Ep. 2010 - The Dating Crisis Has A Solution No One Is Talking About

**Michael Knowles** (0:00)
It's the fourth day in the octave of American Independence. I hope everyone got some downtime over the weekend. Some of you are extending the festivities this week. Maybe you're going to the beach, just taking a few days off work. Whatever you're doing, I hope you are taking this reprieve from your ordinary responsibilities to find a lady if you're a guy, or to find a guy if you're a lady, and that you are getting together and making babies. Because we are in a dating, marriage, and baby recession. It is the worst that it has ever been, and I think I know the reason why and how to fix it. I'm Michael Knowles, this is The Michael Knowles Show.
Welcome back to the show. There's a new trend among the Utes. And this is good. This is countering the dating, marriage, baby recession. It's RizMaxing. The Zoomers are RizMaxing. It's a trend all over social media. The Love Doctor will enter in to adjudicate the efficacy of the RizMaxers. We'll get to that momentarily on this beautiful 4th of July week. Hold on one second. Go to go.pepperdine.edu/dailywire.
Every important decision is made by someone. Every law, every policy, every national security decision, every city budget, someone is sitting in that room. Question is, who? Who is it?
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That is go.pepperdine.edu/dailywire, D-A-I-L-Y, W-I-R-E. Head on over there right now. Great, great school. The numbers are brutal, folks. You're not shacking up enough, okay? You're not making it happen. There's a study out of the Institute for Family Studies, the State of Our Unions Dating Recession, and the picture is very, very bleak. And everybody is offering all sorts of explanations as to why this is happening, but I think they're kind of missing the obvious one. So, birth rates have been on a long-term decline, obviously. We've been below replacement in terms of our birth rates. It's 1971 That long-term decline accelerated after the global financial crisis. So, after 2007, things really started to get bad. The births in 2025, according to the CDC, 3.6 million births. That is down 1% from 2024
2024, which is down from the years before that, down, down, down, down, down. If we're losing 1% of births a year, that is not going to bode very well for us. So, what's the general fertility rate? The GFR for 2025 is a little over 53 births per 1,000 women, ages 15 to 44 So, you don't really want a lot of 15-year-olds getting pregnant, and a lot of the decline in the birth rate and the fertility rate, there are people who are coping and say, no, it's really a good thing, because teenage girls aren't getting pregnant anymore, and that's after years of education. So, it's actually, it's fine, it's a good thing. But the problem is, not the 15 to 19, it's everyone after that, because the trend is really pronounced in women all the way up to 44 The GFR is down 1%, another 1% from what it was in 2024 Do you know how much it's down since 2007?
We are truly just like the frog being boiled slowly. Since 2007, the general fertility rate is down 23%.
And it's not like it was so hot in 2007 either. So, then the total fertility rate hit a low in 2024 of 1.6. So 1.6 babies per couple. Well below replacement.
And these are all based on provisional data, so it might actually be worse than that. This is well below the replacement rate, which is 2.1.
Okay, teen births are way down. That's great. Record low of 11.7 per 1,000 females. That's down 7% since 2024, 72% since 2007 But it doesn't explain a huge number, well over a quarter of the drop in the fertility rate.
The births to women in their 20s have declined. Rates for women in their 30s and 40s have risen modestly. This is the consequence of feminism, where these women are told, it's not even totally their fault, they're told from the time they're in kindergarten that they should put off having children, put off getting married, prioritize having a career, prioritize going to college and then get that graduate degree, get another graduate degree, go work for Mr. McGillicuddy in the Excel spreadsheet factory, and then when you're 40, then try to have a kid. But the problem is that, okay, even if the rates for the 40-year-olds are ticking up a little bit, it's just not enough to make up for the decline everywhere else.