00:01:30.000His spirit, his love of this country, he's done an amazing job building one of the most powerful youth organizations ever created, Turning Point USA.
00:01:39.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:02:12.000But towards the end of our conversation, I just want to rehash our marijuana discussion because you have done some of the most important scholarship.
00:02:18.000I love talking to you about that, Alex.
00:02:20.000We've had you on it a couple of times.
00:02:35.000Alex, I know that's not why you're here, but it's just so pervasive, that lie.
00:02:40.000Alex, you have a great piece out, and I want to plug your sub stack, unreported truth.
00:02:44.000Everyone should go to his sub stack and support it about birth rates, having kids.
00:02:51.000What did you learn in the series of doing this research?
00:02:54.000So, I mean, this is something as I write in the substack that I'm going to come back to because it's a vital issue.
00:03:03.000And I mean, you can argue it's the most important issue, right?
00:03:06.000You know, Elon Musk may want to take us to Mars, but right now, if you look at birth rate trends, and it's not just in the U.S. or Europe, it's sort of in every rich country, they're low and dropping.
00:03:18.000Low, meaning below the replacement rate.
00:03:20.000So every woman has to, on average, have slightly more than two kids, or the population will start to fall.
00:03:29.000And actually, I remember in January talking to Elon about this, and he said, you know, the demographers make the math really complicated, but it's actually quite simple.
00:03:37.000Look at the number of children who are born and multiply that times 85.
00:03:42.000And, you know, that will give you, if nothing changes, the number of people a country will have in 85 years, right?
00:03:51.000At the end of the average life of a child born today.
00:03:54.000So a country like Taiwan, Taiwan has about 23 million people in it.
00:03:59.000And this year, it's going to have about 130,000 children born.
00:04:03.000So 130,000 times 85 is about 10 million.
00:04:07.000So what that tells you is if nothing else changes and the children of Taiwan who are being born today actually have the replacement number of kids, in 85 years from now, Taiwan's population will be less than half of what it is today.
00:04:22.000And I mean, that's really unbelievable, right?
00:04:25.000And actually, you know, in South Korea, it's worse.
00:04:33.000Northern Europe is a little bit better in terms of the rates, but they're going down there.
00:04:38.000The U.S. is a little bit better, but we're below replacement.
00:04:41.000But this is, it's not just, again, it's not just sort of quote unquote white wealthy countries.
00:04:46.000It's South America is like this, countries that you wouldn't even expect.
00:04:50.000Like Saudi Arabia, for example, is barely above replacement level.
00:04:54.000All over the world, people are choosing not to have children.
00:04:58.000And, you know, think about, think about Japan and Sweden and Australia and Canada and Germany.
00:05:04.000These are countries that don't necessarily have that much in common aside from the fact that they're, you know, they're, they're, they're wealthy.
00:05:21.000I mean, one of the things they all have in common actually is that they're having this stunning trend towards very few kids.
00:05:28.000So it's something that actually crosses cultures.
00:05:32.000And if you think about, you know, what is the like, what is the ultimate biological goal of any organism?
00:05:38.000It should be to produce, you know, reproduce to get your genes to the next generation.
00:05:42.000Somehow, something is happening worldwide that is bigger than culture and bigger than what should be our most basic drive to reproduce.
00:05:51.000And I do think this is an issue we have to talk about.
00:05:55.000What do you think it is, Alex, that somebody in Saudi Arabia, Taiwan, and America are all making the same choices with different cultures, different religions, different worldview, but they all are deciding to have less kids.
00:06:07.000You know, that's what I'm going to explore over the next few months, year, you know, and maybe this turns into a book.
00:06:33.000And people were actually, you know, deciding to sign up just so they could comment, which was striking to me.
00:06:40.000I mean, I think there are a number of potential explanations, none of which necessarily, you know, are that compelling to me is, is it religion?
00:06:50.000You know, maybe, but if you look at a country like Japan 50 years ago, or certainly in the aftermath of World War II, the Japanese had huge families and they were not, you know, that's not a Christian country.
00:07:01.000You know, is it is it something to do with women's choices about, you know, workplace, you know, stress that they don't think they can have kids and so, you know, and have a meaningful career.
00:07:13.000So they're choosing to drop out of the workplace.
00:07:15.000Well, how come then in Northern Europe, you know, where there's a country like Finland or Sweden where there's very pro, you know, sort of what you, what the U.S. would call progressive policies in terms of keeping, you know, women's jobs, will they take six months or a year off?
00:07:31.000Those places also have low birth rates.
00:07:32.000Why is it that government policies don't seem to be able to turn this around?
00:07:36.000These are, this is, these people are making, I mean, really, it's the most individual choice you can have to have children or not.
00:08:23.000I would say there was very, very briefly, it wasn't a boom, but it was like sort of a few months when the decline stopped, but then it picked up again with a vengeance.
00:08:38.000It wasn't New York City blackout boom, right?
00:08:40.000We're nine months after the New York City blackouts in the 1980s.
00:08:44.000We saw, you know, like a 30%, which people are familiar with it.
00:08:47.000It was like, I don't know, the summer of 86 or 87, there were like three or four days of rolling blackouts and people were just at home with nothing to do.
00:08:53.000But so I thought about this and my immediate conclusion was for the first time in the species, we've now discovered something that having kids is a value.
00:09:11.000And if you don't hold the value to want to have children, then it's not automatic is what I'm getting at.
00:09:18.000We used to think that having kids is automatic.
00:09:22.000Having sex might be, but now if you have the technology to have sex without having kids, a lot of people are making that choice.
00:09:32.000Now, there's other contributing factors, but that's amazing because a decade ago, you'd say people are always going to have kids because they want kids.
00:09:46.000The most positive explanation I've seen for this, I mean, you know, in sort of, I guess I would call it the least depressing explanation, although in some ways you could argue it's the most depressing explanation, is that most people, certainly in the U.S. anyway, having children is still the cultural norm.
00:10:07.000It's just that they have gotten too in love with finding the perfect partner and delaying childbirth or conception into their early to mid-30s.
00:10:19.000And they still think it's going to be very easy.
00:10:20.000And then it turns out a significant number of those women have a very hard time being pregnant.
00:10:25.000What I find to be interesting is that, you know, there's a couple young ladies that send us emails.
00:10:30.000Charlie had the hardest time, you know, having kids and we're praying on it and we're working on it.
00:10:50.000It's just if you look at the countries that have the most kids that they are advocating for birth control, I mean, it's not the wealthy ones.
00:11:01.000And so in the poorest countries, having kids is so embedded into what you do that the poorest countries have the thing that actually the people of the West sometimes want the most in their 30s.
00:13:55.000And look, I can imagine that if your kids were really difficult or, you know, or, you know, you have, you have a kid who's got like special needs and it, you know, and it, and it becomes something where it's very hard to, you know, to have.
00:14:09.000I mean, even then, I'm sure you love your kids no matter what.
00:14:11.000But when your kids are cool and you can hang out with them and like watch them grow up and start to do more and more things and like, and they're fun.
00:14:32.000And so, and, and, but even like, again, even when it's hard, being a parent is, it's a way to be not selfish.
00:14:42.000And it's a way to like have somebody who's so dependent on you, you know, especially when they're little, right?
00:14:49.000And it's a, it's a way to grow as a person.
00:14:51.000And so I think it's very hard to convey that to people who don't want to be parents or who are not parents.
00:14:58.000And the reason, you know, what prompted me to write that piece, obviously I've been like aware of these trends for a long time.
00:15:04.000What prompted me to write that piece was that somebody I know just got married and, you know, they're they're healthy, they have good jobs, and they're choosing, they're saying we're never going to have children.
00:15:40.000So I can't, in some ways, I can't decide which is more depressing.
00:15:43.000If you can't have kids and you really want them, but you started too late or you have some biological issue, or if you're making that choice not to have kids, because it seems to me either way, either way, it's sad, but you're denying yourself such a great thing.
00:16:12.000You are missing something that is hard to describe that a Mercedes-Benz or 10 Days on, you know, the Greek Islands doesn't even compare to.
00:16:55.000Until you choose to take on that responsibility for another.
00:17:00.000And by the way, you can have kids, unfortunately, and not be a parent, right?
00:17:05.000I mean, you know, certainly in large parts of, you know, some communities, that's, you know, I'm going to, I'm going to knock somebody up and take no responsibility for that child.
00:17:13.000Like that, you're not a parent then either.
00:17:15.000You know, I don't care how many, you know, you know, how much of your DNA you've passed on.
00:17:30.000I want to try to figure this out with you together because some people say, well, it's too expensive to have kids.
00:17:36.000Some people will say that don't have time or I want one of each or they wait too long.
00:17:43.000And then there is also the ideological dark, you know, climate cult of death where they say, I don't want kids because it just pollutes the earth.
00:17:50.000That is a growing group, but it's still, I'd say, five to seven percent.
00:19:55.000How big of an issue does that play here?
00:19:57.000I think that's a really great question.
00:19:59.000And it's clearly becoming more of an issue.
00:20:01.000I mean, the most obvious way is that, you know, as again, we talked about this a little bit, but as women delay having children, you know, I think most, I think a lot of women and men too don't really understand how quickly female fertility can drop after you're 30.
00:20:18.000And I think actually, oftentimes, if you, if you've had one child, let's say when you're 28, 29, it's relatively easy to have a second and a third.
00:20:27.000But if you delay having the first child till after 30, it gets complicated.
00:20:31.000And then, you know, if it takes you a couple of years, then all of a sudden, maybe you're 35 and it's harder to have a second child.
00:20:37.000So, so, so female fertility, I mean, it's, we know this, right?
00:20:41.000But I think most women, you know, sort of educated women are under the misimpression that I can wait till I'm almost 40 and I'll pretty easily be able to have kids.
00:20:50.000And that's, you know, that's not true.
00:20:52.000I mean, it doesn't mean you can't have children, but it is, it is hard, significantly hard.
00:20:58.000Well, especially for men, especially if you've been on the pill.
00:21:33.000And then, so then you switch to talk about men.
00:21:35.000So, you know, there's been these, you know, sort of every couple, every few months, you'll see these papers that come out about showing, you know, sort of global declines in sperm counts.
00:21:53.000I haven't looked at the underlying data.
00:21:55.000This is something that as I, you know, as I start writing more unreported truths about this, I really want to know whether this is true or not.
00:22:01.000And so like, you know, one thing I certainly think I'm reasonably good at, you know, from writing tell your children, even before that, from, you know, when I was working at the New York Times, which may shock some of your viewers, I was a reporter at the New York Times for a long time.
00:22:17.000I like to read the, and I, and I like to read the underlying scientific papers when I'm writing about them.
00:22:23.000So I don't know if that number is real, but the number that I have seen is that, you know, sperm counts just for the average man worldwide are down 50% in the last 50 years.
00:22:34.000Now, we are born with a lot of extra, you know, not born with, but, but, you know, our bodies make way more sperm than we need to, you know, to implant a single egg, obviously.
00:22:45.000So people can still get pregnant, but that's not the trend that you want.
00:22:49.000And then on top of that, to you know, to sort of bring it all together with tell your children, there's no question that cannabis impairs male fertility, both because I think it, you know, it reduces, you were talking about like testosterone and, you know, does it too many, you know, sort of young men these days want to sit around getting high?
00:23:10.000But also the old joke, doobies make boobies, turns out to be, turns out to have some truth in it.
00:23:16.000That, you know, that cannabis is an endocrine disruptor.
00:23:22.000And actually reduces the quality and motility of sperm.
00:23:27.000And so given the number of young men, at least in the United States, who are using cannabis, that could be a real issue.
00:23:34.000But the reason you can't say, oh, well, that's the number one reason or even the number two or three reason is, again, the worst declines in fertility globally are in East Asia.
00:23:44.000And those are countries that don't have a lot of drug use.
00:23:50.000And by the way, I don't know whether those countries have seen the same sort of declines in sperm count.
00:23:56.000This is when you start to get into the weeds of this issue, like any really interesting, complicated issue, it turns out that there's a ton of nuance that you have to look at.
00:24:06.000But there's nuance, Alex, but you're not going to see this is where you, I know you agree.
00:24:11.000You don't see macro multi-continental, multicultural trends just in the nuance.
00:24:16.000There has to be something happening, right?
00:24:19.000And when you have values, I mean, Saudi Arabia is fascinating to me.
00:24:23.000They're wealthy, but they're super Islamic.
00:24:25.000So are even Muslims saying they don't want to have as many kids now?
00:24:29.000Aside from really aside from poor Muslim countries and a few African countries, the trends are extremely clear here.
00:24:36.000And again, countries that, you know, Indonesia, which is the world's largest Muslim country by population, is just at that sort of just over two level that's that's flat right now.
00:24:47.000Countries that you wouldn't expect to be below replacement level are below.
00:24:54.000So, I mean, I think if you had to pick one factor, you know, I think you'd say that it's sort of women worldwide choosing to have fewer children because they now have birth control options that were not available to them.
00:25:08.000But that can't be the only factor or even the one primary factor, I would think.
00:25:40.000So then the only one that makes sense that you found is the wealthier the society, the less kids that they want to have.
00:25:47.000Is that effectively the if you were to draw the graph?
00:25:50.000I would also say it's very clear that people who, you know, I don't know what you call whether the hyper-religious, whether it's ultra-Orthodox or Amish or, you know, sort of other sort of extremely religious subgroups, the rates of fertility are very high.
00:26:09.000So I live in upstate New York, you know, in the Hudson Valley of New York, right across the Hudson River from me are communities of ultra-Orthodox that have the highest rates of childbirth, you know, not just in New York State, but in some of the highest rates nationally.
00:26:23.000And these are places, you know, these are, these are, these are families where women have, you know, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 children.
00:28:13.000But again, I think, I do think the role of economics here is overstated because those ultra-Orthodox families, you know, in Rockland County, New York, they are not wealthy families.
00:28:24.000I mean, occasionally, and this is another interesting sort of facet of this, you see a little bit, for example, in the super wealthy that there's a desire, you know, to have four or five or six, not necessarily six, but let's say three or four kids in New York City because it's a status symbol.
00:28:40.000I'm so rich, I can have a big apartment, I can have these kids and send them to private school.
00:28:45.000But, but I think that's really on the margins of this.
00:28:48.000Yeah, even Mormon fertility is dropping like a rock.
00:28:52.000Modernity is eating almost everything.
00:28:54.000So let me ask you, not, I want to, is there data to support this?
00:28:56.000Because anecdotally, I know it, that the people that live the most joyful and deepest lives tend to have kids and then a lot of kids, that their lives are harder, their lives are crazier, they're less about themselves, but they're deeper and more fulfilling.
00:29:18.000Again, I'm really, you know, I wrote that piece and, you know, it is hopefully going to be the first, a number of pieces I write about this because I really have been surprised by the interest.
00:29:29.000You know, the Federalists wrote something about the piece.
00:29:34.000I mean, clearly there's a desire to have sort of a fact-based, you know, hopefully non-ideological discussion about this that doesn't, you know, it doesn't get caught up in this idea of, oh, you know, you're talking about how white people aren't reproducing.
00:29:50.000Like this is a this is clearly a global issue.
00:29:53.000And, you know, in a way, it reminds me to tell your children, you know, which was my book about cannabis and the problems.
00:30:00.000This was something that was sort of known in the psychiatric community among serious researchers, but it hadn't been discussed.
00:30:08.000It hadn't sort of made the jump into pop culture, the potential issues about sort of high THC cannabis.
00:30:14.000There may be interesting conversations that, you know, demographers and social scientists are having with each other about this.
00:30:21.000And the pop, you know, the sort of popular culture is not getting into it because it's caught up in, oh, you know, again, you're just saying that Muslims want to take over the United States.
00:33:13.000What are some of the documented proven negatives?
00:33:17.000I mean, first of all, even the stuff that, you know, that they call flour, that sort of smokable herb, has been genetically engineered these days.
00:33:26.000So it has about 10 times the levels of THC that, you know, the stuff that came out of the ground in India and China 100 years ago did.
00:33:34.000So, I mean, the idea that this is some natural product and it's stuff these kids are using that they're vaping, you know, if they're vaping THC liquid or if they're taking edibles, you know, I mean, this is a chemical, okay?
00:35:10.000You know, their careers didn't progress and they just kind of go through life in a haze.
00:35:14.000And I do think because, you know, the drug, I would say cannabis, not in its, obviously not in the way that it works, but in the way that it's sort of societally accepted is most comparable to is alcohol, obviously.
00:35:27.000But if you drink the way these folks use cannabis, you're going to wind up with bad hangovers.
00:35:34.000You're going to wind up obviously having problems.
00:35:37.000In some ways, the problem with cannabis is that because it's less physically toxic, you can really use a lot of it enough to really disrupt your life and tell yourself you don't have a problem.
00:35:49.000So you wake up every morning, you wake and bake, you go through life stoned, and you tell yourself, oh, you know, I don't have hangovers.
00:36:24.000I think the United States has a problem with drugs.
00:36:26.000The problem is that the United States loves drugs, whether they're prescription or non-prescription.
00:36:32.000And, you know, so the problem with trying to treat anxiety with any drug that actually successfully treats anxiety in the short term is that when you try to get off that drug, you are very likely to have terrible rebound anxiety.
00:36:48.000And so you can wind up addicted very quickly, whether that's a benzodiazepine, in other words, a drug like Valium or Xanax, or cannabis, because you're going to wind up with all the anxiety you had before that you haven't really figured out how to deal with, plus pharmaceutically generated anxiety.
00:37:15.000I got to say, you know, it's funny because pandemia, you know, which is my book about COVID that came out, you know, about two years ago.
00:37:25.000Tell your children now, which came out five years ago, now outsells pandemia.
00:37:30.000And I hear from parents, I hear from prosecutors, I hear even still from users who have just found the book.
00:37:36.000And I would say that as more and more people get exposed to the problems, especially with high potency cannabis, the book has sort of taken on a second life.