump.
I'm loyal to President Trump, loyal to this country.
I love this country very deeply, but I just was not willing to.
Have a child out of wedlock in order to advance the cause.
I just felt like that might be counterproductive.
So I did not hold up sort of my responsibility that President Trump sort of called on all of us to do, which is to sort of repopulate because we may need to populate Mars or something.
I'm not entirely sure what we're going to do with all the America 250 babies, but exciting nonetheless.
Anyway, President Trump, here's the clip from President Trump discussing this.
This is some pretty interesting stuff.
This is why I wanted to get into all this because this is a broader sort of almost philosophical, sociological discussion.
Most health care plans do not cover these benefits, but today I'm pleased to announce that the Department of Labor is issuing a new rule to formally create a fertility benefit option for employers that can be offered to all employees outside of their normal health insurance plans.
But this will be supplemental option available to those who need it, much like vision or dental insurance.
so we're bringing it right down into the mainstream.
By offering coverage for care at every step, the fertility journey is a very interesting one, very complex it was, and we're making it much simpler.
This will hopefully reduce the number of couples who ultimately need to resort to IVF because challenges can be identified and addressed very early in the process.
This is a new benefit.
This is a benefit that so many people have called me about.
I mean, it's incredible.
Oz and Bobby, I can tell you we speak about it a lot.
So many people have called me about we have to do this.
They've been waiting for it for a long time.
But this is a new benefit or an option that will be a major help for millions of American moms that will result in more beautiful American babies.
So this is an interesting discussion to have because, look, obviously what he's sort of indicating, what he's sort of thinking here is that, again, a lot of employers will provide dental, will provide vision.
And he's saying, in addition to that, he would like to see an extra sort Plank extended here for fertility insurance.
Now, this is interesting because this is kind of what a post negative TFR society is going to really look like.
There's a lot of different avenues we could go off on right now.
I think the one interesting thing, one interesting thing we should note before we get into any of this, actually, let me see if I can even find the point here.
Total fertility rate, birth rate, et cetera, is actually kind of a U shaped, right?
So it's what they call like a middle class trap, insofar as people that actually make quite a bit of money, you know, I think 150K plus, actually see their birth rate go back up.
So, sort of the idea behind declining birth rates, at least the consensus so far from a lot of economists was look, as your country industrializes, people have less of a need for having a lot of kids because that would be something that would be more suitable if you needed people to work, people to, you know, Plow the land, et cetera, et cetera.
And so they think that in addition to this, that's what causes the birth rate to go negative because people, as soon as they industrialize, as soon as they have a higher standard of living, infant mortality drops.
Kids become more of a luxury rather than a necessity.
Therefore, the birth rate drops.
But what was interesting, what's interesting, so okay, Scott Greer pointed out here this article everyone is talking about from The Economist.
The wealthiest neighborhoods are defying suburbanization.
And Jim Bianco here.
He put some commentary up and he says, As the fertility rate collapses, the economist this week detailed who is still having kids rich, white, urban couples.
They detailed Wicker Park in Chicago, which is like northern Chicago on the lake, and the similar neighborhood of Park Slope, Brooklyn.
Let's steal, man.
Let's steal it because our first instinct when we hear this is no, this can't be true.
But if you look at, again, how the birth rate moves based off of your income level, typically it's a U shape.
So the poorest people are having kids.
A bunch of kids, and then it dips down to the middle class.
The middle class is not having enough kids at all.
And then as you go back up to the upper echelon, the richer and richer you get, the birth rate goes back up.
So there's multiple things going on here.
But I think the primary explanation is that the birth rate situation might be a little bit deeper than we thought.
It can't just be hand waved away as a result of industrialization, it can't be hand waved away as a result of urbanization.
And I would even go as far to say it can't be hand waved away as an explanation of.
Feminism and that might be a controversial take, but I think this is true.
Now, The Economist, if you read through the article, I'm not exactly bought in.
I'm not bought in on the idea that park slopes specifically is where you're seeing, you know, a baby boom or even like a higher than normal TFR.
What I will say is like I used to live on the Upper East Side and you do see a lot of strollers there.
And I think it's because wealthy people, we've seen this happen.
This happens across a good example would be like Southern Africa, where you have sort of a wealthy urban population, typically white.
And the rest of the population, not so much.
And those people are actually able to have more kids than you would expect for people in that sort of class bracket.
And I think the primary reason for that is because they have access to cheap labor.
So they have access to nannies, they have access to cheap daycare, et cetera, et cetera.
It lightens the load on the woman.
And I guess you could say that is technically an excess of feminism insofar as these women do have a career.
But it is one way to mitigate sort of the disincentives to have children, which I don't think it's necessarily money related.
And this is what I want to get into.
Because it seems like every government's solution thus far with total fertility rate has been to just throw tax credits at it or throw incentive packages at it and just hope it goes up.
And that just hasn't seemed to work.
Where it seems like what is able to rebound fertility, again, is among the middle class and up, is their access to labor, cheap labor.
So, again, this is just a really deep conversation that you can divulge in.
One interesting thing, I don't know if you guys remember, like about a year ago, I had Nate.
Fisher on the show, Nate Fisher of New Founding, and he is sort of an AI researcher.
I mean, he runs a venture capital firm that does a lot of investment on the AI side, but he's a conservative, he's a Christian, et cetera, et cetera.
He's a fantastic guy.
He kind of postulated the idea.
We might have to bring him on so we can maybe flush this out a bit more, but he sort of postulated the idea.
He proposed the idea that, look, in an AI world, as AI continues to develop and expand, we find more utility for it, that it could actually restore sort of a pre.
Maybe 1950s, 1960s civilizational structure, insofar as women clearly are unhappy working.
You can look at like SSRI rates, depression rates, et cetera.
Women are much more unhappy than men.
And this transcends politics.
I mean, this is just looking at men versus women, and you're not even talking politics here.
AI could potentially just shrink the need for labor, right?
It could shrink the need for labor by and large.
And what this could end up recreating is a Households that can be sort of provided for by a single income, right?
Single income households.
It could sort of bring that back.
Because again, if the labor pool shrinks, like if we don't have as much of a need for, I'm sorry, I guess I'll just say a lot of these jobs that women are working in are primarily management class sort of jobs.
And so again, if AI is able to automate a lot of those jobs, it shrinks the need for a labor force that can allow people to not need to work.
And it'll actually increase the cost of specialized labor.
Which is what men particularly will pile into, as we've seen, you know, STEM and stuff historically has been dominated by males.
And so this could actually sort of restore a preset.
Now, obviously, this is where the issue comes in the lower classes are insulated from this.
This won't affect them as much.
And if you take away their income, they might have trouble sort of re educating, relearning for different jobs.
Jordan Peterson was literally talking about this like 15 years ago.
Where there's kind of an IQ floor.
And if you fall below that IQ floor, there's literally no job you can possibly do.
And I think my hometown is a good example of that.
Memphis, Tennessee, you have a large proportion of the population in Memphis that are primarily black.
So there's already going to be a social struggle involved.
You know, they're going to be, they perceive themselves to still be oppressed by the white man.
And then you factor on top of that, that they typically attain less education, which would indicate sort of lower IQs.
And they will have more difficulty finding work as our economy continues to develop, as our economy continues to get more complex.
And AI could potentially even put them out of a job entirely.
There's a chance that the first jobs that go when AI really starts replacing people.
Right now, we're seeing people get replaced at the service level.
People are automating service jobs, like the idea of data management, right?
Where you're basically just dealing with spreadsheets all day.
We're seeing those jobs get not wiped out, but certainly we're seeing a shrinkage in that workforce and that labor requirement.
But AI, we're seeing at drive thrues.
I mean, drive thrues, if you go to Taco Bell, you're going to get an AI talking to you.
So, there's a serious possibility in the next 10 years that a Taco Bell is just ran by two people in the kitchen that just ensure that everything is functioning properly.
And that's all that's needed to run a Taco Bell when, as I understand it, maybe a Taco Bell now would employ like 20 to 30 people, at least in a busy neighborhood.
I pounded a C4 before the show, so I don't know what's going on here.
I think this fertility benefits program that they're proposing is very calculated because they are not.
Paying people to have children.
I think that's a huge mistake.
I think it's a huge mistake to provide tax credits to pay people to have children.
You might be able to get away with it in Hungary because it's a fairly homogenous society.
But what you saw in Hungary is again, who typically enjoyed those tax benefits the most?
Who typically was incentivized to have the most children?
It was poorer people.
It was poorer people by and large.
And the effect that this has, again, when you sort of incentivize people to have children, is if you're middle class or up, if you're stable, but you just don't want children.
The reasons for not wanting children are probably more lifestyle related.
It's not really necessarily a money pinch situation.
That could be part of it for some people.
But by and large, these people do not want to have children, primarily the women do not want to have children because of lifestyle limitations, right?
Having a child, you can't travel anymore, right?
You can't go out on Friday nights, you got to get a babysitter.
These are very real reasons that you will hear from people that are middle class and up as to why they don't want children.
With the lower class, again, with poorer people, and I'm being Very precise one.
I'm not going to like sugarcoat this.
I'm just trying to be honest here.
Again, a $5,000 bonus effectively that you're looking at for having a child, that can actually be what it takes for them to decide to have another child.
And this could create problems.
This is what you would call a dysgenic incentive, right?
This promotes dysgenics insofar as typically IQ tracks the income level.
That's just the reality.
There's exceptions.
I know there's exceptions.
I'm just saying generally IQ will track with income level.
My point is.
Again, we do know that IQ to some degree is heritable.
We do know that IQ, certain other behaviors, pro social behaviors that come along with that are genetic.
And so, again, if you want those, are the sort of people that you want to have children.
You want to expand that group of people.
The problem with just paying people to have children and providing tax cuts, et cetera, et cetera, in a society like America, which is very complex, very diverse, a wide range of classes, et cetera, et cetera, is the only people I think that would really seize on child credits, the only people that would really seize on additional fertility.
Benefits, et cetera, et cetera, are sort of people that are poor, people that are lower IQ, people that are probably not equipped to be having children.
But for them, literally money could be what makes or breaks their decision to have children.
So, my point in all of this is to say getting the birth rate up for birth rate's sake is not necessarily what you want in a complex first world society.
What you want is the right people to be having children.
And I think the problem as it stands is that the middle class, especially, is just not having children.
And I think there's a variety of reasons why that is.
I actually like this policy from President Trump.
Some people are jumping on this, but if you actually read through what's happening here, he's simply incentivizing fertility programs.
And so far as IVF, I know I'm pro life.
I know there's some critiques of IVF.
I know a lot of people are saying it should be banned.
I'm not an expert on IVF.
As I understand it, the main argument against IVF is again, when you go to an IVF clinic and you participate in the IVF fertilization in vitro fertilization procedure, they fertilize an array of eggs and then they discard fertilized eggs.
Which, if you believe that life begins at conception, would effectively be an abortion, right?
Would effectively be the termination of a life.
So, I understand that argument.
As I understand it, there are IVF clinics and increasingly so that won't discard fertilized eggs.
I know people that have participated in this.
I know people personally that have been struggling with fertility because, unfortunately, it seems like that is becoming a larger and larger issue, which is a whole other argument.
That probably stems from environmental issues, right?
I know I don't want to get too holistic on everyone, but You know, plastic in the balls, lower testosterone, which leads to lower sperm count.
I mean, if you go watch my interview with Raw Ag Nationalist that I put up on Tim's channel, on the Tim Pool channel, you'll see that, yes, actually, again, sperm count is decreasing quite rapidly.
And so that would probably be the primary cause for a lot of, you know, couples struggling with fertility.
In addition to women are also increasingly having complications, hormone issues, and et cetera, et cetera.
So I'll say it's causing a lot of people to have fertility issues.
I know people that have struggled with fertility, and when they have decided to bite the bullet and do IVF, They were particular in the type of treatment they chose.
I know these people are Christians and they wanted to pursue IVF treatment that would ensure that no fertilized eggs would be discarded.
So I do think there's an avenue here.
Now, I know a lot of people are still just pretty outraged about IVF.
Let's just put that aside for a second and let's talk about the larger issue that I'm hitting on, which is if you want to incentivize births, you have to do it in a very particular way because if you get it wrong, you are going to promote dysgenic, you know, the sort of the expansion of dysgenic policies and these sorts of things.
This isn't a pro eugenics argument.
It's just to say that, again, you don't want to accidentally incentivize poor people to have tons of children because it's bad for them, because it makes it more difficult for them to accumulate wealth and escape poverty.
And it's bad for society by and large because, again, you expand your proportion of the population that will probably be unable to ascend the income ladder.
It's just, it's not a good idea.
And Hungary demonstrated this.
Hungary, who took advantage of their pronatal policies the most?
It was like gypsy populations.
And again, obviously, there's exceptions to the norm, but a lot of gypsies by and large in Hungary are very poor.
And for them, these pro natal policies were a financial lifeline.
And that is what just, you know, sort of pushed the needle for them to decide to have a lot more children.
In this instance, targeting fertility, I think, is worthwhile.
I do think this is a good policy.
They're reducing the regulatory burden.
There's a lot of requirement.
It says here, yeah, a lot of market requirements that, you know, make it a little bit more difficult to produce fertility treatment.
I think under MAHA, you would like to see perhaps other avenues towards fertility treatment beyond IVF because IVF is kind of like killing a squirrel with a bazooka.
I think that would be the term you would use.
I think there are other ways to sort of correct for fertility issues because a lot of them, again, are hormonal, are sperm count related, are testosterone related.
We've seen testosterone and sperm count decline quite rapidly in the United States.
This is from The Economist, why Viktor Orban's pronatalist policies are not working.
They were spending about 3% to 4% of their entire GDP on fertility programs, which is a lot of money.
That's what most European countries spend on their military, which I guess isn't, which I guess in that, if I frame it like that, it doesn't sound like that much, but it is a lot of money.
They're spending a lot of money on their fertility.
And this article essentially goes through how, again, you're seeing that fertility rates, when they introduced these pronatal policies, didn't really, I mean, you see a Slight increase, like 1.3 to 1.5.
But again, that isn't terribly consequential.
Hungary's population will still be retracting, will be still declining.
And I think this is why this is an issue.
Because you look, okay, they've passed these pronatal policies, but their fertility rate is still tracked with all their neighbors for the most part.
And their neighbors aren't necessarily, like Slovakia, for example, is not pursuing pronatal policies as aggressively.
And their birth rate is almost tracking one to one with their birth rate.
So again, I think there's a lot more issues here.
It's a lot more complex why people are not having children than just money.
It's not just primarily a money issue.
Again, if you don't believe The Economist, AEI, who I would say is a bit more of a sort of right leaning source, I wouldn't say they're right wing necessarily, but they're certainly more right leaning.
Increasing fertility is an objective for many countries worldwide, but Hungary's pronatal policies have received an outsized amount of attention in recent years.
Hungary is unique because its pronatal policies have been bold and its objective.
Objectives, ambitions.
Since 2010, Hungary has implemented a variety of policies, including zero interest baby expecting loans and debt forgiveness for couples with children, personal income tax relief for mothers, and housing support for married couples, in an effort to reverse demographic decline.
Hungary spends about 5% of its GDP on family subsidies, and the OECD ranks Hungary among the top five OECD countries overall in public spending on health and family benefits.
Although there have been a few recent changes to the benefits, Hungary's prime minister continues to signal his commitment to pro natal policy.
Obviously, there's a new regime in charge, so that thing changed, obviously.
Unlike many countries, which leave their long term fertility goals ambiguous, Hungary has established more specific goals.
Hungary's current prime minister stated in 2017 that the country's objective is to raise the TFR to replacement level by 2030, an ambitious goal.
But unfortunately, as we've seen, it's not budging.
Their TFR is not budging, which indicates that it's a lot deeper than money.
And again, the people that will seize primarily on fertility benefits are not really the population that you want to be expanding.
This, I think, is the primary issue.
I would say this is the primary issue in the United States.
Again, I do think the reason for dropping fertility does vary a bit.
I think in the first world, it is primarily social issues.
I think it's primarily issues relating to gender dynamics.
I mean, you see all these articles that Gen Z is having the least sex on average, which is not a result of like Christian prudishness.
That is not why, because Gen Z is the least religious generation in history.
I know that's rebounding a bit, but still, it's by and large the least religious generation in history.
I think it's more that, again, Gen Z is just not.
I guess at a proper rate.
I think that would be fair to say.
Look at this, 1975.
Americans married by age 30.
This is from Boring Business.
And he was just sort of classifying some of these.
And this is all publicly, except this is all true.
This is all true.
I just like how he laid it out.
1975, women, 91% were married, men, 81% were married by age 30.
And then you could just watch it drop like a rock.
Even when I was born, so I was born 2001, 2005, women, half of women by 30 were married, 41% of men were married.
So society was falling apart, but it was still at least like, okay, well, at least half of them were getting married.
Compared to 2025, 25% of women and 16.5% of men.
That's your TFR right there, going down the drain.
Because again, the way, and this might surprise people, but again, no, it won't surprise people.
Children born out of wedlock is the more money you make, the higher your income is, the less likely it is that you're going to be conceiving children out of wedlock.
So for the most part, in the United States, again, if we're judging TFR for the middle class and up, that would track with marriage rates, and the marriage rates have.
Plummeted.
Obviously, we know that fertility, you know, right about after 28 or 29, let me drop a message too.
We do know that fertility kind of starts to fall off after like 27, 28.
There's obviously you can still have plenty of kids in your 30s.
It's just to say that your maybe prime fertility years would be slipping away at that point.
I don't want to make anyone feel bad.
It's just biology.
So the fact that only a quarter of women are married by 30 just indicates that, yeah, we're not going to be having very many kids at all.
I made this point on Twitter, and this is what I've been kind of hitting at chalking it up.
Again, this was just commentary on the United States fertility rate, just again dropping like a rock here.
Chalking it up to simply feminism or industrialization doesn't fully explain why TFR is tanking across the third world.
It's more likely that social media inflates people's expectations for a partner, but in the West, this comboed with feminism sent our TFR negative, likely forever.
Again, my point being in the United States, our TFR is negative, very negative.
Negative, actually.
And we have probably the highest TFR in the developed world, which I think is primarily attributable to the fact that we have so many religious people here.
Obviously, we have a large evangelical population, a large Catholic population, Mormons, I mean, even the Amish.
Like, we do have large religious groups, but evangelicals, I think, primarily, if you look at evangelical birth rates, they are right around replacement.
I think that's what's kept the American birth rate firing a bit higher than the rest of the developed world.
But again, I think the primary explanation here would be, would be, Feminism for the United States combined with social issues, which I'll get to because again, you really see TFR drop like a rock after 2007.
So we were still at replacement at 2007.
2007, what came out around then?
Smartphone.
Social media became preeminent in everyone's lives and the birth rate just plummeted after that.
Our parents always said it's that dang phone.
And they might have been right.
They might have been right.
This poster here, Leo.
He said, until marriage actually offers men something positive and tangible, expect this to keep trending towards zero.
Women, courts, and government declared the war on marriage and men.
Men are swiftly adapting.
I think this is like broadly true.
I think that men are, a lot of men are increasingly skeptical of the institution of marriage.
I think from their perspective, they just do not see as many women that they would want to be married to around them.
But I also think women, I think women increasingly are doubtful of marriage because.
Again, they're able to provide for themselves on a single income, and a child would completely neuter their ability to do that.
Even being married would sort of limit their lifestyle, their lifestyle, which is primarily hedonistic.
So, both genders in this instance are sort of losing the incentive to get married.
Marriage for men and women now is optional when before it was kind of required because, again, marriage used to be the gateway to sex, to sort of validation from the opposite gender, these sorts of things.
And that's kind of gone, right?
That's just kind of gone where.
You know, women will have a roster of men and men will have pornography, or in some cases, will have a roster of women.
Um, women find a lot of validation through work now.
Um, again, it's fleeting validation, that's why a lot of them are miserable, but that is true broadly.
And both genders, again, marriage if marriage is optional, it just becomes something where if you really want to get married, then you'll get married.
But it's not like the average person, you know, and again, the average person in 1985 was like, Yeah, I'll get married, that's just what you do, that's part of.
Growing up, you get married.
It's part of you, you have your own family.
That is no longer the goal for a lot of men and women.
You've actually seen some polling recently that indicates that more men, more Gen Z men than Gen Z women actually want to be married and have families, which just indicates that something's completely broken.
Because, you know, the narrative when I was growing up, you know, the trope was, you know, men just won't commit to a woman and women are desperate for a ring, you know, but it's just these men won't commit.
But I was always skeptical of that just because I know women and I know men, and it seemed like men actually.
The ones I knew, at least, I'll grant that I was a bit of in a religious bubble, actually seemed to want families more than your average woman.
And then that was sort of flushed out in data, right?
When the polling started to come out, that actually was true.
That actually was true that a higher proportion of men wanted families, wives, children, spouses, children than women did.
So, in addition to that, we're seeing TFR drop across the third world.
So, again, if you're just to simply chalk up tanking.
TFR globally to feminism, you do have to explain the third world because the third world, by and large, there's exceptions like Latin America, but by and large, feminism is not really a driving force in a lot of these countries.
Industrialization is certainly not an explanation.
I mean, hello, we're talking about the third world.
So, why is a country like Pakistan experiencing a massive TFR decline?
Again, it's dropped like a rock.
I mean, they're still above replacement, but they're rapidly heading towards.
Negative birth rates, where literally like 30 years ago they were having six kids.
I mean, do you know anyone with six kids?
Do you know anybody that's like, you know, under 80 years old with six kids?
I don't, barring a few hyper religious people that I know.
It's not common at all, where again, 30 years ago this was like ubiquitous in somewhere like Pakistan.
So, okay, well, what is the explanation here?
What is the explanation here?
And what is the explanation for the rapid drop off to 3.14?
Well, I would argue that the primary explanation here is again social media in tandem with Western media, and it's not what you would expect.
I don't think it's turning them gay or anything.
I think what's happening is, um, I'll speak for like the male perspective a lot of sort of men in Pakistan, and we can even look at Mali.
I think I have Mali up here.
The birth rate in Mali has tanked, the birth rate in Mali is tanking now.
They're having 5.5 kids still, but this is a country that is not industrialized whatsoever.
Feminism is just not really a factor, but their birth rate has.
Dropped like a rock in recent years and is continuing to drop.
India, by some indications, is now sub replacement.
So, India is actually sub replacement, which is whatever.
But you have to ask yourself okay, what is the explanation there if it's not feminism, if it's not industrialization?
And I would suspect, and a lot of sociologists have also suspected this, again, you're seeing the drop off really ramp up because of the internet.
If you're a Pakistani male, if you're a Mali male, and you're seeing attractive Western women on your phone, how can you work up the courage to just marry someone in your village?
Let's just cut the crap here and be honest.
Again, people, and I made this point in my tweet.
Social media is inflating people's expectations for a partner.
I think this is primarily what's driving this in the third world, where marriage is still a bit more vital.
Marriage is slightly less optional, and you're seeing the birth rate completely tank.
I think men and women in these countries are increasingly disillusioned with their options, with their partners, partner options in their towns and their cities because of the internet.
Because of the internet, they're seeing what is out there, what's available, and this is driving them crazy.
And this expands.
I mean, we're talking third world.
This expands across everything.
I mean, I was in Africa for a while last year, and they're all watching Western social media.
They're fully aware of what people in the West have.
And again, I'll go back.
Jordan Peterson made this point, and a few others have made this point, obviously, that poverty isn't necessarily what causes crime.
Relative poverty is what causes crime.
Insofar as a country where everyone is poor and you can't compare yourself to anyone, you don't necessarily realize you're poor.
Therefore, it doesn't occur to you to commit.
Large amounts of crime to again try to make more money to ascend into a higher income bracket or have more money.
But relative poverty causes crime.
So, South Africa, that's why a large explanation of why they have such massive violent crime rates is because again, you have very wealthy white populations right up next to entire slums, like literally some of the worst places on planet Earth.
And they're right next to each other.
If you grew up in that slum, you see what life could be like that's going to motivate you to commit more crime.
And you're seeing crime rates go up all across the third world.
You're seeing the birth rate decline.
I think the explanation there is they're seeing how people in the West live.
They're seeing what their life could be.
And they're exhibiting more antisocial behaviors because, again, they don't want to settle for what's around them.
Their expectations are raised for what life should be like.
This is why they're so desperate against the West.
It all adds up here.
It all adds up here.
I think this is what's going on.
Again, you can't attribute this to, you can't attribute this.
To industrialization in Mali.
You can't attribute this to feminism.
I think the explanation, again, is raising expectations.
Expectations for what they want out of life is increasing, and therefore they're less likely to want to pork someone in their village.
I mean, like, let's just be frank here.
I think that's primarily what's going on here.
So, in close of this whole diatribe that I've gone for almost 30 minutes on, this is why I think throwing tax credits at it, throwing money at this problem is not going to solve it.
There's larger sociological issues happening in the United States, which is marriage has lost its value by and large.
And I'm saying this as someone that wants to get married.
I have a very lovely woman in my life, and we do intend on getting married soon.
There's a lot of people in the space that are crazy people.
I have a very normal love life.
I'm very excited.
She's a wonderful woman, but I'm blessed and I'm an outlier because I'm 25, and most 25 year olds, I was in the dating market very recently.
I know how bad it is.
I know how bad it is.
Where again, everyone's crazy, everyone has hyperinflated expectations on the dating app side because dating apps are now the primary way people meet because there's no other institutions that facilitate people of the same age meeting each other in their 20s.
As in, once you get out of college, you're very rarely going to be surrounded by other people your age.
They have to turn to dating apps, and then there's huge problems with dating apps.
The primary reason I think dating apps are flawed as I see it is because it's a buyer's market.
So, women have an array of options.
They almost have option paralysis, which inflates their idea of their value on the sexual marketplace, so to speak.
They think they have more partner options than they actually do.
And then men develop a scarcity mindset because dating apps, you're very unlikely to actually get matches unless you're like a top 5% male, which 95% of us aren't, including me, I would say.
So, it develops a scarcity mindset where if you're getting like one like a month, then you're going to think there's something wrong with me.
Off about me, there's something terrible about me.
So, whenever you do end up finding a woman, if you find a woman out of a scarcity mindset, you are going to sort of put her on a pedestal.
And I think that's what's leading to the promulgation of like wife guys.
That's kind of been this trope, and I do think it's true, where men are almost relieved to get longhoused because it's like, well, at least I now have access to all the benefits of having, you know, a partner, whether it be sex, companionship.
You know, the other sort of implications of pair bonding.
I think that that's what's going on there.
I mean, I know a lot of guys personally that are committing to women very quickly because, again, of that scarcity mindset where they say, I finally got one.
I finally got one.
I can't screw this up.
I can't screw this up.
And this is giving women more power in society because, again, they are sort of a buyer's market, they have more leverage, and dating apps are effectively institutionalizing that leverage.
And I think that's a huge problem.
And I think that is a primary reason for why relationship formation is increasingly rare among people in their 20s.
And then when you get into your 30s, look, fellas, I was on Hinge at one point in my life.
And when I signed up for Hinge, it automatically sets your filters, right?
You don't go in your filters.
So my filters were like, I don't know, 22 to 40 by default.
So I was seeing sort of what the options were for guys in their 30s.
I mean, it looks like Genghis Khan ran through the place.
It's like all single mothers.
I'm sorry, that's a bit cruel, but it's true.
And so, again, the options for dudes in their 30s also increasingly limited.
And then you compound that with what I said previously, which is it's increasingly rare because there's less young people, because there's so many baby boomers, but also the institutions that would facilitate young people to meet each other, like church, like other social institutions, have broken down.
They don't really function like they're supposed to.
So, it's rare for young men and young women to be in places where there's a lot of other young men and young women.
So, how can you form relationships in that situation?
Dating apps.
That's why dating apps are so powerful and so preeminent in today's society.
Unfortunately, I would estimate maybe 20% of men and 20% of women are really, you know, would be really good husbands and really good wives and really good fathers and really good mothers.
They just can't find each other.
That's the primary issue 20 to 30% of the population that are focused, that are solid, that will be, again, make fantastic spouses, fantastic parents.
They can't find each other in this whole mess and this whole abyss.
So, they just either end up on the dating apps, which are just a meat grinder, or they just spiral and they check out of the scene entirely.
They just invest heavily into their career, their time into their career, or other heated pursuits.
They get really into travel or they get really into video games, which then leads to substance usage, insofar as people now use a lot of SSRIs.
People use weed at a very high rate.
Things that, again, are functionally antidepressants.
It's a huge, huge problem.
I don't think the, I'm black pilled on this actually.
I think the birth rate.
I don't think it's going to rebound.
I like that the Trump administration is at least on their radar.
But again, I don't think there's too much the government can do about this, quite frankly.
I think these are more social trends that are leading to this.
I don't think it's a problem that people don't have enough money.
Again, the only people, like if you were to incentivize a child being born, if you were to give someone $5,000 to have an additional child, most people in America, that is not the reason why they're having a child.
If you said $5,000, say, okay, well, that's.
That's not enough for me to have a child.
Like, I have lifestyle that would limit my lifestyle.
The only people that $5,000, like, yeah, thank you, sign me up, are, again, people that are already having a lot of children because of welfare and their lifestyle is being subsidized.
So, again, it would just promote dysgenia in the United States.
And I think it's a huge problem.
So, until you can rebound this, until you can heal the divide between men and women in the Western world, there's not a chance in Hades that birth rate rebounds.
Sorry, it's just the reality.
You're even seeing it in the third world.
You're even seeing it in places that would sort of demonstrate more trad behaviors, right?
Like Pakistan.
Pakistan is somewhere where, again, they're a bit more insulated from the fallout from feminism, industrialization, and still their birth rate's dropping like a rock.
Their birth rate's dropping like a rock.
So I think it's a huge problem.
Not many white pills there.
I do think it's just we're destined to continue to plunge down the TFR decline.
And again, I think the only way you can really correct for this would be either drastic government actions, which will never happen, like outright banning dating apps, incentivizing, again, like social institutions to rebound.
That's probably not going to happen.
So, what's going to happen is what we've seen, and a lot of people have sort of speculated, which is, again, conservatives are having more kids.
Religious people, specifically, you know, devout Christians in the United States, are having more children than people that aren't devout Christians, people that are liberal.
And so, what could happen over the next 60, 70 years?
The population declines.
Again, this is assuming that immigration restriction continues in perpetuity.
The population declines, and the share of the population that is sort of conservative, that is sort of Christian, increases because they're the ones having more children.
So I'm black pilled insofar as the fertility rate rebounding, but I'm white pilled that the implications of this could actually end up being positive for the United States long term because effectively liberals are getting bred out of existence.
In addition to that, I do think AI will backfill a lot of the labor shortfalls as the population declines.
I know Tim's a lot more black-pilled on this.
I'm still a bit more in the camp of I think that labor will increase in cost as AI sort of just eliminates the need for a lot of service jobs.
And again, I think this actually could create a bit more stable society.
And as far as America's infrastructure being built for 350 million people, I don't think it is actually.
I think America's infrastructure is built for like 220 million people.
Case in point is the fact that every single city in the United States has horrible traffic, constant service delivery issues, especially in places like California and New York, which are overpopulated.
New York City, I mean, hello.
So, again, if the population declines, I don't think we're going to necessarily be in like daisy.
I think AI will be able to backfill a lot of these jobs.
That is contingent on immigration restriction.
So, immigration continues to promulgate these systemic issues of the birth rate because what you're basically doing is, again, if your birth rate's declining, your population's shrinking, but you want to keep the labor force at the same size, you bring in immigrants to sort of backfill the labor shortage.
And the problem with that, there's multiple problems.
One, all the societal ramifications of mass migration, which we're all clued in on at this point.
But also, the birth rate is declining in the third world.
Pakistan, Mali is declining.
India, again, India's sub replacement.
So you're going to run out of people at some point.
You're going to start running out of people that you can source immigrants from to backfill the population.
Like just pretending that these people are blank slates, which they're not.
I'm just trying to steel man the economist's explanation here for mass migration.
That's not even going to be viable after some time.
So, and what we see is when immigrants do come to the United States, their birth rate typically reflects the same birth rate as all their surrounding populations.
So, a lot of issues here, a lot of issues, but yeah.
We'll move on.
We'll move on.
This one's kind of interesting.
This is over the weekend.
This was out of Britain, out of the United Kingdom.
Again, Labor, who's been in charge in Britain now for a couple of years now, Keir Starmer's been in charge specifically for.
What, four years, three years, four years, three years, I think.
Labor, left wing party, very liberal, a lot of socialist tendencies.
They've been the sort of archetypical example of management decline, where they, again, they aren't, I wouldn't say they're like aggressively destroying the country.
They're just, because I think the Green Party there would be sort of your culprit for like intentionally aggressively destroying the country.
I think labor is more managing decline.
And my argument for that, you may repel me saying that.
My argument for that is the conservatives, right?
The Tories were in charge for like 10 years before Labor, and immigration was never higher than under the Tories.
And Labor, all Labor's really done is just inherited all those bad policies and just promulgated them.
That's all that's really happening here.
Now, the white pill here is again, the UK had all of these local elections this weekend, Friday into this weekend.
And the local elections there, they used to be like inconsequential.
This is just you electing like the equivalent of like city council members and these sorts of things.
But in Britain, they've increasingly so, the local elections have been viewed as sort of their analog for like midterms, right?
This is a way to gauge public approval for the parties in addition to a lot of other things.
And what had happened in the UK, again, their midterm elections, I'll just use American terminology here, is Labour, the ruling party, got completely wiped out.
Out of all the seats they were defending, they lost about half of them.
I think like they lost 60% of them.
And they didn't win a single seat.
So, Labor, out of all the seats that were up for grabs, they didn't win a single seat.
That would be like if all the city councils in the United States held an election at one time.
So, we're talking like 10,000 plus elections, and the Democrats did not win a single seat.
That's effectively what just happened in Britain a total political earthquake.
And to the surprise of no one, reform performed the best.
Reform dominated the midterms.
They actually underperformed their expectations, but reform dominated the midterm election, their local elections.
And what's interesting about that, obviously, is well, what would be the primary reason people are voting for reform?
I think there's two reasons.
First is a protest vote against labor, which is obvious.
But the second explanation, I think, is immigration restriction.
I think reform has positioned themselves.
You know, I do think there are some issues, some real issues with their immigration policy.
But yeah, their immigration policy is sort of shut it all down, you know, start stopping the bleed and pursue deportations, similar to Trump.
And they were rewarded for that at the ballot box.
Again, a lot of people did vote for reform just in protest of labor.
But I think the primary reason is because they're hitting hard on immigration.
You saw the upstart party, the Restore Britain party, which a lot of people are excited about.
They stood up 10 candidates in a specific region because they weren't quite confident in their ability to field candidates nationwide while ensuring that these candidates are of good quality.
Because this was something people were hitting reform on, they were saying, well, reform was fielding a lot of candidates that had no business standing for election.
I mean, in Portsmouth, they literally stood a guy that's on a student visa from Bangladesh.
Shows they didn't really, in a lot of races, vet their candidates very well.
They just wanted to ensure they had someone on the ballot.
And Restore, you know, they're very careful, very calculated with their strategy in these local elections.
They stood 10 candidates and won every single one of them decisively, like by dictatorial numbers.
Restore is even more hardline on immigration.
Restore Britain, they have an array, you know, a menu of policy ideas, but I think the primary, and what I would implore them to stay focused on because sometimes, from my perspective, I love the Restore guys.
I think they're fantastic.
There's some good friends of mine that are in Restore, but they do sometimes get sidetracked on other social policies.
And my, Sort of plea, my contention is that's not why people are voting for Restore Britain.
The primary reason they're voting for Restore Britain is because they're going to restore Britain's demographics to pre mass migration levels.
And again, people are just fed up with immigration in the UK.
It's not even like the United States, where you still have a large contingent of the population in the United States, which are like, well, you know, immigration is still like our strength and America's a nation of immigrants.
This is like how half of Republicans talk still.
In Britain, you're even seeing left wing people starting to say the immigration's gotten out of control.
It's disrupting a lot of society.
I mean, the whole Pakistani rape gang thing.
I mean, that was a big deal, obviously.
There was a video in, I think it was in London, actually, of this street where there's a lot of nightclubs.
And women were stumbling out of these nightclubs drunk at like 2 to 3 p.m.
And you had a sort of massive mob, effectively, of subcontinental immigrants, people from the Indian subcontinent, who, by all accounts, were probably sober, who were effectively trying to bring these women home.
Again, this is something that maybe would happen every once in a while with an Englishman, but it is a big problem now.
And so this is why you're having a lot of left wing people even start to be critical of immigration because it's very hard to simultaneously protect women while also bringing in loads of people from countries that have a very low view of women.
I think that's very obvious.
But all this to be said, this is a white pill.
This is a white pill.
Again, in Britain, labor got absolutely steamrolled in the.
You know, in the local elections, while reform just surged, massive gains.
Keir Starmer, the prime minister, comes out and he says, I accept responsibility, which is true.
I mean, you even saw a lot of labor candidates pretending they weren't even in labor.
They were like, I don't even know who Keir Starmer is.
I don't know what we were talking about.
So I think what's likely is Keir Starmer here is going to get forced out.
But the real story here and the implication for Americans is the point I made at the top of the show, which is results in the UK do tend to give you an indication of how things are going to go in the United States insofar as Brexit.
Preceded the Trump election.
Brexit happened.
There was this spirit of populism, the spirit of reactionaryism in the United Kingdom.
And this flushed out in the United States.
Trump won against all odds.
And Trump was the bull in the china shop in 2016.
Trump was the paradigm changer by and large.
And I think if you were paying attention, if you saw what happened in Britain with Brexit, you might have given Trump a bit more of a chance in that election.
And I think that's what's happening here.
So again, Labor getting completely washed out in the midterms.
People are fed up with the managed decline thing.
The difference is obvious here, which is that Labor and Keir Starmer are the incumbent party in Britain and the United States, the Republicans are the incumbent party.
But I think it does allude to something happening in the Anglosphere where people are increasingly becoming Disillusioned primarily with immigration.
They're starting to notice the real, tangible, day to day effects immigration is having on their lives, and they want to punish politicians.
They want to punish political parties that are promulgating this issue.
This is why it seems like the one thing that animates people the most against Trump is anytime Trump goes soft on visas, or anytime Trump messaging says we might need to tone down mass deportations, et cetera, or people are questioning why the deportation numbers are so low.
View as something that the Trump administration could not concede on because immigration is the galvanizing force right now in the United States.
It certainly is in the United Kingdom.
And so, again, if we're seeing a favorable result for a right wing party in Britain, that does indicate that in the United States, there is a possibility that right wing candidates will perform better in the midterms.
Again, it's not a guarantee, it could be causation, not a correlation.
I'm just saying that it's worth paying attention to because you compound that with all the redistricting wins that the Republicans got, where in a lot of You know, projections, the Republicans are now favored to win the House because, again, the VRA getting struck down changed everything.
And we went through it on the show a million times.
The Republican governors all seized on it.
They all seized on it.
They all seized the moment and they pushed through redistricting and, again, eliminated a ton of Democrats, eliminated a ton of high ranking Democrats.
I mean, Jim Clyburn's out of a job.
So a lot of promising signs.
Again, the UK, promising sign, great sign.
Reform.
I know there's a lot of systemic problems with reform, but again, the fact that reform is performing really well is a good indication of where the British population is at.
And where they are policy wise.
And I think this should be a huge white pill to everyone in Britain.
And in addition to that, a white pill to people in America because a rising tide lifts all boats.
I say it on the show all the time.
So we need to start winding this show down, ladies and gentlemen.
I've just yapped for an hour straight, an hour straight of just yapping.
You guys are probably sick of hearing me talk.
So I got to send you guys over to the great Devorey Darkins.