The Canadian Bitcoiners Podcast - Bitcoin News With a Canadian Spin - The CBP - Dan Hess (@MoreBirths) - Canadian Demographic Disaster, Immigration vs Housing, Solutions for Fertility

Episode Date: August 15, 2024

FRIENDS AND ENEMIES  This week we're joined by Daniel Hess (@MoreBirths) for am important discussion on one of the largest problems facing the human race: collapsing fertility rates. Dan prepared several slides for the CBP audience, and has several working theories - all based on solid data - on why fertility has collapsed in Canada, what we can do about it, and why this is ultimately the most important issue of the moment. Website: ⁠www.CanadianBitcoiners.com⁠ Discord: https://discord.com/invite/YgPJVbGCZX A part of the CBP Media Network: ⁠www.twitter.com/CBPMediaNetwork This show is sponsored by: easyDNS - ⁠⁠https://easydns.com/⁠⁠ EasyDNS is the best spot for Anycast DNS, domain name registrations, web and email services. They are fast, reliable and privacy focused. You can even pay for your services with Bitcoin! Apply coupon code 'CBPMEDIA' for 50% off initial purchase Bull Bitcoin - ⁠⁠https://mission.bullbitcoin.com/cbp⁠⁠ The CBP recommends Bull Bitcoin for all your BTC needs. There's never been a quicker, simpler, way to acquire Bitcoin. Use the link above for $20 bones and take advantage of all Bull Bitcoin has to offer. D-Central Technologies - https://d-central.tech/ Your home for all things mining! Whether you need a new unit, a unit repaired, some support with software, or you want to start your own wife-friendly home mining operation, the guys at D-Central Tech are ready to help. With industry leading knowledge and expertise, let the D-Central team help you get started mining the hardest money on Earth.

Friends and enemies, welcome back. Tuesday night, it's me, yours truly, Joey here, solo, at least as far as the CBP roster. I'm going to be joined by Daniel Hess shortly at More Births on Twitter, recent recipient of the coveted, the elusive Elon Musk retweet. Dan has done a lot of work on birth rates around the world, specifically in the Western world. The decline in birth rates, what it means for the countries

that are experiencing these demographic collapses, as he just said before we went live here. And we're going to talk about Canada tonight. Canada is in a situation that I think many of you are finding out the hard way is not great for family formation. So we're going to talk about that. First, let's not waste any time getting the sponsors, EasyDNS, Mark and the team, the best in the business, the friendly neighborhood registrar. If you want to buy a website, port a website, a domain, I should say, website is just such a layman way to speak. You can do it with Mark. It's cheap. It's easy. Mark will help you do that. Once you have the website, the domain registered, pointing somewhere for your business, for your blog, for pictures of your feet, I don't know, whatever you want.

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have already done it i plan on doing it as well and we're looking forward to seeing where that partnership goes daniel hess is here how did it feel to get the musk retweet were you ready for that what is that what is that like was it a celebration were you popping i was i was jumping up and down because you know i i actually i mean I wasn't shocked in some sense because, uh, you know, I'm very active in, in the, you know, talking about the birth rate crisis and solutions. And, and this is, uh, something that Elon Musk is very, very serious about. So, uh, in that sense, but still it's, I mean, it's awesome. I got, uh, for, for, I got, it happened twice, actually. First, at first it was for, uh, you know, something that was just, you know, it's awesome. I got – it happened twice, actually. First it was for something that was just talking about some data about the crisis.

And another was a long essay that I wrote about why liberals need to care about the fertility crisis. And the first one got more than 50 million views, which is a huge amount. So I was – that was pretty exciting, but it reminded me that this is a very, very, very serious topic. It's because this is so serious and he's so focused on the future of humanity that that converged. He's extremely focused to the tune of, I think eight kids, right? Is he, he's out there swinging at every pitch to put it lightly. Wouldn't you say? Yeah, I think so. I mean, he, he said he wants to be an example. He said he wants to be an example for people and, and, you know,

and that's right because you know, he, he's about the future, but there is no future if people aren't having kids. And, of the most strange things is that as people get more technologically advanced the country is, like the lower its birth rate. For example, the two of the most high tech countries are like Taiwan and South Korea. Those two countries like make pretty much 100% of like the AI chips, lots of other things, but 100% of the AI chips of the future and they have the lowest birth rates in the world. So it's terrifying. You're going to talk to us a bit about that, among other things. I want to maybe first start with a little bit of your background. I don't know how Daniel Hess got into this rabbit hole. It's an important one, like you mentioned. And I think one that you may as sort of a,

you know, even the normie, let's say, not worried about birth rate per se, can identify as a problem, whether because immigration levels are extremely high, whether because pressures are piling up other places, thanks to the low birth rate, they're able to at least identify there's a problem. But I'm not sure how you got to where you are in terms of doing all this work and research and sharing your research so broadly. What brought you to this silo? Well, originally, yeah. So this will be interesting to you, but I was interested in investing and, and, you know, we, I I'm 45 years old. I'm a father of six. So I just, yeah, thank you. My wife can't keep her, keep her hands off. No, I say just kidding. If I say that, everybody who knows me laughs. But yeah, so maybe about 20 years ago, I was really interested in investing.

But something that really struck me is that investing kind of floats on top of the tectonic movements of demography. Like, so, so there's a world underneath that. And you look at a country like Japan, Japan has, was high tech. They were supposed to take over the world. Right. You know, in 1990, like most of the like biggest market cap companies in the world were Japanese. Now among the top 500, there's like two of them, or at least among the top 100, it's like two Japanese companies. So what happened? When you have an aging society that's not making enough new workers, things start to wind down.

And the same kind of virtuous cycle that you get when you get population growth, which is more technology, like more investment, you know, everything feeding on itself and climbing higher and higher and higher, you know, imagine that in reverse. You know, imagine, you know, and you can think about it in a lot of ways, but you know, one, one example is, you know, housing. If, if there's fewer people every year, you know, housing, maybe that'd be nice in Canada, right? If housing actually came down, but, but, you know, you have places in rural Japan, you know, because everybody in Japan is moving to Tokyo and rural Japan is emptying out. You have places where, where like these houses like sell for like a dollar but but

nobody even buys them and they just they just fall apart which i i guess in canada you'd probably just like cry to like imagine such a thing just like like you have like a little shack in like what is it in vancouver there's like one point i i see that the way like this this roach motel is is like 1.8 million. It's a charming fixer upper, the realtors would say. Great community. That's a different issue, which we can talk about in a little bit. I'm looking forward to that.

So I, before we started, you shared your screen. I accidentally removed it from the available slide. So I'll get you to do that one more time. And while you're doing that, I will just note to people that this podcast is like 80% probably listened to on audio. So you're, the chances are you're listening to this on audio because you haven't given this a second thought. I will tell you that where you need to go is to YouTube for this because Dan has tons of good data. Actually, I watched his appearance on Stefan Levera's podcast some time ago, I think a month or two at this point. And it's one of the reasons I wanted to bring Dan on because we get a lot of guests who

are really, really good speakers, but don't bring a lot of data to show, even though I don't have any doubts that data exists. But this is very, it's stark. And I think it's important that we look at this data as we speak. So we're going to talk a bit about Canada. We're going to talk about fertility and Dan, I know you said to me before the show, you have the big four sort of reasons for declining birth rates. I know you said Canada, I would assume that's the case actually in a lot of countries, this sort of lack of religion and whatnot. Why don't we talk about

those? Give me the big four and we'll go from there. Okay. So I would say the big four for Canada. And I want to emphasize that it's like a little bit different in, in different countries. You know for example, just to, just to give you a comparison like Spain and Italy have this weird problem where everybody lives at home until they're like 35 or 40 years old. So, I mean, we joke about that, but like, that's like a thing in Italy where like, you have like these, these grown men who are like, in almost approaching middle age, like. Hey, nothing wrong with Italians living at home. Come on. No, but, but, you know, so, so the issues are a little bit different in different

countries. So, but, but what I want, but the four issues that I've identified as the biggest factors in Canada are number one, declining religiosity. Canada actually used to be a pretty religious country. Now that is very much less the case. Marriage, Canadians have a significantly lower marriage rate than the United States. Another big factor for Canada specifically is you have this immigration driven housing crisis, which is just sending house prices through the roof. And I mean, this, this will be no, no surprise to any of your Canadian listeners, but, uh, you know, it is extremely difficult to, uh, afford a house in Canada or probably feels impossible for most people. Another fourth factor for Canada in particular is political liberalism and liberal beliefs are associated with lower birth rates. And if Canada were a US state, it would be more liberal than Vermont, for example. So there's kind of an ideological aspect to it as well. So those I would say are the four biggest factors that I would identify for Canada. So I want to dive into those. I have a bunch of notes here that I've taken over the last couple

of days and just things that have come to my mind. I'm 36. I've been with my wife for, I don't know, 12 years at this point. We have our first kid on the way. So I'm working on- Oh, big, big, big congratulations. I'm working on Hess numbers, okay? But I'm not quite there yet. All right. Okay.

Good, good. I'll stop. So I'm thinking to myself over the last few days, what contributed to the situation I'm in at 36? My wife just turned 35 a few days ago, having our first kid now. And part of me says that the reason was based on money. You mentioned my sort of proclivity to want to stay at home, thanks to MyHeritage. I appreciate you bringing that up, something I've never heard before, of course. And one of the other things I

think is that there was a big time and quick cultural change in the nature of courtship and relationships. And I'm pointing specifically to things like Tinder and the way it amplifies something like the Pareto principle and the way that it makes it seem like the grass is always greener. And there's just so much grass everywhere you look, thanks to stuff like Tinder and Instagram. And I didn't hear you mention that. I think maybe that falls under liberal sort of mores, but you tell me. There are several causes. People wait much longer to commit because they think they have infinite options. So that's part of it. There's the fact that people set their standards extremely high or they think that they are everything in a bag of chips, right? And so everybody thinks that they're a 10. They're all a bunch of fives thinking that they're 10s. I mean, am I right? This is a little bit before... These apps didn't exist when I was that age. And I was actually introduced by a pastor at church to

my wife and we got to know each other that way, which I would highly, highly, you know, the old ways were actually much better in a lot of ways. They're more comfortable. You know, you also had kind of social verification that this person is not a weirdo, or not just that, but that they're serious because you could have somebody who's – some guy who's been with 20 women in the last year and each one, he can tell her that she's the one. Yes. And she can't – she doesn't, she doesn't know otherwise. But if this comes out of a social circle, you know, where, you know, he'll, he'll, you know, he'll do that twice and everybody will, will know what kind of guy he is. But, but in this kind of anonymous dating app world, you know, those kind of, those kinds of people can kind of, you know, pull tricks on women without ever getting identified for not being a serious person or vice versa. I think that's true. I also would add to that that there is a certain social proof that comes with going into a situation with your friends or as you did, being introduced by a

mutual friend. And when you go through something like that and meet someone like that and get to know someone like that, there's a certain level of investment that you've undertaken in order to grow that relationship. And I think it sort of speaks to this phrase, this old adage that the grass is actually greener

where you water it as opposed to- Oh, wow. That's a great- Yeah. And so I think that a lot of people, I met my wife the old fashioned way too, even though I was sort of raised in the app era. It's funny, you know, looking at or hearing some of the things you say, man, I've said this so many times. I think it's true for guys and girls. I don't think it's necessarily just women who are having who have their standards set too high or just men have their standards set too high or just men that have their standards set too high. As you mentioned, I think everyone has a good two weeks on Tinder and thinks that they are the cream of the crop when really they are sort of the probably middle of the pack type as is the case almost always, right? On average, everyone is average as the saying goes. Right. And I've heard, and again, these apps are, you know, thankfully I managed to get off the market before this thing completely exploded.

But particularly for young women, it's my understanding that there are some guys out there in particular that may just use it to date a lot of women and, and, and these women, you know, therefore get, you know, see how easy it is and get their, get the wrong impression because these, you know, these guys, these, this is not a, these are not guys that, that would settle down and marry these women, but they, they, they get, they get a very different impression. Yeah. They, um, you know, there's some, uh, I'm not going to say it on the air because probably it'll rust people the wrong way, which is something I've done fairly frequently. But on this topic, a little more dicey. Let's get into Canada. You have a chart up here, total fertility rate, children per woman.

We are under the replacement rate, which is 2.1. My understanding is we are way under the replacement rate. Is that correct? So Canada, okay. I have bad news. I'm sorry to say I have very bad news. I mean, Canada is like in the lowest of low countries. I mean, you hear about like a country like Japan. Okay. So Canada is the red line on this chart. You can see it compared to the United States. So

that's a really kind of a good comparison. But Canada's recent numbers for 2023 was 1.25 births per woman. So replacement is around 2.1. So what we're talking about is Canada is barely a little more than half of replacement. So by natural childbearing, each generation would be almost a little more than half the size of the one before it, which is, and here you can see it against the United States. Canada used to be for the first half of the 20th century and for a lot of its history, it used to be a very, very fertile country where women had a lot of children, more than the United States even during the first half of the 20th century. And then it kind of tracked with the United States

until like around 1980. And since it's been lower and lately, so America's around 1.65, just to give you a comparison. So 1.25, that's a lot lower. That's like lower than even Japan now, if you can imagine that. So, so one of the, this is in the category of very, very low birth rates now. And it's, it's really just plummeted in just the last three or five years. So it's, it's gotten a lot worse. So I'm, I assume that when we talk about these big four, I mean, we can go to your next slide or your next screen. I think that you're going to tell me that the reason for this sort of, well, I mean, it's not even sort of the rather steep decline in fertility really is based on housing

to begin with, probably also waiting too long to start families and not being able to have more than one kid, thanks to the cost of housing, thanks to the need to sort of settle down and have two incomes, for example, or move for work, or, you know, sort of begin and flourish in your career in a way that makes it make sense to have kids. It's frustrating to me to see stuff like this, because I know that here in Canada, we've done some things in terms of subsidy and incentive stuff, the baby bonus, for example, you know, a lot of people talk about that oh yeah so that's an interesting point which is that actually um you know canada is way more generous than the united states for example the united states has like already now

0.4 births per woman more than canada so way higher even though i i saw one thing with the canada is like the fourth best country to raise a child in terms of like sort of the benefits you get free childcare. Dan threw up the air quotes there. I was about to do the same thing. So I'm glad he did it. But, but no, it's not, you know, obviously the, the, the cost of living in terms of, you know, housing, especially as a very, which I'm going to get to, but, but the, a bigger point is that culture, you know, is a way bigger factor than policy. In other words, you know, whether people go to church on Sunday is going to have a much bigger impact on, on their birth rate than,

than, than any childcare incentives. So here we see a picture of weekly religious attendance in Canada over time. It's been just dropping steadily. Canada used to be, you know, as I said, a very religious country, actually. I don't know how much young people realize that in Canada. So I'll show something I'll, I'll, I'll show, uh, something else, you know, compare that we can see. Um, so, so here, here, I'll just share another chart here. This is, well, you're pulling that up. It's interesting. You know, when I think about my own upbringing and all my friends' upbringings, we met and I would say,

I would say courted, especially as we got into our teen years, a lot of other women who are friends of families that we all went to church with. I mean, I was raised Roman Catholic. I went to church every Saturday or Sunday for basically my whole life until I went to university, which if I had to guess, you know, if I had to sort of pin down your line of thinking here, uh, university is really the time where you want to be going to church the most or continue going to church. Maybe when it's the most consequential to continue attending religious ceremonies, because that's when you're starting to enter your years of potential family formation. Oh yeah. Oh yeah. Long-term partner, right? That's a,'re starting to enter your years of potential family formation. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. A long term partner.

Right. That's a that's a great point. I had another thing that I don't know if you can see it or I see it. Yeah. Sorry. I'm kind of like daydreaming here looking. Oh, no, no problem. No problem.

It's all good. But yeah, you can see this is this relates to the other chart, which is that we saw that, you know, religious attendance is dropping. But but the the frequency that this is looking, this is, uh, looking, I think it, uh, fertility preferences, I think for women, uh, and you know, the, the more often, you know, higher church attendance is associated with much higher desired fertility. So women who, who attend church, uh, are, are more likely to have a lot more children. And the reason, there's a lot of reasons.

One is, you know, you just have this community that is much more family-centric. People who go to church are actually a lot happier. There's this crisis ever since COVID or maybe before that, of young people being unbelievably depressed. And it blows my mind if you see the statistics where a quarter of high school students contemplated suicide or something like that. It's just, it's a very sad, and you're not even, like me, you're not even one of the kids these days anymore. There's a younger generation coming up. It's not, the millennials are actually not the young, there's, you know, generation Z, and then there's a generation alpha after that. And, you know, things are, these generations are doing very

poor psychologically. They're just very sad a lot. And, you know, one of the strongest things in the data is that people who have, you know, regular religious attendance are a lot. And, you know, one of the strongest things in the data is that people who have, you know, regular religious attendance are a lot happier. And that's, so that's a big reason, a big reason there why, why, why people who have religious attendance, you know, tend to have higher birth rates. There's a strong association between happiness and how many, you know, whether people will have a family, people who are very depressed are unlikely to do these things. So there's a real value there. People have been getting away from that, but, you know, it is to the detriment of people. And Canada is a prime example of that.

But that's, you know, the loss of religion is something that's been happening in America, maybe to a little bit lesser extent, it's been happening big time in Europe. So these, you know, even these countries like Italy and Spain and Poland that we think of as highly religious countries, not so much for young people. And the result is that birth rates are, are totally crashing. So in those countries as well. So I will, um, so another, you know, next factor is, uh, sort of the marriage rate, which I'm going to, this is directly tied to religion. And I would guess religious sort of, uh, attendance is wrong word, but maybe a religious disposition we'll call it. Maybe. I don't know. Marriage – religiosity will incline people to marriage, but there's some – part of it is just culture. Europe has this weird thing where people tend to just not get married, even if they're a couple. 60% of what it is in the United States. So people in the United States are, so 7.3 marriages per

1,000 people per year or something like that versus 4.6 for Canada. That is so low, Dan. That is incredibly low. Yeah. And here's the thing. The thing about marriages is is that you know a lot of people will act or talk like it's an outdated institution but even even like very very liberal people are much more likely to want to have kids if they're married it's just kind you just feel much more secure and much more stable and you know one thing about the modern world is that accidental pregnancy almost doesn't exist anymore. That's right. It used to be that people would just – there was hardly any birth control, not very good birth control, and people just fell in love and then just babies just happened. And then these young people had to figure out – they had to have a shotgun wedding or something, figure out how to make things work. But now birth control is so good that people will not have children unless they are married. So the drop in marriage rate,

even though people are thinking it's an antiquated institution, I would say that marriage is more important than ever because people are getting so good at avoiding unintended pregnancy that the only type of pregnancy that you get anymore is intended pregnancy, and that usually means in marriage. So even for very, very liberal people, you know, marriage is, is kind of the, almost the

only case where they'll, they'll actually have to have kids. I will share a personal story here that I haven't shared before. And I'm sharing it because I want to get your opinion on fertility, the issue with aging females and the issue with birth control. My wife and I, like I mentioned, you know, we were a little older, mid thirties. We started trying to have kids two years ago, almost. And, you know, for those of you who don't know what that looks like, it looks like your wife, incredibly stressed out, peeing on a stick, waiting for lines, waiting for readings, looking at apps, everything short of looking at the phase of the moon.

But honestly, I'm not sure she didn't do that too. God bless you. I mean, that's a, you say that that's, that moves my heart. I mean, cause cause it's a, that's so anxious, so much anxiety. It's anxiety, but like, you know, as an aside, it's relationship building, right? A relationship needs those anxious moments and periods where you're both looking to build something greater than yourselves. I mean, I could go down this road for a long time, but we spent two years trying to get pregnant, Dan. And, you know, one of the things that both our doctors told us as we were taking these tests, blood tests, you know, I'm shooting swimmers into containers and taking them to places I've never been before, making sure everything's okay.

Yeah. All you, all you keep hearing is everything's good. And they keep telling you that you just got to keep trying, keep trying, keep trying. Okay. My wife was on birth control probably for longer than she was off of it. I would imagine she went on at 14 or 15, like most women do these days. And it took her almost a full two years for her cycle to regulate again, to have this sort this sort of consistent 28 day, uh, you know, cycle that everyone talks about. And once the cycle regulated, it took us two months to get pregnant. I don't know if that's directly attributable to the time on birth control, nor do I know if it's directly attributable to environmental stress. We were going through a move. We had a sick dog. We had just gotten married. You know, we were thinking about a lot of different things for that two years as most couples do. I think that's a pretty big period of building for a lot of

modern day couples. Now, I'm going to ask you a question. You tell me if you have an answer for it. I have it in my notes here that we are not doing a good job telling young men and women when their fertile window begins and when it begins to get more difficult for them. Instead, what we're doing, especially in Canada, is giving hormonal birth control to very young women. Half of the school board here in Canada is Catholic. There's a whole Catholic school board and other religious school boards who preach abstinence before marriage. And there's a number of different sort of vehicles for telling kids, do not put yourself in a position where you're going to have a kid. It borders on propaganda. I think there's value in it sometimes, but the result here, as your charts have shown, and as I'm sure that you think,

the result has been, I would guess, a net negative. Now, tell me something. In your research and in your travels, let's say, have you given any thought to when and what we should be telling kids about fertility? And I'm not saying that we got to start getting kids married at 14, 15, 16. Not at all. What I'm actually saying is you should be telling kids that at 18, if they want to have a family, the goal should be to start settling down and finding a

partner, not to be, you know, like it's a difficult, it's a difficult topic to tackle, but I'm sure that you thought about this. Yeah. I mean, one thing that almost the people hardly realize is that unintended childlessness is more common now than unplanned pregnancy. So all of sex ed, all of health class is like dedicated to avoiding like the terrible calamity of an unplanned pregnancy. But it's actually much more common now for people to, to want to have a child and not be able to in their life than to have a child by accident that they didn't want. So actually, so everything has been focused on avoiding pregnancy when the opposite problem now is actually much bigger. So I think, I think people, young people need to be educated, you know, very clearly in, in,

in high school health class about the fertility window, about, to be educated, you know, very clearly in, in, in high school health class about the fertility window, about, um, uh, you know, about the, the, the fact that you're at high, that you, that many, many, many men and women who want to be parents, that is not going to happen. Uh, because, you know, mostly because they, they didn't, you know, find a partner and settle down and, and try early enough. And, and actually, uh, because, you know, mostly because they, they didn't, you know, find a partner and settle down and, and try early enough. And, and actually, uh, you know, the, you know, the time to be, to be meeting somebody and settling down and starting to have a family is actually best in the, in the twenties. Fertility is far, far higher in the twenties than, than in the thirties. I mean,

you know, I, I can, you know, share a personal anecdote myself. I mean, we, you know, our, our oldest is 17, our youngest is two. So we have a big spread there, but you know, when, when my wife was, you know, 24 and I was 26, when we were, you know, newly married, it was so easy. I mean, it was like one month. And then the next one, we're going to wait a little while. Nope. No, I guess we're not going to wait a little while. And then, so, so like the, the, the first three were, were like in four years and it was really easy. And then, uh, you know, for our, our last one, I think we were, we were trying for, for three years, that's like 36 months or something yeah and we were this is the same people that had

been like insanely fertile uh you know just you know a decade earlier we were like borderline infertile like as we were near 40 yeah you know so so uh so that just goes to show that you know time and age especially age of the woman but age of men and women both is a huge, huge factor that the young people need to be educated on. That'll make a huge difference. I'm glad to hear you say that. I think it's so important. And I've said to kids I've coached over the years that finding a good woman and finding a good place to live and finding a good, you know, a good balance to build a relationship is huge. One thing I've said on the show before, I think that, you know,

you mentioned that people are staying at home later. I'd be curious to hear what you think about this. In my view, there's, there's been a sort of an uptick in people staying home for the wrong reasons. They can't afford to move out. They can't find jobs. The education they got is completely worthless. You know weaving for $60,000 a year in some US colleges. Yeah, crazy, right? And one of the other viewpoints I have, the thing I think is becoming more common, is

good parents, boomer parents, will have their kids stay home longer, basically friction free, very little rent, if anything, tons of freedom, a meal every night, a roof over their head, and all the beer in the fridge is yours if you want it. And I think they do this for a few reasons. They want to have a say in the three most important decisions in their kid's life, where they live, where they work, and who they end up marrying. Is that a good thing or a bad thing for fertility in your view? Have you given that any thought, this idea that kids stay home and they get influenced by their parents? Is that just another filter that they have to get through? Is that dragging things out? What do you make of that? I mean, in the data, and there's a great

demographer, Lyman Stone, who's done some good work on it. And Brian Kaplan is another one. He had a post a couple of years back on his blog called Basement Fertility, which the point is that the lowest fertility of anyone is if you live in your parents' house. People who live in their parents' house just have the lowest fertility. And I think it looks kind of unimpressive for a girl if the guy is living with his parents. I'll tell my wife. So anyway, and there's no one factor that is the only factor. I mean meeting somebody is obviously the biggest factor of all. And pertaining to that, I think that people really need to be thinking about college, and that's a time when people need to be making a partnership. I couldn't agree more. I cannot agree more. Which of the big four do you want to go next? We did religiosity, the religious… We did marriage.

We did marriage. Maybe the liberal, the increased… Well, let me see you pick this is a fun conversation because I went through this myself I'm not that far removed from some of these thoughts I have friends who are still single still childless

and so I'm not surprised to hear some of this stuff but all the same oh my god I've seen this chart before if you're a Canadian, I mean, this is. Avert your eyes. This is a very painful, a painful thing. Cause I mean, I can't even imagine. I mean, as I was, I was joking that, you know, a tiny little house is in Vancouver, you know, this, this, this, this is a meme like all over the world that,

you know, this tiny little cracker box in Vancouver for, you know, a million, two million dollars. But it's an awful situation if you're a young person. And so and the reason for this is, you know, an extremely high level of immigration in Canada that's completely outstripping the housing. I mean, there just isn't enough housing. So that's just crushing, that's just crushing birth rates because, you know, if people can't, don't feel like they can get a place, then it's going to, they're, then that's just a really negative factor. And there is another problem related to housing, which I'm going to show next here. Okay. I have some questions about housing and incentives when you're finished on your housing point. I think this is a big one. It's one we talk about on the show a lot,

although not through this lens. And so I'm interested in hearing what else you have to say on this. So yeah, there's another thing that Canada is doing, which is I think kind of not helping and making things, you know, kind of worse in the long run, which is that Canada has built been, you know, Canada has a long tradition like America of suburban houses, suburban homes, which is really what you – that's kind of the gold standard in my opinion. Because you still need to be probably near a city if you want a decent job. But actually suburbs, suburban homes where you just have a house with a yard around a single family home is ideal actually the the birth rates for those types of houses are much much larger than

apartment apartments but canada is throwing up these high-rise towers like crazy like way more than the united states there's like you know this this uh chart shows the, the level of house construction. So you can see that LA has like nine high rise towers under construction right now in Toronto, Toronto is 272 high rises. It's just, you know, and the problem, you know, I've written about this quite a bit and, and I've kind of built a reputation on Twitter for being, you know, and the problem, you know, I've written about this quite a bit and I've kind of built a reputation on Twitter for being, you know, vehemently anti high rise apartment. That is the comment on Lavera's show that made me reach out to you because I could not agree more. Please continue, yes. And I live in the Washington, D.C. area, and I'm lucky enough to live in a single-family home, although they're harder to come by in the D.C. area now. But I went to Bethesda, downtown Bethesda, downtown Rockville. If people know, those are kind of close-in, in inner ring suburbs. They're kind of sought after zip codes. And I was looking around at a bunch of new high rise towers that had been built like in the last four or five,

six years. And everything in there had, was zero bedrooms, you know, like a studio, one bedroom or at most, at most two bedrooms. And there was among four buildings that I visited, I was acting like I was a customer or something. And among four buildings that I visited, not a single one, I acted like I needed a three bedroom apartment. And not one of them had a single three bedroom unit in the whole building. You know, so they're just, I don't know how it is in Canada, but in the United States, these apartment towers are only like for singles and couples and not at all for families. Because look, if you have, say you have a two bedroom apartment and you have one child and you want to have another one, and if they're opposite sex, then like you're legally like

not allowed to put them in the same bedroom. This is an impossible situation. And if you look at the data, you look at these East Asian cities that are like a sea of high-rise apartment towers, these places have fertility rates of 0.7 or 0.6 in places like Seoul or Shanghai or Beijing or these places where everybody lives in an apartment tower. So this is a very, these apartment towers are very bad for fertility and they're going to be around for 50, 60 years or more, you know, driving down fertility for such a long time. So this is unfortunately a very negative thing to be doing. And, uh, you know, so this is another factor that's, that's probably, you know, they

create, they have this immigration driven housing crisis cause there's not enough. And instead of building family type houses that they need, they're, they're throwing up high rises to, to try to solve the problem quickly, just get people in something. But it's very bad for families for a lot of reasons. So let's talk about some of the reasons. In my head here, I can think of a few right away. One is they're just too small, like you mentioned, to have a family startup in a one-bedroom apartment. It's not feasible. The second is, this is sort of a second-order effect, but you tell me if you think I'm right or wrong on this. In Toronto, it takes an hour to drive anywhere minimum, which includes to the

office. So you are up earlier to go to work, home later, and I would guess interested in your partner a little less thanks to just the added fatigue and time spent on the commute. That's another cause. Part of me also thinks that, you know, there's something to this idea that animals don't breed in captivity. And I don't think anybody wants to live, you know, sort of your, your soul hungers for more than a one bedroom studio apartment type thing. And it affects your mood sexual desires and maybe just also your biological fertility um what do you think is really driving the fertility down in these places where what is the correlation in your view between number of high rises and fertility rate yeah i think there's several factors i mean one of them is if you you know kids are and you're about to experience this. So, uh, but kids are,

you know, very noisy and very, you know, if you had to, uh, like share a wall on, on all four sides with other people and you have a screaming toddler, like you're going to feel really, really bad about this situation. I mean, they're going to hate, your neighbors are going to be really pissed at you and you're going to feel like terrible all the time because you're going to feel really, really bad about this situation. I mean, they're going to hate your neighbors are going to be really pissed at you and you're going to feel like terrible all the time because you're you're screaming toddler. But all toddlers are like this. And. You know, so so I think I think actually it feels very bad to like be in this situation where, you know, and who's you know, if you think, you know, who's going to have like three, four, five, you know, six kids in an apartment, nobody will do that because,

you know, your neighbors will, by that time, your neighbors will actually murder you. No, I mean, it's, I'm joking, but it's very, I mean, the data shows that very few people have very few children in high rise. And I think that's a, that's a, that's a big reason. It's just, uh, it's, it just feels very uncomfortable. I mean, family is a very private activity and a lot of that privacy is cause cause kids are, uh, really noisy and you need, you need to kind of create a, a space where that they won't, uh, you know, a place with a yard so that you can just have like a sound barrier. This is, this is clearly the case and and you know i want to i want to uh press this idea of you know incentives around family formation because like as i mentioned earlier and you you said it too canada is extremely generous with parents you get this baby bonus there's all kind of tax breaks for you uh we just introduced

like ten dollar a day child care i don't know really if that's a legit thing or if it's just something that's campaigning or on the campaign trail for the liberals but you know i'm curious i don't want to say that that that is those these are good things i don't want to disparage yeah but are we incentivizing the right thing dan like the thing i the thing i have in my notes here and these are just like you know sort of flow of consciousness over the last few days, but shouldn't we be incentivizing new married couples trying to buy single family homes? Isn't that the thing we should be giving money to not, we're going to put you in a shoe box. If you manage to pop out, a kid will give you 300 bucks or 400 bucks every month until they're 18. It seems to me like they're putting the cart before the horse a little bit. And it's something that I think about a lot because we talk about economic incentives often on the show.

And I think that we're always subsidizing the wrong step in the process. And this is another example in my view. Do you agree? What do you think about that? Yeah. I mean, one thing I would say, our house with a yard, I mean, we have a sand table back there. He can just be back there by himself for half an hour at a time and it's fine. Or the five-year-old can be doing whatever she wants to do.

And we're within earshot, but we don't have to do anything. You know, it's that this is, you know, there's this aspect. One reason I think that the birth rates are dropping is there, there's this sort of high intensity parenting that was never the case, like in the past. I mean, kids would run around, you know, come back by when it gets dark and we'll have dinner on the table if you come back in time. Right. You know, now now parents have, you know, travel teams, 100 different activities. But especially, you know, and, you know, getting back to here, you know, these these these apartment buildings, you know, you don't even have a yard to play in. So that it's probably 10 times harder to be a parent because you have to constantly be taking the kid's place and doing a hundred different activities when somebody with a house and a yard can just let the kids run around and play.

Spoken like a man with experience. I would have never said that. I would have never written that down. So yeah, I think, and I think the other point that you're making that you made about just density, there is something just about crowds. There was an experiment done in the 1960s. It was done like five miles from where I am right now over at one of the – I don't know if it was nih or or or a similar thing but they did this mouse they called it mouse utopia and they they gave all the mice all the all the food they needed and all everything that they needed food and water and little compartments to live in but they they were very crowded and like the mice developed all sorts of like mental illnesses and they were like all depressed and like sad.

And they were like, they had like all sorts of like social problems, like very kind of similar to what people have today. And, and so it really does seem like, like when crowding gets too much, people don't, don't, you know, they don't thrive as well. So we, we, we seem to, we seem to just need to spread out a little bit. It's, it's interesting to think about some of these things from the point of view of, you know, someone in my shoes who's expecting to have a child in the next three months or two months, whenever my wife's due, I should know that thankfully she

doesn't watch the show. It's November 16th or 18th, one of those days. And to hear from your point of view, something like the difficulty with raising a kid when you can't do any activities in your home and have to go somewhere all the time, not only does that become time consuming, but it's sort of part and parcel with this rising cost of living we're seeing everywhere. If everything you do has a dollar figure associated with it, as opposed to just a square footage figure associated with it, you to just a square footage figure associated with it oh yeah you're in a world of hurt yeah i you know one one the lowest birth rate country in the entire world is south korea and and south korea is like known for like this insanely intense parenting where where where kids have like these after-school programs one after the other like from like

4 p.m until like midnight or something so they're like hyper competitive, but, but the result is that it's so miserable for the kids. And it's so miserable for the parents. You get this kind of over-parenting thing, which is, which is a real problem. I mean, you know, if you, if you make it, and this is kind of almost like self-imposed. So people actually have to kind of, you know, make a conscious decision to kind of kind of step off the parenting rat race a little bit. One of the worst things that I – something that I am like morally deeply opposed to is travel teams. And my good friend Tim Carney, who's an author here and a journalist here in the Washington area, he wrote a whole book where he started his book about talking about the scourge of travel teams, which I don't know if that's a big thing in Canada, but in the United States, people will, it was huge. When I was a kid, I was

playing high level basketball up until I turned 18. I was, I was somewhere every single weekend, multiple nights in the gym every week. Yeah. My brother, same thing. Yeah. In the United States, I don't, you know, you have, you can have people traveling like three, four or five States away or, you know, uh, my, my daughter is, is doing swimming. She, uh, qualified for a meet in Florida. We're in Maryland. And I just talked to my wife and said, you know, we, we agreed we're not doing travel teams and this is, you know, so, uh, so that's, that, that, because it's just such just such a burden on parents and it's so expensive and it's so exhausting. And that's it's not necessary.

I mean, she goes to plenty of meets in our area and that's, you know, she's not going to be in the Olympics. Yeah. If Ledecky can do it in your area, then she can do it in your area too. Well, she is no Katie Ledeedecky which just brought brought home four met four more medals for you know that's amazing but but you know most most kids are they're just supposed to be doing it for fun they're not future olympians and and this so parents have to kind of step back and make their own lives easier and not you know think that their lives have to revolve around their kids to the point where their own lives are miserable.

That's not the point of it. Yeah, it sort of flies in the face of some other comments I hear from time and time. In Bitcoin, there's a huge chunk of the Bitcoin faithful who talk about family formation being the most important thing. And I don't know, you know, what priority it deserves in the life of a 20 year old or an 18 year old, 19 year old, whatever. But I know in the life of a 25 or 30 year old, it should take a high priority. I'm wondering if you have a view on sort of the, I don't want to call the, the, the would be, or yet to be parents selfish, but is there something to that story that you hear sometimes that parents just don't want the, you know, inconvenience of a kid, the burden of a kid,

because they're so accustomed to their lifestyle. I mean, you see on Instagram, these dank videos of parents who are, I think, faking their, uh, satisfaction, you know, going to yet another craft brewery and paying yet another $8 for a beer that's just a bit too hoppy, but you have to pretend to like it for the likes on social media. Is there something to that? Or is that just a symptom of all these other things you're talking about? Yeah, I mean, there is.

I mean, and that gets to why I think is one reason why I think urban fertility is like so low. Because like, you know, I was in Tokyo with my family in, uh, in September of last year. So, so 11 months ago. And, you know, it's weird that all the young people all over Japan are all flocking to Tokyo and they keep, you know, which Tokyo has the lowest fertility in all of Japan, but like Tokyo has so many restaurants, you could eat at a different restaurant basically every night for your whole life. I mean, can you imagine that? No.

So, you know, and I don't know, eventually, you know, you've had enough noodles of every kind, or whatever, and enough of the Japanese style lunch boxes. You know, I don't think they're all like that insanely different, but it, you know, this, that, that is a problem. This, this kind of, you know, kind of adult entertainments. And I'm not talking about like, like strip shows or something, but just like, you know, restaurants and, and, and dance clubs and stuff like that, that are, uh, you know, you, you, you know, you can just keep, keep doing that, but what is the, what is the fulfillment and what is the meaning in that? I, I, I think that it's, you know, in the long run, that's not, that's not where meaning will be found. And, you know,

especially if you talk to older people in their sixties and seventies and beyond the, the only thing that they want to talk about is like their children and grandchildren. I know. So, so we, you know, I think, I think that's kind of a really misplaced priority. Um, but there, you know, we, we, anyway, I said, I was going to talk about another, another thing, which is kind of the political angle. Yes. I'm, I'm very interested in this. And then I want to, I know we're coming up on time. I'm going to force you to stay a little longer because I want some ideas for solutions to all this. Like, yeah, these are, these are significant problems. It is, I think the most important problem facing our civilization probably at this stage. And, uh, we got to figure it out because if, uh, you know, so here, here we see. Oh, this is going to piss people off.

Oh, yeah. Look at this. This is the Donald Trump vote share for, you a fertility rate of two births per woman. Counties that went like 10% for Trump or 20% were like 1.5 births per woman. So a whole half a child difference between whether they're a Democrat-leading or a Republican-leading county. So it's a huge difference. By the way, this didn't used to be the case. It used to be the Democrats and Republicans in the United States had about the same number of children. But the culture wars have kind of really divided people. And this is a big area where people are really divided. And I think it's very unfortunate, but there is, on the left, there is a subculture that's straight up antenatal.

They straight up believe that you should not have children. Nobody should have children. And people don't really sort of realize the extent of it unless you look at internet subcultures. But there's an antenatal group, a subreddit that has 250,000 members. Kid-free, child-free, whatever. I can't remember the name of all these ones I've seen over the years. I don't understand why that is. There's a number of things to be said about this. Some of them are a little've seen over the years. I don't understand why that is. There's a number

of things to be said about this. Some of them are a little more abrasive than others, but we've all seen these charts of SSRI use in Democrat voters is higher. We've all seen these charts that mental illness and depression and whatnot can be higher in left-leaning voters. I'm curious, you know, in, oh, here we go. If Canada were involved, I know. No, I mean, here's, it's, yeah, I mean, this is, I think this was like the, I forget which source it was like. What's the, what's their main Canadian like public news thing? CBC.

Yeah, this was, this chart is by the cbc and i think they were like if only we could uh but but but but canada like canadian provinces like the nation of canada would would be like more left than like vermont which is like our most left-leaning state apparently so like politically you have some comments in the chat here saying alberta would never vote blue which may may actually be true but i mean that's the only one of our problems well i don't know how they did this poll that i don't know how they did this poll but i maybe i i don't know i i imagine trump is not very popular in in no he's not no he's not

so maybe this was just a poll on trump in particular, but it does show that in general, Canada's left-wing politics are part of the issue. And maybe you can tell me if this is true or not, but I imagine that the American culture war has probably bled into Canada quite a bit. Sure. Every time we have an election coming up here for the first time in four years next year and campaigning is ramping up, as you might expect. And what we've seen is everything from, you know, CBC parroting stuff that you hear on CNN and MSNBC about Trump for our conservative candidate uh you know whether it's talking about him importing mega politics write down dan to our media calling our conservative candidate weird around the same time that it popped up on your side of the border so truly we are just like a um you know what is that uh we we are a tofu to your culture you know we just absorb whatever

you guys are doing and the flavors are very much the same. It's got to feel very unfair. It just feels dumb, honestly. I think most voters are immune. Because the issues that Canada faces are different. Like these insane housing prices, that's a Canadian issue.

Anyway, we want to talk about some solutions, right? How do we fix it? Yeah. What, like, what can we do? I mean, I said some stuff about incentives, but. Yeah. I mean, the first thing you can do, which I try to do and which, which we should all try to do is, is kind of talk about the problem because I think people want to do the right thing, you know, and people, you know, in the same way, kind of, and I'm not going to say whether this was good or not. People will have very serious, very strong, differing opinions, but like, you know, with COVID, you know,

everybody was eager to lock down and pitch in and wear masks. And, you know, who would have thought like before COVID lockdowns began that everybody would be staying in their house and just wearing a mask all the time and stuff like that? A lot of people, whether you agreed with it after two years or not or five years or not, in that first two weeks, almost everybody agreed. Yeah, and people want to do the right thing. And actually, the thing that's going to really make the world better in the future is to have kids or have fewer than they would otherwise have just because they think that the moral thing is to have less kids. Don't get me started. I know. But we hear so much about overpopulation and the environment and stuff when actually the pendulum has swung far in the other direction to far too few, but, you know, people are only starting to realize that. And so just talking about that point, you know, can make all the difference because, you know, also if you're

married and you have a house, you know, honestly, there's no work. Two is the same as three or four. I mean the big thing – really. No, I'm serious. So the big thing is to find somebody, get married, get a house. Now you've done all those things. Getting a bigger box of Cheerios at the grocery store is no big deal. It doesn't make any difference at that point. Your life is already wrecked. No, I'm just kidding. I'll just say, well, I've seen, I've seen a couple of my friends who have three kids and that third one basically raises themselves, you know, like there's, there's already two other

ones running around doing the bulk of the work. Is that, is that actually, I think the hardest would be one child because then the parents have to like play with them all the time yeah but but two kids can like play with each other you know and you know and that and then and it's great and when they're when you have older kids and younger kids the older ones can can really help and i i hope my kids aren't you know don't get too frustrated or resentful that but i but it's it's a it's a wonderful and this is how people people did it all through history is that older siblings helped with the younger ones, and they learned. And it's intergenerational too because kids learn how to be parents. My older – we've got four kind of more older ones that are 17 to 12, and then we've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old. So the older four, they already know how to be parents. They already know what to 12. And then we've got a five-year-old and a two-year-old. So the, the, the older four, like they already know how to be parents. They already know what to do.

And, you know, it'll be easy for them when, you know, but, but most, you know, typically, you know, you may have, you know, families might be like two kids, like one year apart or two, two kids, like two years apart. And then neither of them has had the experience of like taking care of a little kid or taking care of a baby. So like, unless you have a bigger family, kids don't learn that. So, but I think that the biggest part, a big part of the solution is just shifting, you know, to larger families because so many people will have no kids now because they'll never meet somebody. They'll never move out of their parents' basement. They'll never – I'm very sad.

But they'll never – or they won't get to that point in time before their window runs out. So like if a third or more people don't have children, then the remainder have to have like three or more just to balance things out. So that's one thing. Another thing, which we kind of touched upon before is, you know, kind of religiosity. And I think, you know, religious people, you know, do tend to be, you know, a lot happier as well. So, you know, people have to kind of turned away from it, but actually people who have a religious community, even, even if you have a hard time believing, you know, the benefits are still huge and nobody's going to like do it. Like nobody's going to like throw you up against the wall and like, say, how deeply do you believe this? Like, we think you're just trying to fake

it until you make it. We just think you want to have kids. I don't think you actually believe in any of this stuff. No, that's fine. I think, I think that that's, that that's perfectly fine to like kind of go through, go through the, the motions and try to – some people are more – and the funny thing is people are into it more or less at different times in their life. Somebody may be going through the motion and then something significant happens and then suddenly they're like deeply in it or you can have – but at least you have that community and you have that that structure in your life and especially because you know people are on devices constantly and this is something i tweeted about like a day or two ago uh but like you have this substitution where people are substituting you know sort of virtual spaces and like community right fake community for real community yeah but but you know that's the thing with a religious community is that you have a huge network of real-life physical friends, which is amazing. And people usually after they're done with high school or college, that world goes away.

How much pickleball do you want to play with the guy next to you in the cubicle farm? My answer is zero, and I'm guessing a lot of people are the same. Yeah, no, no, that's, that's, you know, that's right. And so people, you know, you just don't have that community anymore. But that's where, where religious communities, you know, offer, you know, so much of the socialization that people needed. And I would be willing to bet that, you know, you look at the world 150 years ago or something when everybody went to church, I don't think everybody was like, you know, a hardcore, you know, believer in every twist of the doctrine.

Some were, which is fine, but some people, you know, they just went along with the flow and their lives were richer for it. So I think, you know, I think that people don't have to be like, I'd love to believe, but I just can't believe, so I can't – whatever. They're not going to kick you out. They're glad to have you, so just take advantage of it. Isn't it true the thing that church and religious communities – I don't want to say church because I think there's other religious communities besides just attending a church. But there is something to this idea of a meatspace community. Unlike the online community where you're united generally against a common enemy, church is really one of the only communities available now where you're united for a common good. And there's no zero-sum thinking during the mass.

The father makes some terrible jokes during the homily or whatever. Great. You talk to people in the parking lot after. You share a scone with Ethel. She's made her famous scones again this Sunday, whatever. That's nice. I got to tell you, Dan, there's a couple of churches here in town. And I tell my wife every time I walk by, I'm telling you something's calling me about this building it's the architecture this just seems nice there's like this aura around this church i know it's nice in there i used to go and you know i may not believe but there's something calling you to that community and and just any community in general i think that yeah you can you can kind of you can one thing is people can fake until they make it or they can just do it you know kind of

you know you don't have to be believe every single thing to to be part of it that's one thing but another thing that people can do which uh is amazing which i don't think people felt like they could do before is that you can kind of try different things you don't have to like if you like in the past you were protestant you had to be protestant you were Protestant. You had to be Protestant. You were Catholic. You had to be Catholic. And you can't – this is what you got. But you can just go into the local Catholic church, and if you like it, if that doesn't jive with you, you can go into the other one. And you can kind of find something that you like. So that's something that people really could take more advantage of.

Talking about – so that's another point that people can do, of course. This is not something that people individually can do, but kind of on a social level is to build a lot more housing, a lot more houses. I shouldn't say housing because – Houses, not units or doors. Houses. Yeah, houses, right. Something with a yard. There's the NIMBY movement, not in my backyard, the YIMBY movement, which is yes, in my backyard, but what we really want is GIMBY, which is grass. So you want grass. People need to have their own patch of grass. That's the type of housing. Because remember, this housing is going to be around – my house is – oh, I don't know. It's probably like – can uh these houses are going to be around for a you know one or two hundred years or something so you need to build something that's that's good for

families because that's that's what what future generations are going to have and if it's anti family then you're going to have a big problem for a for for that's going to be pushing down birth rates for a really really long long time. So I think, and another thing for Canada, which I don't know if this is going to happen, but I think that the immigration level is, is just completely overwhelming the housing supply. There's just,

you just, is there something to like the, like the immigrant population, are they just going to have the same problems that the, I don't want to call them native Canadians, but like the, the current Canadian crop of, of young adults has with fertility? Yeah, I mean fertility drops incredibly.

Fertility is higher for immigrants at the beginning, but it drops very quickly. And they have the same problems as everybody else, that there's just not enough, not enough housing. And I mean, you, you know, you know, immigration has, it has a lot of value, but if, if it's, if the level is so high that, that, that you're not able to absorb people. And especially if, you know, you don't have the housing stock for it, you know, you're just gonna, you're just gonna squeeze out, uh, you know, you're just going to, you're just going to squeeze out, you know, births. And meanwhile, the immigrants who are coming are not, are going to have very low birth rates also. So it's not even going to, you know, solve the problem that much in terms of like workers

and so forth. So yeah, you need to, you need, you know, you can't have a level of immigration that's so high that it completely crushes your housing, which is what has happened in Canada. It's a sad state of affairs up here, buddy. Last question for you. All right. You used the term before we went on the air, demographic collapse. Are we in a situation here in Canada, in your opinion that is basically irreconcilable at this point or do we have to start doing these things now uh regardless of where we are because

if we don't then it's it's for sure a doom loop that we're not well canada is not going to like depopulate and canada is actually gaining people from a very very high level of immigration. But, you know, it's, you know, that's, right, Canada, you know, there may be some brain drain of other countries, but it's really, you know, very hard for young Canadians to, you know, to make it in that kind of, you know, cutthroat competition to try to get a house. And that's, um, you know, so I, I just don't think that that's, that that's sustainable. Meanwhile, there are other countries like, like I think Canada has taken, you know, a bunch of Ukrainian immigrants. For example, uh, you look at the nation of Ukraine, like they, they have just a total, uh, you know, they actually they actually are facing demographic collapse.

They have a very shrinking future. And countries like China, South Korea, these Asian countries that don't have much immigration and extremely low birth rates, they're the ones that are actually going to face almost probably economic collapse. I don't want to say next year or something, but definitely in the long run, I don't see how a country like Korea or even China is going to be able to hold everything together when imagine one worker supporting four retirees or something. That's just not a reasonable number. Well, on that cheery note. Well, it's going to be a difficult, difficult problem, but everybody should try to make themselves into an expert on this and try to just internalize that this is the problem that we face. And, you know, Elon Musk has said, you know, that this is a bigger crisis than the environment, you know, and that'll be offensive to a lot of people to say because nothing can be a bigger crisis than the environment but you know the environment if if the temperature goes up by something it's

not gonna it's not gonna you know break down uh you know economic systems and so forth but you know we we have to look at also at a global scale because the you know as i as i was saying the countries that that make all the chips which is uh korea and taiwan those places are in total collapse and and you know how you And we all want to imagine our future as some kind of Star Trek type futuristic thing. But if the countries that are most technological are the ones that are in demographic collapse, then how are you going to get the Star Trek future? There is no Star Trek future, Dan. Yeah. No, yeah. I don't know how Elon Musk keeps these two opposite things because he's trying to go for the stars, but he also knows these demographic realities. So I don't know if he just compartmentalizes or what. between work and family, the struggles of the dopamine feeder in your pocket and fitness and

hormonal birth control, education, the lack of understanding about the seriousness of the problem. Dan, you've been a great guest. I'm glad we set this up. I want you to tell people where they can find out more about you, your work, more births. The floor is all yours. Yes. So yeah, more births on Twitter. It's a very simple handle. I just, I got retweeted by Mr. Musk himself twice last week, which is, which is really, which is really awesome because I, you know, all of a sudden, and what I, what I do is I, I kind of, I post in ghost, which means I really work hard on, you know, sometimes on some of these essays or some of these posts, and then I just log off and don't look. And so I didn't look, I didn't look for

like 18 hours and like, like, like followers were popping up on my, on my notifications, but I just didn't. And then 18 hours later, I look and like this thing that I, you know, so that was very, you know, but, but, you know, do give me a follow if you want to learn more. And I just also added morebirths.com. So that's a sub stack that's going to try to put my research together. And I'm going to try to organize that because I've really put a lot of stuff out there over the last year and a half. But you'd have to kind of dig through my feed to find it all. So I'm going to try to organize that. And everybody should become an expert on this because it's, this is coming and, you know,

the most important, we're really going to have to orient all of society toward, you know, toward having children more because it seems like the default is just, is just, you know, too low. And, but it is possible to turn things around. You look at a nation like Israel. That is one example. There's a few countries where they just prioritize. Mongolia is another one. There's different countries around the world that really just socially emphasize.

They just value having children very, very highly. We're going to have to start doing that across society to just prioritize it much higher than we have been. And I think we can solve it. Make sure you follow your wife's bed tonight, boys. Okay. Uh, thanks for tuning in until next time. Take care of yourselves. Thanks so much.