Why Nobody's Having Babies Anymore

All coming up on the podcast, fertility babies sex, why younger generations are not having sex. And if there are having sex, they're not having said they're not actually producing babies and what this means for the world. But the key issue is, why is this the case? We have an unusual culprit in the room. And also we're going to be talking to I back about what Irish businesses are seen through the lens of Washington, London and Brussels. Talk to you in a couple of minutes. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature. This podcast is powered by a cast. How you doing there? It is uncharacteristic of the podcast, which you are going to be talking to, Joan, just going to be rather uncomfortable. We're talking, we're talking about sex. Oh God. Oh God, I feel uncomfortable already. Oh Lord God. Oh Lord God. We're talking about the Greek language, the Greek language, the Greek language, the Greek language. It's a pathetic site where you get to a certain age. But with reason we're talking about sex, Joan's going to talk about fertility is apparently to be fertile, you have to have sex. So these are going to logically backwards. No, what we're going to talk about is the extraordinary and rapid change in fertility. The amount of babies that we are having all around the world. The implication of this for economics is profound, it's varied, it's largely negative. The implications for sociology is profound, largely negative again and varied. But also much more interesting, what it is to be human is what we're talking about. What it is to be human, one of the absolute existential urges of humanity is to reproduce. Right. Whether that is reproducing in wholesale are in a very, very logic retail. Exactly, exactly. Holes in a retail. So let's go for retail. Well, retail sort of bloats, right? But the idea is what we've seen in the last few years is a dramatic fall in the amount of babies being born everywhere. This is the thing. So for most of the last 100-hour years, there has been a gradual slow trend of less and less babies being born in rich countries. Contr reception being the major reason for that education, wealth, yadda, all these sorts of things, even television, John. Yes, you were saying this beforehand. Well, the most shocking thing is that if you look at American data, the generation that were, we always think that the sexual revolution happened in the 1960s and 1970s. And promiscuity and writing was basically a drug feud. Drug feud, youth, fornication, John. Yeah, yeah. It was sort of a phenomenon of our modern world and our lifetime. But in actual fact, if you look at the date of the United States, the generation that at most sex were in the 1930s and 1940s. And I don't think we don't like to think about our parents having loads of sex. And comfortable are our grandparents, but that was actually the case. So the amount of, when the Americans have these longitudinal studies, which are great, right? And what they're basically saying is that they do the most at the time. They do them consistently. And what they show is that the generation that had most sex were the generation work that would have been most conservative politically. Yeah. The 1930s and 1940s. This is all behind closed doors and twitching curtains. And that's the best place to have sex, John. Right? John is a little bit of a doggar. He goes doggie and down to Mary Pear. I didn't realize this until we just had this podcast. I came across you. Until I saw him, he's got a little small online community of like-minded individuals. And I will give you the details at the end of the podcast. Anyway, we are now going to know for your doggie. We're going to hang out. Hang out a second. You're saying about television that kind of took off in the 50s? And really into the 60s and 70s when it became absolute ubiquitous. So in the 30s and 40s, that was the time when radio took off. Yeah. So radio was the- could you say that radio was the- The fluffer. The fluffer. I don't know where this is going. Ladies and gentlemen, the podcast is lost its way, but we're going to come back. Hold on a second. We are on the economics of fertility. But we are going to talk to a really sensible person. We're going to talk to John Bern Murdock of the FT. Because he's written a fascinating piece on fertility and why fertility is collapsing around the world, why in terms of timing, it is collapsed in various different countries at a certain stage and what the long-term implications of that are. So let us go to John Bern Murdock and talk about babies. How are you? Great to see you there, John. What's the crack? All good. Wonderful. Yeah. But not at all. Now, John, tell me, we want to talk about global fertility. I want to get to your conclusion, because I think your conclusion will surprise many, many people who haven't thought about it. And then for people of the generation who are affected, will actually stand to reason. But it's a kind of what I like about your- you're taking a lot of the economic reasons for a fall in fertility and the ones that we talk about in academia and all that sort of stuff and conferences and you say, hold on a second. There's something else going on. So explain. What is your observation? What is your observation about global fertility and then let's go through the reasons? Yes. So the observation is for a long, long time, birth rates were falling in most of the world. So we're talking here, like the 1800s and more, a lot of the 1900s. And there's fairly strong consensus on what was happening there. So you had child mortality getting much lower. So in effect, you didn't need to have as many kids to end up with as many children. We had this shift from farming to manufacturing and services, which changed the number of kids you needed to sort of support the family business as it were. That also came with urbanization, which generally meant for your kids. And you had increasing female education. All these very slow moving trends, we have good evidence that that was what was explaining the shift from say four kids to three kids to two kids per woman. Then late 20th century and the start of this century, things were fairly stable. Pretty stable in high income countries, but they even started to stabilize in middle income countries, places like Latin America. But then suddenly, around 2010, in some places, slightly before some places closer to sort of 2015, you get a new decline. And here we're going down from about two or sort of 1.8 kids per woman down to the sort of 1.5, 1.4 or even as some of your listeners, I'm sure, will be aware in places like Korea, down to an average of less than one. So, explain to me, again, that's before we go into the reasons why is this an economics regarded as a bad thing or a thing we should worry about or something that will have downstream consequences. Explain that to the listeners. Why, for example, lots of people say, well, you know, you've less kids, not a big deal. In fact, maybe there's more to go around, etc. So why is it a bad thing? Yeah, the more to go round point is a nice one because it's the evidence that it's almost the opposite. Obviously, you know, in some senses, there's more to go around. If we say that there are a fixed amount of natural resources on the planet, then fewer people competing for those resources like that's reducing pressure. But in terms of the things to go around that we're mainly concerned about in our daily lives, which is, you know, the things produced in an economy, those things are produced by workers. And if you have fewer young people, that means, with each generation, you have fewer workers and the people producing the stuff are a smaller and smaller and smaller share of the population. So Japan is a fascinating example of this, right? So people have looked at Japan for the last 30 years and said, you know, what happened to those guys? They used to be on top of the world. Things are stagnated. The size of their economy, their living standards have not really moved since like the 90s. And some people sort of think, oh, did they just become less innovative, less productive? And you actually look at what the Japanese economy is producing per worker. It's kept going up. It's right up there with America, with the richest countries in the world. It's just that workers as a share of the population are way lower. So they're still working hard, producing as much as ever. But that is now being shared out, less is being shared out over a much larger older population. So when you don't have enough young people, you don't have enough workers and it puts downward pressure on everyone's living standards. OK, so therefore you've got problems like fiscal problems, you have taxation problems, you have all sorts of dynamism problems because I mean, young people go out, they make cities exciting, older people save as a general rule, they don't spend. So you have a contraction of, for example, consumer spending, all that sort of stuff, cascades at a certain moment. And is there just before going to, is there like a tipping point that we know that, you know, up until a certain level of demographic decline, everything's going to hunky-dory, it looks fine. And that's suddenly the tip, like the Japanese tip happened. I presume in the mid-90s, late 90s. Yeah, exactly. So a number and a term that people might be familiar with is the idea that 2.1 kids per woman is roughly speaking what we call the replacement rate, which is to say that if everyone has an average of 2.1 kids, then absent anything else at all, population will be stable. Of course, we're not in a world where nothing else happens, so you have immigration. And that means that you can get down to sort of 1.7, 1.8 maybe. And we're the same. steady inflow of immigration, again, things stay fairly manageable. The problem is, A, we're now in the sort of 1.6, 1.5, or as I said in some countries, significantly lower than that. And when you get to that, the amount of immigration you would need, not just in total, not just as a stock as a flow every single year, just becomes absolutely enormous. Like, you know, you're talking about, in some cases, having 10% of your population every year coming in from overseas to keep it that way. And that's not really sustainable culturally or politically. We know that immigration is probably the big issue culturally of our time. So the idea that you're saying to people, well, you know what, over the course of the next 20-odd years, 10% of your population will be people who look different to you, speak different to you, have different culture. I think that just will not fly in most Western countries. Yeah. And again, that's not in total. That's every year. You get to the point where. Right. So the population, yeah. Then you're into the Tommy Robinson replacement theory there. Exactly. Yeah. If numbers got that low and you tried to keep things stable, that essentially is what you'd be talking about. And one of the things just to mention at this point as well is, historically, we've thought about low birth rates as being a high-income thing. There, you get them in the West, you get them in rich East Asia countries like Japan. But now we're seeing steep declines to very low numbers, even in developing countries. So Mexico now has a low birth rate than America. Tunisia has a low birth rate than America. Turkey has a low birth rate than the UK. So that's a big change as well. That these very low numbers are showing up in countries that are not actually rich in the first place. And the other thing is that what your piece shows is that when you ask people, do they want to have children, younger people? There's a gap emerging between what people say they want to have and what people are actually having. Yeah. So this is an interesting one because there are lots of different questions that try to get at this. And it's hard to know exactly what we're looking at when we look at these numbers. So there's a question which asks people, what is the ideal number of children you would end up having? And generally, again, in most countries, people say on average too. But when the question is phrased slightly differently, some people respond with lower numbers or say they intend to not have any kids at all. So I think there's some tension here. I think this is a really important part of the piece. There's a tension between what people say would happen in an ideal world. If everything mapped out beautifully, I would end up there with a partner and two kids. But then people are not living in this ideal world increasingly. We'll get on to why. And so that creates this barrier where their ideal answer is two. But their answer as person standing here today thinking about their life, maybe they don't even have a partner, let alone thinking about kids. And that answer in practical terms of where they are today might not be too. So let's look, John. Traditionally, now economics will say this has got to do with income or it's got to do with housing or it's got to do with education. Let's go through these things. So what you're saying is, first of all, up until recently, the idea that richer countries had fewer kids held. Something has changed in the last few years and now poorer countries are having lower fertility. So people and poor countries are not having as many kids. Then we say things are housing. Again, in Ireland and the UK and certainly English speaking world, there has been this retardation of adulthood in a way because people can't live with their partners. They can't move out from their parents. So therefore they can't grow up. I mean, look at the traditional reasons and let's see what we can, what box ticking we can do. Yeah. So I think one thing to say here as well is there are lots of things going on here. There are many overlapping factors and the exact mix in the pan as it were will be slightly different in different countries. Now I came into this expecting that housing would be a big one, especially I'm here in London, you're there in Ireland, two of the countries in the world that have had the roughest time for housing for young people. And housing does seem to have an impact. So in countries like ours that really elevate the importance of homeownership, you basically think, well, if I'm going to have kids in a family, I need to own my home. And so what we saw, obviously between the 90s and early 2000s and then the 2010s was this big decline in young people in their 20s and even 30s owning homes. And what I did was you can calculate what we call a counterfactual where you say, right, given that we know people who own their homes have more kids than those who rent. If young people own their homes at the same rate as they did, tail under the 90s, early 2000s, what would birth rates have looked like? And the answer is they would be higher, but they would still have then declined over the last 10 to 15 years. So you would have been sort of shifting up the level, but people who own their homes today, young people who own their homes today also have a few of kids than they were in the past. Young people who rent their homes today are still having fewer in the past. So housing is definitely a factor, especially in the English-speaking world with our crazy housing markets, but it's not the definitive thing for this recent trend. And some people always say, well, maybe it's got to do with the fact that relative to men, girls and now more educated, they're doing better. Basically, they can choose differently because they have cash in the way that their grannies didn't have their grandparents didn't have their grandparents have their grandmother had to kind of settle with the bloke down the road, right? Because they didn't have any autonomy. How much does that factor into things? Exactly. So that again is definitely part of what's going on here, right? That is part of this slow moving process that had been playing out of decades. You've had the feminist movement, which was in part actually based on concrete, well, it was pushing for and then championing these real material changes in the world. So the ratio of young women's to men's earnings has been closing and closing. Many young women now are more than their male counterparts. So that is, again, a real part of this because I think, you know, it feels a bit icky sometimes talking about this, but the relative sort of socioeconomic dynamics of a prospective couple do matter. Like we can pretend they don't, but there's loads of studies showing that they do. So as some young. So you're basically what you're doing is you're putting into economic languages. The notion is, is he a keeper? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah, like I've got with this bloke, I've got this girl, what's the story here? You know, is this prospect or is this just a one-night stand? Exactly. Well, it's that plus it's the fact that in the past when women had significantly less financial impendence. A guy was a keeper if he simply pulled down a salary, right? You know, he would provide stability security, that kind of thing. Whereas now, a lot of women out there in high-powered jobs are in a good wage. And it's, well, you know, sure, this guy seems cool, but is he critical? Do I need him? Do I need that? But again, the issue here is that these are very slow moving trends. Plot any of these things on a chart in terms of relative earnings gaps, employment gaps, that kind of thing. And they have been unfolding slowly for a very, very, very long time. So again, almost certainly part of this. But what we're trying to explain is something that has happened in Mexico, in the US, in Ireland, in Tunisia, over the last 20 years. So let's look, let's look at the culprit, okay, because what you've concluded is I think something really, really fascinating. Yeah. So the beautiful thing about this was, as I was working on this piece, I was really just trying to cast the net wide here. And you know, I had theories for what we're going to talk about now, potentially playing a role. But as I was starting to work on this piece, a new study was published by a couple of researchers at the University of Cincinnati in the US, Nathan Hudson, and her and Moscosso, Boeito. And what they did was they said, we think something that might be going on here is smartphones. And smartphones here, I should say, for this whole conversation, it's smartphones in everything they've enabled. So we're not just talking about that piece of metal and plastic and glass, it's smartphones mean ever-presenting, or media, social media, all these things. So what they did, they said, we think this is playing a role here, especially in younger people, so teens and the very youngest adults in their 20s. So they said, right, what do we know about smartphones and mobile connectivity in general is that people didn't get it at the same time everywhere. So certain parts of the country that 4G masked went up later than others. And so they looked at this in the US and the UK. And they found that places that got high speed mobile connectivity first saw their birth rates fall earlier and more steeply. That I think we should pause just for a second as well. That's a really striking thing. Yes. It's remarkable. And it's a classic study design that people have used to test for causality. Because that's the key thing here, right? Is this just something that's happening at the same time or is there something causing it? You can also do that internationally. So I then extended some of the work they've done and said, well, what you notice about this most recent decline in fertility is that in places like UK, US, Ireland, Australia, the turning point comes in around sort of 2007, 2008. Then in places like Indonesia or Mexico, these sort of developing but relatively high income countries, it comes around sort of 2012. Then you look at the places like Tunisia, even parts of Sub-Saharan Africa. And their most recent decline comes in around 2014-50. And it's really hard to pin down exactly when smartphones and social media took off in a given country, right? Because what do we care about more, the phone or the social media? Was it just the fact that a phone could be. be bought or do you need a certain level of usage. But if you try and get at this by using statistics on smartphone usage rates or another thing I looked at was when did people start searching Google for mobile apps? And what you see is that there's a pretty striking amount of overlap between when the use of these technologies seems to take off and when those birth rates, especially among teens and people in their early 20s, it's ticked over and started falling faster than they were before. So let's look at this, because this is the fascinating thing. So the suggestion is that there's a serious correlation between the fall off birth rates and the ubiquity of smartphones. And it's also smartphone adjacent things like all your all your dating apps and all your, what I would call your options. And the conclusion is that people are just not socializing in the real world anymore in the same way as they used to. Exactly. There seem to be several things. People have proposed several mechanisms here. So one, and I think the easiest to understand is that straight socializing ones. So all across the world, if you look at questions about how often people meet up with friends, how much time they spend with their friends, even in these detailed time use diaries, studies that get done, you see a really substantial drop off in the time young people spend hanging out face to face, outside of say school or university, starting again exactly around that point of sort of 2010, 2012, depending on where you're looking. And it's a really dramatic decline. So in South Korea, for example, again, the sort of post-a-child of falling birth rates, the amount of time young people spend hanging out face to face has halved in about 10 years. So that's the most straightforward mechanism. And one of the demographers I spoke to for this piece, a guy called Laman Stone, he had this great line that relationships are fundamentally the end of this filtering process. You keep meeting people, you keep hanging out, some of them you like, some of them you don't, some of them you like more, you may be hanging out a bit more. And so if you just start hanging out about half as much, that massively extends the amount of time it will take for you to have hung out with someone enough to know that they could be the one. So that I think is this most straightforward mechanism. But then there's another sort of whole package of theories it were, which are about more about social media and how the types of messages, narratives, and everything that circulates on social media can just massively accelerate some of these slower moving trends. So we talked earlier, for example, about young women's relative sort of financial position versus men. Now this, as I say, was this glacial trend on funding over decades. But suddenly now, you've got pretty much every young woman in the world, in the rich world, in middle-income countries, even in sub-Saharan Africa, can over up their phone and see their peers and counterparts saying, you know, like some guys are a bit crap. And like, do we need to do this yet? And I don't mean for this to sound like I'm just saying, oh, these are pretty young women. It's young men as well. But of course, about this dynamic and this empowering message and confident message of the opportunities to be more individualistic, to improve your own life, to live a more filling life as an individual, or with your friends. And this whole bundle of sort of discourse and narratives and everything is, it's not exactly saying to everyone, hey, you should rush to settle down and have kids. So it's that idea that that just accelerates these slower unfolding processes in terms of the gender dynamic. As you said, it directly impacts things in terms of the dating market and what that looks like in the age of apps. And it means that these sort of Western ideals of independence and individualism can suddenly be transplanted to Nigeria and Senegal without the accompanying economic development. Yeah, no, it's funny. I remember I was talking to a couple of young women in their 20s, not that long ago. In this house here, all the kids and mates of kids were in there. And the girls were talking about, the worst thing could possibly have is a lame boyfriend, which I thought was really quite funny. But if everyone is concluding that, and the fellows, the lads are concluding the same thing, well, then what you're going to do is you've got a hook up culture, which is fine, and it satisfies your sexual need for a certain while. But this idea of the trial and error, the idea of the natural me vis-a-vis the Instagram me. So if you were to say, you know, what sort of person is the Instagram you are at? My generation is more the LinkedIn me. So the LinkedIn me is an unbelievably self-confident overachieving ambitious, all these stupid words that you see here in LinkedIn, right? But if you're filtering based on an Instagram me or a TikTok me or a LinkedIn me, well, then you're actually moving rapidly away from the real person, from the real human. And it's the real thing you've got to settle down with. It's exactly that. And it's also just things like, you know, ask people of earlier generations how they met some model got together. Like it's often just a really random sort of, there was still some kind of spark in some kind of unstructured setting. Yeah. And we're just taking away all of those serendipitous meetings. And everything now has to be carefully, strategically planned and all kinds of-- Yeah, kind of curations, yes. Yeah. And, you know, that means for people who do get together these days, I'm sure, and I think we have it in suggests, the outcomes are very, very good. Those relationships are very, some of them are very solid. But we're just making it a lot more laborious to get to that point. Now, you were after you mentioned, or fair, your own case, you said, this could have been me, except for going on the piss one night. Absolutely. And yeah, we should be prescribing certain number of units of alcohol to solve this problem. No, look, I joke. But it was-- that was with me. It was-- this was about 10 years ago. And, you know, life was fun. And it didn't feel like there was a rush. And yeah, I was also someone who was heavily online, should we say. But ultimately, it was just a-- to put it mildly, a very unstructured evening. Which-- That's what you mean. So where I-- you could say that. Which, let's say, yeah, today, where I, you know, wife and kid. So yeah, I think we're shifting away from that world of serendipity towards something that is very different. And as I say at the same time, shifting just how young people think about relationships, family, formation, kids as a whole. And the smartphone is the facilitator of this social trend. I'm not saying exactly that. That's the culprit. But it's a facilitator of a change in human behavior, which is having a profound impact on societal structure. Thanks. That's exactly how I would think about it. Because I think some people hear this claim about smartphones and social media. And they think, come on, you know, that's too strong a claim. What do you mean phones are changing everything? And as I say, the point is not that everything that's happened in the last 15 years is completely new. It's just that things are accelerated. Or the specific versions of narratives and ways of thinking about the world are framed in a slightly different way where phones and social media are the sort of lubricant with that. Last question, John. Would you like to be younger now? Honestly, no. And my personal version of that is I'm quite distractible. And I look back at my process revising for exams and things back in the day. And I mean, I literally had to be locked in the garden at one point. Because if I was in the house, nothing work would not be happening given the number of digital distractions, even then, in the 2000s. So, yeah, for me personally, yeah, we just created this environment. It's endlessly entertaining. No one gets bored anymore. But I just do think it is having all some-- a lot of these sort of unintended second-order, third-order effects, which if we look back at them in the cold light of day, I'm maybe not that brilliant. John Bernmurderk, as always, it's a pleasure. I mean, you're a man who takes economics, sociology, observations, cultural little tweaks and quirks and puts them all into brilliantly enlightened articles. So thank you very much, by the way, that article is in the Financial Times. Just Google John Bernmurderk in the Financial Times. It's really, really well worth a read. Thank you very much, David. I should say, my goal with every piece is, will this get me on the podcast? [LAUGHTER] Listen, while you're on, John and I are going to be very, very-- this is going to be very distressing for some younger and listeners. You're now going to have two middle-aged men talking about sex. Yes. Which-- She'll be very uncomfortable. That's going to push numbers even lower. [LAUGHTER] Really fascinating stuff from John, as always. But here's the thing. We've spoken about this quite a bit over the while. Housing crisis and clots of living crisis and all of that kind of stuff has affected-- Yeah. --the precarious jobs and not being able to stable jobs and all that stuff. Yeah, the gig economy and all that kind of stuff. But I just fascinated by John talking about technology. And of course, that has changed the side and how we work in all of this. With changing fertility patterns so profoundly, is kind of shocking in many ways. Well, I think what he's talking about is changing what it is to be human. And that is a really important point that what it is to be human, there's various rights of passage of adult life and humanity. And of course, the main one is who you choose to settle down. Well, that's the biggest choice you're going to make in your life. Yeah. It's the most consequential choice. People talk about careers, but actually. they are secondary. It's actually the person you decide, okay, we're going to go for this. And then this big journey, this big adventure, this big thing that is love, and this big that is romance. And of course, having families and having children, all that stuff. So this is the thing the humans have done for hundreds of thousands of years. And various societies have put various customs on that. And there has been various different ways of doing that. And in terms of what was acceptable socially and not. But there has always been this framework that at the core of the human experience is this notion of the family. Now, obviously, there has always been outliers on either side. And that's fine. But the general mainstream idea is that you settle down with somebody and you strive to do these things. And what you're saying is that the process whereby people meet each other has changed. So number one, people when they're asked, still say, I would like to have a number of children with somebody. So the wish is still there. But the ability to actually deliver on that has changed, right? Secondly, what you're saying is that in the past, when we looked at fertility, it was that couples were choosing to have less children. And that was the process. Now, what is happening is people aren't coupling. That's the key, right? So what is happening to society that people aren't getting together? And what he's saying is when you look at the data, one thing that screams out of the data is the impact of the smartphone on enabling other behaviors, particularly dating apps. Number one, but most of this idea, and I think this is a very important thing, this idea of one's curated self, right? The person who is on Instagram, the person who was on TikTok, the person who's on LinkedIn, I mean, I always find LinkedIn the most ridiculous because you know, you're LinkedIn characteristics, right? People say, well, I'm ambitious and confident. Yeah. Everybody's ambitious. The great thing is, it's like, I'm a problem solver. Yeah. I'm a team player. I'm a problem maker. Yeah, I'm a problem maker. And I'm a misalphish fucker who doesn't like teams, right? No, but I mean, the point is, right? Think about the attributes. Okay. Little sort of mind game here. Think about the things you say at memorials when somebody dies. The characteristics that you elevate, where they kind, where they generous, where they're nice to others. These are the characteristics of the humans actually value. Yeah. And you can't trust those characters which are LinkedIn countries. No, we get to open and things, but he was very good at making money, right? Yes. Are you very ambitious? I'm ambitious. He's a great team leader. You know, he was the sort of person you can give a job to and they'll do it, right? Imagine you got a leader. Yeah, you must be good up at that, you know, at Mass and said, you know, that somebody's funeral. Yeah. Right? So what I'm saying is the characteristics that are online on the heads don't. Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. He was a proper two-seeking utility maximizing team player. We do or code on it. Yeah. Innovative. Innovative. Innovative. Dexterous, right? Yeah. What you say is he was generous. She was kind. She was a beautiful mother to a family, or a great sister. Or she was somebody you could always sit down and they would have time for all these things, right? The core human value. So if you can't trust the core human values, you're linked in values, right? Which nobody gives a shit about in real life. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So the corporate world, right? Yeah. And when you think about superimposing Instagram values and your Instagram self, they are completely at odds what what humans really want from each other. Yeah. As friends and as colleagues and as partners and as lovers. All the completely different. Yeah. And what John is saying is that those attributes that the online world elevates are a not actually what we really value, but be what they do is they create a different type of human. Yeah. And that different type of human is at odds with the real human. Yeah. So what happens then if you're spending all your life thinking, all girls are all boys have to be look look like this hang out party like this. Then you meet the real thing. There going to be disappointed. Yeah. True. The real the real thing. But he's pointed and if the real thing is disappointing, you won't settle with the real thing because you've this imagined online creature in your head. Yeah. You know, normative discontent. I think they call it. Oh, yes. There you go. But here's the other thing about tech in general and John mentioned it there. It kills any sort of spontaneity and serendipity. Yes. And that is the crucial thing for, you know, however you met, Jan or I met Gina, you know, they were serendipitous. They were at a bar. They were at a dance. They're at a party or whatever. And you just bump into somebody and the spark and the chance and the, you know, no expectations. And something blossoms out of out of that. Yeah. Whereas you were saying the opposite with with this it's the race itself. It's the curation. There is no kind of there is no serendipity. So I mean, I think that the excitement of affection and love and getting together is that notion that this might not work. It's all chance. Your chance in your arm. Your home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It makes me write. And life is now at life. Yes. But I think if you put what what what what John is saying is that because the online self reduces serendipitous occasions and formalizes and makes for me a lay out everything. What you're finding is that people A are not settling down. Blokes and girls have any number of partners they can have they can have they can hook up with anyone tonight anywhere all the time based on. Yeah. Whether it's Tinder or whatever with whatever the run grind or whatever the run right now. All that is means that you would always have essentially too much choice. This is the paradox of choice that you now have a generation with too much choice. And the problem is that when you have too much choice, you can't make a choice. Yeah. And when you can't make a choice, you can't settle. You can't commit. There's nothing long term. So it's a kick off any of possibilities is destroying the possibility of having something. And that is manifest myself. Not just people who are together not having kids, but the people aren't getting together. And this is what Aiding McQueen was talking about. You know, a couple of months ago is that there's just too much going on. Male expectation of what sex is is all the charts are completely unreal. Female expectations of what blokes are is completely unreal enough. The charts and as a result of this, you're pre-rennally disappointed. Yeah. Yeah. But you're pre-rennally disappointed with the normal, not the abnormal. Yeah. Because you can't understand that the abnormal doesn't exist. It exists online. And the normal is what we're like. And it's normal people to quote Sally Rooney. It's normal people that make the world go round. And let's leave it there. This next segment is a paid partnership with Ibeck, Ireland's leading voice for business. We're at a moment of real transition for the global economy. Geopolitics is reshaping trade, supply chains are fragmenting, and the world is increasingly splitting into competing spheres of influence. Now for a small open economy like Ireland, those ships matter and they matter a lot. As Arlene prepares to take on the EU presidency in 2026, the stakes are high. Decisions made in Brussels over the next 18 months would shape competitiveness, accumulation, and growth for Irish businesses for years to come. Ibeck has been on the ground in Washington and Brussels. Listening to policymakers engaging with global partners and bringing Irish business perspectives directly into those conversations. Now to unpack what they are hearing and what it means for Irish business, I'm joined now by Fergal O'Brien. He's Ibeck's director of lobbying and influence for a strategic look at where the world economy is headed and how Ireland's composition itself at the center of this European agenda. Fergal, how are you doing? It's great to see you. We are going to do a whistlestop tour of the issues that are affecting Irish business, the global issues that are affecting Irish business. And just so listeners know we're going to take it to Washington, Brussels, London, IE, you've been on the road talking to listening to absorb in what is going on the world and how it's going to impact on Irish business. So Fergal, why don't we kick off with what are you hearing in states? What is your perception and Ibeck's expectation of the relationship between the states that it's changed and we should be aware of? And this is coming up. Yeah, hi, Dave. Look, great to catch up on this because you know, I don't think I can ever remember a time when the geopolitical issues were right at the top of the kind of business priority order, the way they are at present, right? And there's so much happening and it's really interesting, you know, when you talk to business leaders and CEOs, you know, they feel they've kind of been in that kind of power, my crisis phase, obviously for so much of the last decade, but it's made them incredibly resilient, but yes, you know, they want those. insights and they want that information like never before. As for Quick Take on the US, the challenge definitely remains in terms of, you know, is Europe getting us house and order in terms of, you know, making itself a better location in which to do business, because don't forget that European market remains incredibly important to US investors, right? Yes. So, you know, they want Europe to be a great place in which to do business, in which to innovation, bring their digital solutions and all of the other great, you know, US products, they see Ireland as a really important interlocutor, right? Partly because of the European presidency that we'll speak to, but because they just see us as a natural translator between the US business model and the European business model. So they see us as a supporter and an advocate in Brussels in terms of having sensible regulation in terms of supporting the competitiveness of the European economy. But I suppose probably the most important message we've been picking up in Washington over the last few months is they want certainty and a trade deal, right? So we've had this whole dislocation, we go back to Turnberry of last summer, you know, we told we were getting some certainty, we knew with this administration, nothing was ever going to be fully certain, but that framework gave us a degree of certainty. And then obviously we had Supreme Court rulings and then we had new tariffs yet again. And for lots of our members on average, actually the tariff rate comes down, right? You know, the current situation versus the Turnberry framework, but we don't have certainty. So I think the interest for Ireland, for Brussels and for US business is to get back to that negotiated agreement for the European Parliament to advance the framework agreement and to make Turnberry agreement as certain as we can have and let business get on with this. Briefly for listeners, we cap again with Turnberry agreement is because a lot of people, you know, things have been coming and going, you know, one day you've got to be afraid with the straits of four moves. The next day you've got to understand the geography of Tehran. The next time you've got to understand, you know, the mechanisms between the Taiwanese deal and a non-Taiwanese deal. Tell me, go back, explain to me. Summer holidays of last year, David Turnberry, as was framework, was the 15% tariff on a large proportion of products coming from the EU to the US, but not everything. Not everything is re-known in terms of our pharmaceuticals in terms of our semiconductors. And then, you know, other kind of exemptions in Carveults, but it gave us that kind of certainty. So that's the Turnberry is your 15% right? We know what we're dealing with. Okay, good, move on. And now what you're saying is that's still up in the air. The European Parliament is still thinking about this and looking at it and ultimately will need to endorse that because we've had so many other moving parts in terms of the UF tariff situation, particularly with Supreme Court ruling, impacting on the tariff arrangements. So the key message from business was your advance, your competitiveness agenda gets serious about your effective regulation and lets have certainty in terms of a trade deal. And well, as a bit of that trade deal, you know, as Irish business, we don't particularly like, which we'd rather have no tariff, while having the certainty and that ability to plan is the best outcome for Europe at present. So, Friger, looking forward, there's a big, big deal politically for Ireland to have the EU presidency, which kicks off. Then, a couple of weeks' time in effect, what significance has this for Irish business? Does it make us closer to the EU? Does it make you more privy to EU thinking? Explain it to me. Yeah, so I suppose we get to sit in the chair of a lot of really important conversations. Europe will get to our Ireland, we'll get to manage the flow of a lot of these files in terms of setting the agenda in terms of getting things advanced. From a Brussels perspective, we're coming out quite an important time, David, because we're coming out of a separate presidency that's been disrupted because Europe is now at war in two fronts, right? So to speak, from a European business perspective, we feel that in terms of cyber threat cyber attacks, you know, doesn't manifest itself on two fronted military war. Obviously, we have a war in Ukraine and with the Middle East now, we have the advent of a more cyber attacks. So, the separate presidency has been disrupted, and then when we come out of the Irish presidency, we go to literally any impresonancy. So, I think it's a lot of people in Brussels looking at the Irish president, and they're saying, "This is going to be a really important six months in terms of advancing key files." And Ireland has that track record in terms of being very successful in terms of dealing with tricky issues, you know, previously in terms of enlargement of the European Union. Some really effective presidency work about financial budgeting and the multi-annual financial frameworks in Europe. These are tricky. When you're talking about money, they're always tricky negotiations, right? Yeah, absolutely. The Irish have toned that well in the past, David. So, I think the presidency is going to be important to advance some of those issues. We're going to have some real flagship kind of occasions as well, particularly in AI so much. And we're going to see a lot of global business leaders coming to Dublin far in AI so much later in the year and October of the year. So, I think that's going to be a real key flagship opportunity. And I think one of which are in composition itself, you know, cutting edge regulation innovation. How do we manage those kind of trade-offs and how do we ensure that we get a AI, not just regulatory model, but an economic and kind of competitiveism productivity opportunity for the European economy that's going to work really well for us. So, I think presidency is important and the Irish kind of chairing as some of these key meetings can really make a material impact. So, European competitiveness, we now have again a now crisis that we didn't have six months ago. So, cost of business in Europe is a colossal issue for our members. As probably perhaps spoken about before, you know, Europe is division tree when it comes to our energy costs. And unfortunately Ireland is right at the bottom of that league table. So, you know, energy cost competitiveness is going to be a key issue. And then how we navigate the sensible regulation agenda, crucially important in the context of AI and other issues that are coming through, how do we find new trade and market opportunities? You know, we spoke about the tensions in terms of the transatlantic relationship and it is a changed relationship with the US. So, our new trade opportunities in terms of finalizing markets or Canada, Mexico, in the S, all lots of these new trade opportunities. There's never been more important for Irish business and European health to deliver those. And Ferdinand, you know, one of the big relationships, it's always been crucial relationships to one between Dublin and London. Now, it's fair to say that since Brexit, Brexit's 10 years ago this year, which is kind of amazing. But at the outset, of course, there was a massive, massive disruption to relations. The tone turned very sour. There was a lot of tit for tat insults going back and forth across the Irish sea. Has that relationship been mended, been fixed, been reset in recent weeks or recent months? Yeah, I think so, David. We were around the table with the Prime Minister and the T-shirt as part of the UK Ireland summit. And it's fair to say I think that that relationship has not been more positive since before Brexit. So, it isn't a really good place. But then we see the fields of politics obviously moving very quickly in the UK. That Prime Minister might not be knocking around for very long. And nor am I the next fella. John and I were discussing, they've had seven PMs in 10 years. So, it's a big watch out for us in terms of what's going to happen in London. It's really, really important. We have a Windsor framework in terms of the Brexit arrangements that are working reasonably well for Irish business. We're going to have a key summit over the next couple of months in terms of the UK EU summit to look at the nature of that UK relationship. Can we make it closer? Can we have better arrangements in terms of our trade in food and animal products? So, got SPS kind of arrangements in terms of agricultural produce trade in terms of security and defence. We're definitely seeing that much stronger, you know, regional approach. Right? So, UK has not left Europe. It's still here in Europe right now. We've got a shared agenda in terms of security and defence as does Ireland and the UK. So, some of these issues are really important. And we have our shared Ireland, Trish, you know, where we've got to make sure that the island is working effectively, movement of goods, movement of people, movement of labour. And then on the resilience agenda in terms of things like our energy and things like our data, things like our shared infrastructure and our shared security. That has never been more important than the island of Ireland. So, big issues for Irish business and working with UK business, both East, West and North, South, a positive political environment at the moment, but we're just seeing new risks emerge to work on after map really, really closely. Peril, as always, it's an absolute pleasure. Whistle stop tour, Washington, Brussels, London, and we'll talk to you very soon. Cheers, David. Thanks for the time. Now, that was a conversation brought to you in a paid sponsorship with Ibeck, focusing on what lies ahead as Ireland moves towards the EU presidency. What's clear is that it isn't just about politics or policy. It's about implementation and turning global insight into practical outcomes for businesses at home. Whether it's shaping how new EU regulations are rolled out, defending competitiveness, or ensuring Irish enterprises are strong voice of the European table, Ibeck's role is sent. The presidency is a moment of opportunity, but only if it's used strategically. And that's where insight, influence, and connectivity really matter. For a deeper look at Ibex Impact, the priorities and the work on behalf of Irish business that they do, you can visit ibeck.ie to learn more. [BLANK_AUDIO]