Jack Posobiec walks us through Bootgate and explains why Ron DeSantis wears heels. Bootgate is the greatest political scandal ever, bigger than Watergate and Teapot Dome, otherwise known as Bootgate.
00:01:07.000We will not embrace the ideas that have destroyed countries, destroyed lives, and we are going to fight for freedom on campuses across the country.
00:03:46.000Oh, of course, you know, I see some folks in the chat are already saying 9-11, which Bush did, is even worse.
00:03:52.000You know, I see people in the chat saying that.
00:03:55.000I don't know if I'm prepared to go there, but I am saying this is rough.
00:03:59.000You know, it really started hard to say exactly when Bootgate started, but uh, certainly there was, you know, there was a um, you know, a precursor to boot gate of bootgate 1.0.
00:04:10.000So there's actually a two-part um section to boot gate because bootgate began with the original white boots that I think was Hurricane Ian that he was wearing that kind of looked like the boots that the green MM wears when they do the MM's commercials on the like the cartoon MMs or whatever.
00:04:32.000This is the his origin story, almost like a Marvel hero, if you will.
00:04:37.000Um, where then he said, Okay, I'll never wear those again, but I'm gonna wear cowboy boots.
00:04:42.000And the cowboy boots led people to start questioning things about the height of Governor DeSantis, as well as people who have conducted events with Governor DeSantis.
00:04:53.000I'm sure most of the people on this show have met Governor DeSantis at one point or another in person.
00:04:59.000And we've noticed that his height seems to kind of fluctuate in a way that you know, a normal person's height just doesn't.
00:05:10.000And then there was the way he was sitting with these boots on the Bill Maher show.
00:05:16.000You can see his height here in tennis shoes with Bill Malugan from Fox.
00:05:21.000We're actually, he's, excuse me, Bill is wearing tennis shoes in this picture.
00:05:25.000Whereas DeSantis, even, and I don't know if we can zoom in and hands folks back in the CSI thought crime lab there, but actually, those boots as well that he's wearing do contain fake heels.
00:05:39.000Bill Malugan, by the way, who through a thought crime investigation, our investigatory team found, is actually about 6'4.
00:06:17.000Again, like the whole thing is very awkward.
00:06:19.000Yeah, so I think that contributes to this.
00:06:21.000The pigeon-toed stance is something that we've identified through memology of Governor DeSantis that goes really back all the way until when he was a congressman.
00:06:33.000It goes back to the time where he first ran for office.
00:06:35.000This stance you will find in numerous instances.
00:06:42.000So, there was an issue, by the way, as well, where Ashley St. Clair, who is at Babylon B, did a TikTok video making fun of the boots and just kind of like a silly boot video of herself putting on boots, thigh highs.
00:06:54.000And the Xanis campaign responded to her.
00:07:31.000I have about 500 of these memes at this point in my phone, and I was texting them to Don Jr. when he was in court this week.
00:07:40.000Then it just got to the point where it started blowing up, and I launched the hashtag Bootgate.
00:07:49.000Many people then got in on this and hashtag bootgate, believe it or not, became the number two trend on all of X on Halloween this week.
00:07:58.000So we couldn't be couldn't unseat happy Halloween on Halloween Day itself.
00:08:03.000But number two, I'm going to say that's basically number one because you're never going to beat a holiday hashtag on a holiday, but we were, we were basically number one.
00:08:11.000The memes were flying, people were screaming.
00:08:14.000And Andrew, I want to throw something else out there as well, because this is something that really speaks to the heart of it.
00:08:21.000Because there were people who were claiming that I was making fun of his height or that any of us were making fun of his height.
00:08:28.000And I wanted to point this out for just to be very clear for people.
00:10:33.000I think that was the hard part to watch about it.
00:10:35.000Because I think of us four on this show right now, I might have been the most enthusiastic about DeSantis.
00:10:44.000I was always Trump, but I wanted my heart went out to him, especially at the beginning.
00:10:50.000I wanted to protect him for 2028, really.
00:10:53.000I think that is where it came down to.
00:10:55.000But it's so hard to watch this because you know that that's essentially an admission that he is putting heels in his boots because you could see the sweat like beads forming on his forehead going, if I take these off, he'll know that I actually do have heels and I just denied it.
00:11:14.000And so he instantly held an energistic response.
00:11:17.000Even just the bad energy in his voice as he interrupts.
00:11:23.000Just you could, one, if Donald Trump was presented, let's just imagine an alternate universe where Trump is getting offered the same thing.
00:11:31.000If he would say something different, one, but two, even if you were, he was for whatever reason constrained to say the same thing, he would actually manage to say it better.
00:11:40.000He would say, like, I, you know, you know, Patrick, you know, you said it up.
00:11:44.000Like you said, you got the gold bars there.
00:12:06.000No, and it's not just the cover of the hype, but to your point about the rudeness here, that when you come from Eastern cultures, to offer someone a gift is one of the highest signs of generosity.
00:12:19.000It's one of the highest signs of charity.
00:12:21.000And quite possibly, the rudest thing that you could do is to publicly reject a gift from somebody.
00:12:30.000And even if, which, by the way, I'm pretty sure I've seen Ron DeSantis accept gifts before in public, and people have found pictures of him doing so.
00:12:39.000But it's also like millions of people are watching.
00:12:41.000No one thinks you're getting puppied off, man.
00:12:44.000I mean, like, you could have been like, thanks, Patrick.
00:13:40.000Well, it's also that if DeSantis took off his shoes and showed he wasn't wearing, you know, lifts and put on the Ferragamos, he could have just ended the whole thing.
00:13:49.000What if, what if it's deeper than that?
00:13:51.000He took off the shoes and reveals he's also standing on stilts.
00:13:56.000Reveals he's just three, he's just three children.
00:13:59.000He's three eight-year-olds all stacked on top of each other.
00:14:29.000They're like, we spend a lot of money and people love us.
00:14:32.000And the influencer, I was like, look, guys, I'm actually trying to help you here.
00:14:38.000I know, but meaning that they're like, but what they were referencing is that piece that showed that, you know, DeSantis waged war online and lost.
00:14:46.000They thought it was like a great piece that like, you know, they're fighting the meme war and that there's going to be Blake, just as objectively as you could take, is DeSantis winning the online war?
00:15:33.000Probably not, but it doesn't matter if you, you know, people want to follow people who have the right energy, who have that leadership, who have charisma.
00:15:43.000And what we've seen over the last Six, eight, 10 months is the DeSantis campaign doesn't have that energy.
00:15:52.000It doesn't have that sense of charisma.
00:15:55.000It would be very difficult to turn it around right now.
00:15:59.000And, you know, I hear a lot of people say, like, oh, he needs to get out and save himself for 2028.
00:16:04.000At this point, it's like he has to get out so that we can make sure that Florida still has a Republican governor in two more years.
00:16:10.000Yeah, well, now this has launched a big investigation.
00:16:49.000Did you guys see there were people actually counting the steps because they were saying, okay, it's 90 feet from home plate to first base.
00:16:57.000And so if Ron DeSantis' stride is usually about three feet, how many steps does it take to get, you know, from one of the people were counting this?
00:17:08.000But I actually know a guy who is a fan of the show, fan of Thought Crime and Human Events.
00:17:14.000And I said, who is a former MLB scout?
00:17:18.000He's one of these guys who would go all around the world, you know, scouting high schools, et cetera, for players.
00:17:24.000And so someone who I knew could probably watch a piece of baseball footage and see somebody and look at the strike box and kind of know what strike boxes.
00:18:35.000We've had 9-11, which Bush did, killed all those people.
00:18:40.000And I think if you took all of those scandals combined, you would maybe be at one tenth of the moral atrocity that Ron DeSantis faking his height is.
00:19:44.000I remember because you and I were chatting a lot offline about it, about you know, some of the stuff that was coming out and how we were going to approach it publicly, how we're going to deal with it.
00:19:52.000And you were really reserved, but then it just got to a point where I remember you and Cernovich were talking about this a lot.
00:20:00.000It was like the absolute insufferability of a DeSantis influencer online.
00:20:08.000I don't, you know, it's so impossible to stay on the sidelines and deal with these people in like a normal way.
00:20:15.000They just got so unhinged that it forced everybody into these corners.
00:20:21.000And what the DeSantis camp doesn't understand is that their influencers are not influencing anybody to do anything except run as far away from that guy as they can.
00:20:31.000And you got like this Bill Mitchell guy who literally doesn't let anybody reply in his comments except approved followers because he's gotten so badly trolled.
00:20:42.000These people do more harm to the DeSantis campaign than they have any idea.
00:20:46.000And we tried to tell them, we tried to tell them you're getting cornered into this establishment box.
00:20:52.000You're getting cornered in this like nerd dork box.
00:20:55.000And when I saw this story, Breg Bootgate, I was like, there's nothing we could do for this guy anymore.
00:21:00.000I genuinely don't know that you can save him for 2028, let alone to Blake's point, if we got to start worrying about Florida now.
00:21:35.000And so then that forces you to double down on it.
00:21:38.000That forces, that makes you want to continue it.
00:21:40.000And again, it's because they won't even lean into it and joke like other people that, you know, like Steve Bannon, for example, isn't like super tall or anything.
00:21:51.000Senator Rand Paul is, I would say he was, he's shorter than average, but nobody cares because he just sort of like wears it and owns it and does his thing and he does great work.
00:22:01.000And we all love Senator Paul and it's just a thing, right?
00:22:04.000Nobody, he doesn't make it a thing himself.
00:22:06.000With DeSantis, because he's so insecure about it, that's actually what we're playing on.
00:22:12.000And this is something that, Charlie, I'm sure you remember that Patrick Bett David had actually said a couple of months ago about Ron DeSantis.
00:22:21.000And it was interesting to me that Patrick Bett David was the one who had identified this because I wondered if that played into him then sort of having this, obviously making the decision as anybody does as an interviewer of what you're going to play, what topics you're going to bring up.
00:22:37.000Because Patrick Bett David had said that Ron DeSantis seems like the kind of guy who structured his entire life about being terrified of being perceived as breaking a rule, right?
00:22:48.000Like the kind of guy who tries to get a perfect score on his SATs, who tries to do everything perfect, but who will say, oh, well, and this is, you know, Patrick Bett David, and I'm paraphrasing.
00:23:01.000Oh, I can't punch that guy in the face because then this, this, this would happen.
00:23:04.000I might run for office one day and that might come back at me.
00:23:07.000And it just becomes so insecure and so terrified of ever breaking a rule that it leads you down these paths where if you're confronted with something that isn't within those, you know, those set lines, if you're not coloring within the lines, that they just completely fall apart.
00:23:25.000And that's exactly what he did when DeSantis was on.
00:23:28.000And I'm not saying that he intended to do that, but I do find it interesting that that's how it played out.
00:23:33.000The other piece of this is why does bootgate matter so much?
00:23:37.000Because when you play on this specific thing, something like a person's physical stature, it's not just about that.
00:24:52.000This gets into the weak men, hard times sort of fourth-turning cycle.
00:24:57.000And so when you're painting somebody with that brush and then you have successfully painted them with that brush of a sexual humiliation, that's really something it becomes very, very hard to get past.
00:25:31.000I don't think we've had a variety of personalities become president, but I don't know that we've ever had a profoundly insecure person become president because it's just how, how does that come to be?
00:25:43.000Well, it's also that it's just such a misunderstanding for their team to think they're doing well.
00:25:48.000I'm not, I'm by no means an expert, but I'm enough where I can see who's winning and losing in meme culture and who's actually who gets it and who doesn't.
00:25:58.000Jack, you're going to have to, Jack, you have to call for the tape.
00:26:59.000And so, you know, looking at a guy that that's clearly that uptight, that insecure, you would obviously want to, you know, go through all of these things.
00:27:08.000And by the way, like, I want to explain to people that this isn't something that just like randomly occurred.
00:27:14.000This is something that the meme warriors have been focused on and have been researching for really months when it comes to Ron DeSantis.
00:27:21.000This is something where people have in, and I'm in hundreds of chat rooms where people are talking about these chat groups, just all areas of the night.
00:27:31.000Yeah, this is the one, Donald Trump Jr. Posted this one from the courtroom of that's Ron DeSantis and his the state of Italy, the country of Italy has become his boots, his high-top boots.
00:27:44.000That's actually one where Brent, the guy who made it, actually, that's his body.
00:27:49.000He went and took a picture of himself standing at that angle.
00:27:54.000He just did that himself so it would perfectly fit with the boot of Italy.
00:27:59.000That's the level that our guys will go on.
00:28:02.000And again, this is something where, and Andrew and to the rest, like, you know, we explained to them what would happen a year ago, that all of this would come to pass if they decided to take a run at Trump.
00:28:13.000And that this was always in the cards.
00:28:16.000It was always going to end up like this.
00:29:42.000I have a theory on why this is so devastating.
00:29:45.000It's because it plays into all of the little whisper, rumor mill stuff that was already circulating about Ron DeSantis, that he was awkward with people, that he wasn't that warm, that all the local politicians, I mean, when you have all of Florida, basically, and just breaking this week is Rick Scott has now endorsed President Trump for 2024.
00:30:08.000When you have all of Florida that's supposed to know you best, say, and I think Stube, Congressman Stube, said that he never heard from Ron DeSantis before he was trying to endorse somebody.
00:30:21.000And so he just said, hey, if you're not Trump following me, I'm going with.
00:31:12.000And you remember when Bill Maher gave him this shout out the one time and said, you know, something that's interesting about Ron DeSantis that he actually reads, he understands the data, he understands COVID, he understands vaccines, and people were really talking about that.
00:31:24.000Lean in on the Ron DeSantis is a wonky, you know, maybe a little bit awkward, but nerdy kind of smart guy.
00:31:33.000And so I would have, I said, drop the boots, drop the jacket.
00:31:39.000He's got to keep trying to build this stuff.
00:31:41.000He's already leaning forward because honestly, what I said, the best thing that he could do is just put a pair of glasses on him.
00:31:52.000Literally, just put a pair of glasses on him.
00:31:54.000It could just be the blue blockers or something.
00:31:56.000And he will come across as, you know, kind of like more of a Blake.
00:32:01.000And it's just more accurate to what he actually is.
00:34:44.000And by the way, this is, we have now video of trick-or-treating because of the prevalence of, you know, ring cameras and home surveillance systems that are that are just everywhere because we live in this, we live in a high-tech, low-trust society now, as opposed to a low-tech, high-trust society, which is a much larger conversation.
00:35:02.000But what you see in this video is a couple of kids out trick-or-treating, having a good time.
00:35:07.000And then you have what appears to be some sort of third world migrant just running up and essentially stealing all of the candy.
00:35:18.000Someone who's obviously far older than the other kids who are there, or anyone who should be trick-or-treating at any serious age, and is obviously just out to steal candy and throw it into a pillowcase.
00:35:30.000So, Andrew, you did a fair amount of trick-or-treating.
00:35:33.000Is this a foreigner thing, or is this a built-in?
00:35:38.000Why did this video trigger so many people?
00:35:41.000Well, I mean, I have a couple things to say here.
00:35:44.000First, I want to acknowledge that I myself was guilty of doing similar things when I was a kid when they would put the sign out and say just one.
00:35:56.000I said that in the chat, and everybody was like, Oh, Andrew, you got to share that.
00:36:23.000But if, you know, it's funny, Charlie, you tweeted about it, and then we got a bunch of media inquiries like, how do you know that these are illegals?
00:36:30.000And I was like, you know, just based on odds.
00:36:33.000You know, we just had, you know, 10 million are going to come across with Biden.
00:36:36.000There was always, there was perpetually 11 million in the country to begin with.
00:36:40.000But besides that, it doesn't matter if they're legal or illegal.
00:37:38.000And everybody, it just, it inflamed the public.
00:37:42.000Well, it went viral for similar reasons why the Floyd thing went viral because people have a belief in their head of something they see that's happening macro and then a micro confirms it.
00:37:53.000Well, they see foreigners coming in and leeching off our social services and taking what is ours and it's being sponsored by the adults in the room, not the kids.
00:38:02.000I think it's less the symbol and it's actually more the direct thing.
00:38:06.000It's that there are when you have when you when you have high amounts of social trust and like kind of a shame a guilt shame driven culture where you I should say guilt versus shame guilt honor that sort of thing where you have an internal locus of morality you won't do a bad thing because you will feel terrible and then shame is Is the outward version of this that if you are caught doing something bad, you will feel terrible.
00:38:35.000But if you can get away with it in secret, it essentially doesn't matter.
00:38:39.000And so when you have guilt-driven, you can do things like just you leave out a box and you say, take one, and they will only take one.
00:38:47.000And if you have the right group of people, that can sustain itself.
00:38:52.000And there's huge surpluses that come from that.
00:38:54.000That is how you get the nicest countries.
00:38:56.000These countries where people follow the law, even if you don't have a policeman there who will catch you if you break the law, even if no one is going to actually punish you.
00:39:07.000When you do it anyway, that is what creates the nicest societies.
00:39:10.000And they see people who have come into here and they see that society going away.
00:40:43.000Oh, no, I was just going to say, kind of just double tap what you were saying, Blake, earlier, that, you know, trick-or-treating is something that could only arise in a high-trust society with bonds of community, with a locus of morality, and obviously internal locus of morality, not one where you've got like the, you know, the moral police running around all the time.
00:41:12.000And she was talking about growing up in the 60s.
00:41:17.000And she was saying in the King of Prussia, Pennsylvania area, she was saying, when I was a kid, I don't even remember my parents ever going with us when we trick-or-treated.
00:41:34.000There was no question of it being an issue whatsoever.
00:41:38.000Whereas these days, you know, maybe you could say it's a little more awareness, but I think it's also this level of, you know, lack of trust in our societies.
00:41:47.000That's why you're seeing trunk retreats are kind of the new big thing.
00:43:00.000I don't want to do a prager here, but I want to be careful not throwing out evil like frisbees.
00:43:05.000No, I do, I want to, you know, unthing about the parents out with them.
00:43:08.000And I want to even double back to, obviously, I don't know the specifics here.
00:43:12.000There's a million reasons it could be fine.
00:43:14.000But I think if we imagine an idealized Halloween, this wouldn't happen not just because people wouldn't steal, but I think we are losing the social element that, you know, you ring the doorbell, you come to the door, you see the costume, you say hello to the children, you give them the candy.
00:43:30.000And, you know, I think that actually is the ideal way to do it, and it should be preferred.
00:43:35.000You want to create the sense of community.
00:43:37.000It comes from the communal act of doing this, which is the children go around.
00:43:43.000And one reason they can do this is because there are adults everywhere who look out for people in your neighborhood.
00:43:48.000And so what you're seeing here in microcosm is the decline of neighborly communities, that they're not engaging in the Halloween thing except for leaving out a thing of candy.
00:43:58.000Neighbors, I mean, are less and less of a thing.
00:44:02.000At least in some, I don't know, Andrew, if you agree or not, but at least the type of neighborhood connectedness that I grew up with is largely a foreign concept in a lot of suburban people.
00:44:12.000Well, I remember I always go back to a conversation you had.
00:45:00.000And it's like, you know, it's not uncommon to hear a lot of Spanish going on.
00:45:05.000And I think, Blake, you made the observation in the chat earlier.
00:45:08.000You were like, you know, honestly, Mexicans really love Halloween.
00:45:11.000Maybe it's the Dia de los Muertos thing or whatever, but it's one of those cultural things that translates very, very easily.
00:45:17.000There's a bit of that, but it's that really, if you look at, honestly, probably the best trait about Mexican Americans is they do love a lot of stuff people kind of liked about older like 80s, 90s America.
00:45:31.000A lot of stuff that's kind of cheesy, more, I don't want to say lower class, but very much, you know, pro-coded, normie-coded.
00:45:39.000Like they love, you know, they love cartoons.
00:49:23.000Great to see the young kids running around.
00:49:25.000So hopefully, to your point, Charlie or Blake, we can sort of hold on to some of these things.
00:49:32.000And I also want to say harvest festivals have been going on for a long time because Christians are very skeptical about Halloween in general.
00:51:31.000It's basically dropped essentially everywhere except large chunks of Africa still have pretty high fertility, but everywhere else and Gaza and Gaza and Afghanistan.
00:52:24.000So I think there's a correlation between, and I actually, I actually haven't read Alex Berenson's piece on this.
00:52:33.000Not that I'm anything against Alex Berenson.
00:52:35.000I think I'm the only guy who's read all of his fiction and nonfiction.
00:52:39.000But I just haven't had a chance to get to it, even though I know I was one of the guys who dropped it in the chat the first time.
00:52:45.000That I think there's a correlation between having more disposable income, more things to do in society, more choices, more opportunity, and basically a falling out of.
00:52:59.000So the first correlation is that if there's a falling out of religion and there's a falling out of that central focus, that central focus of society, central moral core of religion, as societies become more affluent, they tend to become more secular.
00:53:16.000We're facing that in the United States.
00:53:18.000In Asia, you know, it's kind of a jump ball because some of their religions aren't like religion religions the way we would kind of classify them.
00:53:28.000And because of that, this sort of moral imperative to have children is sort of diminished or it's lost.
00:53:35.000And so, therefore, you end up getting this situation where people think of kids as, you know, the more money you have, you start to think of: do I want kids?
00:53:57.000You still do see these things going on, but the trend lines are there.
00:54:01.000But I would just, I guess I would say that within a country at the different social levels, this is something that also plays a role as well.
00:54:10.000But I really do think that on, you know, on whole, we're talking about those big Halloween neighborhoods, you know, those big neighborhoods where people want to go, you know, the full bar neighborhoods, right?
00:54:21.000Everybody knows where the full bar neighborhoods are.
00:54:24.000That, yeah, they tend to have more dogs these days than they do kids.
00:54:30.000Yeah, so I think part of it is it's just harder to have kids because there's something in our food that is actively poisoning people's fertility.
00:54:47.000So I would say what stands out to me, like with Catholics.
00:54:50.000So there are Catholics who basically say, don't use birth control, and as the Pope says.
00:54:55.000And so people who are Catholic know families that have quite a few kids.
00:54:59.000But even there, I think my grandparents, my great-grandparents had, I can't remember off the top of my head, I think they had 10 plus kids.
00:55:07.000Even if you know traditional Catholic families who have a lot of kids, they'll have seven kids or eight kids.
00:55:22.000That means it's a cultural psychological difference.
00:55:24.000I think it's a bit cultural psychological, but it might go towards the biological thing that even people who are essentially saying, we'll have as many kids as God decides to have us have, they end up having seven or eight instead of 12.
00:55:36.000There is something that is suppressing testosterone rates.
00:55:44.000So, you know, going to, you know, we have our kids in a Catholic school and, you know, I'll see as the, you know, as the kids, you know, as the families, we drop our kids off in the morning.
00:55:55.000And yeah, you see the minivans that, you know, that you're used to seeing.
00:55:58.000But yeah, I haven't seen anyone with like the huge brood of kids that I, even I remember in the 80s, 90s, you know, there would always be a couple of families that were like six plus, seven plus, as you say.
00:56:27.000But if you got 10 to 15, you got 20% of people that are gay, you're not going to procreate, right?
00:56:30.000So that, but that doesn't explain why even the monogamous couples are having less kids, right?
00:56:36.000That explains the macro population collapse.
00:56:39.000It doesn't explain why the actual family units are there.
00:56:42.000And then, again, there's evidence that corn or other things are really having a lot of negative impacts on testosterone rates and can block, can actually be endocrine disruptors.
00:56:56.000There's a lot of evidence to support that.
00:56:57.000But it's deeper than that because countries that are largely have insulated food supplies that are not as, let's just say, into corporate farming as we are here, where we are, food is trash in the West.
00:57:13.000They seem to also have, I don't know if their testosterone rates are low, but their fertility rates are low.
00:57:48.000But C, I really, I really relate to people that are struggling with whether or not they want to have kids.
00:57:53.000Now, I am like a big champion of kids.
00:57:55.000I'm trying to get everybody knocked up and pregnant.
00:57:58.000All my married friends where I'm always like, go for the third, go for the fourth.
00:58:02.000But I think what's interesting, and I forget who hit on this, but as a country gets a little bit more affluent, it's that kind of lower middle class to middle class realm that I think this is really affecting.
00:58:17.000Because once you get to the upper class, they have enough money to afford babysitting.
00:58:22.000They have enough money to, and then it becomes like a status symbol, right?
00:58:26.000Where you want to have a lot of kids because it's some sort of status thing.
00:58:30.000But what happens is I think we're more online, we're more distracted, the incentive structure's all off, and we're more secular.
00:58:37.000So the short-term payoff is you get to, you know, travel.
00:58:42.000I mean, our generation's obsessed with experiences and traveling, all these very selfish things that our parents were like, hey, we thought of a vacation as like loading up the family wagon and going to Yosemite.
00:58:54.000Now it's like, no, we're going to go to the south of France for three weeks and we're going to work remote.
00:58:58.000And yeah, the kids just don't really fit into that.
00:59:02.000And they're more online, more social media, more distracted.
00:59:05.000And I think it's actually modernity as a whole has flipped the incentive structure on its head so that a lot of people just aren't incentivized.
00:59:15.000I think it's for different people, different things, though.
00:59:20.000I don't think you could name one or even two reasons why it's lower.
00:59:23.000I think it's like five or six or seven.
00:59:27.000Blake has a theory because that doesn't usually, if there's not a one or two input explanation, you usually don't see a global phenomenon.
00:59:38.000Is that, I mean, to see a global phenomenon that's this transcultural, this transcontinental, this, you know, that transcends socioeconomic lines, usually takes, I don't know, like a virus like COVID to have data like that.
00:59:50.000But what's going on here in your opinion?
00:59:52.000I definitely agree that it's a lot of things.
00:59:54.000I want to say when I've looked into it and researched it, the single most decisive one tends to be women's education.
01:00:03.000When women get educated essentially on the level of men, that is when you start seeing fertility decline.
01:00:09.000And I think that happens for a few reasons.
01:00:11.000It gives young women something to do besides get married.
01:00:16.000They have greater economic independence if they can work in the economy equally, which means there's less economic reason to get married, even if you're otherwise not as inclined to do it.
01:00:26.000It means, this is just blunt, it means they have more knowledge about how to prevent pregnancy in various ways.
01:00:33.000And all of these factors combined drives down fertility.
01:00:38.000And you see accounts of this, even in relatively traditional cultures like India, for example.
01:00:43.000You'll have mothers in India who will still encourage their daughters, even if they promote arranged marriages, even if they promote having kids, they still encourage them, complete your education.
01:01:05.000And you're giving people reasons they can essentially be more selective in a spouse.
01:01:10.000In the past, women had very little economic independence, very little economic stability, and they got that by getting married.
01:01:20.000And this created upsides in society, but it did create a lot of downsides.
01:01:26.000This does cause, this did cause women to get married to people they probably wouldn't have gotten married to otherwise, to have kids they probably wouldn't have had otherwise.
01:01:34.000And there's upsides to them not having to do this, but it is a big feeder in people overall getting married less.
01:01:43.000Another thing I would note is it's actually, it was actually somewhat historically unusual in Western society for everyone to get married.
01:01:51.000In the past, we were very dependent on people who didn't get married having a ton of kids.
01:01:56.000And you saw it a lot who would opt out.
01:01:58.000I mean, if you think of like Catholic societies, the number of people who would become nuns, the number of people who'd become priests, the number of people who just wouldn't marry for one reason or another was actually pretty high.
01:02:09.000And this is just offset by the people who do marry will have five kids, sick kids, seven kids, more.
01:02:16.000Now you're going back to a reality where people don't become nuns and priests as much anymore, but they become whatever people identify as these days, and they don't get married.
01:02:26.000Well, could it be though that modernity gives something else for men and women to aim for other than just child raising and child rearing?
01:02:38.000Does life expectancy getting longer actually make you less like because you almost have a new life after the kids become 20, right?
01:02:46.000I know that might, I'm just trying to understand what a global psychology would be.
01:02:49.000Well, we definitely have the idea of a career.
01:02:52.000I don't think that if you are a farmer in the 1800s, you think like, I'm going to not have kids because I want to be really focused on my agriculture career.
01:03:01.000That's why you would have eight or nine.
01:03:12.000And so it's almost hard for us to get into the head of that, that it's so psychologically inculcated that one, there wasn't a lot of easy ways to prevent pregnancy back then, or it wasn't easily known.
01:03:23.000And on top of that, just it's so baked in.
01:03:37.000And we can't really rewind the clock to a time where it was otherwise.
01:03:42.000There's another one other angle that I just want to mention since we're on the conversation.
01:03:46.000I know we're getting kind of long on it, but with a lot of like millennials, elder millennials, people I talk to, we talk about the country becoming richer, but that doesn't necessarily mean that every rung of that society has gotten richer.
01:04:01.000And with a lot of the millennials, elder millennials situation, I've got people coming to me because, you know, most elder millennials are hitting, you know, starting to look at 40, right?
01:04:10.000They're starting to see it right around the corner.
01:04:12.000And some people who have gone through the, you know, the economic, you know, economic turmoil, I guess, of that decade, that decade plus of graduating college, then hitting boom, Great Recession, going through all of it, which parallels the,
01:04:28.000you know, at the same time as war paralleling, not, I'm saying not the same as, but it's a parallel structure to almost the Great Depression, World War II, in terms of time, where you have this huge economic turmoil that people have been delaying family formation, which then ties into obviously what Blake is saying about that the fertility window is just closing.
01:04:49.000So you can't delay that because there is a biological clock on this.
01:04:53.000And so for a lot of people who are middle class, even upper middle class, they're realizing that they're not hitting that career goal where they wanted to.
01:05:02.000So they're trying to hit that first before they can go back to the family goal, but they're realizing they can't do that.
01:05:09.000People were told, a lot of girls were told back in college in the mid-2000s, oh, freeze your eggs.
01:05:15.000You know, it'll be on the shelf when you need it.
01:05:17.000But then you find out there's more complications with that.
01:05:19.000There's IVF complications that people run into.
01:05:22.000Turns out it's not that easy to have kids when you hit that age.
01:05:26.000And then also the fact that people aren't getting married as much anymore in general, which goes a whole nother line about the relationship between the sexes and women in this country has been pushed up so far that, but basically put it to say, I know a lot of millennials.
01:05:43.000I know a lot of elder millennials who wish they had kids, who want to have kids, but for one reason or another, that usually harkens back to one of those factors, does not have kids.
01:06:26.000He was seeing that among older generations, they were very different from one another.
01:06:30.000The cultural norms still held between Germany and Turkey and China.
01:06:36.000But when you got to younger generations, they were all reading the same stuff, exposed to the same ideas.
01:06:42.000The iPhone revolutionized everything because you could and it made the so when you're talking about a global trend, Charlie, you're talking about something that is becoming more and more the norm because those people in 2010 are now 13 years older and they're a larger part of the working population.
01:07:01.000The globalization of youth is now the globalization, to Jack's point, of 40-year-olds.
01:07:06.000So when you've got we're more distracted, we have more options.
01:07:13.000I think that that's so, so important when you're talking about global trends.
01:07:16.000I think we're going to see more and more global trends that people are grasping at reasons for, but it's just because you're simply exposed to so much.
01:09:07.000So, wait, tie this back, though, to the DeSantis memes versus the Trump meme.
01:09:11.000Like, the Trump memes are absurdist and always make him look like some kind of otherworldly superhero type figure where you can throw him into, because there's another one where he's doing like a Daiwali dance at a Hindu wedding where it's incredible.
01:09:32.000And then, and then you throw him into traditional Chinese song, and it's also amazing, right?
01:09:38.000There's a certain X factor to Trump that makes him one of the most memeable people on the face of the planet.
01:09:44.000And it is very hard to describe, but I would say probably the main reason that he's so memeable is because there's something just so wrong about it.
01:09:54.000It's so taboo to have Donald Trump, who's portrayed as a racist and a xenophobe and all of this, to be not only fully embracing Chinese culture, but also fluently speaking and singing in Mandarin.