Is the West Dying Out? The Demographic Crisis Explained

0:00Welcome once again to the conversations that matter podcasts on your host John Harris, your special guest today. First time on the podcast, but I have read his work before. He writes at substack W M Briggs W M Briggs dot substack dot com if you want to check out his work, but it is William M Briggs. He is a statistician. First time I've had a statistician on the podcast. I mean, that's like so smart that I don't even usually tap into those kinds of levels. But here we are today with William Briggs to talk about population and whether or not the population is growing, shrinking. What's happening? Is there a demographic shift and what does it look like? He's going to give us the truth on that from a math perspective. And without further ado, William Briggs, thank you for coming on.

1:00Thanks for having me. Oh, yeah, we statisticians are in great demand. I mean, everybody said, hey, we can't have a party without the statisticians. Just wait till they get here. That's exactly right. And you have a kind of a story. I think is biographically interesting about working in academia and then supporting Donald Trump and here you are, you're doing podcasts now. So I don't, I mean, is that an upscale move? Is that a downscale? I don't know, but I don't know if you want to share a little bit about yourself because I think that's very fascinating. Well, yeah, I was a professor at Cornell at the Med School and then also an adjunct professor up at Cornell Proper in Ithaca. I lived in the Upper East Side of Manhattan for many, many years, which is the Med School connection, which is where it is. And I was also up in 2016 when Trump began his first run for presidency, which I guess everybody remembers. And they had the conservatives, I supported Trump and the conservatives on that side came

2:01out the national review crowd as is their want came out with a big never Trump. Was it never Trump or never Trump or anything like that? I can't say it. It became the never Trump sort of coalition. And Roger Kimball, who was the chief over at Encounter Books and new criterion and so forth, wanted to counter this. So he started a group called the Scholars and Writers for America. And he asked me quite early on when I signed this short very short couple of paragraph thing to supporting Trump for president and why we supported them, that kind of thing. And I did. It never grew very large this group. And never Trump proud I think was always officially larger. But we were willing to put our names in these documents and come out publicly for Trump. And I did and I was canceled by Cornell back then. And which was fine. You know, I didn't make a big thing of it. I did not make, if you do that, you become part of the drama and they love to see that

3:02part of the drama and everything. I just moved on. But it was an interesting time. I got a lot of emails from colleagues, you know, a lot of the first very forceful, how could you, how dare you? I thought I knew you kind of a thing. I didn't think it was that big of a deal, but it was evidently they did. Can I ask you, would you do it over? Would you try to get 10 year first or what would you advise people in your situation to do? No, not anymore. And then the woke kid after that. You know, I mean, it was always progressive, especially at I think, especially at Cornell and one of the big IVs. After woke, it's almost impossible to go through the system. It's not impossible, but it's very extremely difficult to go through. If you're a young man and you have ideas about reality, if you're a realist and you consider yourself to be based or to be, you know, I don't want to use the word professional

4:04conservative or something like that for that kind of crowd. But if you're this way and you want to start out through academia, you can keep your mouth shut and try to go through the system. And if you're in some field that's more reality based, like physics or engineering or chemistry or that kind of thing, you might get through. But you know, it's very difficult to do that, to keep silent, especially when they're giving you classes and they're asking you to fill out diversity statements and all the rest of this kind of a thing. And they do say, and they mean it, that silence is violence, right? So if you're not audibly participating, you're going to be at least suspected. So to get through all that, especially as the academy is self-selecting for woker and woker people, it still is. I mean, there's been some minor victories with the change in administration in 2024, but they're very minor victories compared to what's going on. The academy has not straightened itself out as any current glance at the news says.

5:07So if you're a scientist like I am and you want to do science, the best way you could do that is to do it privately, find some company that's interested in the particular branch of science that you are a specialist or start out on your own, like I do. I was doing okay at that point. So, you know, I'm able to go out on my own and do that kind of stuff. And I still do. I work now all over the world. Whereas I can't even see myself returning to a university at this point. So just just would never happen. Wow. Well, that is fascinating. I heard the other day from someone who's going to Yale, Christian conservative wants to get in politics that he said, oh, they're, you know, they're lightening up now. They're letting conservatives in. They want conservatives because they feel bad about what they did. And I, I'd love to believe that's true. I kind of think you're probably right, though. I mean, the Star Wars scene is coming to me.

6:09It's a trap, but. Yeah. Well, look at just happening at Cambridge. Yeah. United States may be slightly better than other places. That's true. But the rest of Western culture is not. They have anything gotten worse. And what is it? Chris, Chris Burnett, he documents all these things. He's in Canada. I mean, they openly, they're allowed to. It's not illegal. I get supposed to be illegal in the United States. But they openly ask for, you know, we need a research chemist, but you can only be trans. Or you can only be two spirit. Or you can only be a woman. Or you know, they blatantly ask for these kind of things. So they're self-selecting for increasingly self-selecting for further and further woke. So there's no, there's not going to be much joy for you if you want to start out down that path in the traditional academic path. Well, online it seems like to me there's a sort of an in between. There's a, there's sane people in this where not an academia because they've kind of gone insane. They, they don't live up to their standards.

7:11That's the real issue. They say they are about truth and stuff. They don't live up to it. And then there's this, I mean, I started seeing it called podcast to stand, which I think is hilarious. There's people who are just throwing out obvious lies that they, you know, people believe them because they have a force of personality or whatever. And in between that, if you want to say in between or a, you know, the third way, I don't know, there's, there's people who care about those institutional standards, but they don't have the institutions. And I think you're one of those people where, hey, you care about truth, science and academia, but the people who say that they care about those things who run the institutions aren't going to have you. And here you are doing it for us today, which I really appreciate you giving your time. So thank you. Oh, my pleasure. And besides which don't forget, they call truth. Now they, they used to call for truth and free speech and all that kind of stuff. And when they were taking over the academy, now they say truth is epistemic violence. This is the term they love to use. You can look it up. Don't believe me. Epistemic violence or there's colonialist thinking.

8:15The white man's oppressive ways put on to these lovely people of color who don't have the same kinds of truths that we do. So they're embracing this more and more. Reminds me of what I was at UNC Chapel Hill when they were taking down one of the first statues to come down. And I went there posing as a protester. I wasn't lying, but I just, I showed up with a bunch of like, gatorate and stuff and they all thought I was with them. And then I actually told them I was actually here to debate them about it. And I remember one of the things, there were professors there, there were students there and they said, hey, look at this university. Who do you think built this university? It was slaves. And I said, man, you know what we should do is we should just, we should probably just tear the whole university down. But it's not, but it's like all these institutions were set up by the very people that they're designed to target and hate. And it's just, it's like the height of irony I suppose. Well, let's talk about on that note, white people, European, the deal of Europeans to set.

9:16I keep hearing, right on the internet, but I've obviously heard this for years that with Glee sometimes coming from the left, that Europeans are becoming less a percentage of the population, they're dying off, old white men, right? If your institution caters to old white men, it's over. Christian institutions got into this. We got to reach out to the minorities because that's who's around now. I mean, where you can't run an institution with people who are dying off. So you felt, I remember I kind of felt like I was being made to be part of the Dodo bird group or something. Like this is my ways, my people, my children, you know, they're going to grow up in a world where they're not going to have other people that look like them that perhaps have their culture and think like them that even traditional Americans, a lot of them are going to be gone. And I think this rightly creates somewhat of a concern and maybe even a panic in some

10:16people that what used to define the country with its unique mix of people will no longer define the country. It will be replaced by the third world or some other place. So I was hoping you could help us with this because one of the aspects of this is the birth rate and how people aren't having babies. My wife and I have just full disclosure here. We have had our own fertility issues. So we have gone deep into getting rid of the microplastics in our lives and trying all these different things. Everyone has their own way of approaching this. And it really does, I think, affect everyone, but there are certain places online that seem to indicate that no, this is just targeting your demographic. This is, look at the people in India. They're having babies just fine. What's happening to us? We're being poisoned and there's conspiracies. And so, anyway, I don't believe all those things, but I think you approached this with such a cool head.

11:18You look at the numbers. You give us the reason. And so maybe we should start here with birth rate. The birth rate is dropping. Could you just talk about that a little bit? Why is it dropping? What's your theory about this? Well, there's lots of theories while the birth rate is dropping. It's dropping not just in America, but everywhere, everywhere. Among every race in every country, it seems to be dropping. I think there's lots of theories. My theories, and I do say, and it's true, there are as many theories and explanations or causes of infertility as there are men and women and days because anybody, any couple decides whether or not to have a kid, that decision is not always final. And the causes are many and varied. But my leading theories, the ones I think, and these are not uncommon. The first one's not uncommon at all. The second one is, I think, more uncommon. The first one is equality. It's true that wherever equality is, wherever women's equality in particular is introduced,

12:19women start chasing careers instead of families. They believe the propaganda that they can hold off having kids until they're in their 30s or even 40s. They hear of things like women in their late mid-40s, something like this. They've heard of a woman. They saw a thing online or on TikTok or something like this. She had IVF. It was kind of expensive. All this kind of a thing. And she popped out a kid. No, I think, well, I can be them. I'll freeze my eggs. And I'll be able to do this to myself. It's incredibly rare IVF is just bypassing all the moral arguments against it. And there's plenty. If you just want to think like you're utilitarian, it's incredibly rare that it works. It doesn't work very well. It's incredibly expensive. And there are all kinds of difficulties with the children, even, in these things. So it's a very minor thing. So if you're going to base your life on equality and think, I need to have this career.

13:20I need to establish myself in this career. You're using the best, most fertile years of your life, doing that instead of, instead of, instead of becoming pregnant. And that's, of course, an enormous mistake. Anyway, so equality. Everywhere it's been introduced, everywhere, particularly in those areas that had very high fertility rates in Africa and so forth. Wherever women's equality is introduced, women delay having kids. And everybody knows about that. That's not going anywhere. But the other theory, I think, is less well known is I call it the ICU theory, the I-CU. People look around. They're crammed into these big cities, particularly in smaller and Asian countries and the like. And they see all these people around them. And these people are using, they're using, there's a lot of people and they think, why do I need to have other people? And besides which, in order to have my own place, it's an economic. Sort of argument.

14:21In order to afford my own place, because there's so many people around, I need to work even harder now before I'm able to even afford a kid. And this affordability argument is poor and conditioned on when, when, when wealthier people make this argument, they're conditioning their births on all kind of arguments that poor people don't make their arguments on the poor people go ahead and just have kids. In general, they can always defer those costs. The states will take it up for them. They'll pay for them. Whereas richer people are going to pamper themselves and their births a lot more often than they, than poor people will have a lot more C sections. They'll have all kinds of ritual holes associated with it. And they may get really expensive for themselves. So they say, I need to really make a lot of money. But in order to afford housing, how can I afford housing when all these people are around? So why are all these people around? Well, one thing in America, anyways, we had all this open border immigration. So there's a lot of people flooding in, millions, tens of millions of people perhaps.

15:25And they, they take up space, they've, they've required housing and everything. So that makes it more expensive for everybody else. But it's not just that. It's not just that we're also living a lot longer. I proved this a couple of weeks ago, just look at the human mortality database statistics. We're all living a lot longer. We are, in fact, living longer. It's not an artifact of the data or some kind of special thing like this. And two ways has this affected fertility. First of all, and times just 50 years ago and more, the infant mortality rate was enormous. Even in America was, it was quite large. And in other countries, in Asia, for instance, it was really huge. The number of people who died, you know, before they reached their birth, they was, was incredibly large. So people tended to have more kids to make up for that, especially in times historical. But now, if you look at South Korea, which has one of the lowest fertility rates, people are living a lot longer. There's the proportion of people who are dying in their 90s or even over 100 has really

16:31swelled up. And so we have more and more people, even though fewer people are having babies because we're living so much longer. But that, the tide of story together, that's self limiting. Both equality is self-limiting, which I'll let you talk. But and also this, this ICU is also self-limiting for the reason that these people are not going to last forever. And there's going to be open spaces at some time in the future. So I hear you saying that it's the feminism on the one end and then expectations about what is required economically to have a child on the other. These two things are the main contributors. So you didn't mention plastics, which is like one of the things being blamed now for environmental factors as much. You think it's really more so a decision that people are making.

17:31That's what it sounds like you're saying. Yeah, I mean, absolutely. You could just look at the years of first births and everything. And those are just increasing, increasing, increasing, increasing. And it's simple as that. I mean, so the reasons I think I'm right about this is there's some, there's a danger. We look at these things called fertility rate. What is the fertility rate? It's a complicated statistical calculation. It takes the observed proportion of women who have no births, multiplies that by zero, and adds to it the statistical proportion of women observed having just one child multiplies that by one. Takes the number of women having two babies and the proportion of that multiplies it by two and so on. And in the end, we have this thing called an expected value in statistics. And that compresses to this one number summary called the fertility rate in America right now. It's depending on the numbers you use.

18:33There are varying sources, 1.7 to 1.8. But that speaks of an average of the average woman and it doesn't tell you what's going on in any kind of detail. Right now, approximately in the United States. And it's also, this holds up exactly for South Korea, which has an even lower fertility rate. The numbers are kind of fascinating how they're almost identical. We have about 18% of women who by the time they reach age 40 to 44, never have kids. They never have children. For all those reasons, like I see you and the quality or even infertility that could be medical, you know, medical reasons too, but they never have kids. In times past, just maybe 30 years ago or so, we had fertility, the zero percentage women having kids was down around 12 or 13%. And that gives you that fertility rate calculation of the 2.1, this sort of mythical replacement

19:37rate. And it only kind of soared up recently when equality really hit in the 90s and woke hit and all that kind of a thing. And then the COVID panic hit and it kind of warbled around in there a little bit. But in these statistics are hidden, if you look at it, okay, well, 18% are not having any kids. There's quite a lot of it. There's about 19% of women are still having one kid, all right? Well, that's not good enough for a replacement because if every woman just has one, then the population has by every generation. But two thirds of women in the United States and about the same in Korea, South Korea, are having two or more kids. And the infertility rate is incredibly low now. So we might as well count these as almost full births. And the number of women who are having three or more kids is about a third, about a third of women are having three or more kids. And some of them have as many as nine. And the same kind of thing is happening in Korea, almost identical numbers, just a little

20:38bit lower. So the real problem is if we want to get fertility rates back up is really just in the 18% or so, who are just having, who are not having any kids. And if that can drop back down to about 12 or 13%, and I did some calculations to show this, it's a very simple model, very simple model. I think anybody would believe it. We just dropped that fertility rate from the 18 percentage points down about 6 percentage points. Then we're back at replacement, which I think is going to happen. And of course, I also think it's going to get worse before it gets better because we haven't seen the end of equality. And people are still aging out. We have that baby boomer bump coming and they're still aging out. But you know, they're going to be making their great exits here. They started really, but we haven't seen the end of that because of advancements in medical technology.

21:38People are living longer and they take up space and that requires housing and all that kind of thing. So this is interesting because I haven't really thought about this, but the complaints about the baby boomers and how they ruined everything. But one of the things that often comes up when I look online and I see, you know, boomers being blamed is that I can't afford a house. And my folks, my grandparents, for a lot of these, for a Zoomer, I think that would be as grandparents actually, not as parents, but they're not helping me out. They're on vacation, whatever. But you're saying on a normal circumstances, look, people of that age would have been gone by now. The house would have been open. There would have been that would have probably increased opportunities for the younger generation. And that's what it sounds like you're saying, is that right? That's exactly right. So we're kind of, we have two things about us, man, people. We tend to look at the times we're in and we think they're always going to continue on the way they are. That's just a perclivity we all have.

22:40It's very natural. We're tending to extrapolate the way we are now. And I think it's going to be this way into the future. So fertility rates are dropping, which is true. And we think that's always going to be that way. But we're living in a time in which, really, for the last 50, we could say the last century, but really the past 50 or 60 years where medical technology has increased such that people are really, you could quote, it's a really shocking signal where the whole death, the age at death distribution is shifting, shifting, shifting, growing larger, larger, larger, and there's more and more older people that are living. So we're living, but it has to top out. And if you look at these saved numbers, it looks like it tops out around 100 to a little more than 100. There are some people who lived to 110, 115, I guess somebody just the other day made a news dying at 115, some lady, or maybe she celebrated her birthday. I can't remember which, but in any case, that is also exceptionally rare.

23:43We're coming up every more and more of us are living, the greater proportion of us are living longer lives, but we're not really extending our lives at any point. And eventually we catch up to this. We catch up to this because it's this these medical technologies have not infiltrated all over the world, but they probably will. And once we catch up to that, then everything kind of returns back to that equilibrium. And so it's this increase in technology that's driving the ICU part of my theory. And equality itself, I just think is self limiting because the people who are focused on this are not, of course, they're not, they're not procreating. Whatever tendencies they have are dying with them. And in our culture, we love to celebrate, I call it the very neutral term, try to, most neutral term I could think of, non-procreative sexual activities. We take pride and non-procreative sexual activities and a lot more people are turning to these

24:48kind of things. And of course, it then becomes rare, not impossible, but rare for these people to procreate. So their proclivities are going to largely die out with them. And we haven't quite reached saturation for that either, but it has to come. There's an absolute limit to these kind of things because the impulse, the, the, the, what do you want to call the instinct for it to procreate or at least when you're young, to look at, you know, if you're a young man, you're looking at that female or whatever. She'd think, I think she's going to make an ideal, ideal wife. You can't, you can't, you can't fully eliminate that. There's no way to do so. So that's human nature. So you're, this is interesting because you're talking about behaviors like homosexuality and I, it sounds like perhaps people very influenced by pornography or something who want to reenact things that they've seen that don't actually have the potential to produce a baby. That this you think is going to go away eventually because natural instinct is to have children.

25:53I don't say I never go away. So in that 18% of the ladies who never have kids, I looked historical times. What was the kind of minimum? It's not 0%. It's never that every woman has a kid's. The bottom rock bottom seems to be about 4 or 5% and any number of things, war, famine, pestilence, non-procreative sexual activities, even religion, some women go off to become nuns. That kind of thing. The real hard floor seems to be around like 8% or so. Okay. I do say that these, now we had a great flourishing of these things and everybody over-embibed. And they keep trying to invent new ways and new ones to be able to do this. The latest craze is for men to put on address and proclaim that they're a woman. A woman. Right. So that kind of had a, have we peaked out there? I think maybe we did. Maybe I'm wrong about that, but maybe in America anyway, we kind of, we reached peak,

26:54that kind of behavior. And that these people are just not, they're not passing themselves on. They're not pro-creating to anything like the extent that ordinary couples are. But one of the things about that, because I've heard for years on the Christian right that look, we're going to have more kids. We're going to win eventually because we're the pro-life generation and look how many babies we're having. And it's never worked out that way because a lot of these Christian kids who have sent off the universities or they now get convinced online to that they're a furry or something. And so the way that they convert, the way that they produce is through conversion, not through pro-creation. That's true. The conversion is absolutely there. But that conversion too is also led by just propaganda and all that kind of stuff. So that part's always going to be there. But that's always been with us too. That kind of thing has always been with us in human culture, in man.

27:55But again, the desire to do those kind of things will drop off and fall off for the people who are, if there's anything to, if there's anything to our physiological make-ups in which we pass on to people which obviously is true, those things that led people to that behavior just simply won't exist in future populations. It's not that propaganda will never be there. There will never claim some of these people. That's always going to be with us. But I think that the influence of that, once we saturate on all these kind of things and particularly when the population starts dropping, which it will rapidly do because people are going to hit that sort of 100-year-old wall, it's happening fast, really fast. And that was a kid. I was in school. I was just a boy in the 70s, in the 80s in high school. And it was like four billion people on the planet at that time. And everybody was saying, boy, I can't even imagine it's going to get to five or six or seven

28:58billion. Now we're supposed to be at like eight billion. There's disputes about how that's all counted and everything. But, and it's increasing. But it's largely increasing because of that increase in age. And once we hit that wall, once we hit that wall, which is coming up, we're going to come in 20, 30 years from now. What will we all be allowed to see it? I don't know, maybe not me. That's when the fertility rates will begin to climb back up. I think they're absolutely going to drop between now and then for all those reasons. I don't say tomorrow it's going to get better. But I say that it will, in fact, get better for our progeny. What do you think about the countries with the highest fertility rates? What makes them stand out is it's just that they don't have feminism and they've rejected these. They don't have, they don't have feminism. They don't have equality. Their economies are simpler. And they don't worry about, they don't fret about, you know, the having, you know, people

30:00now they want to have, they want, I don't know, I'm struggling for an analogy here. You want to buy a bitter old car used to be able to buy these bitter old cars, right? That was good enough. You can get transportation by. You can say I'm just going to have a kid. I'm just going to have a kid. It'll be good enough. I'll just pop the kid out at home or run to the hospital. It'll be nothing. But now everything has to be, you know, what's the latest hottest craze car or whatever that might even be? I don't even know. Like a Tesla or something. I have to have the greatest new Tesla. And that's the only way I'm really going to be happy about having a kid. I'm satisfied if I can do it this way. And so people angle themselves to this kind of way. Where we have this surplus in the West, where, oh, sorry, my thing's going out here. We have this surplus in the West where we're doing kind of well, even the people who aren't doing too well are doing better than these people in the poorer countries. We're doing a lot better than some of them. And so we're still having this birthing, you know, this gold birthing envy, whereas

31:01these people in these other countries don't. But equality is rapidly coming in with them too. That education, women's education, a particular comes in. And when it does, the fertility rate starts, starts plummeting immediately. So I was in Turkey a few years. Well, now it's more than a few, 2017. And one of the things I noticed was men and women were actually out on dates looking at each other, not at their cell phones. The advertisements there were families, whereas back in the United States, at least in New York, they were mostly friends, you know, get on a data plan with your friends. And over there, it was, no, your family. And I just thought they're going to destroy us, you know, like not destroy us, but they're going to outcompete us when it comes to birth rate and all these things. And I don't think Turkey has an exceptionally high birth rate. In fact, if I look it up, it gets, yeah, 1.42 to 1.48. But it's actually that's what what what what what do you have any thoughts on that? I don't know if you've gotten granular on this. Because Turkey is kind of weird where they have, you know, in the country areas, Islam is

32:06predominant. And I'm sure there's probably a lot more children. But if you're like Istanbul, even though they have these advertisements for families and people are dating and stuff, they really, they're curious about you if you're from the West. They kind of want to be like you. They want to emulate. And so I do wonder with a second, I think they're second world, second world country, like Turkey, or they first world, they're in NATO. So where where is the country like that going when in the blue, I say blue, they wouldn't say blue, but like at the cities where it's more progressive, they're starting to go more the direction where going, which will have probably the effect you're talking about. But in these outlying areas, which make up a whole bunch of the country, they're just living the way they live for a thousand years. Well, they're going to win. There's no question about it. That's just the way it is. So man, when I talk about it, I generally speak of man. Man is going to survive. You understand man, the species is going to survive.

33:08Whether certain groups survive is a different thing entirely. Now what you say about people moving online and losing the ability to communicate or to interact face to face, I had an experience of this just the other day, I went to there's a local brewery here. I was just talking to the waitress who was poor and the beer isn't cheese a little bit younger than I am. And just talking about where is everybody? This is Northern Michigan and the summer. There's usually a lot more people up here, but this summer is quiet. There was two young men. There were maybe 25 each. Good looking guys, reasonable looking guys. I say, hey, what's going on? How come there's nobody on the golf course or something like this? And they both looked at each other. This guy is talking to us. They never responded to me. And I run into that kind of thing more and more. And that's purely the fault of people having most of their communications done for them online face to face. They're completely freely communicating online, sharing everything.

34:13But in person, in real life, they're very reluctant to talk to you. And so that is true. That's going to be very harmful, especially until that kind of thing saturates. And it's funny. I'm just droning on and on. I know. But Isaac Asmall probably a book called The Naked Sun. And he kind of imagined this trait magnified. It's a planet called a salaria in which man has over, you know, has all the technology he absolutely needs. A lot of robots take care of all the. We care that you could possibly have. There's no economic want whatsoever. But people have then become so afraid of communicating directly or being even another person's presence. They communicated solely online, if you like, solely by what they call try, mantic viewing or something like this, where they were absolutely free with each other and the way they communicated online like we are now.

35:14But in person, they were horrified of each other. And that planet was rapidly, rapidly dying because of the same kind of a thing. So this was for scene. And it's going to be a big problem and tell, and tell that kind of saturates. I don't think we've reached saturation level here because again, technology, we're still in this period here. It wasn't that long ago. Just think that it wasn't, it just hasn't been that long ago. We used to call cell phones. We used to call your phone a smartphone, right? And before that, there were hardly any cell phones. So all of this stuff, all this stuff hasn't completely baked in yet. We haven't hit that wall yet either. So I do think it's going to get worse, as I say, before it gets better. And then as third world countries receive this technology, they'll get on the same track probably. Of course. Of course. And this is one of the reasons I bring up Turkey as sort of, and maybe we can bring up Israel actually. Let's bring up the, everyone's favorite country right now. But on the birth rate stuff, I think it's particularly fascinating to look at Israel because

36:18Israel has a 2.87 rate according to my Google search that I just did. And Israel is, I mean, depending on how you look at Israel, I mean, I think they see themselves as a Western country because they're surrounded by these more islamicist countries. That have a very different view. So they see themselves as Western. Obviously, the people around them see themselves as a Western colonial outpost. And, and this creates a lot of friction. There's a lot of war, the small country. There's the fear that they could be destroyed by a nuclear weapon or something. But the odd thing to me about them, because they do have technology just like us. They all the things that you said that we have, like they do have those things. However, they have a high birth rate. So I wonder, this is a theory I'm on the fly putting out there. I'm wondering if you agree or not. Is taking your religion seriously?

37:19So should I? Sure. Okay, does that actually save your civilization from these negative effects that cause low birth rates? Sorry, because they don't have a quality. It's not Israel as a whole, you understand. That's the problem with these one number of summaries. Right. If you want to Tel Aviv, where they openly celebrate pride and non-proc creative sexual practices, the birth rate is of course exactly the same as it is in any European country. You have to go to the kibbutzes where the equality does not reign. Equality is not present there. And so birth rates are naturally higher. So equality is, of course, in religion, in Christian religion, there's no equality either. Although they try to paint it as if there is. Right. Exactly. So in particular, equality between the sexes or there's no equality anywhere. I mean, there's there's parable after parable, the parable of the talents, I always like

38:20that one because because not everybody has been given the same gifts. Not everybody is the same. There's man and woman he created them. They were just different. And so you could take that part seriously. You cannot, that's fine. But even secularly, if you were to suddenly realize, well, wait a minute, equality is just not true. And we go back to realistic biological standards and everything. We can get, we can get to the same exact position. So religion, religion can certainly do that, but so can, so can reasoning about reality. We just acknowledge reality as she is and not as we want her to be. Well, it sounds like at least for Christianity and Judaism and so far as it retains Old Testament practices and so forth. It's factoring in reality. It's acknowledging it and conforming to it. And that's what makes it resilient.

39:23It would seem to me that would be one of, I mean, you're out of Christian podcasts obviously, but that would be, uh, I don't know, that's exactly it. God is the ultimate reality. So if you're not embracing, if you're not, that's what my definition of woke, uh, which differs from others is the replacement of reality with fantasy. And the more you do that, the woker you are. And if you're rejecting, if you're rejecting, uh, the first cause, if you want to speak purely scientifically, if you're rejecting that first cause, which is God, then you're rejecting part of reality and you're in your, in your in some sense, woke because of that, but not to the same way that others replace everything. Uh, and they try to replace everything. You'd be a technology or something with, with their fantasies. And then they insist that you embrace their fantasies and say that they're real. That's the, that's the real problem. If it was just a guy running off, for instance, in a dress and saying, Hey, look how pretty I am or something like this.

40:23Most people would probably laugh it off, but the insistence that that fantasy become real, that we all have to participate in the fantasy and go along with it and not try to inflict any reality upon this guy. Uh, that's, that's the real problem. That's the real problem of woke. Well, if, if folks want to check out, and I'm not ending the podcast, I'm just letting people know they want to check out your stuff, WMbriggs dot sub stack dot com is the place. You have a lot of graphs and a lot of numbers and things. You show your, you show the math, so to speak, of how you arrive at some of these conclusions, which I think a lot of people will really appreciate. Um, I suppose this is where I wanted to get to Ed, and we're here now in the podcast, the solution to this. All right. One of the things that I have been exposed to just because of my wife and I in our unique situation, um, which we are made to feel and some of our friends who have had fertility issues are made to feel, uh, just because of everything around us, uh, that is telling

41:24us when, when you get into this world, that we have a crisis because of environmental factors of some kind. Um, in plastics is one of the big ones right now, but I'm sure it'll be something else tomorrow. It'll be, uh, I don't know. I'm trying to think about the other things. Yeah. Well, climate change. That's a big one. Yeah. Climate change is part of this. Um, the reason that, you know, you can't have kids is because of vaccines when you were young and so now they've damaged you. I mean, there's all kinds of these medical and environmental things. But what you're saying, and I agree with you actually not to say that there aren't environmental factors, right? I'm not saying that, but, um, not everything is Alex Jones. They're turning the frogs gay, right? They're actually, you could map this out. Exactly right. I know I have made a career, uh, particularly since being canceled looking at bad science. I tried to once a week anyway, throw up a new paper to show you not, not, not, not some obscure paper from some far away journal that nobody's heard of. A paper that has made the news and a research shows kind of a thing where people are taking

42:28it seriously. And I try to show people how much bad science there is and it would take an entire whole broadcast to kind of explain why I think it is, but it's basically bad thinking about evidence. And the practices that statisticians in particular have developed in order to ascribe cause to things are poor and wrong and wrong headed and lead to vast over certainty. Now I've looked at a lot of these microplastic, the PFAS and all these kind of thing papers, particularly when it comes to, for whatever reason, academics fixated on the effects of vaccination and these, and these PFAS chemicals, the forever chemicals, they somehow think that the, the forever chemicals are reducing the effects of this vaccination. And so one paper leads to another paper. I did this in a population in, and Suriname or something like this. Okay, I'm going to do it over here. Well, I'm going to do it, especially in women or I'm going to do it in Puerto Ricans.

43:32And it goes on and on like this and they build up this wall of, uh, so-called research. And they all make the same mistakes as the other ones do, but the entire body of it itself makes it look like there's something there. Now I've looked at these, I've looked at several of these papers because I've been asked to, uh, by a colleague. And I don't find anything there, which is not to say that there's nothing there. I mean, to say that the, the, the, the, the descriptions of bad things, or at least when it comes to vaccinations and the childhood diseases and the like, those signals are false signals, I think. Now whether or not they're, uh, affecting fertility, I don't know. I have never looked at those kind of papers, but I could. So you, you think it's overblown the attention that plastics are getting it. This is, there's bad, uh, assumptions that are being used to- I, I wouldn't, I wouldn't rule one way or the other about fertility, but I would say I would think it's unlikely, but which is not to say I'm just missing it.

44:37I'm not just missing it because as I say, I haven't looked at those papers. I've only looked at other kind of, I've looked at, uh, I've looked at effective vaccination and I've also looked at, they tend to look at neurological diseases and the other like parkour controls. Oh, I see. Okay. I got that. Imagine or things like this. And I don't find any signal there. I find a lot of bad statistics and I go through, I go through those on my site and in detail of the kind of details you're not probably interested in here. So, uh, well, I mean, I actually- My only surmises, the same kinds of bad things would be, bad kind of practices would be the same in the, in the papers with fertility, but I don't know since I haven't looked at. No, I, I mean, of all the people out there, I actually would be more interested just because of, uh, exploring this, uh, in detail myself and going to doctors and trying to figure out- Well, I'll give you the one thing that they all do. Yeah. And so, um, the epidemiologist fallacy. You'll see a thing, uh, so PFAS or, you know, forever chemicals, whatever would be a newspaper headline of that kind of a sort of forever chemicals, increase Parkinson's, say, and I think,

45:43wow, the research from doctors, so and so on, doctors, so and so on, this preeminent universe, and it always has big names, big universities, well-funded grants, uh, concluded, you know, as linked to the PFAS chemicals are linked to Parkinson's. In this particular study we've done, which builds on this body of research, you say, okay, sounds bad. So you open up the paper and you look at the paper, the epidemiologist fallacy now is when a researcher says X causes Y, X causes Y, but where X is never measured. And instead of proxy for X is measured and treated as if it were X. Uh, what is, what happens in PFAS? We don't know how many, uh, uh, plastics any individual is taking, right? We don't know, because that's never measured. Instead what they'll do is they'll look at some watershed area or something like this

46:44and say, well, here's how many PFAS chemicals we found in this watershed area, somebody parts per billion. And now I'm going to take your zip code, your zip code and see how far away you are from this watershed. And I'm going to build a model that says the further you are from this watershed, the less of these PFAS you probably ingested. And then I'm going to run a statistical model, which correlates, uh, this model, model of exposure that I have with local statistics, not individuals now, but local statistics from some hospital of the number of Parkinson's cases that, uh, that they had, uh, from this year to that year. So it's all one, you should see the problem. If I want to say that plastics are causing infertility, I look at you, I count the number of plastics in your testes or something like this, or I, I sample them in some way or in the wife's ovum, uh, that kind of thing. And I look at that and I say what's going on?

47:45What's causally happening here? Those studies can be done, but they're very expensive and they're very time consuming and they're limited because it's very difficult to do these kind of things. Meanwhile, I can sit and do this correlational study, which I can announce that forever chemicals cause Parkinson's or any of this other listed disease and it's all crap. All right, it's all crap. I mean, it's, uh, it always turns out to be, there's lots of other explanations that you could substitute in. It doesn't have, because anything, if you live in this particular zip code, that, that's going to be correlated with any of these other diseases. And so what else is common to that zip code besides this increasing PPS? Well, it's the number of cars in the neighborhood, a number of, you know, children playing on, or dogs at people, there's any number of things that you can correlate in exactly the same kind of statistical way. None of this stuff is any could way close to proving cause, but that we're flooded with research like this because of the absolute ease, uh, with which technology like these

48:47computers that we have now, anybody can run these kind of statistics. So and the harder stuff like I suggested doing the actual, you know, biopsies or tests or something like this are much rare. We need the biologists more than we do the statisticians that sounds like on this one. Uh, well, we absolutely do. Yes. Yeah, correlations, not causations. It sounds to me like the, the best thing, like what's going to happen is going to happen, right? And, and we, uh, can't project every variable, obviously. But for, for those of us who are concerned about our civilization, um, it, it sounds like we need to actually to get a dose of religion or something. Like, at least we need to recognize reality and, um, Christianity has been the predominant understanding in our culture for a long time that you should love your neighbor, which means interacting with them, knowing their needs, which now you can't do on a phone as well. But, uh, we, you have a duty to pro create to be fruitful to multiply the field, right? It, it, it, it seems to me, the, another correlation that perhaps is a, is a causal correlation

49:47would be as Christianity has waned, as religion has waned in the West. So has, uh, the birth rate changed. Um, is that a fair assessment to make? Well, sure, because something, what, what replace Christian beliefs? Well, beliefs like equality. The Enlightenment has three tenants, if you like it, uh, secularism, utilitarianism, and egalitarianism, and from which all our modern beliefs are sort of based, and every one of those is harmful to, uh, to, to, to future births. Uh, no question about it. Well, um, this has been enlightening. Uh, I know there's so many other things we could talk about government policy. I mean, I heard, I, there's a paper actually, I, I do want to bring this up before we get. I, I, I, we probably know the paper I'm talking about. There was a paper that the birth rate change when laws about, uh, seatbelts change for, uh, you know, you know, I'm talking about, right? I've heard it. Okay. So, so, so kids, uh, have to be in a car seat and you can only have so many car seats

50:52because they take up room. And so, uh, car manufacturers did not meet this demand. And now if there's a huge jump in cost, when you go from, I think it's like two to three. So, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's what it is. That's the cause you have to get a much bigger vehicle. So, uh, that this actually, you can see changed, uh, the birth rate or at least they correlate that and say this is a possibility. Um, so government policy, perhaps has some, some effect on this. Oh, yeah. The cult of safety first is out there, uh, to our great destruction. The cult of safety first safety first on everything, including all these things. It's destructive in a number of ways. That's one of them. So, that's a cause. That's part of the ICU cause, the economic causes. I don't think it would be the over, uh, overwhelming cause in every case, but it is an excuse. A lot of times people say they make excuses. They say this is the reason we're not having another kid, right? Uh, we're not having another kid because we really can't afford the car to put them in

51:55and things like this. But you know what? There's a will. There's a way. So a lot of this is just a reliance on this is a reason for why we're not having kids, but instead what I really want to do is be self-indulgent. I want to have, uh, I want to have a good time. I'm going, I'm here to have as many orgasms as possible in the shortest possible period and then, uh, run off the Canada to get my made final treatment. Uh, so that's the, that's the utilitarian argument. That's the other tenant that, uh, the, and then die without leaving anything to, uh, and die without leaving anything behind. Yeah. So one of the things too, I was thinking along these lines, my grandma says this a lot by the way. She says, look, we grew up in a small house. My, her, her, I think it was her, uh, her, her father and her uncle or something. They had to take shifts sleeping on the same bed one work nights more days. She slept on the couch like they just made it work and she, she looks at us and you know,

52:56I told her, is like, you know, we have a, our place is kind of small for having an, uh, if we had another baby, it would just be kind of tight here. And, and then she whips out stories like that and I'm like, well, I guess you're right. You know, you make do, um, when I, I worked as a furniture repairman for 10 years and I go into all kinds of places and I noticed, uh, cause there's all kinds of demographics. So depending on the region I was in, if I go into Danbury, Connecticut, uh, which is basically a sanctuary city when you get down to downtown, these old houses are, you know, you'll have like three, uh, Hispanic families or Latino families in these, these homes that I think from the standards of, like, like, let's say the Puritan stock who settled in that area, they all moved out to the suburbs. They would never want to be in that kind of in their mind squalor. So they don't have the kids and I just thought, you know, what? My grandma, her generation was willing to put up with that. Like they, they didn't see a problem in that. Like, of course, we just make, we, we pull out a drawer. That's where the baby's going to sleep in the dresser here, you know, every family of

54:00ours who's been here for however that many generations all have the same story. Yeah. Yep. And we don't like that. That's part of the ICU. That's part of the thing where we have our births. We have to have them and these specially prepared way we saw on TikTok, right? And this is the fact that all the women are following now. Women are particularly prone to fads. I hope that's sexist. Yes. Well, William, I mean, you're basically suggesting we need a good, great depression and then a lot of Christianity. So I just can't think why you'd be canceled for academia for this. But well, if we're, if we're kind, there's something to that because it kind of is, uh, whatever reason to get in their head, you have to have growth, growth, growth, growth. Well, when we hit that 100 wall, 100 year old wall, which we're rapidly approaching, that growth won't be there. Uh, you're not going to get it from bodies like you used to be able to get it from the past and you may be able to get it through technology, but that's hopeful thinking, wishful thinking. So we may get hard times just because of that.

55:03Yeah. All right. On that encouraging note, um, William Briggs, the substacked is WM Briggs. Substack.com. Please check it out, subscribe. Uh, he's also on X. If you want to check him out there, always has really useful things to say. I find it intriguing. And thank you so much for your time, William. I really appreciate it. Thanks for having me.