The following is a transcript of a bonus Rumble Premium episode for Monday, July 21, 2025, of The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Robby West filling for Manila Chan. Transcription provided by AI so there may be errors.
Ted Rall: Hey there. Thanks for joining us. You’re watching a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show with Ted Rall and Manila Chan. I’m Ted Rall, the “T” in TMI. Today, it should be the TRI show because that’s Robby West, our producer. If you watch the show, you’re already very familiar with Robby. Robby’s filling in for Manila for this premium edition. Right before this, I sent an interesting story from Bloomberg over to Robby. I know that he, like me, is interested in demographics and population flows. One of the topics on The TMI Show that generates the most controversy is the issue of immigration, particularly into and out of the United States. One of the justifications often given by proponents of increased immigration to the United States is that we have a declining fertility rate. The average female has 0.7 children, which is not enough to replace the population that naturally dies off. Basically, a female should give birth to at least 1.1 children to maintain the population. If the fertility rate goes higher than that, as in a country like Bangladesh, which has a much higher fertility rate, the population should increase.
People who support migration, legal or illegal, often say, “Listen, the country’s population will collapse.” Since we rely so much on consumer spending for our economy, we need to allow immigrants to come into the United States to fill that gap because we don’t produce enough babies. Bloomberg has this really interesting projection, reviewing a book by economists Dean Spears and Michael Geruso called After the Spike: Population, Progress, and the Case for People. In this book, they use existing data to project something that Thomas Malthus probably never thought would happen: global population, after increasing exponentially for centuries, especially in the twentieth century, will start to shrink and continue to shrink, potentially disappearing entirely. According to this projection, this will happen relatively quickly.
According to the UN, the global population will peak at just over 10 billion. We’re at about 8.2 billion now, and it should peak at about 10.3 billion in the year 2085, then start to drop precipitously. In the 2100s, also known as the 22nd century, the population will begin to ebb. By the year 2130, it will be at 9.4 billion, down from 10.3 billion at its peak. By 2160, it will be down to 8.2 billion. You might think, “Okay, that’s not a huge collapse.” But by 2200, we’re at 6.5 billion. To put that into perspective, that’s where we were in 2005. By the year 2250, we’re at 4.7 billion. That’s comparable to where we were in 1980. By the year 2300, I don’t think anyone watching here, even you Gen Zers, will be around for that. The population of the Earth will have declined by two-thirds to 3.3 billion people. To put that into perspective, the last time we saw a global population at that level was 1965. Fertility decline will create all sorts of pressure on our current economic models. I don’t say economic system because you could develop a different model that might work better with a declining population. With our current model, based on expansion, you need an improvement in GDP in the United States by at least 2 to 3% annually. Otherwise, you start to plunge into recession or even depression. You can get some improvements in GDP from improved productivity, but you can’t rely solely on that because productivity and technology don’t increase linearly. Progress happens in leaps and bounds. What do you do in between major disruptive innovations like the invention of the internet, the automobile, or internal combustion? These authors do not believe that solutions like a guaranteed universal basic income, as proposed by Andrew Yang or Elon Musk’s universal high income, will work. They say you can’t really force people to have more children than they want. Sure, you can. Alright, let’s start with that. Let’s dive into natalism, which has never been a significant part of mainstream American politics but is now seeing its moment in the sun, as much of the MAGA world has embraced it. Robby, bring us into that.
Robby West: If you want to fix this problem, it’s the easiest problem in the world to fix. You ban birth control. Seriously, that’s how you fix the problem. This is a problem of our own making. If you want to dive into population collapse, let’s first define what it is. The population is imploding in East Asia, like South Korea and Japan. They had fewer births than deaths last year for the first time, as did Western Europe and North America. What do all those countries have in common? Birth control, promoting the idea of living your best life, marrying your job instead of a spouse, and not having kids. That’s what it all boils down to.
Ted Rall: There are other factors too, right? People are getting married later, often because they feel they can’t afford to get married when they’re younger. It’s harder to get started, buy a home, or afford a car. When they do get married, couples have fewer children for the same reasons.
Robby West: I completely agree. Those are problems we can fix. This isn’t some biological factor.
Ted Rall: Let’s back up to this idea, though. Setting aside the ethics, I’m not sure if it would practically work. When the world’s population was a small fraction of what it is today, they didn’t have birth control. They were pulling out, as they call it in the Bible.
Robby West: Well, yes, but they also didn’t have antibiotics. Pandemics like the Black Death, which today a shot of penicillin could fix, wiped out half the population.
Ted Rall: Human beings know how to avoid having children without chemical birth control.
Robby West: That’s true, but this is the first time since the 1960s that it’s been industrialized on this scale. Both things can be true at the same time. It’s a societal issue. Governments don’t want people getting married and having kids younger.
Robby West: younger because if a parent, typically the woman, stays home raising kids, you can’t tax her for that. How are you going to fund your wars or social programs? You need both people working. So how do you address this problem? You import the third world to replace your domestic population, creating ready-made tax cattle until you don’t. The Romans tried this. Why isn’t anyone speaking Latin anymore? Because it doesn’t work. It’s suicidal on a global scale. If you look at Sub-Saharan Africa or South Asia, like Bangladesh, they aren’t having a birth rate problem. They’re producing babies. There’s a reason for this. This is a problem happening in the industrialized West.
Ted Rall: Traditionally, countries like Bangladesh or Pakistan, which Bangladesh was once part of, are very agricultural. Each baby becomes a potential worker in the fields, helping subsistence farmers. Agrarian societies tend to have higher populations than urban societies.
Robby West: That’s my point. Also, with the advent of AI optimization, you don’t need as many people to do these jobs because most of them won’t exist anymore. At the grocery store, self-checkout is a thing. I saw something yesterday about movie theaters in some countries where robots, not employees, dispense popcorn. Those jobs are going away. Thirty years from now, will truck drivers or taxi drivers still exist? With self-driving cars, all those jobs disappear. Do you need as many people doing those jobs? The answer is no.
Ted Rall: You’re a student of history like I am, Robby. Disruptive technologies have always been viewed as job killers. Capitalists overstate the case that they’re also job creators. There’s no doubt that these technologies free people up to start new lines of business that nikt thought of before. The automobile was insanely disruptive, eliminating the horse industry, which was massive—shoeing, maintenance, storage, sales. Years ago, I was walking through Times Square in New York, one of the busiest urban places in the world, and a demolished building revealed an old ad from the 1800s painted on the side for horse shoeing and storage. I learned that Times Square, before the New York Times opened its offices there, was a hub for the horse industry in New York City, where people took their horses to be groomed or stabled. That was a whole industry, gone because of the automobile. But the car also created demand for road building, auto maintenance, and so on. With AI and disruptive technologies like self-driving cars, you’ll need workers to handle those systems, like the equivalent of air traffic control for highways and roads.
Robby West: It will all be AI. The technology already exists. For my own podcast, I looked into how China, once a major agrarian civilization, now has more people moving to cities. Who’s farming to feed 1.5 billion people? Robots, using GPS maps on the fields. The reason so many former Chinese peasants are in cities now is because those jobs no longer exist.
Ted Rall: Quite frankly, being a peasant in rural China isn’t much fun.
Robby West: It’s not. So to your point, it frees up more time for you to do something else, but also the civilization doesn’t collapse because they’ve got machines doing the work. It’s part of the problem.
Ted Rall: Those machines have to be programmed and maintained. For example, AI might handle ground traffic control or air traffic control for cars, but someone has to program it and maintain it.
Robby West: I agree. And you know who that someone is? It’s AI more and more. There are factories and repair shops in China where robots repair other robots. No human touches them. That’s for the future.
Ted Rall: But that requires the construction of a lot of energy infrastructure because AI is very energy-intensive. People need to run those plants. More people need to mine the coal. I’m saying we don’t know. Overall, it’s probably a job killer, almost certainly. But how it plays out exactly, we don’t really know.
Robby West: I completely agree. But as far as population collapse goes, it’s only happening in developed, high-IQ societies where, for whatever reason, people have decided—and we know the reason—economic pressures. Our governments have decided—
Ted Rall: National interest. Say high educational attainment because those are not the same thing.
Robby West: Potentially. If you look at the average IQ of, say, South Korea or Japan, it’s higher than, say, Kenya. That’s not a racist thing to say; it’s a statement of fact. So you have to ask yourself why less sophisticated civilizations—so as not to offend people—have more babies. They’re peasants, and they produce a ton of babies. Then what do you do with the babies? You export them to Europe and the West.
Ted Rall: That’s what’s been happening.
Robby West: Exactly. And then you have an increase in crime. When these jobs are automated away, as the French are finding out now, what do you do with all these unassimilated people who don’t want to be part of your culture? The Germans had a pretty good answer for what to do with people you no longer want or need. I’d rather not have that happen again.
Ted Rall: No, we don’t need a final solution, to put it bluntly. So let’s talk about the implications here. With our current economic models, this is a bad thing. But does it have to be? We’re looking at a future where, by 2300, there will be only about a third to a quarter as many people on Earth as there are today. To many ecologists and environmentalists, this sounds like a good thing—less strain on the climate, less pollution, less garbage, and an easier impact on the Earth with a lower population. Not long ago, we had these population levels, and nobody thought it was a catastrophe. Now, suddenly, it’s considered bad. Is it inherently a bad thing under the existing capitalist system? And would socialism address these problems by having a state-run economy that could plan ahead for these changes?
Robby West: I think a couple of things will happen. We have no idea what data these people are drawing on to make this forecast. The biggest population collapse I can think of in history happened with the fall of the Western Roman Empire. The population collapsed. When Belisarius tried to liberate Rome, he had an army of only 5,000 men because that’s all he could get. There simply weren’t enough people.
Ted Rall: There had been plagues at that time.
Robby West: Yes, the plague came after that. My point is that the social order collapses. People lived in squalor, so it’s not surprising.
Ted Rall: People lived in squalor. It’s not surprising.
Robby West: I completely agree. My question is, assuming we have a financial collapse—and I think we’re heading toward one—and you import 100 million people with nothing for them to do, resources become scarce. What do people tend to do? They go tribal and start going medieval on each other. That probably plays into it too. From a global standpoint, I’m trying to make sense of this.
Ted Rall: The other big population collapse we’ve discussed is the bubonic plague, which came in waves. People might not realize that it devastated not just Europe but Asia and Africa. The Silk Road, Central Asia, and the Middle East were the center of the world during the Middle Ages. Europe was a backwater. All the learning, politics, and economic and military expansion were happening in places like modern-day Uzbekistan.
Robby West: Yes, and in Iran, Baghdad was the literary capital until the Mongols turned it into rubble because, with horse archers, reading isn’t important. My point is, if the US economy implodes and resources become scarce, what happens?
Ted Rall: You’re talking about a global issue, though.
Robby West: For sure. The United States is one of the leading food exporters on the planet. If those exports stop, what happens to overpopulated places in Southern Africa with no food? The population collapse might help address that problem. I’m wondering if the authors of this paper are considering these scenarios. What triggers it? I didn’t have time to do a deep study before we went live, but from what I scanned, they weren’t putting much causation into their forecast—just projecting numbers. Using my busy brain, I’m wondering how they get there. Either you have war, economic collapse and war, or a total global societal collapse like Rome or the Black Death. That’s how you get there. If you talk to a typical MAGA person like me—though I’m not a Republican—the quick solution is to ban birth control and start making babies. But that doesn’t address the societal or governmental problems preventing Western or East Asian families from having babies to begin with.
Ted Rall: The argument in the book by Spears and Geruso is that the population will fall, it will be harmful in many ways, and it will come too late to save us from climate change. We don’t have a clue what to do about it. Is this like when you’re a kid and learn the sun will go red giant, boil the oceans, and scorch the Earth in five billion years, but you don’t care because it’s so far off? Is it like that?
Robby West: Or, from my Christian view, God will take care of it well before that happens. Either way, we won’t be here. Hopefully, Elon Musk is onto something, and his progeny can colonize another planet. You’d need a new solar system, though.
Ted Rall: Colonizing Mars won’t help. The universe is so vast that physics makes travel difficult.
Robby West: That’s also part of the population change problem. In highly educated, high-IQ societies, if you’re aborting your babies, you could be killing the scientist who unlocks future solutions.
Ted Rall: That’s an interesting point. The authors say more people mean more ideas and bigger markets, allowing governments and companies to spend more on R&D. A shrinking world means fewer people, fewer ideas, and more problems, like less research for rare diseases. I see the argument—it’s like the case for cities. Historically, cities with millions of people are hubs of technological and educational innovation, more so than small rural communities. They foster a culture of cross-fertilization of different cultures, which you may not favor since you support reduced immigration. When different kinds of people meet, innovation happens.
Robby West: At least for now, until we fix our own house. If your house is on fire, it’s not a good idea to help your neighbor paint their walls. Take care of your place first.
Ted Rall: We can agree the house feels like it’s on fire, but we don’t agree on the cause. I think it’s capitalism.
Robby West: I’ve read your book. Both political parties benefit from it. It drives down wages, and Democrats get a new voter base without arguing for ideas, which is expensive and tiresome. They just import the third world and say, “I’ll protect you from Orange Hitler who wants to deport you and your family. Vote for me.” Republicans agree, play the game, and drive down wages. Everybody wins until society implodes. What happens then?
Ted Rall: You can tell a society’s or political system’s base values when opposing forces like Democrats and Republicans agree on certain assumptions. Those assumptions are what the system is based on. A crisis arises when the system’s values clash with the people’s values. I think most Americans—Democrats, Republicans, Independents, lefties, righties—agree the most important thing is to ensure as many Americans as possible live as well as possible.
Robby West: A hundred percent. The parties are a death cult. We’re talking about a global population decline—death on a mass scale, no babies to replace those dying from disease, war, or accidents. I submit this is by design because we’re governed by people who get off on death. It gives them a sense of power. Look at Ukraine—over a million dead, 7 million left, never to return. In Gaza, American taxpayers are funding a genocide, with at least 100,000 killed, over half under 18. In our country, it’s “live your best life, don’t get married, use birth control, screw as many people as you want, free of consequences.” Then you’re 40, want a family, but have no eggs left. A healthy society would value life, have a growth rate, and people would be happy having babies.
Ted Rall: Historically, happy societies have more babies. The baby boom ended nine months after the Kennedy assassination. Americans became miserable after Kennedy died, even though the economy was still good and Vietnam wasn’t yet a problem. They just decided to become miserable.
Robby West: Feminism played a big part in that. The counterculture said you can be a strong, independent, career-minded woman, master of your own ship. The problem is, women have a cutoff date for having kids, unlike men. That’s not my problem or yours—it’s biology.
Ted Rall: It’s a little fuzzier with IVF and egg storage. Some Silicon Valley companies offer egg storage as a benefit so women can work 20 hours a day without making that decision.
Robby West: Think about how soulless that job must be to make you do that. You’re married to a thankless company that dissuades you from taking time off, let alone getting married or having kids. It’s a death cult, killing the West.
Ted Rall: I took a feminism class at Columbia with Barbara Tishler, who wrote books on feminism. In 1991, she highlighted the negative ramifications society hadn’t contended with. Capitalism benefited when women entered the workforce in huge numbers, increasing labor supply and causing wages to fall off a cliff. That’s why wages froze in the 1960s and dropped in real terms after 1970, and we’ve never recovered. It’s not that women shouldn’t work, but it’s had consequences, like the boy problem.
Robby West: It also led to the immigration problem. Without enough kids, you don’t have workers, so you import the third world. It’s insane.
Ted Rall: I know rich people who don’t raise their own kids because they work long hours. They hire upscale nannies, who then hire lower-wage nannies or relatives to raise their own kids. It’s messed up.
Robby West: It is. The way to fix it is to kill feminism—drive a stake through its heart.
Ted Rall: What does a post-feminist society look like?
Robby West: You go back to the last 5,000 years of human history. You marry a man, have a ton of babies, honor and love your wife, provide for her and your kids. That’s how you get the baby boom back. After World War II, during the baby boom, America was largely a Christian nation with Christian values. Was it perfect?
Ted Rall: There’s a lot to what you say. Studies show sexless marriages are a cliché. People say, “If your wife isn’t putting out, take out the trash or help with the kids.” But studies show traditional setups, where the mother bears most child-rearing responsibilities, lead to more sex.
Robby West: Women have mammary glands—that’s how God designed it. If you’ve got the milk jugs, you take care of the babies. That’s established.
Ted Rall: What about the complaints that gave rise to feminism? Women’s intellectual and economic contributions were often dismissed, to society’s detriment. I wouldn’t want a society where Marie Curie couldn’t work or Simone de Beauvoir couldn’t write.
Robby West: It’s not perfect. But the society we have now, the one being critiqued, is worse. We’re talking about mass die-off and destruction of nations. The traditional system is better.
Ted Rall: But we’re pulling on a string, and things are unraveling. That structure doesn’t work with the nuclear family. I went on a genealogy tour in France, looking at church records from 1630. Every card listed the mother and father’s occupations—the mother had none, and the father was always a farmer, passing the farm to his son for centuries. Everything stayed the same until World War I, when the car and railroads disrupted everything. People left villages for factories, never to return. My great-grandfather died at 30 in the trenches, leaving his family in poverty. In 1848, the community would have rallied, but the proto-nuclear family model left them destitute. That would happen today unless we restore multigenerational families.
Robby West: You need a UBI. More and more jobs are going away. In 100 years, you won’t have talking heads like us—it’ll be AI avatars. It’s already happening on YouTube. Your truck’s motor dies, you pay a mechanic. In an automated society, your self-driving truck goes to a self-repair facility with robot-made parts, no human hands involved. The entire economic model will change. Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations ushered in the modern financial era, but we’re heading toward a paradigm shift where current rules don’t apply. What does GDP mean if only 10% of the population works?
Ted Rall: The worker participation rate in the US is about 64%. One in three Americans isn’t involved, subsisting on disability payments. Yet the economy is doing great—they don’t need us.
Robby West: They don’t. That’s why I think those in DC don’t care about our opinions—they don’t need us. Why is Trump protecting the pedophile cabal in DC? They don’t need us.
Ted Rall: That’s why I found Bernie Sanders’ small-donor model promising. He was getting $29 per person from working-class people. Tulsi Gabbard was similar until the DNC changed the rules.
Robby West: The rules keep changing until it’s unsustainable. That’s where we are. People don’t understand. I could be wrong—I’m just a hick from nowhere, no degree, but I think a lot. We’re heading to a world where existing models don’t matter. GDP doesn’t matter if people don’t matter.
Ted Rall: We’re entering a period of tremendous changes, and the system seems unable or unwilling to address them intelligently. History shows societies that fail to respond collapse or, if lucky, face a revolution like the French one.
Robby West: The Chinese call this the mandate of heaven. When a dynasty becomes so decadent the people overthrow it, it loses legitimacy.
Ted Rall: That’s what popular legitimacy is—a rough Western equivalent. When a society fails to adjust, like Rome with overexpansion or the Soviet Union with external capitalism, collapse is inevitable.
Robby West: If you were in ancient Italy, you’d see the writing on the wall but could only keep your family alive. Here in Western Montana, I hear people from rural areas. New York City, once a great city, now feels like an oversized slum. Why? You can’t build a new subway system like Moscow’s or even repair what you have.
Ted Rall: It would be too expensive. The system wasn’t designed for today’s flash flooding.
Robby West: If this happened in Singapore, could they fix it? Yes. Which city has more mass immigration? New York. If you prioritize building and maintaining your society instead of exploiting the native population until they leave, there’s a problem. The fall of Rome was caused by the Third Punic War, importing half a million slaves and destroying the Republic’s foundation.
Ted Rall: Hadrian and Diocletian staved off Rome’s fall with reforms. Do you think the US and the West have a Hadrian in us?
Robby West: No. As a Christian, I believe we’re cursed by God for embracing things He hates, like the wholesale slaughter of innocents. Even if there’s no God, aborting your future workforce is a bad idea.
Ted Rall: If abortion and birth control were unavailable, young people would be more careful to avoid pregnancy. Does reproductive freedom make people feel they can have sex without worrying, or does it lead to a mindset of avoiding kids altogether?
Robby West: If I had my way, we’d have a baby boom because women would get pregnant. That’s a fact of life. If you don’t want to get pregnant, don’t have sex or use old methods. To prevent a population bust, remove what’s killing future generations. It depends on what’s most important to your society. I want to be a grandfather, to torture my grandkids with ice down their shirts. That’s human.
Ted Rall: Sure, for me too.
Robby West: The current system celebrates sterilizing kids for trans rights or killing them for convenience. That’s anti-human, satanic.
Ted Rall: Would banning abortion and birth control lead to a lower birth rate if people are more careful?
Robby West: No, people will keep having sex and will have to be more responsible. Women bear the higher risk.
Ted Rall: In the UK, early DNA testing in the 1950s and 60s showed half the fathers weren’t the biological dads. The tests were accurate—English women were unfaithful, likely more careful when cheating. If the goal is more babies, does it matter who the father is?
Robby West: That’s my point. The study addresses a global population decrease, and I’m giving the solution.
Ted Rall: But my lefty female friends are horrified by natalism. They feel it turns women into chattel, existing only to bear kids without agency, like The Handmaid’s Tale.
Robby West: Mother Nature did that. You have a womb, uterus, ovaries, vagina—that’s not my fault. Blame God or nature.
Ted Rall: But we have better living through technology.
Robby West: If you’re a radical feminist and don’t want kids, don’t have sex. Problem solved. Demographics is destiny. My argument will win because the death cult will die out.
Ted Rall: Alright, Robby, we’ll leave it there. Thank you for filling in for Nella and for a great conversation.
Robby West: It was interesting. Can you point out any holes in my argument? Where am I wrong?
Ted Rall: There’s an ethical concern about men manipulating women into doing their bidding.
Robby West: And?
Ted Rall: With that, before you get into more trouble with the feminists watching, this has been a Rumble Premium edition of The TMI Show. We air Monday through Friday, 10 AM Eastern Time, on Rumble and YouTube, but we also stream many times, so don’t feel obligated to watch us live. If you do watch live, you can send questions and comments, and we respond throughout the show. We really appreciate you and your donations. Please like, follow, and share the show. Tell your friends about us. Take care, and thanks for listening.
