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Visit yamava.com/palms to discover more. - Welcome to Radical Personal Finance, a show dedicated to providing you with the knowledge, skills, insight, and encouragement you need to live a rich and meaningful life now while building a plan for financial freedom in 10 years or less. My name is Joshua Sheets.

Today I wanna share with you a little bit about a subject that is going to influence your life, my life, your economy, my economy, and many global trends over the coming decades. I do not know specifically how you can apply today's discussion to your investment portfolio or to your personal financial decisions.

All I know is that this is going to be a factor in many trends through which we live. It's going to affect economics. It's going to affect politics. It's going to be affecting your and my life significantly. And I thought it's worthy of a little bit of discussion to make sure that this is on your radar screen as something that you should be paying attention to in the coming years.

The topic is population decline. I have mentioned this many times in passing. In fact, it was last week I mentioned it in answering a question from somebody. And I noticed yesterday that Elon Musk was tweeting about this again. He's covered this before, but I thought it was worth paying attention to.

Here are Musk's tweets. "We should be much more worried about population collapse. UN projections are utter nonsense. Just multiply last year's births by life expectancy. Given downward trend in birth rate, that is best case unless reversed. If there aren't enough people for Earth, then there definitely won't be enough for Mars." Sad face.

Then he links to an article from NPR, an article from BBC. Another interesting tweet. Somebody talks to him about Japan, and he responds with this. "Last year, Japan had about 800,000 births, and life expectancy is 85 years." Impressively high. "Implying future population of only 68 million, dropping almost half from current population of 126 million." That's a lot of ghost towns and cities.

Let me talk with a little bit of background information. By covering these two articles, which are, that Musk linked to, which are from the middle of last year, and then give you some more headlines that are starting to come out about the calendar year 2021. From May 5, 2021, NPR article, headline, "US birth rate fell by 4% in 2020, hitting another record low." Quote, "The number of babies born in the US dropped by 4% in 2020 compared with the previous year.

According to a new federal report released Wednesday, the general fertility rate was 55.8 births per 1,000 women, ages 15 to 44, reaching yet another record low according to the provisional data. This is the sixth consecutive year that the number of births has declined after an increase in 2014, down an average of 2% per year and the lowest number of births since 1979, the National Center for Health Statistics said.

The US total fertility rate, which estimates how many babies a hypothetical group of 1,000 women would have during their life, based on data from a given year, remains far below replacement, meaning there wouldn't be enough babies born for a generation to exactly replace itself. The rate has generally been below replacement since 1971 and has consistently been below replacement since 2007, according to the agency, which is part of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The statistical replacement rate is 2,100 births per 1,000 women, but in 2020, the US total fertility rate fell to 1,637.5 births per 1,000 women. One year earlier, it was just over 1,700 births. Just over 3.6 million babies were born in the US last year, according to the agency. Demographically, the number of births fell across all ethnicities and origins, according to the report, which relied on US Census Bureau population estimates that were derived in July.

The provisional number of births declined 4% for both white and black women, 3% for Hispanic women, 6% for American Indian and Alaska Native women, and 8% for Asian American women. The birth rate didn't go up in any age group and fell in most of them. One of the largest declines was in teenagers, where the birth rate fell by 8% to 15.3 births per 1,000 females.

The birth rate for women between 20 and 24 years old fell by 6%. It goes on. I just want to skip some of the more detailed and talk about this in the context. Remember, this is from last May. News of the continued fall in birth rates comes as the US is coping with losing nearly 580,000 people to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The National Center for Health Statistics report on births did not focus separately on the coronavirus, but it previously found a drop in the number of mothers who accessed high-quality prenatal care in 2020 compared to 2019. Let's go on to the BBC News article. This was published 15 July 2020.

Headline, "Fertility Rate Jaw-Dropping "Global Crash in Children Being Born." Falling fertility rates mean nearly every country could have shrinking populations by the end of the century. And 23 nations, including Spain and Japan, are expected to see their populations halve by 2100. Countries will also age dramatically, with as many people turning 80 as there are being born.

What's going on? The fertility rate, the average number of children a woman gives birth to, is falling. If the number falls below approximately 2.1, then the size of the population starts to fall. In 1950, women were having an average of 4.7 children in their lifetime. Researchers at the University of Washington's Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation showed the global fertility rate nearly halved to 2.4 in 2017.

And their study, published in The Lancet, projects it will fall below 1.7 by 2100. As a result, the researchers expect the number of people on the planet to peak at 9.7 billion around 2064, before falling down to 8.8 billion by the end of the century. That's a pretty big thing.

Most of the world is transitioning into natural population decline, researcher professor Christopher Murray told the BBC. I think it's extraordinarily hard to think this through and recognize how big a thing this is. It's extraordinary. We'll have to reorganize society. Why are fertility rates falling? It has nothing to do with sperm counts or the usual things that come to mind when discussing fertility.

Instead, it is being driven by more women in education and work, as well as greater access to contraception, leading to women choosing to have fewer children. In many ways, falling fertility rates are a success story. Remember, I'm quoting from the BBC. Which countries will be the most affected? Japan's population is projected to fall from a peak of 128 million in 2017 to less than 53 million by the end of the century.

Italy is expected to see an equally dramatic population crash from 61 million to 28 million over the same time frame. They are two of 23 countries, which also include Spain, Portugal, Thailand, and South Korea, expected to see their population more than half. That is jaw-dropping, professor Christopher Murray told me.

China, currently the most populous nation in the world, is expected to peak at 1.4 billion in four years' time before nearly halving to 732 million by 2100. India will take its place. The UK is predicted to peak at 75 million in 2063 and fall to 71 million by 2100.

However, this will be a truly global issue, with 183 out of 195 countries having a fertility rate below the replacement level. Why is this a problem? You might think this is great for the environment. A smaller population would reduce carbon emissions as well as deforestation for farmland. That would be true except for the inverted age structure, more old people than young people, and all the uniformly negative consequences of an inverted age structure, says professor Murray.

The study projects the number of under fives will fall from 681 million in 2017 to 401 million in 2100. The number of over 80-year-olds will soar from 141 million in 2017 to 866 million in 2100. Professor Murray adds, "It will create enormous social change. "It makes me worried because I have an eight-year-old daughter "and I wonder what the world will be like.

"Who pays tax in a massively aged world? "Who pays for health care for the elderly? "Who looks after the elderly? "Will people still be able to retire from work? "We need a soft landing," argues Professor Murray. Are there any solutions? Countries, including the UK, have used migration to boost their population and compensate for falling fertility rates.

However, this stops being the answer once nearly every country's population is shrinking. "We will go from the period where it's a choice "to open borders or not to frank competition for migrants "as there won't be enough," argues Professor Murray. Some countries have tried policies such as enhanced maternity and paternity leave, free child care, financial incentives, and extra employment rights, but there is no clear answer.

Sweden has dragged its fertility rate up from 1.7 to 1.9, but other countries that have put significant effort into tackling the baby bust have struggled. Singapore still has a fertility rate of around 1.3. Professor Murray says, "I find people laugh it off. "They can't imagine it could be true.

"They think women will just decide to have more kids. "If you can't find a solution, "then eventually this species disappears, "but that's a few centuries away." The researchers warn against undoing the progress on women's education and access to contraception. Professor Stein-Emil Vosset said, "Responding to population decline is likely to become "an overriding policy concern in many nations, "but must not compromise efforts "to enhance women's reproductive health "or progress on women's rights." What about Africa?

The population of sub-Saharan Africa is expected to treble in size to more than 3 billion people by 2100. And the study says Nigeria will become the world's second biggest country with a population of 791 million. Professor Murray says, "We will have many more people "of African descent in many more countries "as we go through this.

"Global recognition of the challenges around racism "are going to be all the more critical "if there are large numbers of people of African descent "in many countries." So I'll skip the last couple of... Actually, why not? Why is 2.1 the fertility rate threshold? You might think the number should be 2.0.

Two parents have two children, so the population stays the same size. But even with the best healthcare, not all children survive to adulthood. Also, babies are ever so slightly more likely to be male. It means the replacement figure is 2.1 in developed countries. Nations with higher childhood mortality also need a higher fertility rate.

What did the experts say? Professor Ibrahim Aboubakar, University College London, said, "If these predictions are even half accurate, "migration will become a necessity for all nations "and not an option. "To be successful, we need a fundamental rethink "of global politics. "The distribution of working-age populations "will be crucial to whether humanity prospers or withers." Now, before I provide my commentary, I want to read to you just a couple of headlines.

I went to news.google.com, and I searched "birth rate." And here are some of the articles that came up. "China's birth rate drops for a fifth straight year "to record low." That was CNN from two days ago. National Wales, the National Wales newspaper. Quote, "Birth"-- headline, "Birth rate continues to decline across Wales." Vox.com, "The Great Population Growth Slowdown." The Citizen, December 29, "India's fertility rate drops, "women more conscious than men." Hindustan Times from 14 days ago, "Birth rates in 10 Chinese provinces "fell below 1% in 2020," report.

Business Insider has this headline, "The pandemic baby bust is a lot smaller than expected." And if you read that headline and dig into it, what it means is that somebody had predicted that there would be 300,000 missing babies due to the pandemic. I guess the Brookings Institute-- the Brookings Institute previously forecasted 300,000 to 500,000 fewer babies born because of the pandemic.

Well, in fact, there were 60,000 fewer babies born because of the pandemic. So there is a baby bust, but it's smaller than that one institution predicted. So one of these silly nonsense stories. All right, now if I add in 2021, birth rate 2021, here are the headlines. I'll skip the citation.

Reuters, "China's birth rate drops to record low in 2021." Inquirer, "China's birth rate drops to record low in 2021." Kaiser Health News, "US death rates up, "birth rates hit record lows." Blame COVID, of course. SILive.com, "US coronavirus baby bust is here, "research shows." So what does that mean? China Daily, "Birth rate falling below 1%, "an early warning." And then we continue on.

And then if you add in other clarifying things, like birth rate, US birth rate 2021, you see that across all of it, there is a significant decline in birth rates. And so we're still waiting for all the data from 2021, but there is a significant decline in birth rates.

So what's going on here? What we see is quite simply, people are having fewer children. And if you want to see this in your own life, here is a mental experiment that you can do. Remember that in order for a population to be stable due to birth rates, not growing, not declining, every single woman in a population must have 2.1 children.

In order for a population to be stable, every single woman in that population must have 2.1 children on average. That's what's necessary for stability. Not growth, but stability. Now do a little mental experiment. Look around you. Look around you at your job. Look around you with your friends. Look around you at your church.

Look around you at your neighborhood. And start counting the percentage of women that you know who have or are likely to have 2.1 children in their lifetime. Now if you're 21 years old, this may not yet be apparent to you because you might look around and say, "Well, maybe a lot of my friends will have 2.1 children." But when you start to reach 30, 35, 40, and you start to look around, all of a sudden the trends become massively more clear.

You see that very, very few of your female friends or very, very few of the women that you observe have 2.1 children or more. There are a lot that have zero. And if a woman has a child at all, it's quite common that she may have one or perhaps two children.

My wife and I, we have four children. Like Elon, we're trying to do our best to lead by example and not contribute to population decline. We're trying to grow our family tree. And yet, even though we have four children, which is not that much more than 2.1, most people consider us to have a large family.

Most people consider us to have a large family. And I know almost nobody who has more than four children. I have a few friends who have more. I'm the youngest of seven myself. I have, let's see, one friend, they have six. I have another friend who has five. But very rarely do most people that I know have more than four children.

And when you think about how many of those of us with four children are balancing off people who have zero or one or two, then you start to see the trend. You could just see it with your own eyes. This leads to population decline. But it doesn't just lead to a declining population in an abstract sense.

What it leads to is a disruption and a transformation of society. Let me talk about what some of those transformations and changes are and how they affect people. Number one, it leads to a graying of the population. You have lots of older people. This can lead to all kinds of difficult things.

For example, what you see is that in many nations, because there are so many old people, old people hold a lot of political power. And thus they get to vote and express that power by sheer virtue of their population. But this leads to a lot of frustration amongst younger people.

You'll talk to many younger voters. You see this play out in politics. You'll have a young, who would be, I guess, Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez would be a good example. You have this young, very popular, fiery, public young politician. And yet some of her most ambitious projects and some of her most ambitious initiatives are continually stymied by old, gray fellow representatives who are representing a significant portion of the United States.

This happens on a global basis. So you can have political frustration that happens. Because if people are supposed to vote in favor of their interests, what you wind up with is a system that more and more favors older people voting for themselves. This is especially difficult because many of the legacy systems under which we live were built under the assumption that there would be continual population growth.

A good example is simply the ratio with the Social Security system of the United States is looking at the ratio of covered workers to the number of beneficiaries. In 1940, the first year that Social Security was founded in the United States, there were 35 million, 35.3 million workers versus 222 million, sorry, there were 222,000 beneficiaries and there were 35 million workers for a ratio of 159 workers for every beneficiary.

Also remember, of course, that the average life expectancy when Social Security was founded was much, much lower. By 1945, that number had dropped dramatically to a ratio of 41.9 workers per beneficiary. 1950 dropped to 16.5, 1955 8.6, 1960 5.1 workers for every retiree, 1965 4.0, 1970 3.7, 1980 3.2, 1990 3.4, remember you had this high degree of stability due to the baby boom that happened after World War II and then we've been slowly dropping more or less.

It has been stable from about 1990 through about 2005, 2007 it was 3.3, 2008 3.2, 2009 3, 2010 2.9, 2011 2.9, 2012 2.9, 2013 2.8. And remember where we are in terms of the baby boomers retiring. You've got this massive golf ball that's been moving through the snake and every day more and more baby boomers retire, more and more start to take.

And here's what's happening also. It's standard financial advice that a retiree waits until age 70 to take Social Security. So you see these numbers played out there. So politically this affects a nation. Economically it affects a nation. This is one of the reasons why the danger is so significant for the collapse of globally all of the systems that are the entitlement programs that are built to protect aged workers.

So Security, Medicare, Medicaid in the US and various countries options as well. When you have a society in which there are many workers supporting a few retirees, then that can be stable. Most of us have this desire to want to support other people and want to support the aged and those who are poor, etc.

But when you have a very few number of workers, the burden gets very, very heavy. And this is exacerbated by the personal circumstances of those workers. Let me just use an example. I like to use my own personal example. I'm the youngest of seven. One of my sisters died when a teenager.

And so my parents have six surviving children. At this point in time, all of my grandparents have died. And so my parents have among their six children a significant number of children who can support them in their old age, help them, care for them, pay for them if they need it, etc.

They can support them. If my parents needed care, then our ability to share the burden of that care, I mean daily physical care of them in their home, caring for their daily necessities, the ability to share in that would be quite low. This is especially true given the fact that there are a significant number of grandchildren as well.

My parents currently have 15 grandchildren. And so when you think about the age of those grandchildren, that if my parents needed care in their 80s, in their 90s, in their 100s, etc., then there should be a significant number of children and a significant number of teenage and young adult grandchildren that would be available to care for them because their family tree is growing.

Now if you take that and you compare that with what many people face who don't have children, it becomes much more difficult. And this is very, very significantly the case in many Asian societies. You might have a married couple, a married couple that has chosen or either chosen by will or chosen through circumstance not to have children.

And then their parents start to age. And if their parents are alive, instead there are--excuse me-- both parents have had a single child. That individual child has married another person of an individual child. And so it's not--and then they've chosen not to have children. It's not uncommon to then have two people who are caring for four aging parents with no help.

That's a tremendous, a huge burden. It's an absolutely massive burden to have two people caring for four parents. And so if you compare a declining population of, again, only child, only child who gets together, married, don't have children, and then have four parents to care for, as compared to an expanding population of what I described in my own family, you can see the difference in terms of the social weight that happens.

If you've never cared for an aging parent, let me tell you, it disrupts everything in your life. It's a tremendous, tremendous challenge and a burden. It's obviously an honor, but it's a tremendous burden. And so this has a major effect on society. This more importantly has an effect on many, many institutions.

If you think about all the institutions that are fueled by young people, all of those institutions start to slowly collapse. You see declining attendance at schools, declining attendance at colleges, et cetera. And so this creates major disruptions in the workforce. You see major challenges in jobs that are traditionally entry-level.

You can't get enough workers because there are not enough young people to go into that. And this leads to more and more disruptions in society. Now, I'm not a catastrophist. I think that humanity, as always happens, will adapt and adjust, will change to it. But if you understand this issue, you can see the conflicts being played out, and you can understand where many things are likely to go.

I'll give you an example. Immigration. The reason that a country like the United States has continued to be strong population-wise and experience overall a growing population is due to immigration. Immigration has been a major influence. And so if you understand where these trends are going, though, you understand that the anti-immigration political factions are destined and doomed to failure.

They cannot succeed. So this is where you have large numbers of people in the United States who oppose all kinds of immigration and especially oppose illegal immigration, but oppose all kinds of immigration. Those systems are doomed to failure. One of the things that I personally feel is absolutely certain is that in the coming decades, every single attractive economy around the world will have to rework its immigration system to seek very vigorously to attract immigrants to it.

So places like the United States that currently have very difficult and impossible sometimes immigration systems will have to transform all of their systems because they must attract immigrants in order to keep the system going in some way. But that's not a universally good thing. It's not a universally good thing because this brings tension to society.

Immigration brings societal strife and factions because you start to get immigrants that often cluster together. This creates communities. And if the immigrants aren't successfully assimilated into the current population, then that political strife is only exacerbated. You have us versus them, a significant level of trust. Why are those people speaking Spanish?

Maybe they're talking about me. Why are those people speaking Arabic? And it creates just deep, low levels of trust. Human beings fundamentally have a problem, a very, very hard time trusting people who don't look like them, who don't dress like them, who don't share the same cultural traditions, the same cultural values, etc.

And absent some kind of unifying religion, meaning something that can cross those boundaries of skin color and language, etc., with universal principles that are applicable to all and unify diverse groups, without that, you wind up with a fractured society, with a low-trust society. And this is very, very dangerous because it can lead to tension, to strife, etc.

And so you see this in many parts of the world. I think very prominently you see this right now in Europe, many parts of Europe, where Europe's demographics have been utterly transformed by immigration, and yet there's been major challenges to figure out how do we help these immigrants to assimilate into the culture.

And as the culture has become weak and not standing for something, then what happens is whoever has the strongest principles winds up winning. And so you see a society in a time of transition, like you see right now all around Europe. But this is not only limited to Europe.

This is going to happen systematically on a global basis, because this population collapse is a global phenomenon. It's more pronounced in certain areas than in others, but it is a global phenomenon. In addition to broad-scale economic trends, social trends, one thing that genuinely concerns me personally is the potential for a decline in innovation, decline in creative thinking, etc.

Human beings are the single most valuable resource that we have. The single most important thing that exists in the world is human beings. The human brain, the human intellect, the human creativity, the human spirit. Human beings, people are your resource. If you think about this with regard to disaster planning, it's a good example, right?

Imagine there's some horrible doomsday thing that happens. The gray cloud of death goes up and there's nuclear war that sets off. Well, if you think about it and you think about where would you rather be, how would you live a richer lifestyle? Let me give you two opposing foils.

On the one hand, you can be a lone survivalist, right? You and your buddy or you and your spouse are out in the woods and you got your bug-out backpacks and you got your tents and you're going to live off the fat of the land out in the woods by yourselves.

Or on the other hand, you've got a community of, say, 500 people that all speak the same language both literally and metaphorically. They understand how each other thinks. They share a common culture, a common heritage. They're comfortable with one another. They love one another, et cetera. And they live together in a small community.

If you could join either of those groups, which would you join? You'd be a fool to want to go be with the two guys out in the woods. You would be destined to live in absolute poverty, scratching a living out of nothing out in the woods. And there's a very good chance that all three of you would wind up dead.

But at any rate, the chance of all three of you surviving would be minuscule. Whereas if you could go and you could join a society of, say, 500 people that could work together, those 500 people, if they share a common sense of community, common values, a common understanding of ethics, just a sense of commonality, if you could join that community, you would live very well no matter what the disaster is.

Because even if resources seem scarce--this is always the classic thing, right? Two guys out in the woods, you're like, "Well, there's deer everywhere and there's moose everywhere." Those resources might be there, but those resources are very difficult to get. And even if you're Daniel Boone and there's deer all around, you're still just barely eking out an existence.

Whereas if those 500 people, they may be faced with scarce resources, but the amount of human ingenuity and shared knowledge and creativity among that group of 500 people would be so, so high that give it a couple of years, and even if there were a time of difficulty and you had 20% of them die off with a short-term famine, there would be so much raw labor, there's so much ingenuity and creativity and shared knowledge and historical knowledge that they would be eating well in the community and would have the potential to flourish.

Now, those are simple examples. There's no guarantee, right? There have been communities of people that have turned their backs on each other and murdered one another, obviously. But the point is that human beings are a resource, and when you have a declining resource like human beings, you have a declining population, massive amounts of progress in the world can get wiped out.

You can wind up with a so-called dark age, right? Where knowledge is not growing and where humans are not expanding and sharing with one another. That's the great danger. Human beings are always your ultimate resource. And the more human beings there are, the better and the easier it will systematically solve the problems that the world is, the world has.

However, when we have fewer human beings, we have less intellect, fewer geniuses, less support, less labor, everything starts to get more difficult. Now, these trends will not be as stark as I described in a group of 500 people, obviously not. Throughout your lifetime, you'll be able to find a place that you're comfortable and you'll be able to work it out.

But these things will affect your life in many ways. They're going to affect your wealth. They're going to affect so many things. And we don't know, I don't know, any more than we know that these predictions are accurate. You're making a prediction of something that's 78 years in the future.

How do we know for sure what's going to happen? We don't, right? Could there be some kind of widespread appreciation of the dangers of population decline and people start having lots of babies again? Maybe, right? I'm optimistic. I hope that that's the case. I frequently find myself encouraging people, "Have children." But you see why people don't.

It's obvious why people don't. Let me talk for a moment about that so you can understand. We've gone through a very, very significant cultural transformation, a series of them, which makes it extremely difficult for parents to have children, even when they want to. Not setting aside, let me first deal with the medical reality of children.

There is a major problem that seems to exist in many of our circles of people facing significant levels of infertility. Some of this is just simply-- I'm not sure the word to use. It just is, right? It's not a matter of choices. For example, the testosterone levels of my generation of men, our testosterone levels collectively are half of the collective testosterone levels of our fathers.

This is a major, major challenge. It's devastating, and the reasons are not fully understood. But if you're a man, one of the things that you need to do in 2022 is get your testosterone checked. You need to work with a doctor and review the numbers and figure out how you can increase your testosterone if necessary because these low levels of testosterone are very, very bad, and it's horrible for our sons as well.

If you have boys, you need to study the topic of testosterone and help your boys to make-- and make sure that your boys have high levels of testosterone through proper dietary changes, through all the exercise, all the things that can be done, through making sure they have an environment that's not potentially contributing to the decline of testosterone, but it's a major, major significant issue.

The levels of infertility are significant. I haven't dug deep into the data on this, and I'm speaking just from some observation, but it's astounding when I personally think about the number of my friends who struggle with infertility, and these are often just happy, normal couples that you would think, like, "There should be no struggle here," and some of it is probably environmental.

For example, one of the major trends that has happened is marriage-- the average age of marriage and the average age of conception and childbirth has been pushed far, far later than the biologically normal age. The biologically normal age at which a woman can give birth is teenage years, right?

Post-puberty, teenage years. And throughout history, it was very common that a woman would have children starting in her teenage years all the way through for many, many years beyond that, but in today's environment, that is not common. And I think all of us are glad to see teen pregnancy rates down.

There's no question about that as long as they're down for ethically right reasons rather than for immoral reasons. But that puts a big difference, right? So it's very, very common if the normal age of marriage is something like 26 right now, it's very, very common that a woman might first start trying to have children at around the age of 30--late 20s, 30, early 30s.

But her fertility is massively lower at the age of 30 than it is at the age of 18 or the age of 20. And then the ease of childbirth is massively lower, meaning it's not as easy to have children. And so I have many friends, right? They had very difficult first childbirth and they don't want any more children.

And you go through your circles and you just see then other levels of infertility, whether it's--whatever the cause is, right? I'm no expert on it, but whatever the cause is, there are a significant number of couples in my personal friend circle who you would think would be able to have a couple of children, and yet they struggle.

But biological factors are only one component. I think a much more important component are sociological factors. Our societies, the modern societies in which we live, are not friendly, generally speaking, to parents, to having children. They're not friendly to children. And there are many, many levels of this. At its core, you see a dramatic financialification or a professionalization of life.

It's considered quite--what's the right word?--just not appropriate to encourage someone to plan ahead and say, "I want to have children." Very rarely do we ever tell an 8-year-old man, "Well, how many children would you like to have?" Very rarely would it ever be considered appropriate to ask a 13-year-old girl, "How many children would you like to have?" Generally speaking, we push our children to professional capacities.

And what happens is this becomes an even more significant kind of-- it's a trend that picks up steam. It's a flywheel. The more we do it, the more it becomes. My wife and I value children. We value families. I have three boys and one girl. And so I think carefully about how do I encourage them?

But what happens is we no longer live in a world in which I can exclusively encourage my boys and my girls to simply focus on, "Hey, have babies." My daughter would perhaps be the most vulnerable here because to think that she would live in a society where she would be valued for being a mother, that's just not the societies that any of us live in.

Even if we're part of subcultures in which children are more valued than the general culture, that's a significant risk. And so basically we all continually prepare our boys and our girls for a professional life. We spend years sending them to school, right? 12 years of elementary, middle school, high school, years of college education.

None of that education is related to family. None of that education is related to children. None of that education is related to anything except making money, except being a fundamental part of the economic world. And so then our children feel the necessity to properly respond. They feel the necessity to push back and say, "Yes, okay, I was taught to make money, so I need to make money." My parents invested all this money.

They spent tens of thousands of dollars to educate me so that I could be professionally productive. And so it's my job to be professionally productive. And even those for whom that's not that big of a deal would feel a restraint in today's world about saying, "I want to have children." When I was thinking about-- I've known forever that I wanted to have children, but I didn't go around before being married and ask a woman, I was like, "Well, how many children do you want to have?" That's verboten, right?

That's taboo. We don't talk like that. If a woman went around saying, "I just want to have a lot of babies," that would be tremendous-- she would be a social outcast for that. And then it becomes a continuing self-fulfilling prophecy. The more we financialize, the more we professionalize the training of our children, and the fewer children our children themselves are around, then what happens is we create a world in which they're not really comfortable with children.

And since there's not a need to have children-- meaning you can have all the sex you want without children in the modern age of birth control, abortion, etc.-- there's no biological need to have children. And you can function pretty well in society without children. There's no longer any stigma for not having children.

There's no stigma for being single. There's no stigma for being a couple that doesn't have children. Then what happens is it becomes more and more of it. And so in the circles of people that I talk to, it's very common that I speak to people who have no ambition to have children-- just not important to them.

Obviously, I don't think anyone should be forced to have children. But these trends are continuing, is my point. They're continuing. And again, they're self-fulfilling. Many people who don't want to have children, they often just didn't have a great childhood. And they're not around happy families. They're not around other families with children.

And all they hear is negative jokes about children. If you want to drive Joshua Sheets crazy, just come and open your mouth around me and say something mean to children. Our society is riddled with this and it drives me nuts. I talk about the terrible twos and all this nonsense.

Don't get out of here with that. Do not speak down about children. Children are the future of our civilization. And they deserve to be honored, not discriminated against, not made fun of. If you're one who makes fun of millennials or makes fun of stupid teenagers and kids these days, you're the problem.

It's your discrimination that is causing people to stop. Don't make fun of people. Build people up. And if you see weaknesses, don't make fun of them. Get in and help. Because you sure don't make people want to have babies when you talk down about them, when you insult them.

There are other trends, though, that cause people to-- cause our society to be unfriendly to children. As a parent who's actively living this, I'll tell you that society is unfriendly to children because there's not much of a village that exists at this point in time, especially speaking broadly. There's a classic thing that has become-- it's in some circles quite in vogue to joke about-- people say it takes a village to raise a child.

And there's an expression, I think, of where that does go too far, meaning that I believe personally in the sovereignty of the nuclear family unit. My wife and I don't look to other people for their approval about what we do with our children. They're our children. I don't look to anybody for permission.

I don't ask any permission. I don't look for other people to control anything. But there's a reality in which it does very much take a village to raise a child. And what we find is with the intense, again, professionalization of society, there's not a lot of support that parents get.

There's not a lot of support. And so it's very, very difficult to raise children in the modern context because you pretty much wind up doing it all yourself. And the society in general has become so unfriendly to children-- and I'm not saying that people are unfriendly. Most people are nice to children.

But what I mean is the society has become unfriendly to children such that if you're raising children, you find yourself continually burdened. You continually have to do it yourself. Let me give you an example. Recently we rented a house in Orlando, Florida. We were there for about a month and a half.

And we were in this beautiful golf community. And it was nice. Beautiful Airbnb, beautiful golf community, nice house, beautiful neighborhood, et cetera. The amount of pressure-- every person that we spoke to in that community was so nice. Retirees, beautiful people. They were kind. Everyone was lovely. And they made so many nice compliments about our children.

But the entire structure of the neighborhood and everything about it was unfriendly to children. It was just completely unsuitable to their needs. For example, we begin with the house. The house, meaning--let me not go with the interior of the house. That would be too pedantic. But on an exterior basis, there's no yard.

There's a nicely landscaped front bit, and then there's a back bit that opens up onto a golf course. And so the children, of course, can't play on the golf course. There is a river there right behind the house, a canal. So you have to be careful of that. And all the other houses are just set so close.

And so I let the children go play in the street. The street was safe enough. And again, all the people were wonderful. But it was one of the worst environments possible to have children in. It was awful because my boys go down the street, and they ride their scooters down, and they start digging in somebody's yard, and they have to go out--no, don't dig in that.

They go and dig in someone's trash pile and find some treasures there. And they're just being children. And yet the social opprobrium for messing up the beauty of the neighborhood would be so significant that I'm on pins and needles all the time trying to make sure that we're good neighbors.

Now, you could say, "Well, Joshua, clearly a golf community is not necessarily the right move, right? This is a retiree community full of gray-haired people enjoying their last years of leisure." And that's true. The problem is where do you go where there is actually a great community for children?

Communities are very rarely structured well for it. There are some. You can find sometimes a few neighborhoods. But even if you're fortunate enough to go and engage in one of those neighborhoods, you can't really just let your kids go and play. And even if you want to--I'm very much in favor of the ideals of free-range parenting, letting my children go and do, and I think that it's silly that people are more concerned about-- it's silly that people are concerned about safety for their children.

Our children are far safer than they ever were 50 years ago, 100 years ago. But what happens is you live in a society in which other people don't get it. I'll give you an example. When we were in that same neighborhood, I went and let the children go and play.

And they let them go play in the canal. The children could all swim and keep an eye on them. But I told them where their boundaries were, which were pretty wide. But they had--I can't remember if it was seven or eight houses down. There was a big tree. I said, "You can go as far as this tree.

You can go as far as this other landmark down here. These are your boundaries." Well, then one morning, here comes the guy from five houses down, hurrying down. "I saw your children out playing. I just need to make sure they had a home and whatnot." And, of course, he was very kind, and you appreciate that.

I hope you hear me clearly. I'm trying to articulate. If you don't talk with parents about these issues, these are some of the things that are happening, and I just want you to be aware of them. So the guy was wonderful, right? He was concerned about children. He was looking out for their safety, and he wanted to make sure that they were okay, which was great.

He didn't do anything wrong. But this is an example of what exists everywhere. As a parent, you can't just let your children go play outside. You can't let your children go to the park, because then everyone's asking, "Where are your parents? Where are your parents?" And so what happens is parents have to be on all the time, and there's no suitable place for them to be, even in a neighborhood that's friendly to the children.

You think about the classic idea about the 1950s. "Oh, my friends and I went out to go and play. We went out and played sandlot baseball every afternoon after school." Well, number one, you go into a neighborhood, even the most friendly neighborhoods and the most family-friendly towns, the places where there are children and there's virtually no children.

The streets are barren, so there's no place for your children to play. There's no one for your children to play with. And then you wind up--and then you put the children-- so there's no one for them to play with, and there's very few places that they can play. And then when they do play, all the neighbors around are so concerned about the safety of the children that it gets pretty intense.

And so you've got to be seen sitting out and watching them, et cetera. I hope this doesn't sound like complaining. I guess I'm just trying to articulate that the whole concept of society being friendly for children is not. Now, take that into where most people live, which is in a city.

Have children, what happens? You need a bigger place. And it's even more difficult to have children in an apartment where you've got to go down and buzz yourself in and out of the doorman or whatever that kind of lifestyle is. So what happens? Well, where do your children find friends?

Well, it's always school. Well, the things that happen with school is school becomes this all-consuming thing, and you wind up carting your children around, being taxi driver here, there, et cetera, structured play times, structured this. And so as the number of children grows, then the constraints just become harder and harder.

And now if I've got three children in baseball, then I've got to drive my kids everywhere. And they can't ride the bus, and they're not supposed to take Uber by themselves. And so it's just, as you see, it becomes a lot. And so what do people need? We need a community.

And traditionally you could find this in a local area. You could find a village. I'm reading my children the book by--what's her name?--Estes, "The Moffat Children." And it's so beautiful. It's a beautifully written story about the Moffats. And here you see this expression. And I don't think it's an idealization.

I think it was a society that really was in the United States many years ago. But you see this sense of people knowing each other. And here's this little girl, Jane Moffat, playing in the street up and down. And everyone knows it's Jane Moffat. They know all the children.

They know everybody. But in our modern societies, we don't. And everything is so separated, at least in the U.S., I'll say. In many places it's the same. That this is--it makes it hard. And so your neighbors--you have a hard time trusting your neighbors because we don't know our neighbors because we sit inside and sit in the air conditioning, sit in the heating, and watch football on TV instead of actually going and playing football in the yards.

And so it becomes more difficult. And I think this is one of the things that contributes significantly. When you have parents that want children, that value children, every additional child that you have becomes this intense, difficult price. You're going to pay the price because it's tough. That's not even getting into the infrastructure, etc.

So what are--what am I saying? I guess I'm just trying to articulate that I get it. I get why people don't have children. I get why people don't have children at all. I get why people don't get married. I get why people don't have lots of children. And yet this contributes to this significantly declining birth rate.

Now I don't worry about--I don't think these problems are insoluble. I've worked hard to solve many of these problems for myself and for my family. I have some solutions to some of them, but a lot of times they're not easy solutions, nor are they universally accepted or acceptable solutions.

For example, I find a lot of the community that my family needs, we find that in subcultures. I have religious subcultures of which I'm a part. I have ideological subcultures, homeschool groups, etc. People who are religious tend to have a lot of children, or at least more than average.

People who are homeschoolers tend to have more children, at least more than average. And so what happens is because you find communities of people that share the same problems, then you can put together a community to handle those things. You can find neighborhoods, find properties, find things that work for you, and you can create a solution.

But on the whole, these kinds of subcultures are fringe. They're fringe groups. They're not mainstream at all. They're not easily findable. They're fringe groups. And so you've got to be aware of the fact that this is what's happening in society. Let me pivot now and talk about some pieces of advice.

And I'm going to give this fairly broadly. Let's begin with just some general advice. Number one, make sure that your personal financial goal is not to be dependent on systems of society. Because as I see it right now, the graying population will hold the levers of control in most democratically controlled societies because of their sheer numbers.

But at some point in time, young people are going to rebel. And you see this happening with the movement to drop out. You see this happening in many ways. But I think that there are some long-range trends. The systems that were designed for the world of the 1940s no longer work.

They don't work. They're not going to work. They're going to continue to collapse over the coming decades. And it's as simple as that. It's certain that they're going to collapse. Now, there will be a time in which I think they can be patched together. Remember, immigration is how most countries are trying to solve this, trying to hold up the welfare state based upon immigration.

That works as long as there are significant numbers of fecund societies that are creating lots of young people that are willing to go abroad. But as these mainstream--if this trend continues, those societies themselves will not have as many people available to immigrate. And so immigration can keep some of the leaders ahead.

Immigration can keep the United States going. Canada is desperately trying to keep going with immigration. Immigration can fuel some of the growth in the U.K. and Western Europe, etc., for a time. But there will come a point in time in which immigrants will be less attracted. I think this is already happening in the United States.

I think that so much--I think the demand for immigration to the United States has been dramatically hurt. I can't prove that. I don't have any data at my fingertips. But I think that just anecdotally, I don't think that on a global basis, highly skilled, highly knowledgeable people are trying to immigrate to a place like the United States as significantly as they once were.

There are still lots of low-skilled workers that are trying to immigrate to the U.S., but there aren't a lot of smart, intelligent people because it doesn't have to be. We live in a global world, and the opportunities in the United States are not as stark as they once were in terms of their superiority to many places in the rest of the world.

So this is going to impact society, but you can't be financially dependent on that. If you don't have children, and you don't have the state, you need to think about what are you going to have. What many people have done is they've substituted the concept of children to take care of me as I age, to provide company for me as I age, etc., and they've substituted that with the state.

So if you don't have either of those things, what are you going to have? You're going to need a group. You're going to need some friends. You're going to need a group of people committed to caring for one another. Ideally, this should obviously be found in your local church.

It may be found in a local community. You might join some form of intentional community. You might get together with your buddies and do something and figure it out. But how are you actually going to be cared for if you don't have children and the systems of care that exist in the state continually decline and the things that you don't want to be associated with?

Think about that carefully. In terms of long-term trends, recognize this is going to be at the background of so many long-term trends, so many political trends, and you seem to be aware of it. It's back there in the fabric. If you look at this issue and then you look at the world, many of the conflicts that you see are going to be largely inevitable, and they're rather predictable.

What about in your personal life? I think that personally you should consider if you want to have children. If you do, I think it's very much in your best interest to not goof off about it. I wouldn't change any other way. I think that one of the craziest things that people do is, even with all of the headwinds that I discussed, even the things that are difficult, I don't understand why people don't have more children, especially just successful--let me rephrase.

I shouldn't say I don't understand it. I do understand it. There are costs to it, but I think the benefits far outweigh the costs. I haven't personally met--I've read a few on Reddit, right? But I haven't personally met somebody who's ever regretted having more than a few children. I've met a good number of people who had one or two children and said, "I should have had more." I think if you recognize that human beings are the basic focus of life and they can be an incredibly rewarding part-- and it's what people look at, right?

Look at what 80-year-olds care about in their life, and then begin with the end in mind. Then do the work in your 20s and your 30s, etc., to, number one, not only have the plan of having children, but make sure that you have the resources to do it. Make sure that you have the resources to solve your problems.

Develop yourself and train your children to develop themselves so that instead of goofing off, they're prepared to support a family, and they have the training necessary, the education necessary, the skills necessary to earn enough money necessary. I would have a very hard time supporting my family in an adequate way if I did not earn a significant amount of money.

But because I've developed myself and my businesses, then I can do it in comfort, and I can solve a lot of those problems that I described that face you, and money goes a long way towards that. So pay attention to that. If you have children, recognize that your children are going to be seen as a resource, and so train them for that.

This might be in a negative sense, right? This is one of the reasons I left the United States. There's a crazy, ridiculous, upside-down world that a government that's borrowing money like crazy thinks it can tax everyone, and that government is stealing money from my children, thinking that somehow my children are going to pay it back.

Well, I think it's dumb for my children to be forced to pay for the money that their great-grandparents stole. That's silly. Now, I don't think they're going to pay. I think that a default is likely, but I wanted to make sure they had an off-ramp. I don't want them to think that the United States government sees them as a cash cow and it can just steal their lives, and so I've got to make sure that they're not beholden to any one particular government that sees them that way.

So that would be kind of the negative view. But in the positive view, just recognize that the world is going to be desperate for your children. The world is going to be desperate for thoughtful, well-educated, disciplined individuals, because as the number of competitors declines, then the opportunities open up much more significantly for those who are really skilled and ready for it.

And so I don't have any sense of uncertainty or crisis about it. I think it's just going to be a tremendous opportunity. Society will go through major changes. That's what happens. You go through changes, and there can be massive demographic changes, but change always results in opportunity. Sometimes it takes time to figure out where that opportunity is, but change results in opportunity.

And if you're having children, your children are going to be such a valuable resource, especially your children, right? Not common, ordinary, everyday children, but your children are going to be such a valuable resource that their future is going to be extremely bright. I think finally--there are more things I could say, but I think finally what I would say is that if you have children, you will have more of an opportunity to direct the future than those who choose not to.

The future belongs to the fecund. And those who have children and who do--you have the opportunity to mold the future every single day. And it's such a powerful responsibility, yes, but it's such a powerful opportunity. There's nowhere that you have more opportunity for influence than in your own home.

So no matter what the difficulties you face are, press forward and influence your children in the proper direction. And those who grow, those populations who grow, those are the ones who are going to control the future. It's true on--in every level. I wish I had a better kind of bang-up thing to close on.

My conclusion is simply pay attention to the data. I don't know what you can do with it today, but this subject is going to be at the backdrop of many major societal changes over the coming decades. So pay attention. When you see the headlines, you don't need to do much more than read the headlines, but pay attention to the headlines because this is going to be a transformative influence and trend in our lives over the coming decades.

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