#996 - Stephen J. Shaw - Why Population Collapse is Closer Than You Think

Nearly three years ago since we last spoke, I want to start afresh.

What is the big question that you're tackling?

The reason for global birth rate decline.

It's what's kept me awake for nine years

and continues to do so.

The difference now is I feel I know the answer.

It's the answer that keeps me awake.

And, you know, that's why I came to Austin after nearly three years to share what it is that the data is revealing.

And frankly,

I feel a sense of responsibility.

I feel a sense of

awareness of what has to happen to societies for us to have a chance of combating this.

And just a reminder, if I can chris, no nation in history has been known to recover from long-term low birth rates.

We don't have an example.

So sometimes it's felt over these years,

whilst, I mean, can I just say when we last talked, almost no one was talking about low birth rates.

And I think, frankly, the conversations we had then were part of a catalyst.

In fact, I know they were because people tell me that.

That was the, basically the launch of BirthGap, right?

The first documentary you did.

I was pretty much the first pod that you'd done.

My gosh.

At that time, you embarrassed me in your introduction.

You mentioned that I had only 5,000 views.

I thought this is going to go badly.

Obviously,

it got up to close to a million.

I think I had 13 followers on X at the time.

So really, it was a different world for me then.

But more to the point, if you take the one-liner from that

podcast that I think is quoted more often than anything else, we covered a lot.

But that, now, this is important.

At most, people forget that at most a woman turning 30 without a child has a 50-50% chance of ever becoming a mother.

And,

you know, my gosh, I know that's hit a lot of people, young people, especially young women who are frankly shocked that by age 30, but it's at most 30.

I'll come back to that

a little bit later if I can.

But at that time, I think that resonated with a lot of people thinking, well, why don't we know this?

Why is it that we are educating our young people?

It's great.

Telling them to get established on the career ladder, great.

But we're completely silent on the fact that, by the way, you very well might run out of time if you want a child.

And if I could just say, one of the most moving moments to me in the past week was

dear Charlie Kirk, just a video, the first one I saw after the tragedy popping up in my feed.

And there was Charlie Kirk repeating that exact fact to someone someone in a debate at a university: that a woman turning 30 without a child has a 50-50%.

I don't know if you watched the documentary, but I knew that fact got out there.

And so that was important.

You and I have kept in touch since then.

I know a year ago I sent you

a message or two that, okay, I think I found something.

And you were curious, but I wasn't ready.

And, you know, today I'm ready to share a little bit more on what it is that's causing this.

It's a big reveal.

Yeah.

Look,

I got interested in this conversation around about the time that we spoke.

And that really was kind of like

a cognitive hammer blow, I think, the conversation that we had.

It is very stark.

And since then, it's been something that I've really struggled to get my mind off.

I'm not an ardent campaigner for tons of stuff.

You know, climate change, I think, is a big deal, but it's not something that I'm

furiously fighting for.

AGI, bioweapons, engineered pandemics, natural pandemics, nuclear risk, all existential risks I got into for a good while.

I'm worried, but I'm not actively campaigning for.

And

population decline is the strangest kind of risk.

Not a true existential risk, permanent, unrecoverable collapse, but it's really not good because it's the sort of thing that creeps up on us year after year.

There's no smoke in the sky.

There's no increasing wildfires.

It's just this slow and then increasingly

rapid decline.

And

we've both taken a good bit of stick over the last couple of years, basically for that one conversation, which is strange for me because if I am fucking patient zero for like the horrible get women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen person,

I really think that that shows how much work needs to be done in order to be able to get this conversation to move forward and to get people to understand the genuine,

compassionate, progressive justifications for why this is not a good thing, individually, relationally, culturally, economically, socially, politically.

Like,

every different thing that you care about, whether you're on left or right, pretty much gets impacted by a reduction in the population size.

And

given that this is only one of the third rails that I've decided to touch, whereas it's a third rail that you just continually hold your hand on,

it's

an odd sort of bravery that you're not choosing to, like it's keeping you awake.

You're compelled to do it at night.

But yeah, man, I'm glad that you're out there.

And as far as I'm concerned, as far as I can see, you're the best person doing the most cutting-edge research, the most sort of obsessive approach to this.

So it feels cool.

It feels like a full circle moment to have had that first one, to have launched the Birth Gap documentary.

You've got the second Birth Gap documentary, which people will be able to go and watch for free once this episode's done.

And

yeah,

it's been a very strange three years for me, uh, feeling right but early on

maybe the most important topic that is going to capture it's this and AI for me, or like I guess the other reproductive technology would be um embryo selection, like genetic embryo selection using IVF.

Um, those three for me will be the stories of the next century.

Maybe there's wars, maybe there's like conflict and stuff, but of new things.

AI, population decline, and embryo selection are the three big ones.

And no one wants to talk about it when it's early.

So, yeah, I guess a good place to start.

People can go and watch our first episode if they want, but I really want to just give the best primer that we've ever done on birth rates and what's going on.

Why do birth rates matter?

Why is decline a problem at all?

Why should people care?

I would say that

even if you don't care about birth rates, you should at least understand that it's going to impact almost everything in your life, young and old.

In fact, young more than old, by definition, the young have more years to live through, and they've got to live through the youth and all the way through old age.

And the only thing I can possibly think of that will not be greatly affected by birth rate decline is parks.

I guess parks will continue to be there.

Maybe they'll they'll become more wild in some way.

But that's the only thing.

I'm thinking, well, okay, parks will still be there.

Everything else in society, from

how we've set up our social care, our pension systems, our healthcare systems, will whittle away.

And that's because we need people.

We need workers to pay for those.

So, yeah, it comes back to economics.

And some people don't like that.

Some people then twist that

deliberately, I'm sure, that, oh, so this is just about money.

This is just about supporting the elderly, supporting the boomers.

I get that a lot.

No, this is everybody.

When you go to your local doctor or hospital, you're competing effectively for a slot to see that doctor as soon as possible and to have the best care possible.

You're going to be competing with a lot more older people for the healthcare systems that our nations can support.

So the idea that this won't matter is a fallacy.

The social side worries me even more.

If you take cities, and I spent a lot of time in Detroit, six, seven years in the city, find a company there.

And, you know, the thing about Detroit is

today it's reviving.

They're opening the first Apple store in downtown Detroit right now, which to me is incredible.

I remember when the first store of any kind

opened in downtown Detroit some 10 years ago.

When cities become hollowed out, now Detroit's birth rates are not the issue.

It's a city designed for 2 million people.

70s, it had 2 million.

And within 30 years, there were 700,000 people living there.

What happens then?

You can't afford to pay for the infrastructure.

You can't afford to pay for the city pensions, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.

People move away.

It becomes infested with vermin.

But some people still live there in amongst these decaying communities.

So you have to think that birth rate decline will have a similar impact.

And it is having an impact in Japan, where I've spent most of the past eight years.

So, because the reality is this impacts everybody, even if you want to celebrate that we have reached peak birth, that happened over 10 years ago.

Go and celebrate that if that's really a thing for you.

I can't say, isn't it

important that we in some way stop population growth?

But that happened already.

That was then.

This is now.

So what I really struggle with is, and I'm sure we're going to see it in the comments here.

Every time I do a podcast, the comments follow that there are too many people in the world, that this is the best.

What do you think about that argument that there's too many people in the world?

world?

To be honest with you,

it's like

what's the expression about the, you know, that the horse is bolted.

You know, that was then.

If there's too many.

What do you mean that was then?

Population is determined by the number of births more than anything else.

People think it's births and deaths.

No, it's births.

Why?

Because births also predict how many future births are going to be.

All people don't have children, at least for now.

So all people just slowly live out their lives.

So by looking at the total headcount on the planet, the total number of people here, you're mixing apples and oranges, people living out their lives, and new children being born who will grow up and have more children.

So it's all about the number of children.

And we reached the total peak on the planet in 2013.

We're already down something like 5%.

And you don't mean population number because the population number is still increasing.

And it will do for some time, for some decades, but that's because people are not dying.

People are living out their lives in countries where not long ago people were dying young.

So

the analogy here is if you had a wave that was sort of crashing and you're taking the total volume of the wave, you can have a very high peak of the wave that continues for maybe even longer.

On the back end of that wave, it can be a slowing slope, an ever-reducing height of it.

And then when that highest peak point crashes off the end, which is those people that are living longer than previously dying, you end up with a very precipitous drop.

I think it's, you know, was it Hans Rosling that does that really great analogy that's in your documentary?

And he's saying, how is it that you can have fewer people being born each year, but the population number overall continues to grow?

And it's because of this.

It's because if you have better healthcare technologies, people are living longer, you get an increasing but aging population while a decreasing birth rate isn't yet felt.

And this is, I think, sort of one of the real fundamental cognitive issues that people have.

There's lots of people on the planet and the number is going up, but the birth rate is declining.

So it hides what matters most, which is how many young people we have in an ever-increasing population size.

And that is the sort of

foundation to this was the population bomb concerns that existed in the 1960s, that there's going to be too many people, the planet's going to be overpopulated.

Or there was some guy that you quote in the documentary saying,

if you have too many children, you're going to be like fined or put in jail.

This was the concern in the sort of the 60s and the 70s that this was the future that we were going into.

There is not, is there a single country on the planet that's concerned about too many young people, too many births?

Well, there might be in certain countries in southern Africa, but everywhere birth rates are falling.

And right now, as a whole,

sub-Saharan African mothers are having one fewer child every 15 years.

So we're looking at sub-Saharan Africa reaching replacement level.

I hate the term.

And now I try to call it stability level, where you get 2.1 children per mother where you're not growing and you're not sinking.

Sub-Saharan Africa is going to reach that around 2050.

So even there.

Eight to seven to six to five in every 15 years, you're losing one of those.

Yeah.

So at the moment, we're down to around four, I believe it is.

So the path is clear effectively everywhere.

There are a few outliers, but by definition, they're outliers.

And you find interesting things when you scrutinize those.

There's no country you can look at and say, ah, there's a solution.

That just doesn't exist.

Just to give some headlines here for people to

wet their whistle, the birth rates in Italy, Japan, and Germany are falling rapidly at exactly the same rate.

Nations like Italy, Japan, and Germany that have a birth rate of 1.4 per woman will decay by one-third per generation.

That means that in two generations, the population will fall by over half, and in three generations, by 70%.

70%

fewer Italians, Japanese, and Germans.

So this isn't just Japan anymore.

This isn't just something that's happening weirdly out in the East.

This is slap bang in the middle of developed Europe.

There are half the number of children in Germany as there were 50 years ago.

Today, 75% of us live below the replacement rate tipping point.

By 2020, every country in Europe apart from Iceland had more 50-year-olds than newborns.

And even in sub-Saharan Africa, birth rates have been falling fast.

Women are having one fewer child each for every 15 years that passed.

Yeah.

And, you know, let's, I mean, we could talk about South Korea, even worse, where for every South Korean born today, births are going to half in less than 20 years.

So by the time a child born in South Korea today reaches college age, the country is going to need half the number of daycares.

And soon after elementary schools and high schools.

And by the time a South Korean gets to the typical age of becoming a parent, which is late 30s it's going to half again so the communities they grew up in will have one quarter of the number of daycare centers

so

we have those well i'm not going to call them outliers because to me they're a potential first movers first movers exactly um

but on the other hand we have brazil with a birth rate of 1.5 now almost the same getting down to levels in Europe and Japan.

We have parts of southern India with birth rates around the same level, too.

32 out of 36 states in India have below replacement fertility.

India.

India.

Births in India peaked

in 2001.

India has gone through 24 years of falling births.

We haven't noticed it.

In fact, it overtook China to become the most populous country on earth not that long ago.

So why?

Back to Hans Rossling's great example again,

using building blocks to show how we

have countries that, for a time, increased total population.

People in India used to die very young.

They're not, they're living out their lives.

And just to go back to

what this century might see in terms of the new waves of technologies or crises,

longevity keeps coming up.

And if you put longevity on the table here, let's say we all live twice as long.

Well, in simple terms, overly simple terms, the population of the planet would double because we're all going to be here for twice as long.

Now, I don't hear the anti-natalists who attack me also starting to criticize longevity.

I think they'd be quite happy to live twice as long.

So part of the contradiction to me and what their movements might be.

But, you know, this is no longer about Europe and Japan.

This is about the US, Canada, Australia, but it's also about Latin America.

It's also about southern India,

Thailand.

Birth rate now, 1.2.

These are places that I think, if you were to ask a normal normal person on the street, do you think that they're having lots of kids?

Oh, they're breeding like rabbits.

Yeah,

I mean,

why is it it takes so long for us all?

I mean,

I've been studying this for 10 years coming from data science.

Feels like 20 years, but

I'm quite new to this compared to some other demographers who have for

many decades had these concerns.

So why is it as societies we don't know about this?

Why is it it such a shock?

And the reality is our education systems are teaching us about the past and continue to do so.

And it's probably not just about human geography.

It's probably other things too.

And that's part of the problem.

We're educating young people on the idea that birth rates, I mean, a great antinatalist tactic.

I know it is because they're the ones that create the charts.

They'll tell you in the year 1800, there were only 1 billion people.

And they'll draw this curve and the curve will go up and up.

And now we're up to 8 billion.

And then they stop there.

And that's in education textbooks, and that's what kids are learning.

Roll the projection forward until 2150 for me.

Yeah, and if you ask them that, they'll then do something quite clever too.

They'll kind of show it flattens.

It's like, oh, in the year 2100, 2150, we'll still have billions of people.

They won't tell you, yeah, that most of those people are going to be over 65 and need care.

And the shrinking number of births will be an ongoing thing at the current levels.

Do the projections for me.

What's the global population going to look like 2050, 2100, 2150, 2200?

I'm at the point, Chris, where

I almost don't care.

I just want us to survive.

You know, it's a point, it's at a point now for me, and you made a comment at the start that it's not existential.

I'm not so sure.

I believe you're right.

It's not going to be extinction, but I think it's going to be a lot more severe than we expect.

I used to think, well, after a century or so, some new society will emerge.

And maybe there'll be societies that we like, maybe societies that we don't like.

Maybe they'll be repressive in some ways.

Maybe they'll be high in religiosity.

Who knows what might happen?

But there'll be societies that promote having family.

Pronatalism.

Pronatalism in some capacity.

I

now

think that that's a vast oversimplification of what has to happen based on my more recent findings.

Trust me, you are like, this is all stuff that for me is cutting edge that you're now saying is old hat and there's a new, new thing to be scared about.

I was already scared, but had a little bit of hope that on the other side.

Yeah.

I'm sorry.

I'm the harbinger of fucking demographic doom here.

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The good news, uh, as I see it.

Fuck, I made some good news.

Holy shit.

The good news is,

I think it's quite clear what the problem is now.

Okay.

But maybe I can go back

to Japan last summer when I thought I'd finished.

I completed my first research paper,

which has just been peer-reviewed and published in scientific reports.

So I was happy a year ago.

I'd done all that research.

And it shows, oh, the key thing we were talking about in the last podcast is that mothers across all these countries are having around the same number of children as in 1970s and 1980s.

That was the shocking thing that, you know, I was sharing two to three years ago.

And it still shocks people that in the U.S.

in the 1980s, mothers were having 2.4 children.

Not average woman.

Mothers, once you had the first child, it was 2.4, and today it's 2.6.

So family size in the US has actually increased.

In the UK in 1970, mothers were having its 2.3, I believe, children.

Today it's the same, in effect.

Japan, 2.2 in 1970.

Today, the same.

This has nothing to do with family size.

It's to do with childlessness.

So the very first

discovery

I made, I believe it was a discovery because it wasn't being talked about.

It still surprises a lot of people, including demographers, is that, no, this is actually focused on childlessness.

And then you get into the debate of why that is.

But a year ago, I was sitting in Kyoto, having literally finished all my charts for the paper just published.

And I thought, you know what?

I'm going to prepare some charts and data for my next paper because I know what I want to write about or what I want to study.

And it goes back to our first podcast.

And it goes back to that statement that I made that

at most half of women turning 30,

50-50 have a 50% chance of becoming a mother.

And I wasn't very satisfied by that comment to you because I use this term at most.

And why was that?

Because the data I had at that point was grouped into five-year age bands, 20 to 24-year-olds, 25 to 29-year-olds, 30 to 34-year-olds.

And I saw it was under 30.

So that's why at most.

But I knew it was probably a little bit less.

And I decided, okay, I'm not going to plot this data.

I found all the sources.

I had it for 39 countries, going back decades, for 300 million mothers and this night in Kyoto Japan I set up my database and I just run the test to make sure I could see what I was expecting well what was I expecting I was expecting to see by age of mother

some form of curve

not many people having children in the teens these days sure probably a peak after college age a little peak then another peak maybe around 30 I don't know why it just seemed around 30 might be an age and then you would certainly see a peak of people

who pursue careers around 35 becoming mothers.

And you would definitely see a peak from IVF.

None of those peaks were there.

I was staring at a near perfectly smooth bell curve by age.

Now, this was for Japan.

And I looked at the same data for,

well, multiple countries, multiple years, one and a half thousand data sets.

And with a few small caveats,

there was a smooth curve everywhere.

And I stared at that chart for two to three hours.

And I wrote myself an email, which I've only done that one time in my life because I wanted to remember that moment.

And the email said something like, we're all the same.

And what I meant was,

We might think that we get to decide to become parents, but we don't.

Something else decides because this perfectly smooth curve indicated there's something much more fundamental in nature that was determining parenthood.

Cross-cultural.

Cross-cultural, cross everything, across religion,

across all sorts of strata demographically, whatever way you want.

It all stacked.

Different economic setups, different levels of capitalism and not.

Exactly.

And through economic crisis, changes in political regimes in some nations.

There is a caveat, and I should say it now because I don't want to forget.

And it's not an exception, it's just an interesting case, and that's the U.S.

In the U.S., you don't have one curve, you have multiple stacked curves.

So you have a near-perfect curve for Asian Americans who are having children later than other demographic groups.

You have the start of a curve for African Americans who are starting to have children younger than other groups.

And then in the middle, you've got this kind of mix, but it is a stacked set of curves.

I can tell from that immediately, it would make a great research project if anybody's interested to dive into this for the US.

But I can tell the US is not a particularly cohesive nation because almost every other nation, you have one curve.

Oh, that's so interesting.

So, what you're saying is that

the multiculturalism that exists in the U.S.

is skewing the U.S.

number overall to actually be broken out by the demographics, the different cultures of the people that are inside of it.

Yes.

Right.

And is it right to say that the U.S.

is like the most multicultural nation on the planet?

Well, from the data, I've seen 39 nations.

There's no question of that because, I mean, in effect, what it means is that Asian Americans mostly are not dating

other races.

Of course, there'll be exceptions.

Of course, there are.

But I can see an incredibly clear curve.

And I've heard it said in the past, I think I have, you know, why don't Asian Americans marry African Americans so much?

I don't know if that's right, but I can see it in the data because African Americans are mostly having having children much earlier than Asian Americans are even starting to think about it.

So,

you know, the US is an interesting case, but it's kind of

the rule that kind of proves that there's something happening at a much more fundamental level, even within the U.S.

now.

So that was Kyoto last summer.

I thought I was finished, and suddenly now I have this responsibility.

I was expecting to come on your show one more time and tell you the exact age where a woman has a 50% chance is 28, 28.

I thought that was all I was going to really do that evening.

And no, now I've got another research question.

And this one bothers me because it means that really there's no autonomy.

There's autonomy not to have a child,

or at least most places in the world.

And that's a good thing for those who don't want, which isn't that many.

But we're all

linked to some greater factor,

force-like factor, because it's so predictable.

So, let me just share how predictable this is.

While I'm doing my research now, 300 million mothers, 39 nations, multiple decades.

I don't care about the name of the country.

I don't care about the year.

Everything goes into one big pot for my analysis because it actually doesn't matter.

So, here's what matters:

age.

You might say, well, yes, so what?

Age, fertility, biology.

No, no, no, no, no, nothing to do with biology at all.

It's the average age of parenthood in a nation

more than anything else that determines overall rates of motherhood and childlessness and birth rates.

There's an extension to that, which is how far stretched those years are.

And there's a third factor, which is there are some bumps in these curves, which are interesting, and they're a factor too.

But with those three things alone, you can get

heuristically over 90% accuracy in predicting rates of motherhood and childlessness, irrespective of the nation, irrespective of anything else.

And because we know that the big difference in birth rate is between non-mothers and mothers, not between mothers who have one child and mothers who have five children, this is the main thing.

So it maybe is a not reductive, but it's a lower resolution way to look at this.

But this builds on your previous piece of work, which is, hey,

the reason for birth rate decline is not because mothers are having fewer children.

It's because fewer women are becoming mothers overall.

Once you have the first child, you are more likely to go on to have, realistically, and in some situations, even more children than previous.

But this allows you to work out the average age of motherhood.

So that's if you have this bell curve, that is how left or right shifted it is.

You have the sort of

tail of the distribution, which tells you sort of how long it is, how wide that thing is, and then you've got some little peaks that are inside of it.

Is that a fair way to summarize it?

It's a very good way to summarize it, but there's a very cunning element to this, almost a trap.

When the average age of motherhood and fatherhood, we have some data, thankfully, for fathers here.

We talk too much about women.

I do, but it's because we've got so much data on birth records.

But this is fathers, too.

When the average age of motherhood was young early 20s the curve had a really high peak

because around the same time people were on the same page and you had a lot of evidently in the data pair bonding 95 would be a typical number of people having a child within a few years of that early 20 peak

But as the average age of motherhood and fatherhood has extended, the curve has flattened and has flattened at a predictable accelerating rate.

So, as it shifts right later, it also gets lower and longer?

Longer, but at an accelerating rate of collapse.

Right.

And that's what it is.

So, what does this mean, just for the people that don't work well with graphs, visualizing graphs in their mind?

Yes.

Can you give an example?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, let me try this one.

So, back in the day, for many of us, maybe uh, you know, my parents' generation, uh, younger people's grandparents' generation, there might have been, of course, no internet.

Um,

there might have been

a town dance.

There might have been a Saturday night at 8 p.m.

Everybody in the town got together, all the young people.

And from 8 p.m.

to 11 p.m., everybody would be there.

And there'd be a bit of gossip at the start, you know, anybody new, anybody bringing their cousin from out of town, any breakups, any new relationships,

maybe hoping to get to talk to someone you hadn't talked to or danced with before.

As the evening progressed, you might get to this midpoint where you have energy and you get this kind of maximum point where people are dancing and laughing and getting to know one another and maybe some relationships blossoming from that moment.

And then towards the end of the evening, less energy as people start to go home, some early.

and probably not the optimal time to introduce yourself to someone late in the evening.

Well, imagine in this town, hypothetically, the manager had a great idea.

Instead of opening from 8 to 11, I'm going to open 7 p.m.

and stay open to 1 a.m.

It's now going to be 6 hours because we're going to get even more energy.

But the population of the town is the same.

So all you've done now is distribute the same energy over six hours.

Some people come early, hoping to meet someone.

then get bored and go home.

Other people have dinner first and come later.

Other people meet someone they think they like and then turn their head at nine o'clock when someone new comes in that they want to get to know, and they might get a slap in their face, and that's the end of that opportunity.

I think what is happening is the exact same loss of energy.

I've got a word for it: vitality.

I've even got a formula for it.

So, as this curve is stretched, as we have now, what, 20 years to consider starting a family as a woman?

20 to 40-ish.

Right.

A man might imagine they have a little bit longer.

That energy is sapped out, this lack of vitality.

Quite simply, the chance of you meeting someone that you're prepared to make a lifetime commitment to, especially if it involves creating a child together,

the chance of you being on the same page with someone you happen to meet randomly goes down rapidly compared to that really compressed early 20s when the likelihood was everyone around was thinking the same thing within a year or two or three.

And that's why I feel

this sense of,

I don't want to say gloom,

but

the sense of scale of what we have to do.

Because mathematically, based on the evidence of 39 countries and 300 million mothers, and a similar number of fathers,

I can't see any way out of this crisis unless the average age of motherhood goes back to a much, much younger age.

And I haven't yet worked out what that is.

Could you not squeeze the age together, but have it be higher?

Right.

So it's an obvious first question.

Yeah.

Well, actually, it's a good first question.

I haven't been asked it before, to be honest.

But you're right.

If you, for example, could keep men and women apart,

literally, until they're 27, and then suddenly bring them together.

You in theory could have that same peak within a three to four or five year period, and you might have the same high birth rates.

But that's not realistic in any scenario I can see.

And that's part of the problem, actually.

In every scenario, this curve is still left anchored at around set age 18.

So you can't shift the curve because people at 18, the race starts at 18.

Some people settle down at 18.

And some people are thinking, wait a minute, I like that girl, 18.

I've lost her.

I've lost him.

So the process starts.

And again, back to this curve.

Why is it that the number of 18-year-olds who become parents is less than 19-year-olds, 20-year-olds, 21?

It just keeps going up and up and up and then down and down and down.

What's the middle of the curve mostly for most countries?

It's 30.

29.6, 30.

South Korea, interestingly, is one of the higher ones, getting close to 32 now.

And I think that's why their birth rates are so low.

Because what you can see in the data for South Korea is a secondary effect,

which is

almost uniquely a significant increase in one-child families that does not exist.

For example, in Japan,

Japan, about 20% of families in Japan are having one child only.

Around the world, it's typically 15%, 20%.

In South Korea, that's 40%.

And that's because they're skewed later, which means that you get fertility problems.

Then you get biology becoming a factor at that point.

You've said a bunch of times already that a woman turning 30 without a child has a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother at most.

Can you just explain the mechanism that's causing that to happen?

Because

it requires a little bit of explaining.

Yeah.

And it's hard to accept because, you know,

we want to believe we've got autonomy.

We want to believe

adamantly that

we,

within reason, have a good chance of becoming a parent as much in our 30s as in our 20s.

Especially given that you've got stats like more women had children over the age of 40 than under the age of 20.

Right.

And again,

if we get on to the world of media headlines and surveys, you know, that could be a whole other conversation.

So there's a lot of misinformation.

The reason we're having more births over 40 is not because it's an overall increase.

It's that curve has stretched and crept into our 40s, but at the same time brought down birth rates at younger years.

But to get to answer your question,

I think we overestimate the challenge of, on one level, settling down as we start to form our own lives.

At a younger age,

we're more flexible.

By the time we're in our 30s, we already know pretty much probably where we want to live, what neighborhood of town we want to live in, where we want to go on vacation, where the kind of friends that we now have.

We want

our partner to like our friends.

We want to like their friends.

We want to have the same pastimes and hobbies.

So the idea that, oh, I'm just going to randomly meet, no, now your criteria list is longer and longer.

And at the same time, there are fewer and fewer choices.

People are becoming, people mostly still do become parents.

And the potential options to find that perfect partner or even.

With higher standards.

Right.

So what do we do?

Well, we wait longer and then longer and longer and time fades away.

But if you look at it from a more mathematical point of view,

there's, you know, and here there's a

a topic called game theory.

I don't know if you've come into game theory at all.

It's fascinating.

I've taken a class or two in it, and I have modeled

this exact crisis using game theory.

Now, in game theory, if anybody wants to watch the or has watched Beautiful Mind with Russell Crowe,

a wonderful movie in its own right, it covers his discovery of what's called the Nash

equilibrium.

And a Nash equilibrium is when two people

decide that it's in their mutual interest not to change their outcome.

And

it can be in financial markets, it can be literally gaming, it can be playing card games, it can be, sure, partnering.

And I haven't done it justice there, but when you look at pair bonding, to me, evidently, it is a Nash equilibrium.

You've got two people who've decided, do you know what?

It's in my best interest to stay with this person rather than change to anybody else.

and that other person has to think the same thing

especially when it has a cost and game theory talks about cost here the cost is you're going to have a child together and that makes it more difficult to

have a child with someone else you're making a long-term commitment so it's a big decision now What happens when you model birth rate decline using national

equilibrium?

What do you get?

A perfect bell curve.

You get most people matching somewhere around the middle, and you get this fall off at either side.

And what happens when you model this, when you stretch out that curve, when you stretch out those years?

Well, you find a collapsing curve, exactly like we saw.

So less area under the curve as well as a lower peak.

Yes.

Right.

And I guess you need to add into this the fact that if you start to shift it right, that adds additional complexity on because of the limits of biology.

Yeah, which is South Korea's problem right now.

It's also our IVF problem right now.

IVF is a wonderful thing for some people, the lucky ones.

But I can see in the data overall, I mean, this is going to be controversial, but I have to say it.

The more society encourages

later in reproductive life technology, the lower the overall chance of a person ever becoming a parent.

Because they're not going to find a partner.

There's other factors like not finding a partner.

People will delay and delay thinking, hey, all this technology now.

And it could be other things too.

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Okay, I'm going to try and recap because it is kind of, it is a little complex to, even for me, someone that's been swimming swimming in this for a while, wrap my head around.

The original vitality curve was a

more cohesive,

tighter, sharper peak, which is most people in their early twenties went looking for a partner.

The dance party at which they were trying to couple up was relatively narrow.

And that meant that if you met somebody, it was reliable that their timeline was the same as yours, that their goals were the same as yours, and that you were both ready and committed to get into a relationship, get married, start a family, do all of those things together.

Right.

Now,

because, and I'm going to find out why, because why, which we haven't got into, but at least what's happened in terms of the numbers, this curve has flattened.

So there are more people choosing to start

looking for a partner, coupling, committing, starting a family at differing times, which means that of the overall pool of people, which is actually bigger, so you'd think, well, there's more likelihood of me finding somebody, but there is a greater variance in when people want to.

I'm 37, I'm ready.

You are 30, you are not.

That's

an imbalance that typically wouldn't have happened because everybody would have been squeezed together and everybody would have agreed on,

culturally agreed on when this is supposed to happen overall.

So as you shift the average age to the right, because people have got things to do with their lives, women are in education, employment, socioeconomic uplift, all the rest of this stuff, independence, which we can get into, that's pushed it to the right.

That hits a hard biological wall.

That brings the height down.

You also lose height because it's flatter generally, because you have this greater variance, which means that for every one person that you meet, there are only 0.1 people who are at the same stage as you.

Also, if you shift it further to the right, you have this, Louise Perry calls it the lamp effect, which is if you are moving into an apartment and there's nothing in the apartment, you need to buy a lamp, it's really easy to find a lamp that fits the apartment.

But if you've spent 10 years building the perfect interior design, finding the lamp that fits that very carefully crafted interior design is super tough.

This is the same as somebody who's ready to build a life with someone versus somebody who's already built a life and tries to find someone who slots into it.

That second version is much more difficult because, well, I'm not compromising on my career so much.

I know where I want to live.

I've got a preference about, no, I know what I want for a diet.

You, you have these preferences and they begin to get locked in and ossified as a part of yourself.

Oh, this is a part of me.

This is who I am.

And it's

a big predictor of where I take my self-worth from, as opposed to I take my self-worth from my partner and from us being together in this way.

We have built a life together as opposed to I have built a life and do you slot into it perfectly?

And as you push that later, that preference challenge becomes a higher wall for people to get over, which again makes it less likely.

So not only do you need to be at the right stage, the same as me, but I now have an even greater number of criteria that you need to be able to tick off in order for this thing to work.

What am I missing?

No, that's it.

I mean, to be honest, you've done a really succinct job of describing exactly it.

I've actually got a name name for this overall process.

Vitality curve is the curve, but the process I'm calling reproductive synchrony.

Okay, yep.

That's a nice term for it.

As a man who likes giving unnecessary names to things, it's got my seal of approval.

So

I think this,

and to share more broadly, part of my research right now has extended into other species.

This is not...

human-centric at all.

If you look at prairie voles, if you look at wolves, if you look at seahorses, other animals that pair bond, you also have Gaussian curves, these bell curves.

Now, they have not been researched, and we can't say they're necessarily the same thing, but it may well be that this is an evolutionary trait.

Evolution itself has determined that those species or those cultures or societies that get it right early on are the ones that evolution chooses to

this, this suggests reproductive synchronicity, yes.

Yes.

Reproductive synchrony is synchrony, sorry.

Reproductive synchrony suggests that cohesion, like cultural cohesion, is a big part of this.

So I guess the obvious next question,

assuming that everybody's keeping up, I'm holding on for dear life, but this is fucking fascinating.

What are the driving factors behind the vitality curve moving in terms of height, in terms of left to right, and in terms of distribution.

Yeah.

So this goes back to our conversational last podcast and the first part of my documentary, where we see sudden shifts in this average age of parenthood.

It's very clear in the data.

And it, in simple terms, is linked to moments of financial crises.

So you can go back to 1973, 74 in much of Europe and Japan, 71 in the US, mid-90s in Korea, and more recently after the mortgage crisis shock in the US and many other countries, 07, 08.

And what do you see?

Well, mothers, parents who already have one child, really no change at all in their progression to have two, three, four, or more children, as before.

You would barely notice that there's been a crisis.

But you see that those who have not had a child suddenly delaying parenthood because there's a sudden drop in first-time births.

How sudden do I mean?

Well, the paper just published has a section describing Japan in 1974.

The last quarter of 1974, every single prefecture in Japan, 47, I believe,

they all

whether they were metropolitan, whether they were rural or the tropical beaches of Okinawa, every single one of those saw an identical trend, a drop in first-time births in that quarter.

Well, that's kind of confusing because there's no financial shock in 1974 until you really, what happened nine months earlier?

Well, actually, 12 months earlier, which is interesting, you had the oil shock.

Japan, the biggest oil importer in the world, I showed in the documentary the reels of the shelves, all it was like COVID, you know, times 10.

It was just

everything sold out in those days, mass panic buying, and a nation that had gone through this period post-war of rapid growth, suddenly realizing without oil they have a problem.

What happened naturally, parents across all of Japan, every prefecture decided, sorry, non-parents, wait a minute, not this year, maybe next, maybe next.

Same after the Lehman mortgage crisis.

We see it.

Yep, so after the financial crises in the US, we can see in the data

this measure that demographers unfortunately still use, I feel sorry for so many demographers, the total fertility rate,

which measures this thing called the average woman that doesn't exist.

But still, it's a measure that we tend to use mostly.

The average woman started having fewer children.

And that decline is known to be mapped back to that period of time.

But the measures I introduced in my recent paper show that the average mother, the TMR, the total maternal rate, didn't change at all.

Explain the difference between TFR and TMR.

So this has just come out in my recent paper and it tries, it separates the average woman into two women, which is a step forwards.

Mothers and non-mothers.

So the average mother, the total fertility rate really, to me, has been the reason demography has missed many of these trends in recent decades.

The reason of average mother is simply because you can't be a mother and a non-mother at the same time.

If you look at the TMR, the proportion of women who are becoming mothers,

that number descended sharply after 08-09.

It was around 0.8,

0.85 even women in the U.S.

were becoming mothers prior to that.

Now it's heading down close to 0.6.

So it's gone from most to nearly half.

Yes.

And it's left the U.S.

today.

So we know from CDC national family growth surveys, which are the most reliable thing we have for the US, we know that 90% or more of women either have or want children during their fertile years.

6,000 interviews used to be all in-home interviews, which are highly accurate.

Now it's a hybrid, which has made it a little bit more blurry, but it's given us a very good sense.

90%

have or want children around age 30.

And

when you compare that to the TMR, which to the U.S.

is now heading towards 60%, it means that for every 10 women in America today, if fertility patterns stay the same as they are now,

one out of 10 would choose not to have children.

But only six will have children.

Another three will be women who are, I use the term, unplanned childlessness.

Involuntary childlessness.

Well, this is another term.

I appreciate the chance to just clarify.

Voluntary childlessness is easy, choosing not to have children.

Involuntary is well defined as people who have medical issues.

So either.

Oh.

Now that can be you had a disease, there's something just not medically the way it should be, or it can be you've tried IVF and it's failed.

The other side,

the bigger side, is this circumstantial childlessness.

I call it unplanned childlessness, which is,

so let's link all this together.

Japan going back, all these waves of delaying parenthood.

People, they weren't saying, I want kids now because of the shock.

I've changed my mind.

They were saying, not yet, not yet.

And that's what's happened.

We've slidden into this world of delayed parenthood through people saying not yet.

And of course, when people were saying not yet, they were doing something else.

They were pursuing their careers

or education.

Sure, good thing.

But there's a consequence to that.

If people are pursuing their careers longer, it becomes a societal norm to pursue your careers longer.

In fact, it becomes a risk of vulnerability, particularly to women, to have children younger.

So suddenly you've pulled the needle later and later and later.

And the fear of fears I have in this

Time moves forwards.

It's easy to stretch the age of parenthood as a society.

It's easy to say, well, not this year, not 25, 27, 29, next year, next year.

How as a society, even if people want to, and I think a lot do, as a society, how do we kind of go back in time?

Because we have to go through a turbulent period where people, let's say, over 27 are still having the kids they want to have.

But we have a new bubble of younger people at the same time coexisting.

We need a new.

And that's where,

to me, the only hope lies that we do have a group of younger people saying, wait a minute, I don't like what I'm hearing.

That doesn't work unless you can do it in a coordinated manner because you can't be one person at 22,

the equivalent of a population bubble of a small number of people at 22.

You need a large social movement overall.

Okay, so one thing that's been in my head as we've been talking, like the obvious question, and this is what happens when I speak to anybody about this stuff, whether it's Lyman Stone or Brad Wilcox or

Louise Perry, no matter who it is that I speak to about this, Simona Malcolm Collins.

One of the coolest questions that people love to ask is: why are birth rates declining?

And

what you're suggesting here is that there's actually sort of two buckets of answers.

One is

social, cultural, expectational, psychological, financial, educational, you know, all of these things that are occurring to people that make them feel like something's going on, but that is feeding into

this dynamic.

And the dynamic is reproductive synchrony or vitality curve stuff.

Is that a way to look at it?

Because it seems like the vitality curve is shifted.

And there's when people say, why?

What you could give an answer, justifiable justifiable answer based on today, is well, the vitality curve has moved and flattened.

That is why, but it's also not why.

Does that make sense?

Yeah, but it changes the question.

The question then becomes, why is the fatality curve shifted?

Yes.

Which is the right question to ask rather than why are birth rates falling?

So suddenly we can start to ask the right question.

And I think that moves us forward a lot.

Because it's a much more direct intervention to say what we need to do is shift this curve back.

It's a more accurate question, more precise question.

Okay, so I guess

I mean, could I just add in?

I mean, with greatest respect to everyone else researching in this field,

there are multiple interesting factors.

I mean, for example,

falling sperm counts keeps coming up.

And

just to explain,

if there were falling sperm counts, we would not get a vitality curve of this shape.

We just wouldn't.

Because

it would be skewed in some ways.

And you would see over time this impact it would have.

This curve exists and it's shifted rightwards, but at different times in different countries.

So you'd be saying, kind of, well, yeah, the sperm suddenly affected people of all age in Japan 20 years before the US.

It just doesn't make sense.

No, those issues like that may still be a major problem to increasing the fatality curve.

But they're operating at a level that's not as powerful as the curve itself, which is effectively defining, governing the number of people who become parents.

And to put it in some context, heuristically,

90% of birth rate decline is related to the average age and vitality.

10% is everything else.

How do you know that?

Because if you look,

because there's a formula.

If you look at,

if we go back to what I said earlier, you've got the average age of parenthood, you've got the stretch.

Those are important factors, but you also got some little ripples.

They do exist, some imperfections.

And you can clearly see that, okay, those imperfections

are kind of defy

this kind of

law of nature.

And you realize, oh, actually, we can do something through policies and incentives.

You look at Hungary and there was a bubble of people.

Or else there wouldn't be ripples.

There wouldn't be ripples.

So we can do something.

There are interventions that are available.

But they're so minor compared to the overall power of the curve.

Understood, right.

Okay.

Yeah, that makes sense.

I asked the the question what causes the vitality curve to shift the first thing that you said was financial crises um a lot of the time when you ask people uh what are your uh what's your desire for children do you want to have children why have you not yet have children why do you not plan yet to have children etc uh at least if you look at social media one of the first places people will go to is

just don't have the money, cost of living, crisis, et cetera.

This to me, you saying financial crisis would just play straight into that.

So, okay, it is how much money people feel like they have and that they need to have kids.

And if they have this threat, this looming specter of economic uncertainty or a real felt sense of economic scarcity in their own lives and lives of the people around them don't want to have kids.

Is that true?

Why did you go first to financial theory?

Why is that the predictive driver?

Yeah.

So one really noticeable fact here is that after these crises, the average age of parenthood doesn't go back.

The curve doesn't go up.

It becomes locked in even when times become more prosperous.

So if it were simply correlated to finance alone,

you would see a curve shifting later and then shifting back or shifting up again in some context.

It's simply

related to environmental security in that way.

Yeah.

Well, you find that

vulnerability rationally causes people to delay.

But you equally find that because it's a societal synchrony, getting everybody to synchronize suddenly to take

the risk, particularly for women, to have a child earlier.

Why does it ratchet only later, not earlier?

Because I don't know how.

So I like to use Japanese terminology for it.

It's very clear.

In Japan, Japan's employment system is very hierarchical based on the year you started working for a company.

In fact, right the way through rather than by performance.

So you have Senpai is your boss, Kohai is your junior.

And particularly if you're a woman, if you have a child before your boss, before Senpai, Kohai will probably get your job.

If you wait till Senpai has her child,

you will probably get her job.

So there is this kind of everyone's frozen in the headlights thinking, well, when is the right time to take the step out of the career ladder when I get to that certain point?

And you're looking at those people who

entered employment a little bit before you mostly and looking at the societal norm.

Now, how do you go back?

How do you then say, okay, Kohai, you can go first now.

We're going to go back to your age.

It feels much more risky.

Yeah, that's fascinating.

And that would explain the ratchet thing.

You don't have a God's eye coordination issue to be able to drag people back because the tendency of, I'll just wait.

And it is, you know, it fundamentally is from a financial perspective safer to wait.

Financially, it is safer to wait, right?

The single biggest predictor of wealth is age.

You get more wealthy as you get older.

If the thing that you are optimizing for is wealth, which is security, right?

This will, it's a prophylactic against the financial crisis that just happened.

Whoa, oh, fucking hell.

Like, I'm going to stick about.

What if things don't go well again in the future?

I'll be all right.

I'll keep pushing forward.

It doesn't surprise me that then shifting that back is something that wouldn't happen.

Yeah.

And

this may be the great gotcha that nature has planted for us, that there's no going back.

It only pushes us later and later.

I just want to sink into sort of what's happening with women's culture,

their interpretation of having children.

This is something that we talked about a lot on the last episode.

People got really pissed.

Let's do it again.

What is happening with women's desire for children, the culture around

becoming mothers, child-rearing?

There was a number last time that we spoke about, which was 80% of women who reach menopause without children didn't intend to not have children.

Does that still hold up?

Yeah.

There is a caveat.

It's only a temporary one, so it does hold up.

When you look at nations that have gone through this transition to low birth rates, high childlessness, it holds up.

So if you go back 30, 40 years and you're looking at the 1960s when childlessness in the US, many countries might have been 5%.

It was much lower, which suggests that the people who did it were doing it through volition.

Exactly.

We're talking about the modern world.

Fuck that.

Fuck the 60s.

Well, you say that.

But you know, the number of researchers, my gosh.

Oh, well, if we go back to the 60s, you'll actually find that

Chris

cohort studies, it's just a fucking selection effect.

Are these people are these people actually stupid?

Like, it's just a select, it's the same as saying, Well, look, the divorce rate's going down.

It's like, yeah, because the marriage rate's going down, because the only people getting married are the ones who are really certain that they want to get married.

Well, this is just a kind of plea to the world of demography and researchers for a second.

Stop being so retarded.

Stop using cohort for your predictions of the future compared to period-based risks of what's happening right now.

And

we see it all over the place.

And I get accused even recently by senior professors saying, no, we saw some data for a cohort study.

Yeah, it was women born in the 1960s compared to the 1940s.

Of course, family size went down back that far ago because cohort.

studies take decades to all right bring us into the 21st century what do women think about having kids yeah i see no evidence of change the cdc numbers have fallen a little bit.

It used to be 95% of women have or want children around that age of 30.

Now it's closer to 90%.

So there is a shift downwards, but there's also been other shifts that have gone on at the same time, have delayed parenting.

And

all washed out.

You know, I have talked to, I mean, the documentary, 24 countries,

230 people interviewed, mostly women, often, you know, sitting in their homes talking about their dreams and aspirations.

And since then, hundreds, if not thousands of personal conversations.

And clearly, not everyone wants children.

And we have to respect.

And I want to say this.

Because otherwise there'll be comments against me and certainly you get gripped in with it too, I'm sure.

I don't believe we should be coercive at all.

We should be entirely respectful that some people genuinely do not want children.

And that's fine because those people have other things that they can do to support society.

I don't think it benefits anyone by trying to guilt them in any way.

I wouldn't want to live in a society where we were trying to guilt people into having children.

We're also not going to make particularly good mothers if you force somebody who doesn't want to be a mother into being a mother.

Right.

Yeah.

I mean, look, I can see exactly where you're going with this.

At no point in any of the conversations that me and you have had have we said, we should be forcing women who don't want to be be mothers into being mothers that's not where you improve birth rates from we're talking about the huge overwhelming percentage that 80 percent of women who pass reproductive window and do not have kids didn't intend to not have kids right right this uh unplanned childlessness and these women have support groups to grieve over families that they never had like of the of the two groups of people the one who's on the outside saying look at these two white men getting women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen, making them domestic prostitutes, conned by the patriarchy into just churning out women.

This is just the handmaid's tale all over again.

Where's your compassion for the 80% of women, the overwhelming majority?

And the 20%, me and you were saying, awesome.

Like you made your life choice.

That's totally great.

Congratulations.

Enjoy your future in however you want to do that.

Like, how is this not the compassionate perspective when when you've got women who literally have fucking support groups?

Who is that lady that's got the

Judy Day?

Fucking fantastic.

And

they have support groups to grieve, it's that sentence, grieve over the family that they never had.

Yes.

Like,

it's

if you've ever been around a woman who is getting toward, and because I'm 37, some of my friends and friends' friends are doing this.

These women who are

feeling the ticking clock of biology,

like not just

conceptually,

they're coming into contact with it in reality.

And it is a type of like terror.

It's like a fear.

It's like rabbit, beyond rabbit in headlights.

You know,

I just give an example of a woman I had lunch with because she wanted to talk to me

knowing I made the documentary in Japan, 35 years old,

just gone through another breakup.

And distraught, she said, I don't want flowers.

I don't want vacations.

I don't even want romance.

I just want family.

And

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is becoming more fleeting and fleeting.

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Have you got the number?

So you said a woman reaching 30 without kids has a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother?

At most.

At most.

What about 35?

Oh, I mean, it's, it does vary by country.

I'm not going to cite it here, but I guess I'm going to say it's 15%.

I'll be pretty sure that.

A woman without children at 35 has a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother.

Okay, I'm just going to, because we haven't fully delved into this, and I do think it's an important

qualifier to explain what this means.

A lot of women that are listening and guys that are listening would be like, oh, what do you mean, 50%?

Like, I could have sex with a woman who's 31 today once.

over and over.

It's easily get pregnant.

That's not what we mean.

It's not that there is a 50% chance of you getting pregnant.

What we mean is of all of the women who as yet haven't had children by age 30, this includes single women, this includes women who are coupled but not married, this includes married women that haven't yet tried.

But a big cohort of that is people who are as yet not in the situation that is ready for them to be able to start a family.

And that bundles all of this in.

If you reach that age, the likelihood is that you probably haven't been trying, because most people who try to get pregnant do get pregnant, who want to.

It is a...

How do you come to describe it?

How do you come to explain it in this sort of way that I'm doing it here?

Well, the number of people I've met

who were in a stable relationship at some point in their 20s, maybe into their 30s, thinking, this is it,

everything's good now.

And then suddenly go through a breakup.

And very often for the woman, the breakup comes from the man.

And within a year, he's got a child with a 25-year-old.

He's traded down.

And now you've got a 33-year-old woman who has to find someone else and has to start trying to think of having a child maybe age 35 or 38 if they don't meet the same person again.

So it's it all, and this comes back to the vitality curve.

It's finding that match and

quickly.

Committing quickly.

Yeah, because if you wait, this is the thing, dude.

So many people

that

I've talked about this a lot since we had our first conversation.

And a lot of the time, I bring up a theory from evolutionary psychology that is

maybe more a notion than a theory, but at least it's postulated to be true.

If two people that are in a committed relationship, pair bonded together, are together for a good chunk of time, we're talking, you know, three to seven years, something like that, and no children have come along,

sometimes they break up.

And you would think, well, I've broken up because we just fall out of love.

We don't have the same sort of spark anymore, the energy, the chemistry, we argue all the time.

Yeah.

What would be the adaptive reason for that?

Well, the adaptive reason would be

ancestrally, there was no reliable birth control, which meant that, and who was in a relationship and not having sex?

And unbelievably small, like, you know, the asexuals of the past era, there probably weren't many, and it certainly wasn't a meme that stuck about to survive.

Most people ancestrally that were together and pair bonded had sex.

Most people that had sex got pregnant because they couldn't do contraception.

That means that most couples who were together for a long time and didn't have kids, it was due to a fertility issue.

Now, I don't know if it's me.

I don't know if it's you.

What I do know is if we break up, there is a 50% chance or something like that, 50% chance that the next partner that I get with is going to be able to have kids with me in case it's a you problem.

And if it's a me problem, I'm just going to keep cycling through that until that goes.

Now, this is just this underlying dynamic that sounds like a

restrictive,

horrible judgment on people that choose to not have kids immediately when they're in a committed relationship.

It's like, what do you mean?

I got with her when I was 25,

we're 29 or 30 or 31 or whatever.

Like, we're going to start when we're ready to start.

And we love each other.

We love each other just as much as we ever did.

You're like, yeah, I get that.

But I do think that you should treat whatever we want to call this infertility paradox

with caution.

I think that it's a dynamic that comes in and

just causes people.

The way that she used to sip her tea that I thought was so cute now fucking drives me up the wall.

Like these little things creep in.

And how much of that is due to this dynamic?

How much of that is due to this ancient programming of there's something wrong here.

We've been together a long time.

No kids have arrived.

Something's wrong with one of us.

I think that we should move on.

There's an effect, and this is also a theory, but I think it plays into this.

What I term little sister syndrome.

So if you go back a few decades when most people were marrying and settling down early 20s and starting a family,

for the man, there weren't that many younger sisters in in the dating market yet.

You're probably going to marry someone closer to your age, 18 plus.

But as the dating window, that fatality curve has shifted more and more left,

of course, I don't necessarily literally mean the sister of the one you're with right now, but that generation is suddenly interesting to you.

There's a distraction there.

There's more options, which itself may induce part of the delay.

Oh, right.

Okay.

So the reason that guys, women that are saying, you know, I'm ready to commit or I'm ready to start a family.

And he just keeps using it next year.

We'll go next year.

We'll go next year.

Well, if he knows

subliminally or consciously that he's 35, dating 32, but he's seen quite a lot of 27 and 25, and they look pretty fucking fertile and hot to trot.

You're like,

maybe it'll just hold off just a little bit.

And then the trade-out happens.

So this is really interesting because

women are the ones mostly, not just that men's fertility drops with age as well.

That's why I froze my sperm this year.

Because women are more

restricted in terms of their ability to reproduce.

They have a much harder and faster line.

Men who do this

like

holding pattern dynamic thing where guy of 30 gets into a relationship with girl of twenty seven, they stay together for five years, then he trades down for a younger woman, that still allows younger women to have a child with older man, but that kicks older partner out potentially out the top of the mating pool and means that it's unfortunately desirability for women is at least slightly correlated with age, and that means that the dating market is going to be tougher for her to step into, uh and that means that the likelihood of them now falling off the end of this reproductive window is greater.

Yep.

But there's another impact to this as well.

Brilliant.

Which is that that one woman who now is reaching the end of her likely fertility window, for every woman, there's also a man who is also, in effect, also checking out.

Now, men can have children with more than one woman, which is a slight blur of this, but that's not that many overall.

So again, it comes back.

So if you look at the vitality curve for men and women,

men have the same shape curve, but not quite as high a peak and more stretched.

But you can see that these curves are linked together.

So,

whatever is happening to women ultimately is happening to men too.

But can I just

come back to

this waiting game that's going on in people's 20s?

So, if you take

a 20-year-old today, let's say a 20-year-old man for a second,

and maybe he's got his first girlfriend, or thinking about it.

He's probably not thinking she's the girl I'm going to have kids with

because that's 10 years later, or maybe more.

Where does that come from?

Where does that 10 years later?

Because the vitality curve, looking at the average age of parenthood in a society, the societal norm or people, this cohesiveness around the central age,

on average, there are exceptions, but it's all in in this curve.

Mostly, young men are not thinking she's the one for life, she's the one to have kids with.

And she's also not thinking the same thing.

So then you get to a point of, I imagine, and this might be more your expertise than mine, that

men in early 20s are thinking, well, what's the point of dating at all?

Really, why make any commitment of any kind?

In fact,

what's the point of even being in the dating game at all compared to becoming in Japan at Otoku, someone stays at home and plays gaming machines?

And you have neats here, you have so many other social things these days, you know,

infidels, femsels, all of these things.

I believe those are downstream of the fertility crisis of delayed parenthood because nature didn't design it for people to sit idly in their 20s.

I mean,

we can't assume that shifting this period of having family 10 years out would be without some social impact.

Yeah, I think it's an interesting one.

At least where that comes into land,

for me, the tall girl problem, as I've come to call it, raising socioeconomic standards that women have got and hypergamy, those two together means that there's an ever-increasing cohort of high-performing women competing for ever-decreasing cohort of ultra-high-performing men above and across from them.

The research doesn't seem to be great at kind of reducing hypergamy down.

Hey, women, if you're outperforming men socioeconomically, maybe you should be looking to date a little bit lower.

It's even difficult to try and

separate out education from employment.

That a woman with a degree or a master's dating a blue-collar worker who earns more than her, but is less educated, there's some complications in that too.

So men can't even compensate for undereducation with overemployment in that regard.

So the whole it doesn't matter, dude, go and get your apprenticeship.

You can earn more money as a co- or whatever.

Sometimes that doesn't work because people tend to mate within their education band.

Like

that, to me, at least seems to be one of the big drivers of this imbalance in early age.

It's one of the reasons that you're getting older guys dating younger women because by that, you're able to compensate so much more socioeconomically that it does

flip that imbalance.

But given that people date assortatively within their education band and two women for every one man are completing a U.S.

college degree.

Like that,

that's just raw data again on this that isn't great for mating when it comes to sort of the relational aspect of this.

The thing, just to kind of round out the women point that we came into earlier on, I saw a really interesting reaction to Taylor Swift getting engaged.

Taylor Swift got engaged to Travis Kelsey.

She has been, I think, for a lot of women, a

kind of permanent breakup artist for a very long time, you know, sort of over a decade now, she's been singing about the machinations and challenges of a woman going through the world of makeup and breakup and heartbreak.

And I saw a bunch of different threads and forums talking about how it's such a shame that Taylor had got engaged because she was going to be such a wonderful role model for child-free women.

Now,

that makes sense if she wanted to be child-free.

And she still may.

Her and Travis may decide to not have kids.

Something tells me that that's not going to be what happens.

First question: First off, I think that there is going to be a bump in your vitality curve if Taylor Swift gets pregnant

just because of that mimetic, like you see mothers around you, that means that you get more mothers thing.

Like, I just think that's going to be, you know, I'm sure that some group of women lost weight when Adele lost weight.

And Lizzo, right?

You know, like people that are in the public eye that do a thing, you end up doing that thing too.

But the other side of this is,

I think a lot of the conversation, the question that I have is, why is the conversation

that is so pro

or so antinatalist specifically for women that you don't need to have kids, you're being forced into a family, if it's the case that four out of five women

that fall off their reproductive window and didn't intend to not have kids,

how can it be the case that the

talking point online encouraging women to not have kids, why is that not being pushed back against?

Your four in five women that aren't, that are childless, didn't intend to be?

Yeah.

So I've come to see

a huge divide, a lack of

empathy,

understanding between

those people

who want kids and those people who simply don't to a point I think often they can't understand each other.

If you don't want kids, it's hard to understand why anybody would want to get up three times during the night for the first three years of your kid's life and you know, have to transport them to every after-school activity for a couple of decades.

And on the other side, if you do have that strong desire to children, it's really quite hard, I think, to understand completely why someone just doesn't have that desire.

So, I think part of this is fueled by this lack of empathy and understanding.

But it goes deeper than that.

I mean, anti-natalism is alive and well.

And,

you know, it's one of those things hiding in plain sight.

But it certainly touches me, you know, when I get heckled by a professor in Japan, as I was recently, you know, a British professor of strategic thinking, I believe it was,

came into a class of Japanese young students while I was talking about

this subject and started hurling

questions at me without letting me respond or been canceled at Cambridge University because

that happened, I think, just after a podcast.

That

it was too controversial a topic.

Well, where is that coming from?

Why is it that people want to make it their business to tell other people not to have children?

And I believe it has come from sources, sources that had good funding back in the 60s and 70s.

The person you referred to earlier, who was telling people that they should be locked up if they have more than two children in America, that was Paul Ehrlich, who wrote the book Population Bomb, and clips of him saying that are in the documentary.

But the funding for that came from some very substantive foundations.

And those organizations are still there.

I show in the documentary the latest part how in the U.S.,

Paul Ehrlich's non-profit organization is still alive in what

Population Connection

of DC.

And they boast that they teach, provide materials to 3 million high school children per year based on.

What's their justification?

Why do they want fewer people to exist?

Well, I think they're locked in time.

You know, talking to them,

they are affable people.

They will, you know, tell you how wonderful kind of it can be to have a child, but then tell you 20 reasons why you might not want to.

And then they have a very, I would say,

clever tactic of pointing to stats of people in Africa and showing pictures of here's an Afghan man marrying his 10-year-old bride, and then suddenly telling you, but you can do what you want.

So there's this undertone.

Now, they are part of a group, and I'm happy to state it because the CEO told me that they do not inform people about birth rate decline.

I would say to anybody listening to this who themselves or knows a volunteer working for organizations like that,

stop

because you are telling half-truths to young people.

Find an organization that's telling the full truth.

about exactly what's happening.

And particularly when it comes to sex education, we're very good at telling young people how to avoid pregnancy, and that's a good thing.

What we're not good at all is telling people there's a fertility window, and by the way, you've a lot to cram into your 20s.

And by the way, here's the real data on the likelihood of becoming a parent at age 30 or 35.

15% at 35 is fucking insane.

That's so wild.

That's optimistic.

What do you make of people who celebrate women having fewer children?

I don't understand it.

I mean, I really

evil.

If people don't want children,

they shouldn't have them.

If people are having fewer children because they themselves have decided to have, well, fewer than what?

There is an organization in the UK

who

come out with this mantra: people should have fewer children than they want.

So I asked the question online: well, what happens if you only want one child?

If you have fewer children, I want.

And they repeated, oh, people should have fewer children than they want.

Well, whatever the math is, let's say you wanted four children.

Okay, you know, I'm indoctrinated now from this message as a teenager, I'll have three.

I'm hearing it again, so I'll have two.

You know, you can see the direction.

I mean, this, I mean, nihilism is out there and it's real.

Some people

do state.

I think after the documentary came out, there was one nihilist

channel on YouTube who reviewed my documentary and they sat through and watched it all together.

And it was just interesting seeing these people who genuinely believe that humanity should become extinct.

That's a very different perspective.

It is.

Right.

Yeah.

So I had a conversation with Alex O'Connor recently and he explained there's a bunch of different brands of anti-natalism.

There are some that are so extreme, a very few.

There's some that are so extreme that

once you're alive, you should kill yourself.

Like that's a very particular to, I guess that's like anti-humanism in some sort of a way.

That's a real, so if you're that anti-natalist, if you were super, super antinatalist, you'd be like, well, even though I'm alive, I should no longer be alive because you are impacting the planet by that.

So, you know, you can put your money where your mouth is if you don't want that many people on the planet.

No.

And then you sort of move forward to

people like David Benatar.

If you're familiar with him, it'd be fascinating for you to look at.

So his philosophical position is basically that suffering is more painful than pleasure is enjoyable.

And most of human life is some suffering which outweighs the pleasure.

And he's got some other sort of squirrely ideas.

And he's a philosopher, like an anti-latinist philosopher.

A little tough to wrap your head around at times.

So again, like impact is going to be at least moderated.

But then there's places like stophavingkids.org who hold rallies here in Austin, Texas.

Yeah, I think when you ask the question, like,

what are the impacts of people not having kids or of people having fewer children?

There's two buckets as far as I can see.

One is the personal.

So, what does this do for men and women who reach a later age and don't have a family, who reach the end of their life and haven't gone through the process of having a family?

Like, that's one.

And then the other is the macro.

It's like, what does this do to the human race?

What does this do to economics, politics, culture, so on and so forth?

Is that how you come to think about the impact?

Yes.

Yes, I think it's a very good way.

And often we only think about the macro.

And I think those people who are,

you know,

I guess protesting about other people having children, I think they have been fed information that these macro problems are so vast that

they obscure any sense that there is a micro problem in in personal people's lives.

People don't yet understand the level of desire there is to have children.

Especially given that the people who are child-free by choice are very vehement about it and they knew.

So I think you have the,

it's such a, there is an asymmetry in the sexiness of the argument, right?

But even, Chris, I have to say,

I hate that term.

Child-free by choice?

Child-free.

The idea you put the word, we don't say pet-free.

I don't have a dog.

I'm not pet-free.

That's just not the term we would even think think of using.

If I don't go on vacation this year, I'm not vacation-free because you have the hassle of booking the flights and your packing, whatever else.

The term free was attached to the word child by ideologists, certain waves of feminism, going back to the -

and you have relinquished yourself from it.

Right.

And the reason I don't like it, oh, there's many reasons I don't like it, to be honest with you.

With the term free, we use for disease-free, you know,

debt-free, stress-free, universal negatives.

We don't put free

after something that actually most of us want.

But it goes further than that.

There are people who do not have children by choice, childless by choice, I call them, who also don't like that term.

Two of them are school teachers I know who said to me, I would never use that term.

It's a horrible term.

I could never tell my class that I'm child-free.

So I don't know.

I think it's another example how this

ideological anti-nathalism in whatever flavor has been allowed to seep into the psyche.

Yeah,

like I say, I think that there's a real,

it's a little bit of a messy argument to try and get across.

And it's not the sort of thing that you can say instantly

because you've got the macro and the personal occurring separately.

So someone will say, well, you should stop having kids because of the environment, right?

There's too many people on the planet or because of carbon emissions or something like that.

And one of the costs of that, let's say that that is true.

I actually don't think it is.

I think it's like 0.04% over the next 200 years if you, you know, if population stays the same versus decreases.

But let's say that you do say that and you're like, okay, well, what are the costs to that person individually?

Like, well, relationally,

the 80% of women don't have kids, didn't want to have kids, grieving, families that never had, et cetera.

But then you can go the other way too, and you can say the girl with a list on TikTok, did you ever see that?

Nice Nice girl who wrote 350 reasons about

everything from can't go to brunch with the girls to can't wear cute heels to literally a parasite growing inside of you.

It's like every bad thing.

And then it was, you know, eight pages of reasons not to, and then half a sheet of A4 of why you should.

And that's somebody who is talking about the personal, but not thinking about the macro, that's not thinking about the impact economically, politically, so on and so forth.

And other impact

that people often don't think about is, I mean,

we're talking,

I remember we had this in the last podcast, this analogy of like, people imagine you can glide down to some better optimal population number.

There's too many people here today.

How many?

Oh, maybe 1 billion.

We're just going to glide down.

It doesn't work that way.

It's a collapsing spiral of ever-decreasing births.

So births half over a certain period of time, depending on the birth rate.

South Korea, it's every 18 years.

In the UK, right now, it's 55 years.

In the US, it's probably similar.

So we're talking halving of births in decades.

I'm 37, so potentially in my lifetime, I'm going to see 150 million people in the US.

Births.

Yes, births.

So, yeah, there'll be a ton of older people.

Yes, yes, yes.

But if you look at the birth numbers, they will be, you know, instead of 4 million right now,

on current patterns, it's going to be closer to 2 million in the US.

But it doesn't stop there.

That's the point.

Then it halves again and again and again.

So even if you're one of the people who think, no, I still am happy for us to not glide, but this kind of roller coaster downward, that's a good thing.

I think you should really be thinking about, okay, maybe.

Just how vertical is this line?

Yes.

And how would we stop it if we wanted to?

Because we're in this kind of, it's not a glider.

We're sparkling down.

The engines are off.

And there's no pilot.

There's no manual as to how to revert.

Can you give me

an overview of what the macro impacts of declining population size over the next couple of centuries is going to be?

Over the next few decades?

Well, I can because, you know, eight years now in Japan, you know, I'm living it.

And if you're in the center of Tokyo,

mostly you won't see it.

You'll probably notice relatively few children around.

But you go into the suburbs of Tokyo.

Never mind going into the rural, decaying towns.

Let's just take

a suburb of Tokyo Tokyo that going back to the 70s was burgeoning.

Apartments were built there, luxury apartments for 10,000 people.

Now, those apartments are still fully occupied, 98% occupied.

I show this in the documentary.

But now it's old people,

many of whom are old women living alone.

No children around.

The playgrounds are kind of grassed over, you know, long grass.

And the most moving moment in making my entire documentary, and there were many,

was going there to film and being told by some locals that the week before a 90-year-old woman had jumped off the roof because she was lonely.

And then going to talk to a pharmacy and the local grocer.

To be told, oh, yeah, this happens every week.

So you realize that the impact is not the total number of people.

The impact, to me, is the loneliness and I think the mental disorders that come through that loneliness for people who don't have family.

And even those who do have family, where we lose as a community, we're in shrinking worlds.

If children move away, and they mostly will, they want to find somewhere more vibrant

where we're going to have these decaying worlds.

Now,

I've I've worked on projects in Japan

and

talked to mayors,

municipalities,

and the heartbreak in their face is the gloom because

they know that

their future.

I came up with a term actually this morning.

I just wrote an article for the spectator.

And I came up with the term futurehood.

I think, you know, I've been spending a little bit of time in Hanoi, Vietnam.

And

I've really enjoyed just spending a little bit of time in a vibrant nation with energy and youth.

It was crazy the first time I was there.

And it was like, no, this has got something Japan is missing, Europe is missing.

And it's that youth energy.

People in Vietnam don't worry about their future.

They know they have a future.

They can see it around them through the construction, through the building work.

You go to Japan, and that futurehood, that sense there is a future, which I think underlines nationhood is gone.

And these mayors and these municipalities are making tough decisions as to what services do I cut next?

How am I going to keep that bus service to that town?

5,000 schools have closed in Japan in the last 15 years, an average two per day.

You take a school away, communities disappear.

Looking at total headcount is another distraction, I think, that has been,

you know,

everything's stacked against us, actually, because it's too easy to, you know, play with numbers if you're an anti-natalist, just focusing on, oh, look at the total headcount of the planet, or look at the total headcount of the U.S., we'll be fine, without realizing as you peel away the layers, the economic infrastructure is one of decay.

And then behind all of that,

what I worry about,

have you seen the movie or read the book, Children of Men?

Yep.

So when we're making the documentary, one of the film crew kept telling me, wow, you should watch Children of Man.

And the title didn't really stand out to me as something like, Why of Man?

Because what I was talking about to the crew was, oh, it's going to become this really gloomy world.

A world without children.

You know, that's not a positive thing when you literally

see your world in decay.

And there seems to be no way out of it.

And Children of the Man just shows that, I think, perfectly.

Different storyline, perhaps, but

not that far off.

So I worry about despondency.

And I think it comes back.

So why am I even sitting here?

Why am I not kind of closing up research saying we're done and that's it?

Well, there is hope.

And that hope lies with the youth.

It lies in new bubbles of people in their 20s saying, you know what?

I'm just going to resequence life.

I'm going to figure out a way to do this, to have family at the same time.

And the power that younger people are going to have, given they're a shrinking shrinking number in many nations, I think will mean employers will have to follow them and say, do you know what?

I will give you that sabbatical to have children.

And the real,

I think,

game changer in all of this comes back to education.

I would love to take a year out of high school and a year out of college.

I think people should be in the workforce by 21.

And let's have people start their lives and get established at a younger age.

Well, less education, that's not a good thing.

No, no, I mean, switch the education model to lifelong learning.

I go back to college.

I still do, haven't for a couple of years, but I just love going back.

I used to come to the U.S.

summer schools for three or four years, studying psychology and game theory and all sorts of other things that were of interest.

I think switching our education pathways.

And why would universities, colleges, education boards want to do this?

Well, the reality is that universities around the world are faced with an ever-shrinking number of potential students.

Switching to lifelong learning is actually a pretty smart move if I were a college.

Let's have someone

go through some form of

associate degree, certification, community college system,

something similar to this, but then be able to come back later in life.

And for some people, it might be after they become parents.

Even if you do enable that, even if you get people into the workforce early, you still have this huge cultural swing, this sort of massive narrative that specifically for women,

when you just got access to higher education, you were just allowed, the gender pay gap is still a thing.

We haven't even reached parity yet.

So, what, you're saying that you're going to give up this thing that you just got access to?

It certainly seems, at least with regards to Korea, that's one of the reasons the birth rate did decline, that they got access to education but not employment.

And then, when they got through the higher education, arrived into employment and weren't selected or promoted by what was still a pretty sort of misogynistic culture that didn't see women as in the same sort of equal way, perhaps, to be able to get them access into these higher paying jobs, that they said, well, fuck this.

Like, I'm not even going to bother.

So I understand.

And it would be great to start people off early.

They don't need to stay in education as long.

I mean, the American education system, what is it, some 50% of people that are leaving high school don't have like an eighth grade reading level and all this stuff.

I don't think that you need to be in education this long to not get the results that you're supposed to be getting.

We can definitely make changes there.

But that's like

this is a huge multivariate problem.

I have to guess that the countries that take this seriously earlier are going to be the ones that are going to benefit, and the ones that don't are going to be very self-defeating.

Yeah, and that's part of my frustration with Japan.

I'm losing confidence in many countries.

I've been

able to talk to

a lot of people who are in a position to do something about this.

Government ministers, several prime ministers, presidents.

I collaborate with the former president of Hungary and a nonprofit to increase awareness of this worldwide.

But yet no one really yet is doing anything.

But it's changing.

So

your point about education, I want to come back to that if I can.

Women's education.

I mean, you already give the example that two out of three

undergraduate students in the U.S.

are female.

And I think men have a higher dropout rate as well.

Well, you take Thailand.

What percentage of women in Thailand get college degrees?

55%.

Men, 30%.

You know, Thailand.

So the idea that women have something to catch up on in terms of education is, it looks like no longer the case.

So I don't think it's a very good argument for people to say we're going to take education away from women necessarily if everyone shifts to lifelong learning.

I'm talking about men and women shifting to lifelong learning.

And

again, why am I

doing this?

The comments I have from young people in particular, I talk to colleges, universities, speeches,

the shock that they have such a low likelihood of becoming a parent in their 30s is so intense.

I can see in their eyes, they're going to make the right decision for themselves.

And very often, that's going to be, do you know what?

I don't really want to go to the office and report to a boss for 30 years and not have a child.

I'm making sure I do that first.

And,

you know, I call myself a pan-natalist

because I don't like being called pro-natalist, and I'm certainly not anti-natalist.

Pan-natalist, meaning I support those who want to have children, to have the children they want to have, and those people who don't want children not to have the children that they don't want to have.

So, ultimately, you know, I'm on the fence in terms of what people actually choose.

It's not my

role to tell someone anything, but I think giving young people the information so they can sequence their lives what is right for them is part of what

part of the answer here.

What happens to GDP of countries and the world if this continues?

What happens to quality of life?

Yeah.

I want to get some big macro shit out there.

Yeah.

You know, GDP, you can talk about GDP.

Well, that's going to shrink if there's fewer people.

And then someone will say, well, it's GDP per person

that matters.

You know, a number of people glide down.

You know,

what does it matter?

Because there's going to be fewer and fewer of us anyway.

But no, you see, the services that we provide through taxes are locked in at a much higher level.

They cannot scale down because older people need more health care and need pensions.

And in most nations, the pensions are paid in whilst people work go into the government kitty

and are paid out to current retirees.

So the idea that economically this will not hurt

is simply wrong.

And in terms of

my biggest concern,

and I don't don't know how we're going to figure this one out,

is investment.

Investment drives growth.

Give a concrete example.

Well, you know,

30 years ago, I studied an MBA,

and the entire MBA was about growth markets.

How to find a product that would grow, how to create a company that would grow, the importance of growth.

And why does someone invest?

Why Why does an individual invest?

Why do pension funds invest?

It's going to go up.

It's going to go up.

They don't invest because it's going to go down.

So the appetite for investment in anything

is, well, perhaps old people's products like diapers for, you know, for the elderly, for a time.

So the appetite for investment, by definition, for me, will reduce.

And what can be called this degrowth model, or I'd like to call it retronomics, know, retrofitting economies continually for an ever-shrinking size for diminishing returns.

I don't know how that's going to work.

And if you take away investment, what does that do to jobs?

So people will say, well, sure, we haven't talked much about AI.

Thank goodness AI is around, right?

Robotics.

Thank goodness we have some way of increasing productivity.

Because you know, one thing that isn't going to shrink with GDP is our national debts.

Those are locked in.

And

by definition, I did the numbers for the US very recently.

It might be

thousands of dollars per worker per year are paid in interest on the national debt.

And that number is only going up because the national debt's going up in the US, like effectively every country.

Now, if there's a shrinking number of workers to pay that off, what happens to our next generation?

So effectively, what we've been doing as nations,

and I don't think people have been doing this willingly, so I don't blame the boomers.

I don't blame it's just the reality of where we are.

We were boring money against our future

for the present.

And it's the next generations who are going to have to burden that.

Yeah, there's an embedded growth obligation.

If you have an increasing debt, the assumption is at some point we'll outgrow our own debt.

So, growth has to occur in the future.

This is the mad thing about the economics, especially given that a lot of the pushback, I think, against talking about birth rate decline comes from progressive-leaning individuals who are very concerned with quality of life, especially for people toward the bottom rung of society and inequality, two things that they really care about or are supposed to really care about.

Well, if you have a decreasing GDP, if you have a worsening economic model,

what do you think that does to quality of life?

And who do you think it is that's going to be I'm going to be fine?

You're going to be fine.

All of the people that are educated and have wealth are largely going to be fine, lots of problems as well, but they're going to to be more fine than the people who were relying very heavily on a social safety net that was paid into by taxes from an ever-dwindling workforce that's now being pulled up more by pensions and healthcare that needs to support old people.

And if you say, well, fucking hell, at least we've got AI and robotics.

Well, what about the second thing that you're worried about, which is inequality?

Who do you think is going to capture all of the economic gains from that?

It's the 10 companies that own all of the chips and all of the compute and all of the AI systems and all of the robotics.

Yeah, fucking Jason from an NVIDIA is going to be fine.

Sam from OpenAI is going to be swimming.

But this

decrease, it's the two things that progressive people are supposed to care about the most, that as far as I can see, and I'm totally open to being wrong, I am an idiot, but economically, those seem to be the two things that are going to be impacted the most.

People at the bottom rung of society are going to be cared for less because it's fewer resources and more are taken by people who are older.

And if you do rely on the one technology that could be a bit of an escape velocity to pull us out of this thing, where do you think those gains are going to be captured?

They're not going to be redistributed down by these amazing companies.

This company contributes 10% of all productivity in the United States, this one robotics company or this one AI company.

Okay, you now have the most powerful company in American history that's running this thing.

And this is something that I wanted to get on to.

Why do you think that talking about birth rate decline is right-wing coded?

To me it's not from where i come come from um but you but you've got the same accusations that i do right yeah for sure um

so i think on one level

there are people on the right

uh who are aligned with the idea of family

and uh you know i often their perspectives come from a good place often it's uh some religious perspective um

so you do get this weight from the right, I think, where family is in some way prioritized, not just for religious reasons.

But I think on the left,

you have multiple ideologies that were linked in some way to the idea of exploding populations, too many people on the earth, etc.

So,

you know, you know, I'm on record saying you have a daughter and two sons, and I will do everything for my daughter as much as my boys in terms of whatever I'm capable of.

So in that sense, yeah, I'm maybe a first wave feminist, you know, maybe second wave, depending on how it's defined.

Education is wonderful for women.

Opportunities are wonderful.

But there are waves of feminism out there that really

I think are anti-motherhood.

At their core, they don't understand or don't want to understand motherhood.

And they will use things like the patriarchy.

You know, women are only having children because men are forcing them to.

I've literally had that stated

in a debate.

Despite the fact that four out of five women who fall off their reproductive window didn't intend to not be childless.

Right.

And then they start

getting

accusational about, oh, you're using the wrong survey.

And they kind of have all this fuzzy data to try and support that.

But there are these ideologies therefore that are threatened by the idea that actually 90% of people want women.

That's just people on the right.

That's the right, the middle, and the left.

And then you have environmentalists, which may be, I don't know, maybe more left-centered often, who have been indoctrinated in some cases.

I think it is that, that we need less people on the planet because we can't possibly sustain the idea of

people having families and simply polluting the earth less.

So you have the left, I think, that's going through this exercise of trying to remap its prior views on many things, like gender pay gap,

the environment, and many other things.

But

it's changing and it has to change because the left will be left behind.

Well, let's not forget.

The Democratic National Convention had free vasectomies happening outside of it.

I didn't know that.

Free vasectomies in a van, like a bus, like a vasectomy bus.

Open to being told that this was right.

But I mean, this was reported fucking everywhere.

So I'm downstream of a lot of people reporting incorrectly if that's the case.

I know what you're about to say.

Anyone that's taken the behavioral genetics red pill understands that your political ideology is at least partly heritable.

That means that the children of left-leaning parents are more likely to be left-leaning themselves because they have a personality inherited from their parents, which is independent from the environment that they were brought up in, which predisposes them also to left-leaning beliefs.

This means if you are anti-natalist, but also pro-progressive,

you are self-defeating.

That is ideological fucking seppuku, right?

Because

you have to assume that in the future, the pro-natalist ideologies, subcultures, groups of people, the religious, the conservative, the fucking Amish, they're fine.

Look at Israel, right?

Like, you know, there are small pockets that are fine, I imagine, but they're in an overall decreasing vitality curve.

Who do you think inherits the future?

Who do you think inherits the future culturally, ideologically, religiously, politically?

If you really care, I mean, it's a difficult argument to be made.

Like, if you really care about progressivism, you should turn against all the people that are progressive that say you shouldn't have kids and you should start having kids.

But that's the future.

The future will be inherited by the children of the people who have children, shock, horror, and they will be predisposed to a particular type of ideology based on this.

And I'm like,

am I fucking high here?

Like, does nobody else see this?

You are saying we care about democratic

ideals.

The DNC is here to help move America forward in the right direction.

But this denial of the fact that heritability is something that even exists in behavioral genetics is like fucking pseudoscience.

Sure.

We can see how long that gets you moving through the future.

You're encouraging your supporters

to cease themselves from being able to have kids.

So in terms of who inherits the earth,

it's interesting you mentioned the Amish.

It's interesting

you mention Israel.

Israel I know a bit about.

I imagine the Amish

have very low child insist rates, probably larger families.

But also I imagine that their vitality curve, I imagine they have their own, and it's way left shifted because people are starting families younger.

Yeah.

Cultural cohesion.

Right.

Israel doesn't have cultural cohesion.

And I haven't been to Israel.

I certainly would like to go at some point.

But you can see in the data, there's more than one Israel because 15% of mothers there are having six or more children, but you also have 20% childlessness.

So you can see, okay, there's multiple vitality curves inside Israel.

So who will inherit the earth?

It's going to be those groups of people who have a vitality curve that is less left shifted towards probably the average age of motherhood being 25 or less.

And the challenge, therefore, I think, if we are, if the conservatives are to get a little bit smug saying, well, we will inherit the earth, that's only true if conservatives start having children younger.

If you're saying we're going to have more children, but you're still keeping your vitality curve at age 30,

this is effectively a law of nature.

You're not going to match with the person you wanted to match for all the reasons we've already talked about.

So it comes down to,

you know, you talked about a movement earlier.

It's not, individuals cannot change this.

It has to be coordinated.

It has to be coordinated.

And I don't mean coordinated.

Someone's going to twist this that we want some coordinated parenting.

It's the same as the unfortunate term enforced monogamy.

We're talking about encouraged monogamy, not coerced monogamy.

We're talking about encouraged vitality curve, not enforced vitality curve.

Yes.

And I think, again, it can happen because

I get sent photographs of babies.

Quite a lot of people watch the documentary.

It's heartwarming.

You know,

I was at the ARC event in London speaking there this year, and this lady came with a pram ran up to me and said, you know, I wanted to show you my baby, I want to show you my baby.

It tells me that once people are aware of the risks of delayed parenthood, I mean, that's another way of expressing it, it's a risk of delayed parenthood,

that this

movement

will naturally happen.

It has to be natural, that people, and then the left has a challenge of what do they do.

And we're already seeing one of the most heartening moments to me was earlier this year in Porto,

there's an organization called the OSCE, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, 57 nations.

They have a parliamentary

assembly, 350 members, includes the U.S., Canada, every European nation, North African nations, and east as far as Mongolia.

And a demographic resolution was

added to the overall declaration.

was able to give a speech and meet some of these politicians the day before.

It passed unanimously.

Left, center, and right.

What was the demographic resolution?

It was that we need to take seriously what you and I are talking about, accept that we have got a demographic challenge, support people who want to have children better than we're doing now, increase awareness amongst younger people in terms of education of the fertility curve,

et cetera, et cetera.

And to see that resolution pass unanimously,

I was speechless and heartened that actually now.

Well, yeah, but that's at the macro level.

That's at the level of, that's at the level of countries that are able to stare down the barrel of economic shrinkage in the face of climbing debt, that are going to be looking at infrastructure being increasingly relied upon by an old population, fewer young people, towns that are just completely abandoned.

This was the craziest thing that you taught me one of the times that we spoke.

It might have even been in Qatar when we did that.

Me and you were there having breakfast over the top of this big courtyard.

And I was like, well, what happens to a country if the population decreases do you just end up with half the number of people in each town you said no no no no you end up with the same number of people Manhattan's gonna have eight million people yeah

but there's gonna be towns everywhere that have no one yeah because the infrastructure has to it's more economically uh efficient to do it that way um just on the environment point that you made before A new paper argues that reducing the size of the human population would have close to zero effect on climate change.

A baby born today will have a similar carbon footprint than one born a decade or two ago, and that kid's carbon footprints will be even smaller.

As a result of population momentum, population numbers won't decline for several generations, and by the time they do, people's carbon footprints may be negligible anyway.

The authors estimate that population reduction would lower global temperatures by 0.05%

Celsius, 0.05 degrees Celsius compared to population stabilization.

Yeah, there's another factor as well, which is if you decide today, as a young person, you're not going to have a child because of the environment.

Well,

your child actually actually doesn't start contributing to emissions at all until I think it's mid-20s is really when they start to become economically productive.

We're already living in a planet that is past peak child.

We're already on the way down.

So for me, it is just a fool's game to try and think that not having children, given that the vast majority of people want them and often desperately want them, I think it's a fool's game to bring the environment into this, unless you're an anti-natalist and decide to spin this in some way.

Yeah, you're using a lie about the impact on climate, that population reduction would be 0.05 degrees Celsius, unless you're using lying about those stats and then saying that we shouldn't have kids because of the environment, because people believe that.

And then that is the way to sneak your antinatalist policy in under the guise of being caring about the climate.

So on this exact topic,

the worst ever chart I have seen in science.

In future, I'm into data, as you may have guessed.

And in future, I'd love to see a museum of data science.

And I said before that, you know, in the basement, there would be the naughty room, you know, the

seller for bad data.

And then the center would be this one chart.

And on the chart, you've got these small circles, the impact of...

one flight a year, the impact of driving 100 kilometers, all these things.

They're all little circles, let's say grape size.

And then you have this giant grip fruit in the center, you know, the effect of having one child.

And then you read the footnote notes and it's from some study and you go to that study and it's based on another study.

And what they did was work out

the cost of a child's emissions over their entire lifetime.

plus the fact that they were assumed to have two children.

So their children's emissions and their children's children and their children's children's children's children.

And they lumped them all together.

So it's one flight or the entirety of your future.

Your dynasty for the next couple of hundred years.

And this was published in The Guardian and many, many other.

Can you do, you evaded it earlier on, and I have to assume that was because of something that was diplomatic.

You have to know the numbers.

Based on current fertility rates and your predicted decline,

what do the next few decades and the next couple of centuries look like in terms of total global population?

Yeah, I did evade it because I try and stay away from total headcounts.

Yeah, sorry.

I'm going to keep my foot on you here.

Sure.

So

without interventions, without changes.

Yeah.

I think we're going to peak 10 billion-ish.

When is that?

About 2,100?

No, but I think sooner than.

I think 2060 is really.

I think the rate of decline when you see what's happening in India, when you see what's happening in sub-Saharan Africa, is much faster than expected.

And

we're then going to go through a period of not rapid decline at all

because

there will be more people living longer.

That will continue.

Flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat, flat.

There we go.

And when's that start to happen?

Oh, I mean,

if you're interested, and I'm not sure why anybody would necessarily be focused on total headcount in the year 2100, but it's going to be that far out.

And I say that because at that time, so many people are going to be old retirees unless we have some

technology to, and we may well do.

Reinvigorate.

A hundred-year-olds might be having kids, but then we might be in a whole new world, but we're really into a world of science fiction there that we can't imagine.

So for me, so there's a number I like to share, and it's in my paper.

It's the societal half-life, S-H-L.

And I think it should be stated every time a birth rate is quoted.

So South Korea, I mentioned it earlier.

South Korea's birth rate of around 0.75 now, I believe, means a societal half-life half-life of 20 years.

So births are going to half every 20 years, but then eventually everything will half, the economy will half, the number of consumers will half, the number eventually of old people will have, but by that time the number of children will have halved again, probably several times.

You know, most of the developed world, including the U.S., are going to be halving in terms of births every 50 to 60 years.

China, it's probably 40 years right now.

That, to me, when I talk to mayors and governments around the world, I think is more meaningful.

That what you're planning now for infrastructure, for tax base, for whatever it is,

is going to half in this.

And of course, it's not like you wait 50 years and then suddenly it halves.

That path is starting now.

And of course, immigration comes into it.

And

just to cover that,

I'm a migrant myself, so are you in a sense?

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm certainly not against migration.

I think each country has got its own entire right to decide the level of immigration that's right for them and what context.

In Japan, it's very low, though that's changing quite rapidly.

Other nations, like the US, historically, it's been relatively high.

But the idea that you can patch over birth rate decline with immigration is another fool's game.

So you take a nation right now that becomes dependent on fresh workers because its birth rate is so low,

like Germany, Italy, for many decades now.

You get to a situation eventually where those retirees are those immigrants will retire, of course.

And you need to look after them.

Of course, they need taken care of like everybody else.

So,

what do you need with falling birth rates?

More immigrants who then get older.

So, the number of old people will never decrease.

The one thing you might say is a benefit to Japan, the number of old people will eventually decrease.

So,

maybe you accept, okay, we need perpetual migration from where?

You know, another.

Coming from Brazil.

Well, India is going to need its own immigrants very soon.

I mean, we're already at a point where there are ghost towns in India

of people living alone.

And the competition for migrants, especially perhaps the ones that most countries would best like to have, the more, the younger, the more able, the more educated, you know, countries will be offering free housing.

Maybe they are already in some cases, you would argue,

for people to come to simply support their decaying societies.

Two things that we haven't spoken about:

IVF, can that not fix this problem?

And the second one, adoption.

You're saying, people, good?

Yeah, yeah.

I've never had a drink like this before.

That's an element.

So it's

good.

It's like electrolytes, sodium, potassium, magnesium.

It's salty, but yeah, it is.

It's a weird, you know, this is the inverse of birth rate decline.

decline um because it's so salty and nice and sweet you want to drink more of it but as you drink more of it you want to drink more of it so it's this very strange yeah it's good it's really good for you natural uh sweetener it's it's fantastic total carbs one percent yeah yeah very good um

ivf adoption

well adoption we can maybe cover that first because it's an easy one um you know in the u.s

you've seen the this episode of the documentary i'm releasing can i say i'm releasing a full feature-length version of the documentary simply simply called BirthCap.

It's covered in part one and the whole thing through.

And

in it, you see adoption experts say that in the US, for every adoptable infant, there are 30 parents wanting to adopt 30 to one.

You have situations.

That's pairs of parents, 30 families.

Yeah, 30 families.

So the chance of adopting an infant, and the quote from the expert was that, you know, people giving away an infant for adoption these days is a very rare thing.

Most people are having the children they want to have, which was not the case decades ago.

Then you have other regulations,

certainly, I imagine, for good reason,

were

in some states in the U.S.

that children are not allowed to be formally adopted until, for example, eight years old.

Why?

Because reconciliation is promoted.

The parents who are perhaps drug addicts or divorced and have no money or whatever it is may change their minds or so might family members.

So they're put into foster homes until that age.

So now you're adopting an eight-year-old.

I guess most people would prefer to adopt a younger child.

Then you look at international adoption.

International adoption is down over 80%

in recent years.

Many countries in Africa, Latin America have closed their borders to international adoption.

What I mean mean by that is

poor countries exporting children, doing the Angelina Jolie thing.

Yeah.

And it all happened when there were some horrendous cases where I think it might have been,

if I recall, Russian babies were being brought to the US.

And in one or maybe two cases, horrendous things happened to those babies.

Russia shut its borders first, I believe.

And then many countries decide, you know, we can look after our own infants because countries,

you know, including Latin America, now have have a birth rate crisis.

They've got to.

Export your kids if you've got few young people.

Right.

Right.

And if you've got parents who are unable, we'll come on to IVF, unable to have children because they've tried IVF and it's not working.

So

the idea of international adoption, the idea of now, if you want to adopt, I didn't include this in the current documentary, but I have a lot of footage and I may release it at some point.

If you want to adopt in the US, there are children who are adoptable.

They're 13.

Probably, but even infants, but probably they're black.

And I know white parents have adopted black kids, but probably their parent was a drug addict living under a bridge.

And I'm not just saying that from, gosh, if anybody wants to call me a racist, I'm the wrong person to do that.

So please don't go there.

This is from adoption experts and from families who have adopted because black kids tend to be poorer.

There is a higher incidence, I believe, of drug abuse.

And unfortunately, there is

a higher likelihood of a black child being given up for adoption, whose mother may have been a drug addict.

So the idea of

adoption, and so many people in the documentary saying, oh, I'll just adopt.

Oh, if I can have a child later in life, I'll just adopt.

That's fantasy.

They're not available.

They're not anywhere.

No.

Yeah.

And they're going to be decreasingly

anywhere as well.

Absolutely.

IVF.

You know, this is, you know, I know people including close to me who have

had children, wonderful children, through IVF.

So you have to say it's wonderful.

But

there's a sad story.

And I shared a little bit of it earlier, which is when you look at the vitality curve, there's no uptick in people having children later.

So there's more people having children in their 40s, but overall,

the likelihood of having a child at some point in life has gone down.

So what we're not seeing, and I've heard it from multiple fertility doctors, again, the documentary, the horrendous reality of having to tell parents who've gone through the challenges of IVF is not easy.

You get pumped full of hormones

and you, you know, sometimes in multiple rounds.

And multiple rounds.

It's expensive.

Absolutely, with no guarantee of success.

For doctors having to tell people who've gone through that,

that it's failed, and people having to make the decision to give up

is harrowing.

But there's another group of people as well,

which is those people who

get to age 38, 40, 45

and

don't have a partner.

And I feel tired.

It's just things didn't line up.

I've got eggs, but not sperm.

And then if I do want to do this with a sperm donor into my eggs, I'm going to be on my own.

This wasn't the vision that I had for my family in any case.

My intention wasn't just to have kids.

My intention was to have a family.

Yeah.

That's right.

And

very often, again, coming from fertility experts, women later in life, into their 40s, are quite probably using donor eggs.

Fucking hell.

And donor sperm.

So this was at least a couple of interventions that I thought

I wrote a newsletter post a couple of weeks ago about the Cassandra complex, about being right but early, the pain of being right but early.

And

I think that birthright is one of the things that me and you are right but early on.

Not being right but early on that much stuff, but this is one of the ones that I'd bet a pretty good amount of money on.

And interestingly, like most things that you're right but early on, first off, you don't actually know, except for with demography, you do.

We know how many one-year-olds there are.

So I'm, you know.

I'm prepared to bet a good bit of the house on this thing being a good.

I don't understand how a shrinking population can't be a big deal.

I don't understand how it can't be bad economically, culturally, politically, socially, in terms of mental health for individuals, in terms of social cohesion, in terms of war and peace across the world.

All of these things, whether you're from the right or from the left, progressive, all of this, like whatever it is that you care about, declining birth rates are probably going to impact it.

I wrote this thing about

stuff that I'm right, but early on.

And I, you know, wrote about the difference between Copernicus and Galileo.

Do you know this story?

No.

Brilliant.

So Copernicus realizes that maybe the earth isn't the center of the sun, but he holds off from publishing his sort of groundbreaking work until basically his deathbed, and he sort of whispers it out, essentially.

100 years later, 100 years later, Galileo has the same insight, realizes that maybe the idea that everything circles around us isn't true, and he publishes it straight away.

What happens?

He's castigated by the church.

He's forced to recant.

He lives the rest of his life basically under house arrest.

So what you see is the pain of somebody who's right but early.

And the difference between Copernicus and Galileo is Copernicus was able to foresee the problem of being a Cassandra.

He was like,

I shouldn't talk about this.

I shouldn't.

And

the crazy thing is

the people who are enforcing the

restriction, the judgment, the castigation of anybody who decides to talk about this stuff

are

just straight up limiting, they are causing and inflicting future suffering on

all of the different dynamics.

I've mentioned that.

So, I've decided to, after I'd gone through all of these examples from history, germ theory of disease, the guy died in an asylum.

The lady who discovered DDT was mocked.

I was like, I better put some skin in the game.

Like, what are the things that I think I'm right, but early on?

And one of the things that I thought would be a positive social norm would be encouraging women at 21 to freeze their eggs.

And it's expensive, it's difficult, it's all of those things.

And it does not fix the problem entirely.

It only fixes one small dynamic of it.

But I think the more that, you know, because this is going to be richer girls.

I mean, actually, it currently gets 15 grand.

So like, you know, you've got to have a pretty rich family to be getting a 15 grand, 21-year-old birthday present.

But some people get cars and all the rest of it and stuff like like that.

And it's like, okay, maybe you pull 18, 19, 20, 21 together, and you do this thing.

I think that the more that there are movements like that, the more that they are linchpin moments that people huck into and think more seriously about fertility overall, that start to think about it earlier.

Well, why am I freezing my eggs?

I'm pumping.

Oh, fuck, that's why.

Because it's a big deal.

And because if it goes wrong, it goes wrong in a big way.

I'm not sure I exactly agree with that about egg freezing at 21 anymore.

I did think that,

but I worry that in doing so, it encourages people to wait.

And then they don't do the partner and we're back into the

yeah, I did foresee that.

I thought you would say that.

I frankly, I just don't have an answer.

I just, I'm, you know, not all of my ideas are going to be winners here, Stephen.

But the thing, you know, and again, going back to

you know why

being early

was important to me, and maybe also to you in this context.

It starts people talking about the topic.

And when we did the first podcast, people weren't talking about this in their classrooms, in their homes, with their friend groups at all.

I was at an event in Europe, a EU event, and we were being bussed

to an evening dinner.

It was linked to this OSCE event in Porto.

And I hadn't sit close to this 21-year-old young woman who,

wanted to know a little bit about what I did.

And I wasn't a politician, that interested therapist, almost everybody was.

I mentioned the documentary.

I said, you know, I'd love to come along sometime if you have a political event.

And all she said, we talk about this all the time.

This isn't new anymore.

We're talking about birth rates constantly.

And I think what, you know, starting to talk about whether it's about egg freezing or IVF or the GDP, or we've given people, in a sense,

an open door to actually start talking about a problem that otherwise I think was a very private thing.

Yeah, well, it is right.

Talking about your choices for starting a family, it feels like a very individual decision.

It feels like something that you have a lot of agency over.

It feels like this is my choice.

But based on the fact that the vitality curve has shifted and there hasn't been a staunch group of 21-year-olds that have just kept this peak in there, well, it shows that it's actually not, you don't have as much volition over this as you said.

And you're right.

Like, you choose if you are going to not have children.

That is something that you choose.

But you can't, it's going to be much more difficult to choose to have children, especially as a man.

We're going to get an egg donor for your sperm and a surrogate from, and I'm going to raise this child on my own as a solo father.

Like that, you know,

this is crazy world.

So

I guess a couple of other things.

IVG

in vitro

gametogenesis.

Okay.

So this is taking cells from anywhere on the body that you can then turn into pluripotent stem cells.

You can then turn into eggs that you can then fertilize.

So what you do there is it permits you, if you also

move in artificial wombs, you can basically from like, I'm not sure if it's quite skin cells, but basically any cell on the body

go through a sequence, turn that into an egg cell, then fertilize that with the

surplus of sperm that's floating around.

And then if you have the artificial womb too, away you go.

You basically have like, you know, the matrix where it's just banks and banks and banks of humans.

You do that.

I mean, we're really getting into sci-fi territory here.

Yeah, yes, but I can already answer that statistically,

given the data set of 300 million mothers

going back decades where IVF and technology started to creep in.

And there's no dent.

on the vitality curve.

So it tells me there's something more powerful.

And the only thing that explains this curve is pair bonding, being in a stable relationship where two people are on the same page at the same time.

So no matter what you've got in terms of IVG or surrogate opportunities, I think surrogate parent, not surrogate, I beg your pardon, artificial incubation, this idea that we can kind of soon, it won't be soon, test your baby our way through.

Yeah.

I have yet to meet a mother

who has told me that she would consider remotely being pregnant i think is something with its challenges

that

is important to women and the idea well i'll just you know louise has this wonderful line where she says pregnancy doesn't just make a child it makes a mother right right right and then and probably in many ways psychologically as well as biologically

correct yeah um

so when it comes to interventions what are the ones that don't work everything

not quite true um but you know

give me the give me the the top things that people throw at you what about what about what about what about what are the things that just

no

yeah i uh this is um

you know i i talk in different countries and the thing that is evident to me is that people are convinced that their own local grievance is the reason people are having fewer children.

So I was at a technology conference in Japan.

Unusual to speak of the technology conference, but industries are now starting to worry about low birth rates.

And this was

a topic they wanted to hear about.

I thought they did a really good job of explaining to this Japanese audience that

work-life balance or having men rather do more in the home would not change Japan's birth rates.

Because if you look at Scandinavia, where men already do a lot, lot more in the home, birth rates are pretty much as low as Japan.

And, you know, to me, that's evidence.

It's like you cannot just say, okay,

this local solution is based on this if it's not working somewhere else in the world.

But it kind of broke my heart afterwards.

This lady came up to me and said, Yes, but Stephen, really, if men did more here, we'd be fine with birth rates.

So I think there is this tendency for people to focus on what, so in the UK right now, where I've just come from, it's house prices.

But

that's a regional thing in the UK.

You go to the areas of the UK with the lowest birth rates, like Scotland, and you don't have the same house price issue that you have in London.

So people, I think, have got this tendency to blame,

I was calling it the local grievance razor, like an extension to Occam's razor, where the simplest explanation.

is usually the correct one.

For me, it's a case of, well, the local grievance is probably not the explanation to a global or a widespread phenomenon.

So you you can go through all of those.

Because this wouldn't explain if it was based on the UK saying it's because of housing and Japan saying it's because of men helping around the home and Scandinavia saying it's because of cost of living and the US saying it's because of g gun control or whatever it is.

If that's the case, why is every country so reliably decreasing at the same rate in the same sort of way at the same kind of time?

And now with a vitality curve that can be predicted without knowing any of those things.

So for me, that's proof positive.

But the vitality curve does reveal

what for me is more than a glimmer of hope.

And it comes back to Hungary, a country we've got to know pretty well.

It's cited a lot because of its

increased birth rates, but it's now criticized because birth rates in recent year or two have been falling again.

I don't care.

This idea, this total fertility rate, this average woman, really masks so much relevant information.

If you look at births by age in Hungary, the policies from around 2010,

right the way through for about 12, 14 years, did one remarkable thing.

There was a bubble of young people starting to become parents.

So you had like a bimodal vitality curve.

And that is

a real outlier for me.

So you then look at Hungary and what might they have been doing?

Well, Hungary has dozens of policies.

Some are interesting.

A woman under 30 having a child will have her college tuition cancelled.

No college fees.

A family who wants to, or a couple who wants to have a family can get effectively a deposit for an apartment or a house.

And that deposit increases whether you're going to have one, two, three, or four children.

There's also this famous thing, perhaps in the media, where a woman having, it was four children, I believe it's now two, will pay no income tax for life.

But the one that I think is most interesting in all of that is helping young people get housing in Hungary.

I think that caused enough young people who were in a stable relationship at a younger age to think,

why not?

You know, in a way that in many other nations, that just isn't part of the psyche.

So, Hungary certainly hasn't solved its crisis at all, but it's a signal of hope.

But the irony of this, and people are going to hate me saying this,

but from the data, so I'm going to blame the data.

What we have to do is put all our efforts on the young.

We almost have to take all the incentives away from the over 30s having children

and put everything into,

well,

you know,

I've cited 25 year old is the optimal age and people look at me as if that's impossible but i'm looking at data here the more we can do to help younger people have stability so back to economic vulnerability having some framework that gives them security to know that well i am i've got a good employer i am allowed to take this you know extended period off.

I love the idea of young people having a career.

It's more and more the gig economy, of course, so it's not for everybody necessarily, but let's say joining an employer and you take your three, five years off,

most likely a mother, but could be a father, I guess.

But you're still an employee.

You still have the business card.

You still have the email.

You still go to the Christmas parties or whatever party the company throws.

You still do training.

You might still work on and off.

You still feel part of that company.

And you come back age 32.

And with retirement being pushed out you still can work for 40 years 570 yeah exactly yeah I have

I wonder about

the

sort of personal social choices that people are making I saw I want to say

GSS data maybe or some other survey that looked at

why is it that you don't want to have kids yet and a lot of people were talking about just working on myself at the moment don't feel ready.

So it was a personal choice.

So what we have, at least when it comes to people's trying to nudge this vitality curve, when you ask people, they're like, I don't want to have kids yet.

I don't want to have kids yet.

And what you're trying to do is get people to

work out what them in a decade would have wanted them at 25 to have done.

Now,

if that was easy to do, nobody would ever cheat on their diet.

like you eat the cookie now because it tastes good now even if in even if in future retrospectively you wish that you hadn't tomorrow i wish i hadn't had that fast food today i do want the fast food i do what i want now like we hyperbolically discount we can't win the marshmallow test every single day the uh challenges and issues of the restrictions of having kids in a world that's got more opportunity than ever before more distractions than ever before we've got netflix and tick tock and porn and video games and travel got interconnected world i can go and you know backpack around Bali and Thailand.

I can't do that with a kid.

So you're telling me I'm going to stop doing all of these things

now that I want to do now, to do something that I don't want to do now.

I genuinely do not want to have a kid at age 23 because the world is different to how it used to be.

The world is different to how it was.

a few decades ago where there were fewer things to do.

Maybe the most fun, most engaging, best thing that I could have done was have a kid, but there's other things for me to do now.

And you're telling me that I'm not going to do the thing that I want to do now to do the thing that me in the future might want to do, probably will want to do, but I don't know that now.

So I give up the thing that I know for the thing that is uncertain or the thing that I don't know I will want.

Give up the thing I do want for the thing I don't know I will want.

I love this.

There's so many different points to make.

One I'll make so I don't forget is that, you know, there are so many younger parents, I mean, maybe my age, whose kids are all grown up, who are now touring the world doing all the amazing things when they're able to do things that they wouldn't have been able to do in the 20s.

The idea that everything has to be crammed in to our younger years, I think has to be questioned.

And maybe people, my generation, should be sharing more of that.

But to me,

everything you've just said makes sense in two contexts.

One,

those people who really don't have the desire for kids.

You know, they just, and it is pretty, I believe it's binary.

And people are going to challenge that.

So maybe it's not perfectly binary, but it does seem in the people I've met, you either do or you want them one day.

Now, so you look at the category then who are saying, like, you're suggesting in many cases, well, not now.

I want this vacation now.

I want this, you know, new iPhone now.

Career.

Yep, absolutely.

You

better inform people.

I'm going to say that because it's based on data.

You tell that person that you've got a 15% chance of, so I'm going to launch an app.

I wasn't going to announce this here because it's not ready yet.

I don't want someone to beat me to it, but if they do, that's fine.

Imagine an app

where you

tell

the app where you're located.

Austin, London, Tokyo.

What age are you?

What age would you ideally want to start a family?

35.

And so, okay, for Tokyo, the probability of having a child at 35 is 7%

for men and women.

We have this data now.

We can tell people.

It's going to be a very popular app.

I've registered date race.com because I think it is a race.

Daterace.com.

Yeah, it doesn't exist.

Daterace.com.

Datecom is one letter away from a really, really delicate word.

Okay, your mind works in a different way.

I worked in nightlife for a long time.

Okay, all right.

Well, maybe I'll rethink that.

Yeah.

You can maybe cut that.

I'll do something.

No, no, no, no, keep it.

But I just, I caution, I caution you that date daterace.com also

perilously close to date.com and daterace.com I'm like

date what race so right just come to birthcap.org and we'll yes

birthcap.org yes but but the point really is though that again I've seen it with my own eyes so many times once you tell those people the likelihood of becoming a parent, especially as a woman

you you can see the shift

Actually, that's a good point.

Let's say that, you know, we've done nearly three hours on this, which added on to the other thing in the documentary.

People got a lot to watch, right?

They're going to go watch the BirthGap documentary, which will be out by the time that this comes out.

You can just search BirthGap on YouTube.

Go and watch the first conversations that we've had.

A lot for people to take in.

Let's say that someone has been compelled by this three-hour treatise.

What if they're going to try and convince a friend to take it seriously beyond listen to the podcast, watch the documentary?

And obviously you're trying to do this a lot.

You're trying to convince people to take seriously their personal choice when it comes to maybe thinking about having kids sooner, right?

I would guess that's a way to summate what it is that you're trying to achieve.

Yeah, without coercion, just to think about it.

Yes, to think about this thing more seriously.

Yes.

What are the most compelling one-liners, few one-liners?

What is the

Thanksgiving table

pitch that people should be giving to their friends and family?

I think we've covered quite a few facts here that would be perfect for Thanksgiving.

You know, 80% of people without children had planned to become parents one day.

That

by age 30 at most,

a woman has a 50% chance of ever becoming a mother.

I mean, those are really topical things and are quite shocking to a lot of people.

But I think there's an opportunity beyond this

for

younger people,

men, actually.

My experience on multiple corners around this globe is that there are multiple women who really want to become mothers enough to consider it much earlier than would otherwise happen.

And they're waiting for Mr.

kind of quite right, maybe not perfect.

Nothing's perfect.

Mr.

Quite right.

Yeah, yeah, quite right.

And

to young men who may even have checked out or been embarrassed at being rejected multiple times, I would be dropping that line in whatever you can.

You know, just asking someone, do they want to be?

Oh, God.

Wow.

Did you know that 80% of

yeah, well, maybe that's a little bit direct and crude, but the point is, I would persist because the more and more people

who

start to understand

There's a thing

today, young people are learning more and more called life design.

Have you heard of life design?

It came out of Stanford in the 90s.

Basically, it's telling young people you can have whatever you want to design your life.

And

interestingly, there's a branch of evolutionary biology

or some form of biology called life history.

Strange word, life history.

It's looking at a species and saying typically what actually happens in terms of when species reproduce, you know, when they age, what they do in terms of, you know, do chimpanzees look after their grandchildren, yes or no?

How does that all work?

And for me, I want to put life design and life history together for humans.

Look at the reality of what tends to happen to young people in terms of that curve, the probability of having a child at a certain age against your aspirations.

And I think the more

young people figure out that you can't have it all.

It's a liar.

You can have certainty about having it all.

You might be very lucky and get it all, but

your sister might have managed to get it all.

Right.

And the more they have it all,

the greater the likelihood that others won't.

The idea of things lining up

is mostly a mess.

Education, travel, career, fulfillment, family, on time, before it's too late, with the right person, at the right time.

It's mostly

a myth to suggest that there's a high likelihood of that for anyone.

And once I think people start to,

from data again, understand what these realities are, I think the psyche will change.

And my point, young man, is don't give up.

I know there are women out there.

This comes back to what I was just saying before, that it is about trade-offs.

It is about, well, I know what I want and I know what I can get right now.

I can get, I have much more agency over my own career, over my own education.

One of the reasons I think that people prioritize careers over relationships is that a career can never leave you.

You can only choose to leave it.

A partner is not quite the same.

There's a level of

existential investment, of romantic investment, that is not within your control.

And in a world where people are dealing with more anxiety and uncertainty, depression than ever before, I think that it tends us to go for things that are safer and it's just a sexier talking point.

Like,

there is

really easily a way to look at every single thing.

If you take a very, very low resolution view,

there is a super easy way for somebody to look at the entire conversation that we've had today and say, this is just men telling you to not embrace your freedom in the modern world.

And

it takes much longer than that one sentence to rebut that one sentence.

What that means is there's an asymmetry sort of with the battle of ideas that we've got going on here.

Yeah, but ultimately, we've started a conversation.

And I think people will make up their own mind.

That person lecturing, telling someone they can have it all, when we start...

challenging that and that's never really happened before challenging that saying look at all these childless women grieving in tears about their lost dreams men too and here's the actual raw data that shows right now in the us

a woman who wants to have children has basically got a 25 chance of um sorry

a 60 chance of becoming a mother in the u.s only six out of ten people will do so

i think

i no longer care about

i've only been canceled once but it was enough to see that you know the views in the documentary went up a hundred thousand

from the media coverage that that got.

So I don't mind at all about the naysayers, the challengers.

The asymmetry, I think, comes the way.

Well, ultimately,

unless you're going to misrepresent either stats or intentions, the power lies with what's true.

And again, with demography, this is one of the things, even with regards to climate change,

we understand where the climate is now, but we're only using prediction models to work out how that's going to affect things in the future.

Demography may be the most accurate in terms of any.

We don't know what the financial market's going to do in the future.

We don't understand what's going to happen to cloud formation.

We don't understand what's going to happen to sea levels.

We know how many one-year-olds we've got.

We know how many one-year-olds we've got, which means, yeah, you don't know how long people are going to live, but you can't make any more one-year-olds or two-year-olds or three-year-olds or 15-year-olds.

So, we know how many 75-year-olds will be maximum in the 2010s.

This is the limit.

Yeah, because they're being born this year.

They can't be anymore.

That's right.

Yes.

And yet it surprises me greatly is that organizations, publications are in some form of denial.

So the UN came up with some projections.

It's been on X quite a lot this past week about likely scenarios of future population levels of the planet based on birth rates.

And they've got these different scenarios, best case, mid case, worst case, in terms of birth rates.

But every single one of them assumes that birth rates will go back up to 2.0.

Well, when?

Well, they just over the century.

Oh,

there is no, there's no rationale for it.

It's just, well, they must do.

Oh, this is.

So the worst case scenario still assumes a best case scenario.

Way better than anybody that's actually looking at the data or understanding the mechanisms of this would think.

Yes.

So, and you know, and part of it,

part of it I get, you know, The Economist came out with an article this week saying basically, don't panic about low birth rates.

Sure, we shouldn't be panicking, but we've got to be realist about it.

Things will change.

I disagree.

I disagree entirely.

I think it's perfectly right to panic about low birth rates.

I am.

I don't, you know, I'm a pretty even-keel guy.

I haven't got involved in many sort of big social movements.

I've largely been an only child energy adult infant until pretty much now.

You know, I cared about some stuff to do with mating because I was worried about loneliness and people not coupling up.

I got worried about AI safety and the alignment problem.

I got worried about that about eight years ago or so, and that's still something that's a big part of my concern.

I'm worried about existential risks more generally, pandemics, bioweapons, including climate change, although it's on a longer, more protracted timeline.

But this is the first one that really has like huge global implications.

And I'm sure that...

I'm sure that everybody, even the people from fucking Heaven's Gate, right, that were sure this asteroid was coming over and we're going to, you know, this is is gonna destroy the earth or you know people that thought that in 2021 or whenever it was that the the earth was going to be destroyed all of this stuff like everybody from the inside of some uh inaccurate cult believes that they're telling the truth but none of them have got the level of certainty and data that demographers do so it it kind of comes back to raw stats and that's why you know

I would love to get you to sit down with Louise Perry.

I'd love to get you to sit down with Brad Wilcox and,

you know, the Collinses and have a conversation where we thrash this sort of stuff out because I think they've got important

elements to contribute to this.

What are the mechanisms that are going on?

What we're seeing with regards to relating and culture.

What was the change with regards to the pill, with the sexual revolution, with all of these sorts of things, hypergamy, changes in socioeconomic status?

But

first and foremost, demography is about maths, and that's where you come from.

And I think that that's why you're an important voice with this.

I think, though, to be fair, there's many branches of demography.

And

perhaps the biggest part is like social

demography.

It's a branch of sociology, looking at societies and why things happen.

And I've been at events speaking where I've been pulled aside by other speakers from a world more aligned with sociology saying, Stephen, what are you doing?

Why are you telling people this?

Why are you panicking people?

Because it's in the data and it's their future and I care about young people and that's true.

Yeah, but we shouldn't be panicking people.

So I think not all, clearly, but many voices in academia

have

a level of responsibility.

I mean, we've known this.

You're right.

Demography is about numbers.

Those numbers have been on the books.

Birthrights fell in 1970.

You only need to

look at the justifications for this,

just compare Galileo and Copernicus, right?

Very few people, especially are in academia.

This is very unpopular.

The advantage and the reason that I can talk about this even more than you is that most of my friends, they don't hold particularly staunch beliefs that I'm going to be ostracized for going against with regards to me saying that I think population is going to go down and it's maybe not a good thing for pretty much everybody.

No one, I'm not going to be kicked out of the hallowed halls of the canteen for doing that, but people inside of academia are.

People inside of government are.

You know, the

repercussions, if you're inside of an institution like that are much bigger.

And the advantage that you and I have is that we're on the outside of the tent, pissing in.

And

I

it like I say, you can, I'm fired up about this thing.

I think it's super important.

The first conversation that we had sort of red-pilled me.

This one's given me enough to think about for another fucking three years.

What should people do?

What do you think that people should do if they want to educate themselves further on this thing?

I mean, there is good news here.

When I started making the documentary, my first assumption was that people just didn't want kids.

And I was expecting to conclude that, you know what, we just got to prepare for the wind down,

you know,

understanding that

for some decades, a century or so, we're going to go through this painful phase.

Contraction.

But, yeah, yes.

Contraction, but not an elegant contraction at all.

Crash

can.

Yeah, yeah.

The sort of compression,

collapse.

I mean, it's collapse.

It's what it is on many levels.

And

that's not the case.

I mean, what I learned consistently, surprisingly, is that mothers are having the same kids as decades ago in Japan and parts of Europe.

Young women are having the same number of kids, if they have the first one, as their grandmother's generation.

So it's nothing to do with parenthood or motherhood.

It's these waves of childlessness that kicked in, and then this unplanned childlessness element.

So

the reality is, there's an easy fix if we can just solve the unplanned childlessness crisis.

And how do we do that?

Well, we know how now we just got to enable people.

We've got to increase the vitality curve.

And the only way to do that, it's pretty clear from the data, is for the average age of parenting to be younger.

So then all we have to do is reinvent education, reinvent careers, and a whole bunch of other things.

But it's possible.

It's at least possible.

Okay, because previously you thought we're just locked in.

Yeah.

But I'd also say to policymakers or anyone influencing them or voters,

the idea that a

magic policy is going to be pulled out of the hat to solve this,

I would save your money.

I would focus on the, unless it's focused on the.

Where should resources be focused mostly?

Providing support for young parents in their 20s.

What does that look like?

If you're a young woman today,

you have a vulnerability career-wise and you have a vulnerability therefore financially, but you've also a vulnerability in terms of divorce is still a common thing.

And

I, you know,

it's not an easy solution, but providing better assurance to young women that whatever happens,

we've got you.

We've got you.

Yeah, I mean, look, it's two things that we haven't spoken about much here.

It's probably too culture-wars.

I'm actually,

it obviously leads open to people saying, well, what about the pill?

What about the sexual revolution?

What about increasing divorce rates and a secular society and stuff like that?

It's actually a bit culture.

Maybe we can come back and do a group conversation with some of the other people I spoke about where it's their wheelhouse.

But

I will say this, just the pill comes up a lot.

The pill was legalized in Japan in 1990.

Birth rates fell in the early 70s.

The pill was legalized in the 70s or 60s, maybe elsewhere.

So the idea it's all because of the pill, you just look at Japan and it's not as simple as that.

The point that I was about to make there, you said sort of women's level, felt level of security, it's a part of the driver of this.

It's really difficult to hear that and look at the

increased acceptance of divorce and not think about those two things being correlated because, and look,

increased acceptance of divorce.

Does that mean that in the past, many women stayed in relationships with men that weren't right for them, weren't good for them, because they were financial prisoners, because they were socially going to be

ostracized if they did do that.

There was so much pain that was going to be associated.

Yeah, I completely, I get that.

But if we can't hold a couple of thoughts in our mind at one time, right, I'm not saying that that was good.

I'm not saying that women should have stayed in relationships with men that weren't great fathers, that were abusive or uncaring or neglectful or whatever, right?

Yes.

But we can also see, okay, what can we take from that, that a pro-marriage culture, that one that encourages couples to not be confluent, that I'll stay with you for as long as you can provide something to me.

but one that really genuinely commits, one that does look at a breakup, not as a moral failing on either person's side, but as something that is

to be avoided at all costs, because the more of those that happen, the less confident young women are, and women in general, and men are about committing to this thing.

Sure.

I think there's another dimension.

Again,

it's not easy to talk about, but it's there.

You know, I

meet

women who are divorced older in life, who have no kids.

I've also met women older in life who are divorced who do have kids.

What would you rather be?

If the marriage doesn't work out,

would you, and it's a personal choice again, but maybe in many cases

that risk of divorce

should be weighed up against having a family in that context.

And again, this is down to personal choices, but it is is part of the equation.

Calculus.

Yeah.

So it's not a simple thing.

I mean, there are a lot of people who, you know, one of the things that

I think I irritate some people, well, a lot of people.

Me both, mate.

People who promote, you know, marriage.

But for me, it's the other side of the same coin.

You know, it's simply saying, well, people married more, they'd have kids more.

I think often people are getting married simply because they want kids.

You can't separate those, in my view.

There's nothing wrong to promote marriage, of course.

But I think focusing on that alone.

Yeah, what is it in Western cultures?

Only one-third of babies are born outside of marriage.

Yeah, well,

I think it's a little bit more than that.

I think in France, it might be as low as that.

But, you know, in Japan and South Korea, 95% or more of babies are born inside marriage.

But what happens there is that, you know, in a relationship,

if it's going well and maybe there's a pregnancy often planned, now it's time to get married because socially you got to do that in Japan there's a history and certain reasons for it so you know you there's a lot of complexities here and you you know for me I sleep better

because I

to me, now my second paper fatality curve is not yet peer-reviewed.

It's going into pre-print very soon.

It'll be out there to be analyzed and it'll have to go through that scrutiny.

But three years ago when I talked to you about unplanned childlessness, that wasn't peer-reviewed.

I put it out there because the data was clear, and now that has passed through peer review.

So we'll see.

At least for me,

I am sleeping better at night.

That I know what the problem is.

It's just the scale of the solutions, the reinventing of our 20s, basically, that frightens me.

Stephen Shaw, ladies and gentlemen, Stephen, you're great.

I appreciate you, man.

I commend the fact that you are continuing to be obsessive about this one problem.

And

yeah, people should just go and watch BirthGap.

Search BirthGap on YouTube.

That's all you need to do.

BirthGap.org to keep up to date with this stuff.

I'm glad that I'm on this ride with you, man.

I really am.

I think that we are talking about something that's really, really important that's going to hopefully make people's lives and the future of the world a little bit better.

Well, I appreciate your interest in this topic, to be honest with you.

You've been a big factor in getting this story out there.

So, thank you.

Let's keep doing it.