Ep. 040 Premium - 2.5 Kids [VIDEO]
Added 2026-01-27 00:00:09 +0000 UTCRecorded on January 20th, 2026
TOPICS
New Style of Dating App
Birthrates vs. Affordability
Replacing Kids with AI
Apple and Google join forces?
Apple's Products and Market
Outro
Comments
One of the best examples of good solutions to low birth rates is a Bulgarian scientist-turned-politician named Elena Lagadinova who took a crack at the child problem back in the '70s. She took surveys asking women, the people having kids, why they weren't having kids, and they mainly broke it down into lack of job security and lack of child care. The country instituted a 3-year maternity leave with guaranteed job protection and massive state-funded kindergartens, and this caused the birth rate to jump back up to nearly 2.3 almost overnight from a low of 2.02. It stabilized the population for the next 15 years until the government collapsed in '89. I'm not saying this is going to work for every country in every situation, especially if they're far behind, but solutions like this are worth a shot.
TheThoughtCabinet
2026-02-03 00:24:44 +0000 UTCI very much could afford to have childern but the idea of being pregant and risking my life and body doesn't appeal to me at all. There was a time that would have been my only purpose but I am allowed to have other goals so I wouldn't I pick those. Paid surrogacy isn't legal in Canada so money doesn't address that issue. The robots we need to fix the birth rate crisis is wombs.
AH
2026-02-02 18:00:39 +0000 UTCMy brother and I were talking about life generally, and here's what he said. "There's this ring of pedo's that aren't going to be brought to justice. I just can't muster the energy to give a fuck." I think that the issue with birth rates is that people are becoming more demoralized with life.
Eric
2026-02-01 21:41:21 +0000 UTCI think I get what Aiden is saying and I agree, I have noticed that a VAST majority of the girls I have met talk about never wanting kids and hating kids(unrelated to economy), I think it is way more than affordability
Dragau4
2026-02-01 05:11:07 +0000 UTCi would like and episode where they pitch cultural solutions to the birth rate, (ala the daily fuck) cause cultural shake ups are an interesting concept tbh.
lemonboi
2026-01-31 14:26:37 +0000 UTCI pulled the "immediate call" on dating apps back in the day it was goated as a strategy tbh. I fear phone calls but it just wasted so much less time to either 1) just immediately meet up with the person in a public place or 2) immediately check out the general vibe
Rachel Cunningham
2026-01-30 23:30:53 +0000 UTCI think with the question of birthrate we have overblown expectations of what we need to have because of the baby boom. They got back from WW2 they get smashing like crazy, they have money, and have opportunity. If we just had a steady birth/death rate that didnβt have a generational imbalance because of macro factors I think our perspective of βthe perfect balanceβ would be different.
Fluplaxio
2026-01-30 22:33:54 +0000 UTCI've done very well on dating apps. It's incredibly powerful to be able to read a dossier authored and provided to you by the very person you want to talk to. If you're willing to read a few paragraphs, apply some reading comprehension and ask questions about the things you read, I think anyone can do exceptionally well. You're basically competing against freaks who try to send dick pics as an opening line. It's not hard. Yet, despite all that, I hate those freaking apps. Humanity isn't meant to be reduced to items from a restaurant menu. And when you make the opening meetings itemized and transactional, everything that follows is going to follow that trajectory. Why did we leave it to pocket protector engineers to decide the fate of human romance? Wasn't it enough to let them decide what news we hear, what entertainment we consume, what comments we see, and every other aspect of modern life?
Claiming Light
2026-01-30 17:58:00 +0000 UTCDid you guys where color coordinate the white and black shirts for this argumentπ
Seit2663
2026-01-30 00:37:31 +0000 UTCIt felt like *I* took a bong hit trying to understand Aiden's birth rate discussion. He's right that when kids are a cost rather than 'free' farm labor, people are going to put them off more. But Big A is right - I think Aiden is ignoring decades where births met replacement while cost of living was lower, child labor wasn't useful to most families, contraception was still widely available, and women were still fairly liberated. The assertion that there is no sum of money you could give people to have more kids is simply not based in reality. Where you get the funding aside, if you gave people 2 million dollars to raise at least 3 kids instead of working, you can't tell me that doesn't move the line. It seems vastly more feasible to restructure society in such a way that people aren't prevented from achieving goals at work and in their personal lives by having children - fundamentally an affordability problem, than to completely abolish work for most people. Societies with communal child rearing have existed for millenia - it was the norm for most of human history; and while communal property has been similarly commonplace until just recently, "communism but with robots" is going to be a less likely transition for post red scare, hyper-capitalist modern society IMO. I mean, I think he's right to question the wisdom of a society which cannot ever shrink, and robo-communism seems like a decent solution to inevitable problems, but his solution is still fundamentally affordability. Robo-communism does ameliorate the need for a high birth rate, but it does so by reducing inequality & unaffordability... Unfortunately we can't do two things at once, so we will have to stay destitute and have no children forever.
James
2026-01-29 19:12:49 +0000 UTC
