TRIGGERnometry - The Depopulation Bomb: Stephen J. Shaw

Episode Date: June 25, 2023

Stephen J. Shaw is a data scientist & demographer. He is the writer and director of ‘Birthgap - Childless World’, a documentary exploring the global decline in birth rates. Check out part one here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A6s8QlIGanA SPONSORED BY: EasyDNS - domain name registrar provider and web host. Use special code: TRIGGERED for 50% off when you visit https://easydns.com/triggered/ Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Locals! https://triggernometry.locals.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Music by: Music by: Xentric | [e-mail] | https://www.xentricapc.com/ YouTube:  @xentricapc   Buy Merch Here: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] Join the Mailing List: https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/sign-up/ Find TRIGGERnometry on Social Media:  https://twitter.com/triggerpod https://www.facebook.com/triggerpod/ https://www.instagram.com/triggerpod/ About TRIGGERnometry:  Stand-up comedians Konstantin Kisin (@konstantinkisin) and Francis Foster (@francisjfoster) make sense of politics, economics, free speech, AI, drug policy and WW3 with the help of presidential advisors, renowned economists, award-winning journalists, controversial writers, leading scientists and notorious comedians. 00:00 Intro  01:41 Stephen Shaw’s Background 02:35 "But I Thought World Population Was Growing" 04:16 False Information About Population Explosion 08:37 Negatives of Population Decline 10:59 Reasons for the Sudden Population Collapse 15:20 Economic Triggers for Childlessness 19:13 Sponsor Message: Locals  20:15 The Lie We’re Being Sold About Fertility 24:06 Economic & Societal Difficulties with Raising Families 30:51 Cambridge University Protests  37:09 Dropping Fertility Levels in Men & Women  38:36 Cultural & Climate Issues Stopping People from Starting Families  41:31 Cultural Norms & Childlessness 46:25 Sponsor Message: easyDNS 47:29 Does the Pill Contribute to Population Decline? 49:24 Egg Freezing & Delaying Parenthood 51:44 Societal Consequences of an Ageing Population  57:54 Is There an Antidote for Population Collapse? 1:02:10 Antinatalism in Different Cultures 1:06:06 Advice to Young People on Becoming Parents 1:07:45 What’s the One Thing We’re Not Talking About? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

How can the world's population be collapsing if we're still growing? That's the conundrum. It really is counterintuitive. Last year, there were only 700,000 babies being born. So there's a 22% drop already in the UK. Countries like Italy are 55% down. Germany's 36% down. Japan's 55% down.

I don't know why we're being told this absolute nonsense about population explosions when that was a thing in the past. What clearly occurred? was a deferring of parenthood. It wasn't that people suddenly decided, okay, well, I'm not going to have children. It was more that people decided, well, I'm not going to do it now.

It's 25, 27, I'm going to wait to I'm 30. And that's the pattern. I see more childless men than childless woman. And I think men need to understand that this applies to them just as much. Hello, and welcome to Trigonometry. I'm Francis Foster. I'm Constantine Kissy.

And this is a show for you, if you want honest conversations, conversations with fascinating people. Our brilliant guest today is a data scientist, demographer, and the creator of a very, very good and important film called Birth Gap. Stephen Jay Shaw, welcome to Trigonometry. Thank you for inviting me here. Oh, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show.

You are talking about an issue that I genuinely think will be the biggest conversation over the next five to ten years that all of Western societies and actually, frankly, societies outside the West are going to be having and seeing as crucial to their survival, frankly. Before we get into all of that, though, who are you, what has been your journey through life? How do you find yourself sitting here talking to us? Well, I didn't expect that I'd find myself talking to anybody about a film I'd been. I'd never intended to be a filmmaker. My background is, first of all, in engineering, computer coding.

For 20 years, I've run a data analytics company out of the US, doing forecasting and data predictions for industries like the car industry. And seven years ago, I saw some data that basically pointed to the world's population collapsing that shocked me so much that I decided I need to write a book about it. My younger son said, Dad, younger people don't read books anymore. We watch documentaries. I thought, well, there's no way I'm ever going to do that. That's the end of this story for me until I came across someone who was in that world.

And seven years later, yeah, the birth gap child's world documentary, yeah, it is out. You should have made it a TikTok documentary if you really want to reach the young people, just 20 seconds. But birth gap, I've had a chance to watch part of it. And as I say, it's super important. Explain to everybody, look, we all know, right, that the population of the world is exploding. You know, we're going to be on 9 billion people by whenever. We're never going to have enough resources.

We're all going to die. The planet's going to burn. We've got 12 good harvests left and all of that. Isn't that all true and right? So how can the world's population be collapsing if we're still growing? That's the conundrum. It really is counterintuitive. But it's true.

The reason the world's population is still growing is only because people are living longer and surviving longer, in fact, in the case of countries, like India, for example, like parts of Africa, where many people would have died in childhood, that didn't happen 30, 40 years ago. So as a planet, we've got a lot of young people who will simply live through their lives. And that's a good thing. But that's not going to go on forever. We know we will max out at no more than 11 billion, possibly.

a little bit less, but we're aging. So all growth is coming from aging. And if you look at the total number of babies being born on the planet, we hit a maximum around 2014 of 143 million babies being born that year. It's never been higher, and they don't think it will be as high again. More recently, that's down to 132 million. So we're basically 10 million down already in 10 years compared to what we were in 2014. That's globally. That includes sub-Saharan Africa. If you look at countries like where I live, Japan, it's just frightening. And so is China. And so is much of Europe. And frankly, the rest of the world is on the same path. What I'm getting at though, Stephen, is to people who are not familiar with the issue that we're

talking about, which is the fact that we're not having enough kids, basically, to put it simply. the narrative has been for many, many years, for decades, actually, that there's a population bomb. There was a book of that name that had a huge impact on how people thought about this. Yes. That the expanding population of human beings on the planet was a fundamental threat to the people who were already alive, but also to the planet itself. And what you're saying is the opposite of that, which is we're not having enough children.

So how does one reconcile that if it's the first time they've encountered your your data and your information? Well, the data, the information being given is wrong, vastly outdated. We already knew back in the 70s that the world's population was going to peak. We already knew it was going to peak at around

what we are now. Because we saw falling birth rates everywhere at that time, almost everywhere. But the trend was constant. But these voices have been there, and they've infuriated me. I think that's one of the reasons I made the documentary because I thought, I'm involved in data prediction.

I have three children. I'm trying to educate. There were teenagers at that time to prepare for the future. Why don't I know? Not only that, the clients I have, including some pretty senior executives in industries around the world, who I'm talking to about planning and forecasting, no one in those corporations is talking about what we're talking about here, population decline and collapse. So I felt that nobody knows about this. So what are these voices? Why is it that we, through education systems, through the media, are bombarding us with this utter nonsense about population explosions. Yes, the world's population did increase. It clearly is still aging, but the underlying trend, which is what we need to be focused on, is downwards. So, you know, something's become institutionalized to educate us.

I'm not sure it's brainwashing, but I wonder, frankly. But we're being educated with information. using charts where people start telling us the population in the year 1800 was down here, one billion, and these curves go up like this and they say, this is where we are now. And then they stop. And what they might even do is look upwards, implying that we're going up forever. That's what I thought seven years ago. I'm sure it's what my kids thought because the textbooks they used, they showed me, that's what they showed. But we know that we're going to plateau because there's so few babies being born now. We've known this for a very long time.

So anybody who wants to talk honestly about population will be telling you, yes, we went through this, but we know it's going to maximize, going to plateau. We're then going to become a much older planet with people, frankly, who are going to be in need of care and will not probably have the care that they need because the workforces are going to shrink.

And then it's going to decline. That's the real story of population. And for many nations, another problem I have, frankly, is when people talk about total population. This is nonsense. What matters to you and me are our own countries predominantly, are the countries we like to visit,

or our own communities, in fact. Taking the total population of the planet, well, fine, but we also need to be looking at what's happening under our own noses. And for the UK, if I can just share with you something. In the UK right now, there are around 900,000 people aged exactly 50. I like that number,

because 50-year-olds will retire in about 20 years. So, 900,000. Last year, there were only 700,000 babies being born. So there's a 22% drop already in the UK in terms of that ratio. Now, in 20 years' time, whenever 50-year-olds go to retire, newborns will be the ones who are finishing school just about to take the jobs in the workforce. Countries like Italy are 55% down. Germany's 36% down.

Japan's 55% down. So, you know, when I look at that, you realize that life is going to change for so many countries and for young and all the like. I don't know why we're being told this absolute nonsense about population explosions when that was a thing of the past.

You touched very briefly on why this is not a good thing. But apart from that, why isn't it a good thing? Whether it's a good thing or bad thing, we need to prepare for it. Now, let's say someone says it's good, someone says it's bad, the world is going to change. And I think anyone surely would want to know how the world's going to change. I assumed that I was educating my kids for a future that was going to be similar to my generation. So putting them on the same path,

the same education, same career path. I would have expected a similar, hopefully retirement path. But when you realize that the structure of societies were typically, there's been a much smaller number of older people and a much larger size of workforce, that that is shifting to become what I call an inverted world, where there's so many old people to take care of and a shrinking workforce. What does that mean? Well, it means many things. First of all, taxes are going to increase significantly if we're going to be able to keep the same level of health care for older people, something like, I believe, two-thirds of all health care costs. are devoted to older people.

So those are going to expand. I don't know how the NHS is going to cope with that in the UK, different mind health services elsewhere, but you've also got social security, you've also got pension systems. Most people think, I did too, that the money we take as pensioners, I'm not quite there yet,

but the money we will get is the money that we were paying while we're working. But it's not. The money we pay in towards pensioners, systems in most countries today goes to pay for current retirees. So any generation is expecting or needing to appoint younger generations to keep paying in to support those pensions. So this is just an idea of the changes that we're going to be looking at. There are many others as well.

So Francis, I'm not saying that the world's population is too small, too big. I'm saying a change is about to happen. And this change will last for the rest of this century. It's going to be a very long, slow, and I think quite painful change. So I just wanted people to understand that the world is not going to be the same for much of the rest of the century. And so what are the reasons behind this? Why is this happening, Stephen? Childlessness.

Whenever I started my research, I couldn't understand why no one had really been able to explain why. by birth rates have been falling in many nations at almost exact same rate, starting at almost exact same time. So if you take Japan, around 1973, 74, there was a very sharp fall in birth rates. Italy had happened at the same time. Germany just a little bit earlier. Many people have theories that, oh, in Japan, it's work-life balance. They work too hard.

And that, I would say is probably true. but you couldn't say that of Italy necessary. In Italy, it was blamed on something else. It was blamed in youth unemployment. Spain too. Germany had other reasons. But I couldn't believe that this was a big coincidence. In fact, if you look at this trend,

it started in these places at the same time and it spread throughout those regions. It didn't ever go back to normal. It kind of was a progressive thing. that just spread across now the entire more developed, industrialized world, and now I'm far into the developing world. So the idea that there wasn't a common explanation was to me, almost an impossibility. So I set out to see if I could find a connection.

It took a year and a half before I was even able to come up with an hypothesis. And that hypothesis finally formed in a bar in Tokyo. there's not many scientific hypotheses get formed in the bars and talk, oh, maybe there are, I don't know. After a year and a half, I noticed something strange that I couldn't find all that many people who had no brothers and sisters. Of course some, but not that many.

And to have birth rates below, on average, two children per woman, you have to have a lot of people, either with no children or with only one child or a mix thereof. And in this particular bar this night, I was there with some friends and there's other people coming.

And I said to myself, okay, tonight I'm going to try and ask at least 10 people if they're brothers and sisters. And if it's not more than one or two, I think there's a thesis here. I ended up asking 15 Japanese people. And I think one didn't have any brothers and sisters. All the rest were two, three, four,

one even had seven. Wow. And okay, I felt at that moment I have to find a way to analyze childlessness. In a way, it hadn't been done before. Usually the way we measure childlessness is waiting to people are 45 years old. And that means there's a long lag and the analysis is a lot more difficult to do. So that was my challenge then, and that's the one thing I was able to identify.

Be clear. I will say this and please keep this in the edit. I will support 100% anybody who decides they do not want children. I will be the biggest supporter. This is not about trying to coerce people to have children who do not want. Cut. Repeat. But those people are the minority compared to, if you look in countries like Japan, Europe,

where this trend has been in place for many decades, less so in the US and other countries that are still transitioning. But what you end up with in countries with very high-churchase, childlessness. So for example, right now in Japan, you have childness that's running around 35%. In Italy, it's 40%. Around 80% of those people had planned of children. So four or five people have planned of a child and life took its course and that's why I ended up calling it unplanned childlessness. So the reason is unplanned childlessness. And then the question is why do people, in the end, not have the families they want to have.

But that's your show. Well, we'll get into that in the second, but let's first of all, just if we stick with the chronological order of it. The initial triggers, which you're talking about, and Germany, it's the late 60s and other countries, it's the mid-70s. And you've talked in, you talk in birth gap in the film, about economic triggers.

So it's the oil shock of the 70s and so on. Is that your contention that this is economically driven? Triggered. Triggered. Economically triggered. I suppose the obvious question from where I'm sitting then is, I mean, I'm not much of a historian, but I have studied some history. Like the oil shock of the 70s was not the worst thing that's ever happened to humanity. You know, and human beings had went on and had children after the Great Depression.

They went on and had children after World War II and during World War II. And all of the terrible experiences of human beings have always had. We've always bounced back. We've never had this issue as far as I'm aware. of before. So why is essentially economic disruption? Why did that have such a huge triggering effect on this particular issue? So it's a great question. And I don't cover this in a documentary, so let me go a little bit deeper. And just explain, I've lived in Japan for six years, but I've employed a researcher and I've worked with academics there to look into the history of Japan around

this time. If you look at the early 70s in Japan, what was happening was many people were moving into cities, getting new jobs working for the car companies, electronic companies, things were looking good. And around that time, things started to get more expensive rents started to go up. More and more women were looking to work, but there were a few kindergarten spaces. So there's tensions in communities trying to balance affordability of apartments along with finding enough kindergarten spaces. But still, birth rates were relatively high.

Then the oil shock hits suddenly. And Japan was the largest oil importer in the world at the time. So their entire growth required oil. At that moment, prices went up even more. Commodities you see in the documentary shelves that were empty. This was a stress society anyway. Then something happened. What clearly occurred was a deferring of parenthood.

It wasn't that people suddenly decided. okay, well, I'm not going to have children. It was more that people decided, well, I'm not going to do it now. It's 25, 27. I'm going to wait to I'm 30. And that's the pattern. So when we look at America, well, many countries actually,

but to take the mortgage crisis of 07,08, you can look at America, you could look at Canada, Malaysia, Netherlands, even New Zealand. Around that time, childlessness was hovering around 15%. So let me explain a little bit if I can. on this as quickly as what do you see with childnesses are waves. Waves that happen when going back to the UK in the 1960s, the most common age of children was age 20 to 24. 30 years later in the 90s that had shifted to 25 to 29. So it became natural to have children a little bit later.

You wind the clock forward to now, and that's 30 to 34 in the UK is the most common age for women to have a child. You then interject some form of economic shock. into that. And you're causing further delays into women's 30s, into the women's late 30s, that mean, frankly, women aren't able to have the children they want to have. So just to come back to your point that, yes, during famines and wars, you're absolutely right. Those times in the past have been times when basically societies delayed having children, but because it was normal to have children younger, at the end of the war, at the end of the pandemic, at the end of the crises, women which generally still young enough to be able to have the families they want to have

today that's changed. And let's be really honest about this. We're not, women are being sold a lie. They're being sold a lie of, you know, you can have it all. You can go out and work and have a career and do all of this and then have kids later on in your 30s. And the reality is you're going to be far less fertile in your late 30s than you will be if you have children in your early 20s. That question is going to make such a great little. Twitter short, mate. Just you go, the reality is women have been sold down another world. Let me tell you, darling, what's going wrong with?

And I have to be a little bit cautious here because... Come on, it's called trigonometry. Just let it rip. Yeah. So, in my words, if I can, yeah. It's like, keep the distance away from your inflammatory language. Yeah.

Sorry. I, I, um, you're not 100% wrong. You're not at all. But the way I see, I don't think anyone's doing the selling. And I hope it's going to be easy to kind of explain the reality that has not been shared up until now for whatever reason. I think if you look at younger people, I have three children who are now in their 20s. I think young people have, and their parents, frankly, are of the belief mostly that if you get an education or training, it's then a good thing clearly to get a job, to get a career, build on that to a point of stability.

And then maybe in your 30s, why not? What we're not aware of for whatever reason is that women's fertility, A, falls much faster than expected. There's a lot of variability in that some people, some women are very fertile to 40 or older. Some lose their fertility by age 30. So we don't know about that variation out there, and therefore the risk. Also, we don't know that the question. of a woman's eggs. A woman is born with all of the eggs she will ever have in her life. Women do not make new eggs. So two things happen during that time. And it's covered in a documentary of Kim

Kardashian's fertility doctor included to explain how this happens. You lose both the count of eggs, but you also lose the quality of eggs. And then a third thing happens, which is the ability to carry a baby to term the risks associated with that go up. So to be honest, with you, and you'll see it in part two of the documentary, which is not quite up yet, a little bit in part one, where I started asking women in their 40s and 50s without children had they intended to have children. It was a very delicate subject, and I have to say people watching this in this situation, these are people internally grieving the fact that they had never families. And you see deeply emotional scenes, and it's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking. It's, it's

something that I think we should know more about as a society, you know, just the fact that we've got to be sensitive to people. So just to give you an example, some people, perhaps many who don't have children in the workplace will see a colleague bringing their child to work or talking about their children. Many of these people go to pieces when this happens. They'll go to the restroom. and they'll go to the toilet and just stay there. They'll go and have a walk. We don't realize, I certainly, I didn't, the internal anguish that happens.

So to your point, society, I agree, is not informing people men or women because men are trying to partner with women if they want kids who are able to have children. Men also are in the dark here. And so the question, why that's happening, I don't know. It's remarkable.

We teach people so much about biology in schools, but we don't cover this. So it's got to change. Well, you're right, I think that a lot, and this is, I said it on Twitter a while back and people got annoyed with me as they do whenever anyone brings this up. But we've got to a position where a lot of people,

but particularly in this case, women, are going to end up in a position when they're not happy. They're not happy with where they've ended up. And I'm curious, I mean, the economics of this, I imagine, are significant because, you know, my wife, for example, right now, she's not back to full-time work by any stretch of imagination. And Nassan is a year old.

And I don't think she'll be back to full-time work for a long time. And she doesn't want to be back to full-time work for a long time. But for a lot of people, that is not a position that they can afford. They can't afford to, especially if both parents have a high-paying job and they need that money to maintain the lifestyle that they wish to have and that they're used to. that's an economic difficulty that I think didn't exist in the past when 40, 50 years ago, a family of four could live on one person's income.

Typically the dad would go out to work, the mom wouldn't, and they could live on that comfortably, and it wasn't as big a deal. Now, economically, that's not viable, but also societally, that's not quite viable. The choice of giving up a lot of money to stay home with the kids doesn't seem like a very appealing option to a lot of people as well. I think partly, I have to say again, if people don't want children, we have to just accept that. I think the challenge is the conflict then for those who do want to

and are trying to find the right time. I think the best way for me to answer this is to say, if we're going to find a solution to this problem, we've got to make it more flexible for people to have, what I'm calling educational pathways and career pathways, that make it easier to do things at the same time or to take breaks from one or the other. Why are we cramming all of our education

into the first three, four years? I still take classes, college-level classes, because I like to keep up to date with things. And it's refreshing to study something that you want to learn at the time you want to learn it that's relevant to you. I think we need to make education more flexible so that people are able to have children younger.

And why not have people start their careers for the first time age 30 or 35? We're living longer now. The idea of retirement, I don't know what the French are thinking about right now, but retirement that age 63, is it, 65? Yeah. You know, it's going to be 75. At the young people today watching this, you're not going to retire until you're at least 75 to 80 years old. 100%.

Yeah. So why not start careers age 30 or 35 if you're going to have a 40, 50 year career anyway? So I don't have all of the answers here, but I know the current structures that we have are for sure not helping, are hindering many, many people. And also the thing that we don't talk about as well is that women like to partner with people who are, if not a similar level to them, education-wise and earning-wise, they prefer it if they're higher. But then what happens if you get women who go to university? And by the way, there are people, I'm in favor of women going to university. And, you know, educating. Not really.

Educating themselves. Stephen, they're just jokes. We're like, you look so tense. Just jokes, mate. So women go into, you know, education. They come out. They have this amazing career. They have this amazing job.

And then they want a partner. And then they realize that the partner that they want comes from a very, very small pool in which a lot of women are competing for that small pool of men. Well, that's right. So this is called hypergamy. It's absolutely true that women do cross-culturally prefer to partner with men who are at least as successful, whatever that means, as they are. And that's not going to change because that's part of who we are as a species.

Men don't mind. Men will marry down, but actually prefer less women. her more educated it seems to be. We've got to accept that that's a reality. Now, your point is absolutely right because if you look at colleges in the US right now, almost two-thirds of people at US colleges are women. Even in Thailand, it's 60%. It's a global trend that women are focusing more in education. This is a problem. I don't have an answer to this. In some ways, I have to say that men need to be studying harder or not dropping out of colleges. I mean, I heard recently the dropout rate for men, at US colleges is much, much higher than women.

So this is another problem we have to confront. Maybe if you personalize it, you would say, if a woman wants to be sure of finding someone, don't leave it until you're 35 and through all your graduate education, et cetera, because you're right at that point in time, there will be a very small pool of people who you might feel you want to partner. Because that's the real challenge.

And you know, you have to feel really sorry for these women, I have relatives of mine who are doctors. You work really hard at school. You then go to university, then you then have to go through medical school, you have to qualify. And by the time you've done all of your exams, you're in your early 30s, mid-30s,

and you've pretty much just started your career, and then you have to go, oh, right, now I have to think about kids. It's huge. It's huge. And you wonder, what are we going to do to be able to actually overcome this challenge? And do we just need to start talking more honestly about female biology?

One of the interviews that we did was a young German medical student. It didn't make the final cut of the documentary, but I will be including her in some future coverage. I think she was 23, 24, and she had decided to take a year out of medical school to have a child. And she was laughing with this.

Yes, it's a struggle, but you should see what it's like to be a doctor and have a child. And she had decided that if she didn't make that the right time for her, she'd probably end up being childless because she saw so many older doctors who were childless. And she was making it, she made it work. To be honest with you, she was one of the happiest positive energy people. And of course, when you're 22, 23, 24, you do have more energy for things like that. And again, I have to say, I don't want to pressure people to have children younger than they want, but we have to make societies more flexible so that those who might consider this are better able to do so. Well, look, none of us wants to force, this is kind of, I think, part of the reason that we can't have this conversation the way we need to is you and us, to some extent, are very tense about coming across as telling other people what to do.

none of us, just to be clear, none of the three of us wants to tell women or any other human beings how they should live their lives. However, we are also starting to see that some of the ways we've been living as a society are not generally speaking creating the highest amount of fulfillment,

meaning, purpose and happiness for people, right? And so we should be able to acknowledge both of those at the same time. I think that's really, really important actually. And we make all the jokes about it to diffuse the tension. but I know exactly why you are very careful about this, because it's a very difficult issue to talk about.

And we'll come back to talk about the issue itself in the second, but one of the ways that this difficulty of this issue showed up recently is your experience is at Cambridge University. Tell us about that. Or my lack of experience. Your lack of experience, yeah. So I was invited by a student at Cambridge University to give a presentation to show the documentary in the Q&A,

and I was greatly honored. and any students who want to invite me to universities anywhere, I'll try and be there. The students' name was Charlie Bentley Aster, who I didn't know at that time, but I've got to know her quite well since. And she explained that at Cambridge University these days, it seemed to be quite a thing to protest. And that she wore me, we might have some people who were upset by the documentary. Well, when I first heard that, to be clear, I've screened the documentary 40, 50 times, including to universities, international students, from various podcasts. I think there's now over 15,000 comments have been written about the documentary. Not one of those comments or one of those prior events would have ever given me any reason to think that anyone would want to cancel my documentary.

Why? It's about life. It's about people. It's people's voices. I don't even come up with a lot. conclusion in it, I simply say, here is the world and here is data. Hard data, real people. And most of the people I interview are women. In fact, entire crew, other than me, there's about nine of us involved in making a documentary. They were all women except me. And it wasn't I went out to try and find women to make this documentary. Women gravitated towards this project because they won't also hear answers from other people. So when Charlie told me there might be a few protesters, that was well, okay. My first thought, was I'd like to meet them. I'd like to sit down with them. I'd like to talk to them about

why they're protesting and talk to them about their lives and how the world's going to change. What actually happened was on another scale. There were protesters in the street a week before the event took place. Varsely Magazine wrote a hit piece on me, challenging the documentary, but giving no reason for it whatsoever. Yet no one ever contacted me. No protesters said, hey, Stephen, can you explain this data? They didn't even watch. the full documentary. They only watched the intro to it. And what is the thrust of their criticism? Well, the reason it was actually cancelled was St. John's College felt that there'd be too

much noise protest during exam time. So that was the excuse. Well, that's the hecklers veto. But why are they heckling in the first place? What's wrong with talking about this issue? They've called me anti-feminist, misogynist, bigoted, racist. racist? Yes. And most recently, fascist. Welcome to the club. That's what we all are now.

Why? Why are you? Okay, look, anti-feminist and misogynist. I'm not saying you are, obviously you're not. But I can see how people can add two plus two and get about 75, right? What does it have to do with racism? It's ridiculous. I mean, clearly, people are just trying to use terms.

As Charlie put it, they're trying to, intimidate other students and academics from attending this event. So by throwing out these words, accurate or not, it's just a warning to stay away. So the question there goes, these people don't know me, they don't know the documentary. There's something the subject matter they don't like, and I hear it might be to do with the definition of a woman.

I think putting the term mother and woman in the same sentence today is provocative to some people, perhaps. That's what's been explained to me. So, you know, I don't want to, I'm a data scientist. For me, it wasn't just a cancellation of the documentary. It was an attempt to cancel UN data. I mean, the data I gather is purely from government sources.

And it's an attempt to cancel the voices of the world, mostly from women. And something's clearly very, very wrong in society. When universities were places where people go to absorb new ideas and to reject them or accept them or change them, that even now in universities, least the little Cambridge. So I'm actually going back next week. We're going to try one more time before the end of the semester to screen it. I think I've been told if it's cancelled again, I'll become the most cancelled person ever at Cambridge University

because everyone else who got cancelled eventually went back and were able to kind of do their speech or whatever. So we'll see what happens next time. So I didn't know this part of it. I thought the reason that they were upset, with your documentary is, you know, you were telling women to get back in the kitchen. That was their interpretation. But it's not.

It's the mere idea that mothers are women, essentially. To be honest with you, no one's given me a specific reason. I mean, even if you read partially, there's no specific reason why this documentary is in any way upsetting to anybody. So the interpretation I've just given you is what I've been told, that the group of people, the 90 people who were due to come and protest, often protest against trans-related issues. And that's very sad. I mean, these are people I actually want to reach out to,

to sit down with, to talk about their lives. I hope I get that chance. That's because you haven't met them. Anyway, I'm just kidding. Stephen, moving on, there was this part of this, which I feel we're not talking about, which is fertility levels are also dropping as well.

So I was reading about certain studies that we're looking at male fertility and saying the quality of sperm in, I think it's something like men in their 20s, is inferior to quality of sperm and men in their 50s. And how much of an effect is that having on this particular? This comes up quite a lot. And the answer is, if it is having an effect, we haven't really seen it yet. It may be starting to be part of the data. We'll see in future. But one thing I'm very sure of, that is. is not the reason for the start of this trend. This trend started in the late 60s and 70s and has basically been on the continuum since then. So applying modern or more recent possible explanations

doesn't work out. I get perhaps the most amusing one. I got a comment on one of the sites that they thought Ronald Reagan was the reason for this whole problem when it started in Japan in the 1970s. So people are often taking things that they hear that are more recent and applying. I get this a lot. But now you have to find a reason that can explain this going all the way back to the 70s and to explain why it started in some countries before others. Only then can you understand this. Well, I feel like we still haven't quite got there in terms of our conversation here

because we talked about the economic shocks that people experienced in those countries and that those societies that have seen a reduction in the ratio between earnings and the cost of living essentially, right? It's become harder for a family to survive economically. But I still feel like there's got to be some kind of cultural stroke psychological dimension to this where we have become more risk-averse. And I think we see that in other areas of life as cultures generally. And I certainly would posit at least that the way we talk about climate change

and the way we talk about the future of the planet has an impact on how, people feel, do you know, the number of times I've talked to young people, and probably at one point thought myself prior to really educating myself about these issues properly, you know, there is the sort of human beings of the virus narrative that's going around, do you know what I mean? Like, there's too many of us, we're causing too much of a strain on the planet, why would we bring another person into this world that's about to collapse anyway? Like, that is definitely out there as well. Do you think that's a contributing factor here? I worry that that will be a contributing factor in the decade or two ahead, because I do hear that more and more from younger people

today. Frankly, birth rates are already so low, if that, you know, that could put us really over the age, if that becomes a case. And it's sad because, you know, I, first of all, I don't think we should be ranking our crises. I'm as concerned about the planet as the next person. The dialogue that we have around the environment, you know, frustrates me, frankly, because we only seem to talk about certain aspects of it, rather than, for example, technical solutions. that we should be talking about. We should be talking about everything if we're genuinely worried about it.

So the idea that whatever you think in terms of the environment that someone can say to somebody else do not have children, that's morally wrong. You might want to say, be careful how you raise your children, you know, in terms of consumption. Maybe that's okay.

But I've heard of situations. I've heard of professors in universities in the US telling the classes they should not have children. And that's just shocking. That's beyond immoral to me. If you were to say, let me bring in one of the other points about my findings, in all of these countries, once a person, once a woman becomes a mother,

family structure has not changed in decades. So back to the US in the 80s, back to Japan in the 70s, the proportion of women in Japan having four or more children was 6% in the 1970s. Today it's exactly the same. Now that was quite a shock to me to find out actually once a woman has her first child, she's typically going on to have as many children as it looks like she will want to have because that structure just does not change. But as a new father, just to interject briefly, that makes total sense to me because once

you have your first, it's like Pringles, once you pop, you can't stop. Like you're going to have as many as you're going to have because they're great. You know what I mean? For the vast majority of people, it's just the experience transforms you, but it's getting people over that line is what you. you're talking about. So the reason we are where we are is not that families have become smaller, it's just there's way more people not having children at all. Yes. Right. So, but I still feel like we haven't quite got to why that, my sense is my cultural and climate related explanation you feel

is much more forward facing. But in terms of why we have dealt with these economic shocks and the cost of living issue in the way that we have, do we have any sort of sense? Do we have any sort of sense of why it is that for the first time in probably human history, we're whittling down our own society. Do we have an idea of what that is? Well, to go back to these triggers, the oil shock, the mortgage shock, et cetera, also in Korea, the currency crisis of the mid-90s, there's multiple examples of this. What you find is a very quick transition to high childlessness, but it never goes back. It locks in. So the question to talk about the culture around this, societal norms change in some way that lock in a new pattern.

And that pattern is one where people have children later. So I think what's happened is frankly, as societies, and this is cross-cultural. I mean, you look at Japan as a culture, you look at Europe, different parts of Europe, the US. Even Brazil is suffering from the exact same problem, even Russia and Ukraine. So you look at all of these places. and you find that across all these cultures, once people start delaying parenthood, it gets locked in. And I equate this a little bit. In Japan, we have words for this. The person who was hired a year or two before you is called Sempai. So everyone has a Sempai and Sempai has a Sempai. And then the people below you are like Kohai. So it helps me with this terminology.

If you are particularly a woman and you're just turned 30 and your sempai and sempai and sempai, sempai, have not had a child yet, you're a feeling as, well, it's probably not my time yet because I might be perceived as, you know, so you're not even thinking of it. And what you might be thinking is, well, when senpai, sempai, boss's boss has a child, then there'll be a promotion opportunity. So I'm going to wait to that. So I think the way, you know, the world kind of welcomes people to kind of delay parents. parented around this. So it becomes a cultural phenomenon, but yet it's cross-cultural,

if that makes sense. That makes perfect sense. So essentially, once you've had the transition from having children young to not having children young, it becomes a locked-in cultural phenomenon that people essentially memetically take on from others around them. And then you add to that the economic rationale for, well, I'll get my career sorted first, then we'll have kids. And because of that, as you say, 80% of the women who end up being childless did not intend to be childless. In countries that have gone through the full transition. So in the US, there's a lot of women right now hoping to become a mother who are aged, you know, 35 to early 40s. And just statistically, you just look at the chances are not high. I mean, that's one other fact. Just I love sharing

if I can. Yeah. That in every country except one, and the one is Israel, I'll talk about in a moment. In every country I've looked at, women turning 30 without a child only have a 50-50 chance of ever becoming a mother. 30. In Israel, it's 31. It's just a little bit older. And when I ask people on a survey, what age do you think it's 50-50? 40 was the most common answer. So again, we have this mismatch about what is possible. We talked about fertility, but fertility is not the biggest reason people aren't becoming parents. it's because they're not with a partner at that right time. So they're working on their career 32, 33.

Maybe they do have a partner at that time. Now everything's good for one of them, but maybe the other partner isn't quite ready. Or maybe there's a breakup or a divorce. Or maybe you actually don't have a boyfriend, girlfriend, partner at that time. Not having a partner at the right time is the biggest reason. And that's what I wanted to tell people at Cambridge

was that, you know, one of the comments in, I think, firstly magazine from one student, the medical student was that they don't need to be told whether they want their children or not. What I want to tell them is actually it takes to have a child. I'm finding a partner at the right time is therefore really important, and most people skip over that. And it's also the fact as well, you know, we're talking about the 60s in population collapse. I mean, the pill must play a massive part in this, surely. No.

Correct. So you would say so. And the counter argument to this is that in Japan, the pill was not made legal until 1990. Really? Really. And do you know even today in Japan, only 3% of women take the pill? Three. It's incredible.

I didn't know that to quite recently. But let's go back. So the pill, I guess late 60s, became commonplace across much of the industrialized world. And we, like you, many people, me too, I'm sure in the past, would have said, oh, the pill has enabled women to, well, in Japan, there was no pill. What happened is there was a huge increase in abortions there. So with or without the pill, women were able to decide whether they want the children or not. So you have to put that, and by the way, I have to say again a caveat, I do not want to have any say on whether a woman wants to have an abortion or not. That's her choice.

Not my business. So the fact that it's the pill alone, you know, that's what I said no to. But for sure, women have a lot more control over their biology. But unfortunately, we are not educating women well or men on how short fertility cycles can be. And it's also as well that now women are being fed this, you know, this story that, and look, it works for some women as well, where they go, well, you know, technology is getting better and better, you can freeze your eggs. I've heard certain companies say to female executives, oh, we will freeze your eggs and we will pay for it, which you think sounds great, and you're going,

hang on, that's really dystopian. It's not just executives. It's young recruits, young women being brought from university are being sold this as a benefit. And when I first heard of egg freezing, I thought this was a great idea. I thought this is part of the solution. But the more I thought about it when I realized people are just delaying parenthood until they don't have a partner or they don't have energy. In a way, I love the way he pointed at me. I haven't slept for a year. I haven't looked as good for a year.

Don't point at me when you say they haven't got energy. I've got 40-year-old dad energy. That's what I've got. I'm sure you do. I, you know, now I've lost my track completely. No, I'm so sorry. You were talking about egg freezing. And people delaying parenthood to a point where they're old like me.

Well, I think it's dangerous to assume that egg freezing will en masse solve this problem. It may solve it in a very few cases and that's wonderful. I've got a fertility doctor in Tokyo who's just, you know, we're working with me right now to say, how can we let people know that that's really might be a last hope resort that may or may not work? So I think we have to put everything in perspective. And, you know, if technologies get better and people are able to have children,

and later in life, well, that's great, but we're certainly not there yet. Stephen, so your key takeaway message, and correct me if any of this is incorrect, is you don't have as much time as you think. Yes. That's one of your key messages. And if you get to 30 and you haven't got kids, your chances statistically speaking of having kids of 50-50 at that point. My wife and I, we had our first son at 39, very late.

Probably have another one. My wife comes from a family, like her granddad was born as like, like the 15th child and his mom was like 58 at the time. So she's maybe got genetically in a better position. But you don't have as much time as you think. You don't. Right? You don't have as much time as you think. So if you want to have children, basically you need to find a partner and try and make it work by around that time if you haven't already. If you want to be a mother or if you want to be a parent. It's about prioritization. It's what's important to you. And if someone decides, you know, I'll take the risk. I'm going to, you know, that's fine. So I don't want to force people.

I'm not saying that. But that's not what I was saying. I was saying if you want to be a parent, that's kind of the strategy you want to follow. Now, societally, the question for me is, we touched on some of the impacts earlier, but I actually think we didn't quite go as deep as we could

because when you talk in the movie, one of the stats you gave, which I was like, whoa, you said there are more adult diapers being sold in Japan than baby diapers. Yes. already. Yes.

It's been like that for quite a while, actually. That is terrifying, isn't it? Yes. So, you know, I live in Japan, and the reason I'm there is because I'm passionate about this issue. I'm actually passionate about trying to help save Japan. One of the great things there is that everyone in Japan intensely knows about this topic. It's on the media every day. The government are, you know, making regular, you know,

policy changes to try and address it. So it's a place where I hope, if anywhere in the world can solve it, it might be Japan first. Because you're right. Another statistic, in Japan, this data goes back a few years, within the last five to ten years, the average number of people waiting for a care home was around 400,000 people. When you get to an age in Japan of needing a care home, you can't take care of yourself. You're living alone. That is the moment you can put yourself on the list to wait for a care home.

So you need a care home, but you can't be on the list until you need it. Why? Because there aren't enough care home spaces. The average time I think from then to wait on a care home place is three years. So you've got people who literally are unable to take care of themselves and able to address themselves and unable to do anything living for three years before that place in a care home opens up. Japan is a template for much of Europe. Can I say, let me say here, I haven't said this before, but I'm from the UK originally.

I didn't have a vote here, but I don't live here. But I'm pro-Brexit. And at the time of Brexit, I contacted some newspapers here to say, look, I think we should do an article using some of the maps I've created to show how grim the situation is in Germany, Italy, Italy, Spain, much of Europe, because people need to know just how fast Europe's going down the hill economically, as well as in terms of the care of the elderly there. And I used this slogan, if you like, I was using the term, it's safer to be out because of what's going to happen in Europe.

With this rapid aging of old people that's already well underway. And so it's not just Japan. It's on our, or on your shores here in the UK. And it's catching up so much, so fast and so many parts of the world. And I think what people probably haven't been able to quantify, but it's undoubtedly the case. an age in society changes everything. It changes whether people start businesses or not. It changes whether there's innovation in society.

Because as we all know, that once you get to a certain age, you become less flexible and less willing to take a risk. I mean, that's why young people are much more risk hungry because that's the time you're supposed to be trying things because you've got time to fail. You've got time to make a mistake. You've got time to do that.

Economically, militarily, I mean, it just seems to me that this is a huge issue, as I said to you at the beginning, that people don't even understand the implications of, let alone the implications of the implications, the second order, third order, fourth order consequences. Yeah, we haven't gone into too many of those, but just a very obvious one is that we're going to have too much housing for the number of people in our societies. And today, in the UK, that's probably hard to understand because it seemed to be the other way around at the moment.

But that will change. And these are societies, therefore, that will have decaying communities where houses will become desolate, where communities will become desolate. I feel young people will mostly move away from those communities. I think certain towns will become what I call magnet towns that people gravitate towards, mostly younger people, which become quite expensive.

The older people will be left in the decaying towns without enough health care. Taxes are going to go up for everybody. and then you take national debts. So most countries, Japan certainly, all countries I want to say, have got significant national debts. And these tend to get larger rather than smaller.

Well, if you've a shrinking workforce to pay the interest on those, you're going to have a real pressure on the younger people to continue to have anything like the quality of lifestyle that we've had before. So communities are going to look different. And yeah, I really worry about loneliness and all of this. You know, we haven't used that word yet, but that is a core word that I think that we need to apply.

It's not the right word. People who don't find a partner, people who don't have children when they want it of children, are likely to face a level of loneliness. And there's many support groups online already for this. You can see, you can read the stories. You can even read the stories. I imagine after this podcast, you'll see comments coming up of people in this situation who left it too late

dealing with a level of loneliness. But then you take older people. So there's a community in Japan where I visited, where 50 years ago it was filled with younger families and today it's only older people. But it's mainly older women living there alone because partners, men tend to die younger. So you have this situation where we went to the local

grocery store and we hear that these women come out maybe once a week to do the shopping and they're spending forever talking while they're paying for the groceries was that's the only person they're getting to talk to a weekly and we've got to do something about this clearly we can't let people remain in their apartments without a sense of community but we're going to have to think about so many issues so many problems that come out of this that we're not scratching the surface of yet and stephen is the sorry francis just i wanted to ask this one other question on this other than sub-Saharan Africa, where people are very happily breeding away and enjoying big families and all of that, and there's fewer childless women, I think. Am I saying anything that's incorrect? Yeah, but I don't think they're enjoying having bigger families. The reason people have large families is typically because of extreme poverty.

Yes. Once you put in running water and opportunities for education, that changes completely. Right. So what you can say is in Subtitarian Africa, where people are having fewer children year by year, it's quite significant. But still there, you have extreme poverty in many areas and that's causing larger families. I think it's a better way to go. Okay, that's a more accurate way of putting it. Is there an antidote?

I've spoken to some people from Israel recently, and they're telling me, you know, Jerusalem is the best place. There's kids everywhere, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Does Israel offer some kind of solution? Like, where can we look to for some answers to this? So there's two places that are interesting. One's Israel, one's Hungary. Israel is a very stratified society. I've never been there. I hope to go this year, but I can see from the data very clearly, you have quite high childlessness and rising childlessness. It's about 20% there now. But you have 15% of mothers having six or more children. Right. The Orthodox, I imagine. People tell me that. Yeah. But there is something interesting in Israel. The most common family size in Israel is three children. And that's quite rare. Usually it's two.

So is there a learning there? Perhaps, again, I don't ever want to tell someone to have more children than they naturally want. But I don't think we're going to get 15% of mothers in other countries having six or more children. That's just not realistic. Hungary is the other one where they have a lot of policies. For example, in Hungary, if you're a young couple, you can get a loan to buy a house. And the loan will increase depending on how many children you effectively commit to up to four. So you're going to get a bigger loan to buy a bigger house without even having had your first child. If you don't have four children, well, you have to pay some of the money back. So you only get the benefit of this loan when you actually have children. Now, the interest, and I'm not saying that maybe that's coercive, but what is interesting about it is the

actual structure of family size and hunger has not changed at all, like everywhere else. You don't have any more people than before and wants to become a parent having one, two, three, four children. But you do see a significant reduction in childlessness. Quite significant. And it's too early yet to say that this is causal. But it's certainly something I think we should look at. Is there a way to, you know, through loans, encourage people, to take away economic vulnerability, which is there for people to say, look, okay, if you do have the children, you think you're going to have, you know, here's this, and you have to pay back some of it if you don't.

Again, I don't want to comment necessarily on what's good or bad here in specific policies, but those are two countries. I could talk about Russia very briefly if you wanted to. Of course. Russia is also sided with, as having policies that have somewhat successfully encouraged people to have more children. And Russia's birth rate did dip very low and then did go back up. But if you look underneath this, up until 95, the,

most common family size in Russia was one child. Over half of families were having only one child. And I don't know why that is. But from 95 onwards, that started to normalize, normal mean become more similar to other countries, where two was the most popular and the number of people having only one child fell sharply. So it wasn't really an increase in overall birth rates.

It was a reduction in people only having one child. Whereas right now in Russia, birth rates are just falling through the roof since around 2015, I believe it is. Births, I think, are done. It might be 30%. So all of these countries that people look at and go, oh, Russia did something good here.

It's never as easy as that, or it's rarely as simple as that. And do you think as well part of this problem, and Constantine has actually mentioned it, more imparting than anything else, is society, particularly Western society, is very anti-Natal. So whenever I hear you talk about South, Korea, you talk about, and correct me if I'm wrong,

0.8 is a replacement rate in South Korea. Yes. I was reading about South Korea the other day when I was researching for this interview. They have child-free zones in, you know, I think it's in the South, in an island in South Korea. And they say, you know children are allowed in coffee shops, restaurants, etc., etc. And then you go, and then you wonder why people don't want kids. South Korea, I did film there, several people from Korea appear.

It's a culture where there are issues, work-life balance, and women do get paid less than men. There are certain cultural issues you would point to. The term that's used in the media is birth strike, but none of the women I actually talk to in Korea were saying, well, I'm on strike. So I think that's a cute media term. The reality is women in Korea are starting, families very late, much later than other countries, and they're not achieving the same family size as other countries would do. And Spain's very similar as well, by the way, in terms of

the number of people starting families really late. So in those countries, you find very high proportions of families with only one child again. I hadn't heard of the Child Free Island. I must research that, but it sounds horrendous. And, you know, the anti-natalism, it is out there. Oh, 100% it's out there. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You meet so many. people. I'll be honest with you. I used to be like that. Before we had our son, I used to find kids annoying. I do. And I think the fewer of them are around actually the more annoying you find them because they become the anomaly. It's like almost everybody's had experience of getting on a plane, seeing a baby going, oh, for fuck sake, I'm not going to get any rest. I'm not going to get any

sleep. Whereas I think if everyone was having kids around you, it would be a whole different experience because it's like, well, it's just part, like you get on a plane, there's going to be some kids on there because there's going to be some men and some women. It's like part of the thing. Do you know what I mean? So I think there's an awful amount of it around. Do you know, the thing that irritates me most is a term used a lot, and we haven't used it here. I don't want to ever use it, but it's putting the word child and free in the same. Right. Yeah, I call it the CF word. And the CF word is used commonly in the media. It's used in some academia. but the word free means free from something harmful.

And the idea that children are harmful. So you put the word free after disease free, germ free, debt free, mortgage free. Things are universally negative. Not something that you want and you don't want. Not a selective thing. So the idea that there's people out there who would use the CF term, you know, as a parent, I find that offensive. The idea that I might want to be free.

from my children. Or if a teacher in school was saying to my children, when they're younger, oh, that they are child free, what would that do to a child hearing from a teacher? Oh, maybe my parents also want to be free of me. I mean, it's damaging to children. So this is where I see this, well, not exactly subtle, quite obvious, anti-nehitalism creeping in everywhere. And I think that term just has to be called out for what it is. Well, I think on a more positive level, I always try and talk about how much I enjoy being a parent just to get the idea out there that it's actually a lot of fun.

It's not something you want to be free from. It's something if it's right for you, like you want to make that happen. So we're going to go to supporters only questions in the second on Locals, and they've got a bunch of great questions for you. But before we do, just so wrapping it up, If I'm watching this, I'm 23 years old, I'm a young woman, I want to be a parent, I do want to be a parent at some point, what are you telling me? Start thinking from now about how that's going to best happen for you. Don't wait until you're 28, 32, 35 and be aware that you will have to make compromises, almost certainly. Something will have to give. And if you don't make a decision for your.

yourself to have a child, you know, that's unplanned childlessness will be the consequence. You may have your career and that might be fine. You may have friends, other extended family, that's fine. But the thing that is most likely to give is family if you don't in some way start to consider it from age 23. And if I'm a policy maker listening to this because there are some of those two, what are you telling me? Show this documentary in all your schools or start education about this in schools because people need to know about fertility challenges from high school age. They need to know that there's only a 50-50% chance of becoming a mother. A man that's only a little bit older too.

People need to know that when they're planning their lives. Policymakers, spending more money on, you know, enabling people to have children, maybe a good idea. More kindergarten, that might be good, but those things don't fix the problem. They never have and I don't think they ever will. Devour information. Spare information. It's been an absolute.

absolute pleasure having you on. Before we move to locals, our final question is always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be? Well, unplanned childists, I know I've already said it. And I, you know, I, but I'll say unplanned childness is in a broader context here. We've talked a lot about women becoming unplanned childness, but it happens to men too. And how it happens to men is we think we can wait and wait and wait because technically, mostly were able to have children later than women. But do you know what happens? Ace 45?

You're competing with a 35-year-old version of yourself to find the same woman who's able to have children. So there are actually more childless men than childless women. And I think men need to understand that this applies to them just as much. That makes a lot of sense. Stephen, where can people watch the birthcap? So birthcap.org is a website we have. Part one of the documentaries on there.

The other parts are available for members only because we're working with some streaming services right now to look at possibly having them brought out later this year. Part one is also on YouTube. I caught it on YouTube and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. So I recommend everybody check it out there and continue to follow it. And we will go over to locals.

Join us there. He says, I agree with David Attenborough when he says all our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder and ultimately impossible to solve with even more people.