TRIGGERnometry - We're Not Having Enough Kids - It's A Disaster - Stephen J. Shaw

Episode Date: September 17, 2025

Stephen J. Shaw is a data scientist, demographer, and filmmaker best known for his groundbreaking documentary Birthgap – Childless World. | Want better sleep? Try Beam Dream. Visit https://shopbeam.com/TRIGGER and use code TRIGGERPOD for up to 35% off. Limited time only! Triggernometry is proudly independent. Thanks to the sponsors below for making that possible: - Cape - America's privacy-first mobile carrier. Click https://cape.co/trigger - Promo Code: TRIGGER33 for 33% off - Qualia Senolytic. Go to https://Qualialife.com/TRIG for up to 50% off AND use code TRIG at checkout for an additional 15% off. Join our exclusive TRIGGERnometry community on Substack! https://triggernometry.substack.com/ OR Support TRIGGERnometry Here: Bitcoin: bc1qm6vvhduc6s3rvy8u76sllmrfpynfv94qw8p8d5 Shop Merch here - https://www.triggerpod.co.uk/shop/ Advertise on TRIGGERnometry: [e-mail] 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 - Introduction 02:15 - There's A Singular Reason For Falling Birthrates 16:07 - What Are The Long-Term Consequences? 21:05 - The Effects Of There Not Being Enough Children In Tokyo, Japan 27:50 - The Closure Of Schools 30:19 - South America 37:04 - The Economics 45:18 - Unplanned Childlessness 49:03 - How Ignorant Women Are About Fertility 55:34 - This Is An Anti-Human Message 01:01:40 - Children Are Seen As A Burden 01:09:18 - Our Society Is Dishonest About Biology 01:11:40 - What's The One Thing We're Not Talking About That We Really Should Be? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

So I looked up some data and I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting. What I didn't expect to find was a pattern across 39 nations. That explains everything. And I mean everything. There is a singular reason for falling birth rates. Japan seems to be at kind of the forefront of this out of the South Korea. On average, every day, two schools close in Japan, and that's been going on for 15 years. Stroller sales for pets are now outstripping.

for kids. That's in South Korea and I believe it's true in Japan too. There are people out there trying to block messages. And one of the messages they're trying to block is educating women about fertility. A woman turning 28 in the UK has a 50, 50% chance of ever becoming a mother. At 28, there are some people who literally want humanity to die. This is a civilization ending. In that case, what do we do? Relax, relax. This is not an ad. If you're not a fact, fan of ads, but love trigonometry. Join the thousands of trigonometry members who get extended interviews, no ads, early access, and the ability to submit their own questions for upcoming guests. Sign up now at triggerpod.com.uk or click the link in the description of this episode.

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with code podcast at checkout. That's time number four, learning.com. Start today with month-to-month access and no long-term commitment. Steven Shaw, welcome back to Trinconometry. Great to have you on. Thanks for the invite. Yeah, well, obviously we talked with you, I think it was last year, about your documentary birth gap, talking about the fertility crisis across the world now,

not just the Western world, but across the Western world, which is basically the fact we're not having enough children to replace the population as we have. Now, we talked about many of the challenges that poses. I think the stat that really stood out for a lot of people from that interviews in Japan where you live, more adult nappies are sold than baby nappies. So there's more nappies for people who are in the final stages of life than for babies. And this is a thing that is increasingly being replicated around the world. And you now have some new data and you've done a lot more research into this. So talk to us about where the world is in respect to all of that.

Just remind people and then what have you discovered about why it is that way. I'll add just one thing about nappies. I believe it's not the case for strollers as well. I think strollers sales for pets are now outstripping strollers for kids. That's in South Korea and I believe it's true in Japan too. So things aren't getting better anywhere and you're right, you know, what's happening in the Far East,

I'm still based in Tokyo, is absolutely playing out. So it was two years ago I was here. And at that time, I would say fertility came into the mainstream press once or twice a year. I mean, it just wasn't a thing. US too. it's now almost daily. So the transition of awareness

is the one big change I notice. And that's a good thing because one of the reasons for making the documentary was to make people aware of what's actually happening. But you're right, over the past two years,

I've been doing more research because I still wasn't convinced that we really understand this crisis. My first paper now peer-reviewed, I can say that. I tend to make documentaries first and then do the peer review after,

which is probably the wrong way around to some people. But I think this is so important that people need to be aware of certain things. And the peer-reviewed research really shows that mothers in Japan and the UK are having around the same number of children as 1970. Mothers. Let's just part the category of women.

Because there's no such thing as that. Debatable category nowadays. To me, it's like, a Schrodinger's cat, but they're not going to like me for this, the idea of a cat that's half alive and half dead. So part, that analogy, but the idea of an average person,

mother or father, is someone with a child and childless at the same time. We measure these, you know, average people. Demographers do it. And it's held a lot of people back, I think, in fully understanding exactly what's happening. So original research separated, people who are having children.

we've got so much data on women. It's terrible, really. I'm always talking about women and mothers, and I really want to talk about men more, and I hope to do that here. But looking at the data for women, if you become a mother, 1970s, Japan, 2025, Japan,

you're going on to have around the same number of children. UK too. In US, mothers are actually having more from 2.4 to 2.6. So this is not to do about parenthood. This is to do with the transition into parenthood. But I felt, well, from my first, research, that's as far as you could go.

That it was obvious parenthood was being delayed. So I had this category delayed parenthood. People doing other things first and running out of time. What I didn't expect to find one layer deeper was a pattern across 39 nations that explains everything. And I mean everything. So I'm not on camera, on trigonometry, for the first time saying there is a singular reason for falling birth rates.

And I'll either be laughed at for that or people might look back and think, oh, that's interesting. I hope it's the latter. So if I can take you through for a moment, last June, I was in Kyoto, Japan, and I just finished all the data analysis for the first paper. Literally just finished it. And I went out for an evening, and a friend that was due to meet,

was double-booked for a birthday party, so I had an evening to myself, and I do what I'd like to do on Friday nights. Let's do some more data analysis. And I decided to do only one thing, which was, okay, let's just prep the data for the next paper, which is going to be about the probability of being apparent by age. That was always in my mind. and I threw this into a visualised dashboard data tool

and the age of parenting became a curve. I'm not going to too much now because you made more questions first but I've been to share with you that the latest research is what I call vitality and it shows that the age of parenthood can predict birth rates with very high accuracy but it's not your age it's everybody else's age. Well, it's other people are the problem, you see. That's helpful. It doesn't matter if we decide to have a child younger.

The overall average of things, someone having a child will replace someone else not having a child. All balances out. What I mean is it's a societal thing. These curves center around an age where everybody is tending to have children. And trying to move that forwards or backwards, just because a group of people decide,

well, we're going to have kids earlier. Great if they do for them. But the whole challenge we have now is to do with the age of becoming a parent, and that's a big problem. Just to understand clearly, what you're saying is, if you look at societies

and you measure the average age at which people become parents, that will tell you what the fertility rate of that society is going to be. You can derive it in two or three, rather simple steps. Okay, but I'm a little bit confused about you say that why that's a

single explanation because there will be causes of that average age increasing over time. A number of them, I imagine, not just a singular one, right? So some of them will be economic, some will be cultural, social, I imagine, right? So I try and think of analogies

and some of them are good and some are not, so let's see. Imagine you're a fish, a sense, salmon in a river, a fast-flowing river. Let's say one day some bears come along. Not good. So all the fish moved downstream. They found a new home there.

And the fishermen come along and think, what's happened to all the fish? And then they go and they find the fish. But it's not nice where they are now. We want to move back upstream. Oh, we know the problem that. It was caused by bears. So let's just get rid of the bears.

That was the trigger. The bears were the trigger to moving the fish downstreet. Getting the fish back upstream is a whole different challenge. So you're right. What we see is major social turbulence, crises, recessions, causing delay parenthood if you have not had your first child. If you've already had your first child, there's almost no effect. So it delays parenthood. So we're now moving downstream of when people have had children before. So the triggers need to be separated from, you know, not resolving the triggers now would be like taking the bears away when they're longer the

problem. Well, that's a very specifically framed metaphor. Forgive me for interrogating it as much as I am, but it implies the way this works as you can't move back. Some people might say, I'm just thinking of the sure with you, Stephen, not trying to argue with you at all, that if you remove the conditions that cause people to delay parenthood, Well, the reason I'm asking is, for example, right? My wife and I had our first son at 39. I know for a fact we probably would have had them earlier

if our material conditions had been different. If we'd bought our flat earlier, if I was making more money earlier, if, et cetera, do you see what I'm saying, right? So if I go back to that time when I was 35 and I had the income that I had now or the physical, you know, security of owning a property or whatever it might be, we may well have had a child earlier. So if you remove that economic constraint from Constantine at age 35,

we may well have had kids then. Do you see what I'm saying? Sure. And to go back to that evening in Kyoto, once I called up this chart, I was up to 3 in the morning in disbelief for the reason that this curve, which I'll explain, is symmetrical without bumps.

So what I mean, if you look at the age, of parenthood, motherhood, and fathers. We now have some father data. My full expectation up to that evening was you'd see a delay in parenthood, some people having children, young, of course, and then maybe mid-20s, you would kind of have a slope going up. And then maybe around 30, there might be another uptick, and then there'd be another uptick. Somebody out would start to go down, but there'd be another little uptick, mid-30s, and then IVF, you would definitely see all the progress in terms of technologies. And you'd also say, well, if you go back to 1970, it would be different,

but it would be smoother then because maybe there was closer to an average parent back then. Most people were marrying at the same time, having kids at the same time. So I think doubt myself that this would be a curve that starts smooth and shows all this bumpiness as people, through autonomy, decide whether to have a child at 35 or 39. But what I saw was a smooth curve in 1,539 datasets. Very slight perturbations, very slight for periods of time. I stared at that screen.

I wrote an email to myself at night, and I don't think I've ever done that before, ever will. Because I wanted to remember the moment. So this is a symmetrical curve centered around the age, and today, let's say it's around 30. Starts around 20, goes up almost perfectly a perfect bell curve, what we call the Gaussian curve, with a formula. It's a formula for us. The email to myself said, we're all the same. And what I meant was,

it's a toss of a coin for us all by age. Whether we want things or whether we have money, the money you may have had, in the younger years, you may have spent to, you know, take a few modifications or do other things and then wait. I thought the data was wrong.

To me, this was impossible. I went back to the source, data confirmed that it's not national database, it's verified it against other sources, went to the CDC and the US. US is interesting, by the way. The US, I'll just state now, US is multiple curves. Asian Americans, perfect curve.

African Americans start starting younger. If people were to say in the US, why are so few Asian Americans and African Americans, black Americans, are having kids? Well, you can see in the data, Asian Americans are having kids, five to ten years later than African Americans. So this curve, to try to explain, I call it the vitality curve,

the desire to have children, I think, is bumpy. I think there are people at those ages when they get through college, two years of career, when they get to 30, when they get to 35. I think there is bumpiness in the desire of kids or on certain ages, but there's a greater force that overrides everything. So to put it in context,

when you model this, again, 39 economies, have to say economies, because it includes Taiwan. It's a wide diverse set of countries in East Asia, North America, almost all of Europe. When you put all this together

into a database, all of this data, you get the same smooth curve and you get predictability that around 94% of birth rates are related to that central age, that fatality curve, only 6% relates to taxes, family policy, the economy, culture, anything else.

There's some exceptions to 6%. You can tweak it a little bit up and a little bit down. But to me, the takeaway for policymakers is that if you ignore the average age of parenthood and only focus on helping everybody of children, the chances of success are small. And I'll say one more thing.

And this is an irony to me. The more you do to help people have IVF or delay parented in any way, the lower the curve goes. So overall, IVF, of course, great for many people, of course. But the more you kind of encourage later parenthood, this curve started like this and anchored, at a young age because people are still having kids

in teenagers, so it's anchored. And as it stretches, you take the life out of a society. Can I give you an analogy? It'd be better than the fish one. Imagine times gone by, maybe my parents' generation, where in a town, people would go to a dance hall, and that was the only place to meet people realistically.

And the dance falls open from 8 until 11, and everyone's there at 8 o'clock because you'd only miss out. And the first hour so is gossip and who's brought their cousin from another town and has there been a breakup? And the conversation starts. And then by the middle of the night,

you know, the dance floor, everything's flowing. There's lots of energy. And towards the end, people start drifting home and it's less likely that any, you know, new connections will be made. But it's condensed.

Everything's out. Everyone's on the same page at that same moment in time. So imagine the dance hall. Hunter thinks, well, this is amazing. I'm going to extend the, hours I'm going to open at seven and going to stay open to midnight. But there's still only the same number of people to come. There's not an extra body of people you're pulling in. So what happens,

some people come at seven, but someone get bored and go home at 10. Some people have dinner first and come later. There's never that one central moment. You've stretched out the energy and you don't get that one moment. And I imagine in that situation, let's say you're dancing with someone and you you think, okay, this is interesting. And then some new people arrive, you know, at five to ten, and your head turns and thinks, wait a minute, there's something new. I need to consider that, at which point your partner knows

you looking elsewhere and he or she's gone somewhere else. When you have a concentrated time span, when everyone's on the same page, it is easier in technical terms. There's less entropy, less disorder, when people are pair bonding, matching by the younger. reach. If you're a trigonometry fan, you probably think before taking things at face value. So why trust a mobile carrier that makes billions selling your data behind your back? That answer is Cape, a premium mobile

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Start today with month-to-month access and no long-term commitment. Stephen, you know, when I was watching the doc and I was reading your data, it reminded me of a book that I read a few months ago called Adventures in the Screenwriting Trade by William Goldman. And it's about the movie industry. And he wrote Bush Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. And he said in 1982, the blockbusters were aimed at 16 to 24-year-olds. So all the blockbuses in the late 70s, early 80s,

Williams at 16 to 24 year olds, because he said at the age of 24, people were getting married, they were having kids, they weren't going to the cinema. So all of those blockbusters would be aimed squarely at that target demographic. Now imagine a blockbuster being released nowadays. It wouldn't mean 16 to 24 year olds. If I was a suit of movie producer, I'd be like, well, 16 to 35, maybe 16 to 40. Well, that's why you've got a 60-year-old Tom Cruise and Top Gun Maverick, right?

The Ohio world here is maybe not 60. Yeah, no, Tom, yeah, Tom, yeah, Tom Cruise is about 60. Yeah, so you've got all these people identifying with an aged Tom Cruise. No offense, Tom. And in that analogy, I think what happens is you've actually got more people, because there's more people to watch those movies over a wider age span. The issue with pair bonding is that aren't any more, there aren't any extra people that were stretched out the hours.

So it'll be like stretching the hours of, you're like stretching the hours of, a blockbuster, but the same number of people coming in and not just the energy might be taken out and sure the analogy fully holds, but you know, this is my biggest worry now. This is what keeps me awake at night, including last night. Time moves forwards, just like a river. It's easy to delay parenthood. You know, we all, like not this year. I got to make sure, that's fine. but if we're to go back, if we are, if we are, it kind of means creating this turbulence where you're trying to,

you're almost trying to tell all the over 30-year-olds, look, you've gone do your own thing, deal with each other, figure it out, while you're trying to have some. I never use the word encouragement. It's up to people to have kids if they want them, and I'll say it here and now. No one should force anyone to even contemplate children.

But there are many young people who do want families, and given the risk of unplanned childlessness. But having those two things at the same time, I've seen it done once in Hungary, in a limited way, where you have had policies that have created this bubble in 25-year-olds and younger having children in Hungary.

And that's probably the most interesting thing happening in demography right now, okay, there's an example. Hungary's overall birth rates have gone up and have not settled back down again, but that's not the most important thing to me. So there's a bubble that could be interesting for the future of younger people, starting a family.

And what you do so beautifully in the documentary is you explore the real impacts of childlessness on countries. And we'll talk about South America because with my background, I actually found that quite shocking. We'll talk about that later on in the interview. But the Japanese lady, who you met, and you took her back to the town that she grew up in,

And in the early 70s, it had been this vibrant town where there were schools and kids' playgrounds. And then you went back in, I think, in 2021, 2022, whenever it was. I mean, talk about that. It was horrific. And it was actually a suburb of Tokyo. You know, it's 40 minutes on the subway line. So it's technically Tokyo City, which people would think is this 30 million, you know, boom. place with too many people.

So this is my Japanese language teacher. She told me for a long time the suburb where she was brought up. And I knew that she'd left that suburb when she was 12 years old. Her family moved elsewhere. So I looked up some data. And I thought, oh, this is going to be interesting.

I think the suburb has completely changed just looking at the residence ages. So I persuaded her. I waited to have a film crew in town and persuaded her kindly, Emmy Sensei, to go with me. And I kind of knew what she was in for, but she didn't. So she walks into this playground and she's smiling.

There's where I used to play and I used to climb here. And she's just filled with joy. You can see it. And then she comes to an alleyway that used to be filled with shops. And they're all closed. Every single one shuddered. And she just says, shock. And you just see what's happened to her.

Because you can't see inside apartment. who's there, old lonely people mostly. Well, I know it's old lonely people because one shop that was opened, one store is a pharmacy. And the pharmacists are like 80 years old, husband and wife. And they confirmed everyone,

as they put it, everyone's old, and it's mostly a single woman living alone because men die younger. And the grocery store, mother and son run it. The mother would be on the till, and she liked doing that because many of the elderly people who come by, she's the only person they get to talk to once a week.

And they delay and delay paying their bills and chit-chat and then one day they don't come back. The scene you're talking about, Francis, yeah, you know, it's, it was a most chilling moment in the entire documentary, and there were several, but we found some locals outside this pharmacy. And they were talking amongst themselves, my assistant, me, I got to talk to them. And they're saying, no, no, don't say this, don't say this, don't mention, don't know, but one person told us that the week before, an elderly woman in her 90s, without children, had thrown herself off the roof from loneliness. And then we were told, that's not uncommon.

Right, right there, she fell off because she was lonely. I don't think we know what loneliness is like in our younger years. what is loneliness not being connected with the world we can't sit there on that sofa and observe someone sitting there depressed day after day

after day yeah and you know I talk out probably my first time talking about this scene in any detail I don't know how we do anything about that unless people start caring for older people in the way, I don't think we do anymore.

And these bills are being passed around the world about assisted suicide. I think they're just terrible. Maybe well-intended. Sure, I can empathize with some unfortunate people, where that would be a preferred choice. I remember flying back to Tokyo and sitting beside two young Japanese students, girls in the early 20s. And if you end up sitting beside me in a plane,

we're going to be talking about birth rates, you less for sure. But the young woman sitting beside me was on her way back home after studying, I think, in the UK. And I explained she was on her way back to her house, excited to see her parents. And I said, oh, you know, the brother-sister, yeah. And then she mentioned her grandparents. And she said, oh, yeah, my grandparents still live with us.

Well, that's good. You've got community. And then she kind of welled up in tears. and she said, why are they still here about their own grandparents? And obviously she was doing chores, obviously she was studying, obviously she was imagining all the things

she would have to do to take care of her grandparents. But to verbalise those words, to me in some way, what has stuck with me, those words may not often be spoken, but they might be thought. Or they might even be hinted to a point where elderly people in nations where assisted suicide is possible,

start feeling guilty. I'm a burden. Why am I here? I can sense it. And then communities build in this expectation, well, you shouldn't be a burden. And we'll all think when we get to that age, that's the done thing. Now, what does that do to any civilization, any society where that becomes the end? So this whole area of, I call these communities,

and it's not just Japan, I went to one in Germany as well, that they're everywhere. You don't see them in the center of the city. You know, go out of cities in many countries and you'll find them. I call them yesterlands, like lands built for yesterday. And they're too big now, there's too many vacant houses. Sure, not in the trendy places.

You know, that's where the house prices go up, but not in the rural areas, or even these suburbs. Yeah, I worry about that a lot. And, I mean, like I said, the doc is brilliant and incredibly powerful. And that was one of the moments that really hit home with me. The other one that hit home with me, particularly, was the amount of schools that were closed. There's somebody who used to teach and you're being surrounded by kids and the energy that kids bring and the liveliness. and just seeing you in a deserted playground.

And then you said that school closed in 2006 and you showed the photograph of a boy being taught on his own. It made me feel an almost visceral pain. Yeah. Yeah. So, you know, we talk a lot about Japan. It's at the bleeding age, but the rest of us are not so far behind. in the UK, schools are closing in some areas. It's becoming more and more on the radar.

But, yeah, I mean, that one photo to me, you're right, the last student in this elementary school. And, you know, so Japan, something, on average, every day, two schools close in Japan, and that's been going on for 15 years. It's 5,000, 6,000 now. Schools aren't just schools. They're hubs of the community.

Like you say, the energy is not just within the classroom. It's all around the classroom. And you take a school away from a community. I've seen that happen. So let's say you've two towns, maybe five, ten miles apart, five, ten kilometers. And there's only enough children for one school. So a decision's made,

okay, we're going to keep this school. We can just bust these kids. Solution. No. What happens? Slowly, the families start to buy houses in this town or move there. Suddenly fewer people want to live here,

and you end up with elderly people left here. And then maybe a few kids still getting that school bus. Meanwhile, this town's still got a bank and somewhere to repair your car and buy groceries. This one ends up with nothing. I went to such a town, pretty central Japan last year. There's one cafe. So one cafe.

Maybe a town that would have had two, three hundred people. Not big, but one cafe. The cafe opens once per month. they have a day to all go to the cafe. So these fading societies, you know, it's terrible. And we talk about fading societies and obviously Japan because Japan seems to be at kind of the forefront of this as does South Korea.

The part of the doctor I found shocking is someone with a Latin American background is you were talking about South America. You were talking about Brazil. I think what was the stat is it 1.64 replacement in Brazil? I mean, I found that mind-boggling. This is a Catholic country where fertility is celebrated. And when I spent a lot of time, I'm not in Brazil, but in Venezuela. It seemed to me that I was surrounded by children and young people,

and it was a vibrant, energetic society. Yeah, I think that's shocks. Most people, I actually spent three weeks. filming in six countries just because I had to see it, because I knew people wouldn't believe it. And yet, if you go back to Italy, 40, 50 years ago, it would have been the same. No, it would have believed Italians would stop

having big families and birth rates who crash. Now it's happening in Latin America, and it's about to happen. It's already well underway in India, particularly southern India. It just takes us time to notice. You don't really notice that people aren't having kids. What changes?

Nothing for a tent, a few schools closed, but not a big deal in the initial phase. It takes time for us to know this, which is part of the problem. But yeah, Latin America, Latin America has a bigger problem than the West, much bigger problem. Because the West and the Far East got wealthy before they got old. Japan's got reserves, huge national debt, but it's got reserves for a while. Perhaps they can use those reserves to help re-engineer society. Brazil doesn't have reserves.

Still today in these countries, the pension systems are geared up for very large families compared to the number of retirees. And the experts I interviewed there, including one, well, a doctor who's now into looking, gerontology is at care of older people. And the fear in his eyes, and voice talking about the future of elderly people in Brazil.

So what's happening in Latin America is what happened in Europe in the Far East 20 plus years ago. It's popping up in the numbers now. The real impact will be 20 plus years. And India is on the exact same path. So this being a worldwide problem, let's come back to the conversation we started with, which is, I guess, implied and implicitly what you're saying,

to some extent, is the idea that the way we got here is not necessarily the way we'll come out of it. Even if we address some of the reasons that this has happened, that won't take us to where we want to go. Can you talk about why that is, first of all? Yeah. So we have this central tendency,

this fatality curve, and it's there, 1,539 data sets, so a year in a country put together, massive. Which shows that as the average age of Parenthood gets older, people have fewer kids. That's basically what it's shown.

Overall. Overall. Overall. In a very predictable way. Okay. So that's equivalent to tossing a coin, 1,539 times, and it coming out heads every time. Don't bet on the next one being a tail. So you have to assume whatever the reason for this curve,

I've got my theories. I think it's linked to pair bonding, matching up. But it's there. Now, if you... take, let's say, average age 30 is common in many nations right now. South Korea 32, 29, 30 is common. If you were to do things like put more money in young parents' pockets, if you do things that open more daycare, baby bonuses,

all sorts of things that people think of, gender, you know, men doing more at the home, more paternity leave, let's say we solve all those things. We're now living in a perfect world. that central age is anchored at that point if you're to pull it forward so you're at that peak point now at 30 we've got to move the peak earlier

but you're already 30 so you need to create some new bubble a solution can only emerge if a new bubble emerges that allows the people older than 30 to continue doing things as they would for a time while something new and you blossom if you like

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is that the average age of people getting together into a serious committed relationship seems to be increasing. And I have a lot of friends in America now who are in their 20s, who are all married and about to have kids because that's kind of part of their worldview. But they are kind of the exception,

at least globally. But, you know, in the 70s, you still had, to some extent, the one earner household where the man would, stereotypically speaking, would go out to work. He could feed the entire family off his income. His wife could afford to be at home with the kids. And now that is just much more difficult to attain for people. So I would say there are probably quite a lot of young people that would be happy to have kids if that vision was available to them, which it isn't. So wouldn't solving that problem, not that I know how to solve it. But if we solved that, wouldn't that turn this all around? I'm not saying that these things

aren't important. But I am saying there's no evidence. They'll affect birth rates. But we've never, we've not seen that economic reality be reversed. It's only getting worse. It's only getting harder for people to get on the housing ladder. It's only getting harder for people to survive on a one one income, right? Yes, but if you go back to, you know, 70s, there was a time when things were getting better. And you can look at different recession. getting, and does it affect birth rates? No. More people weren't having kids

in the Reagan-Thatcher boom years? So, Reagan-Thashableness, so we're talking now the 80s, I think, really. Average family size in the UK was the same in America. It was 2.4, so it's actually gone up. Childlessness was lower in America at that time.

But no, this is something really quite locked in. But if I could... I understand. And I have this conversation. I think my eldest son won't mind mentioning him. He got married recently. And living in Central London, he and his wife, focused on careers. You know, they tell me similarly that people, if they had more money.

But what seems to happen is that when people do have that bit more money, they think, great. Let's go enjoy it for a year or two and let's have kids later. So, and there are many examples, counterpoint. So you'll take somewhere like Southeast of the UK. where house prices are going through the roof right now. And that's the problem. Well, you look at Scotland, and Scotland's got one of the lowest birth rates in the entire UK.

Scotland doesn't have this in the rear area. So there's imbalances in logic. I've got them, we all know, is that Occam's Razor? Is that the saying where I think the most simple reason is probably the right one? I've got maybe something to pair with that in subsets. here, which is the common grievance raiser, you might call it. So I go around the world talking about this, lecturing about this.

And when I'm in Japan, people are certain if men did more at home, birth rates would go up. Really? Oh, certain. I gave a talk to a technology conference there recently, and this lady came up and thanked me and said, but really, you do know if men did more at home, that would solve the problem here. And I come to the UK, and it's house pricing. And I have different places I go.

They've got local grievances. So if, so the razor related. The trend is the same everywhere. Everywhere. But that little razor is, if you're blaming local grievances for things you're unsure of, they're probably not the right answer. Okay. In that case, what do we do?

Right. How do you get, in your analogy, the fish back upstream? Yeah. Thanks for continuing the analogy. Mm-hmm. Yeah. Reinvent things. In fact, reinvent everything. Education. How about taking a year out of high school and focusing on what's important?

How about taking a year out of college, focusing what's important? How about switching to lifelong learning? So a 20-year-old can realistically expect to be graduating first stage of education and getting out into the workforce choosing a career earlier and maybe having time to actually readjust that career based on lifelong learning saying that didn't work out. what about long-term career sabbaticals? What about joining a company? And becoming an employee,

but being able to take a five, seven-year sabbatical, but you're still an employee, you still get a little bit of a salary. Yeah, some simplifying the economics here for sure. But imagine you still are attached to that company, still the business card, the email address, you go to the Christmas parties, the training sessions you might even do half a day a week.

The condition would be that after that, sabbatical? Maybe you've had one, two, three kids. Maybe not, but you have that sabbatical. Conditions is you have to come back for three years. So, just an idea. And then we have some accelerator programs. You know, parents, particularly mothers, I would say, are incredibly efficient. Good at timekeeping, conflict resolution, organization. How are young mothers? 27, 30, 33? That's possible now, but it's a huge vulnerability for any young person to assume, Okay, I'm going to have that family first, and then I'm going to cross everything and try and have my career.

So that's what's just a disjointed at the moment. The idea that we have to complete our education, in effect, training, whatever it is, start a career. But get onto that ladder at a certain point that the vulnerability, particularly for women, of stepping back, is right now it's not minimized, but we need to minimize that risk. I think blending everything together is the only possible.

And the one hope I do see is, you know, if I can come back briefly to Hungary, I get asked a lot about Hungary. I go there a lot. I work with the former President Kettleman Novak on a non-profit X, Y, worldwide, and we're doing all sorts of advisory work and awareness programs around the world in this topic. So policy there is fascinating. There's so many policies. But the one I think that may have had the most traction was if you said as a young person, I would, want to have a kid, you would get a mortgage deposit, depending on the size of house you wanted. Now, why didn't everybody go for big houses? Well, the overall risk is still higher and you don't

need that space. But if you end up having those number of children, two, three or four, the deposits basically cancelled. You don't ever pay that back. And if you don't, you pay a portion of it, and if you don't have any kids, well, you have to pay it back like you would have had done anything. I think a lot of young people thought, wow, we can get a house. Now, does that sound coercive? gosh, let's get married and have kids to have a house. People don't do that. It means, I think we know, I mean, family policies have failed so much worldwide generally, that people aren't taking $5,000 and saying, great, let's go.

And let's go to the bar tonight and find someone to kind of deposit that check with nine months from now. That doesn't happen. This is too important. So I think enabling younger people who want children and become more aware of unplanned shalllessness and this curve. Now one final thing, education itself. People need to be taught. Young people are taught often what's called comprehensive sex ed. Not just in developed nations, but you go to parts of Africa, Southeast Asia.

There are non-profits there teaching. But it stops at how not to get pregnant. That's what it's all. It's not comprehensive. It's that and that alone. No one's saying, by the way, here are some risks. And if you really do want four children, the spacing thing about delaying them three, four years

might not be for you if you really want. Those conversations need to enter into our education system. Well, you use the term that you use often, which is unplanned childlessness. And I think that's really a big portion of this conversation because I think the overwhelming majority of people, and I include myself on this, just fundamentally do not understand fertility even remotely.

So can you talk to us a little bit about some of the facts and myths about that? Yeah. And of course, there's so many people proposing theories that sperm counts are falling and that that's a factor and that women's biology, you know, isn't quite as, you know, it happens younger than people might think. So, and those all may be true. What I'm saying is that before biology becomes a factor, so biology is a big, big thing. There's another more important factor that it's like a filter, if you like. So, you know, what, I'll try this one, why is the water in the river, you know, becoming less and less and less and less? Well, it's something upstream's causing. So trying to focus on that itself is an issue.

But to summarize childlessness, we have voluntary childlessness. It's about 10% of people, never have the desire to have children, and my experience will have no regrets and possibly won't understand those who do of that desire and vice versa. So, and we need to respect that,

Those people have big roles to play in society and are playing big roles and non-profits, I think, they're the biggest contingent in some senses. So that's voluntary. You then have involuntary chalessness, which is quite tightly defined as either a medical reason, maybe there's an illness, a hysterectomy,

something happened to one of a couple. Or biological. Basically, you've tried and tried and tried and IVF and hasn't worked. There was no formal category for circumstantial chalessness. biggest factor not finding a partner. That's not involved in childlessness. Other factors socio-economic concerns. So that's why I coined unplanned childlessness.

It's not in my published paper. And it was brought out, it's now in an international declaration, 57 nations in Porto two weeks ago. I worked with an Austrian MP, Guglund Kugler, who included this term, unplanned childishness.

And I was there in person to see politicians from the UK, Labour, Liberal Democrat, conservative times 57 nations in a cleanery session of 300 people, unanimously vote to support that resolution, which includes these definitions. So childness is not about, I think people, someone once said to me, so this is not my analogy,

so I'm going to get a cop out of people don't like this. It's not like buying a pet. It's not like, okay, now is it time for a child, I'm going to go down to the pet store. A lot of things have to line up at the right time and finding a partner is the biggest one, or not going through a breakup. So many people break up.

Dating for seven years, you know, sure, we're going to have kids together, 32 breakup or something happens. So unplanned childness is the big factor here. For the UK, I recently updated my analysis. A woman turning 28 in the UK has a 50, 50% chance of ever becoming a mother.

At 28. Most countries are below 30, and the US is lower than that, but the US, again, as Asian Americans are a little bit different to other groups, so it's a little bit more complicated than the US. But I think simply letting young people know, sure, get as much education as you can,

sure establish something your career path. But by the way, you better think about this curve because it's there and, you know, like they're not, you can't cheat the curve, it's there. And I think, you know, look, men are ignorant about fertility, absolutely, but I also find it shocking how ignorant women are about their own fertility. They seem to think that you can just, you know,

you're going to be able to have kids seeing your 38, 39. Now, some people may be able to, and obviously that's great, and some people are able to in their early 40s. But that's really the exception of the, that proves the rule, isn't it? The amount of information on this, to be honest with you, I can see it. It's been a one-way street controlled the message, a one-way street controlled by groups of antinatalists.

Going back to the likes of Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, the book The Population Bomb. That way of thinking got into the education system. Education materials only talk about population explosions. Still, you know, they cut off this year, and they point to the year 1800 and like, oh, look at the increase. They don't then tell you, oh, yeah, by the way,

it's going to flatten out. And then when I do point out that we are going to peak total population, that's not far away now, yeah, but you 2100, they will say, there's still going to be around 8, 9 billion people. Yeah, but they're old people needing care. It's not the same as it is now.

So there are people out there trying to block messages, and one of the messages that they're trying to block is educating women about fertility. So they're very happy to confuse. I've seen it. I was invited to Doha debates two years ago. It never aired. It was unfortunately that series coincided with October 7th.

And the tone of it, the host was a comedian. And once you get comedians involved in things, you know, there was too serious an event, I think, and sadly it was pulled. But I was debating against, you know, a lady who, runs a population organization. For me, she's a population denier because she would not talk about low birth rates even in their own home country of India.

But it seems to be that young people are engaged to this message, particularly young woman, they want to hear, yeah, you can have a career, do it, you're free to whatever. There's no downside to this. Don't listen to Stephen who represents the patriarchy.

So people like me in the past were blamed as being anti-environmental, now the patriarchy. Now the next wave of confusions coming in. I've heard some politicians pick up on messages, which is too late anyway. Let's not even think about what can we do now. I think that's another anti-natalist message creeping in.

So you're talking about women awareness, and I'm broadening it. There's an anti-natalist message driving many things, and I've had it in my face more than once. And we're talking about an anti-natalist message. I haven't seen it so much over here, but I've seen it certainly in the States, particularly in places like New York, where bringing children into the world is seen as an act of grotesque selfishness. Because, number one, the planet is already dying, is their narrative,

and then you're just going to bring children in that's going to accelerate its demise. And also as well, I hear people going, well, you know, the world is so terrible. Why would I bring children into it? that is, you know, that's awful they're going to suffer. Yeah. And I mean, I get that. I get it in comments. I get it in a tax.

I got it in a classroom, university classroom in Tokyo this year, doing a lecture to young Japanese students when at the end, a British lecture came in and sat at the back and then got up and started heckling me, basically saying the things, why are you here talking to these young students? you trying to tell the environment's burning, the oceans are boiling, people shouldn't and wouldn't let me speak. So these voices are there trying to, I think, poison young people's minds. I do think it's a poison because why can we not at least talk about this topic? Why can we not debate this? It's perhaps the most topic. There's a lot of toxic topics out there,

but usually you can get a decent debate about most things. I feel in this space, in the same way when I was cancelled at Cambridge, and there's a fake website that's been put up trying to discredit the documentary. The UNFPA is not basically saying the message I've been sharing is right. The report titled in the past two months was the real fertility crisis about people not having the children they want to have. The world is shifting. So I am hopeful in very few years, all those rogue voices will die down because they'll just be seen as the idiots and people want to talk about this.

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That's shopbeam.com slash trigger. Code trigger pod. But to me, it's not an anti-child message. To me, it's an anti-human message. It's putting forward a narrative that human beings are evil and that we are a scourge on the planet. Yeah.

So, and where does that come from? Now, that's quite an extreme viewpoint, but it's there. I've interacted online with some people with this view. People have made pods from that community, you know, reviewing the documentary. So I've seen it. I can listen to it now. There are some people who literally want humanity to die.

And they're happy to say it. Most of them don't say it is what I've figured out. Most of them know if they come out and say, I want humanity to die. A lot of people are going to switch off to that message. So they find more subtle ways, maybe through, you know, writing books called the population bomb. I don't know. But those voices, but there are people. And what's really interesting, if you go back in history,

who funded a lot of the non-profits in the space? Population Connection, used to be called zero population growth, going back to Paul Erlich in the 60s. All those, who's funding them, not them specifically, but a lot of money went into this. Well, you look at the Ford Foundation. This is on record, don't worry, you're not going to get sued. I mean, it's been written about a lot.

The Rockefeller Foundation. Rockefeller Foundation funded a lot of the India campaigns on low fertility, which directly or indirectly, some say directly, led to forced sterilizations of something like 8 million people, literally people taking off trains. So there are voices out there, some quite wealthy, who, to me, their motives at least have to be questioned as to whether they really care about humanity, but definitely some people don't. And the more I look into this,

and this is going to sound like a provocative question, and it really doesn't mean to. Isn't this just the natural byproduct of women becoming more educated, having more rights, having control of their reproductive rights? Most women, if we're being honest, and it showed yourself in the dock,

they don't want five or six kids. They don't want four kids. They'll be like two's enough. Two is just enough. That's what I can cope with. That's what I'll be happy with. I also don't just want to be a homemaker. I also want my own life.

And you're looking at these women. You go, I mean, fair enough, no? Sure. So I would never want to be associated with anything that would take away any women's rights. In fact, I don't even want to get involved in conversations about abortion. As a man, it's like, okay, that's so delicate.

And will it affect me personally? In a relationship, yes. But I try to be agnostic on all of those things. I want to say that first. And I'll get to your point about women, but let's talk about men for a second. So this Gaussian curve, that's everywhere, with some data for the US for men at a granular level.

It's very hard to find. And guess what? The same Gaussian curve is there for men, too, just a little bit later. And as they stretch, it's like a coordinated stretch. So men and women are interlinked. So it's not just about women focusing on education and focusing on other things.

Men are two. We're all in this race together. And what's happened with double incomes? Well, property prices are in case because we've got double incomes. So it's no longer an option or choice for most for only one of us to work. So hence everything's interlinked. So if we start blaming women,

women are thinking, well, you know, that's the solutionalized with women. We're going to miss out again. You can't move one of these curves without moving the other. So I think it's a dead end going down, you know, what happened in the past. We can't change it. For me, I wouldn't want to change it. And men and women are completely linked to each other. But isn't that, forgive me, but that's kind of where the problem is, because if the reality is that it, as you say, the double incomes have made everything more expensive, it then makes it very difficult for people to survive on one income. And that makes it very difficult for people to have kids in the way that they would want to.

And unless we address that in some way, we aren't going to really get anywhere. Yeah, and I come back to the Hungarian housing scheme again. I think government has to do something at that level. I mean, if you're thinking of this in terms of pure economics, I read this morning the UK is going to be the fastest growing country population-wise in Europe and it's because of immigration of course

well the issue there is immigrants get old too so it means if that's your policy or non-policy you're going to have effectively the same number or an increasing number of older people to take care of forever for as long as you can find immigrants and with birthrights going down

India and soon Africa too. That's a risky strategy, but not to get onto that too much. The point is here that unless we have new people coming through a system, we won't be able to support our entire infrastructure for those who do have kids

and don't have kids. So how do we get back to that age is, can we, I don't know, can we put enough incentives to create such a bubble that enough younger people will have children,

and maybe even possibly have more children than they would have otherwise, to support the entire system. So it's a conversation we all need to be having. I'm not sitting here saying, I've confidently found the solution. I'm not. I'm saying,

I think this is our best chance, by far, and by the way, it means reinventing just about everything. Well, Francis wants to end the education of women. Yeah. You know, what was controversial about that? Why don't we try that? And then if that doesn't work, we'll try. No, no, but this is kind of the issue really, isn't it?

because on the one hand, we all are very happy for women to be educated. Speak for yourself. And I don't think anybody would want to hold anyone back from having a career, male or female, if that's what they'd like to do. I can only speak from my experience. I know quite a lot of women who fill different types of templates.

I know women who love having a career and several kids and they manage it great. and I know some people who feel like, well, actually, I had a career, and it was on reflection now that I've had kids a bit of a waste of time, actually. And so there's that full spectrum. And it comes back to what are the societal expectations, what are the cultural norms, what are you seeing around you? What are you being told by your female friends and relatives, et cetera, about parenthood, about children, et cetera. And I think it's, it'd be difficult to deny that we have lived. for some time now in an environment in the West at least I can't speak for other places where

you know children are kind of seen as a burden more than they are seen as a joy and as a thing that you even when we know from survey the act surveys actually most women would really like to have kids yeah yeah certainly it's absolutely true that you know most women want kids and there's this conundrum that comes back to vulnerability to we do it now or do I wait another year? And a partner may be saying the same thing. There's some incentive to wait a little bit longer. And that's where unplanned childnesses kicks in.

It's the ones that you're meeting who have had the career and the largest family took the plunge at some point when someone else may have delayed a little bit. And then other things happen in life. And, you know, so for example, in the US right now. for every 10 women 35 and below 1 approximately never wants kids 9 do

of the 9 3 will not have kids 6 will based on current fertility patterns you know if you look at fertility last year so for the 9 who do 1 3rd of intending mothers will remain childless and it's lack of awareness or lack of understanding of the complex factors like breakups, like your partner not being in this,

that just creep in. And then the moment it rests away. And this timing curve, it put me in a bad mood that day in Kyoto, and I'm still in a bit of a bad mood because I wanted to think that we had more autonomy to choose the timing ourselves. But you can see it in the data.

This is to do with synchronization forces that just get harder and harder and harder. You know, if you imagine, Imagine today you're an 18, 20-year-old with your first girlfriend, boyfriend, that's getting a little serious. You're probably not thinking, this is the woman I'm going to have kids with when I get to 35, because that's too far away. You're just not even thinking that.

So you're thinking about, well, this is fun. And then maybe there's a breakup, and then your partner at 23, 24, you're still not thinking that way. And I think a lot of people drift through relationships without taking them seriously enough. Because that might be the best relationship you were ever going to have. It's just you weren't on the same page as society, which is telling you, wait, wait, wait. And I think this has caused a lot of other issues.

The whole issue with young men, sexless young men, and I know they exist, I've certainly met them in Japan. I think they're just zoning out and playing in their mother's basement, playing games because I think we're meant to form relationships sooner. and that means something to us biologically and psychologically. And by knowing, well, I've got to wait for 15 years before I even can start to think about parenthood, I think it's part of a broader societal issue.

And one of the things you explore are these people who want kids and then don't have them. And I've actually met a lady at a party in New York and she represents one of these organizations. I mean, it was haunting talking to her. There was just a profound sense of sadness there. Profound. And again, my heart goes out to even listeners of this

because it's such a difficult topic. And we all might assume that our aunt or our colleague, they must have never wanted kids. You know, they seem quite happy, you know, and it's a private thing. You know, I read a poem by one of these people. I'll not remember it. but it was just heartbreaking about being in the office

when a new mother comes in with her baby to show everybody in the office and all the women flock. And she's locked, trapped in her desk, just frozen, unable to escape because you can't get past, but just wanting to get out of there. Not all feel like that.

And some people I've been told by this community, I should say that later in life, you can find other purposes. but for many years, decades or maybe forever, there's a grief, and that's what people in that category call it, men and women. I've seen men cry as much as women

about not having the kids that they intended to have, and it's just like what happened, timing. And because that's the thing that I've found surprising, because I always thought, you know, for blokes, you know, well, you can have kids at any age. You, like Mick Jagger seems to be popping them out at a rate that is just quite frankly staggering considering he's in his early 80s.

But that doesn't, that's kind of an illusion, isn't it? We're stupid. I'll put that way. We're stupid. I mean, if you think about it, no, I mean, biology is a factor, sure. So we got that one in theory. But you've got to find a partner.

And unless you're, you know, super famous, super rich, something's... For the listeners, he's pointing us for answers. Exactly. Take, take. Not. So, right. We forget that we're actually competing against younger versions of ourself.

I learned that. Divorced at 42. It wasn't exactly planned, but there we are. I thought, well, I might meet someone plenty of time yet. And, you know, you realize, that person over there who's now X years younger, than me, X plus five years younger than me, X plus 10 years younger, who's able to have a child, that young woman.

You know, why would she choose me compared to it for everyone else? So biology, we've been fooling ourselves. It doesn't even come into it. And for that one 80-year-old who has eight kids, you know, all that's happening is the women he's having kids with, which are probably almost certainly under 40, under 35, they would have been having kids with somebody else,

so there aren't more children overall. So the overall thing, it's just really, yeah. Because and but that ties into the fact that, and it's actually a lot of what we talk about here at trigonometry, which is we live in a society where we're fundamentally dishonest, not only with our children, not only with our peers, not only when we're at work,

but also fundamentally with ourselves. We are in denial of our own biology. lying to ourselves or biology generally trying to believe we're younger than we actually are all of it, all of it I think and this is what it comes down to

with this conversation is a fundamental lack of honesty and what you know because we think and look maybe push back on this if you think this is untrue but because we think being honest and being direct

is unpleasant, it's rude and it can be seen to be cruel but actually to me the cruelest thing that you can do is be dishonest, particularly with a woman, and say, look, your most fertile years are between X and Y. You can run the risk if you want and try and have it later. But if this is what you really want,

then this is what you need to optimize for and prioritize for. No, you're absolutely right. I mean, we all relish, I think, in the idea of longevity, that 30's the new 20, that 40s the new 30. But biology hasn't reset itself at all. And again, from this curve, there's no uptick from IVF. So all this idea, while you've got IVF, you've got egg freezing, it doesn't actually look predicting good for likelihood.

Okay, some will benefit. But overall, it causes more people to delay, just because you can do that. And many of those fall into unplanned childlessness, so it washes out. So it is a lie. And so that promise that you can delay that promise that you can delay parenthood

incentivizes people to attempt it and then many of them are actually then unable to have the children that they wanted to have. Yeah. I see that really is what I think Francis is talking about which is we're just lying to people basically. We're just telling them things are going to be possible which are for many of them not going to be possible.

And if they had known that, they would have made us whole set of different choices quite possibly in the run up to it. Stephen, it's great to have you back on the show. before we head out of our substack and ask you questions from our supporters, what's the one thing that we're not talking about that we should be? The next humanitarian crisis, which will be aging people in countries like Brazil, but more particularly, I'm so worried about old people in India.

We haven't got our head around the idea that these are nations that are going to age very rapidly without any support systems. I just want people to start to think a bit longer term, particularly when they criticize countries like India for, or high birth rates, which was a thing of the past, actually the real crisis there is being baked in right now. Old people. Stephen, thanks for coming on.

Head on over to Substack where we get to ask him your questions. The usual explanations for the fall of the birth rate in the West involve the economic cost of childbearing. So why is the birth rate falling in Cuba and in North Korea where childbirth and childcare are free and supported by the government? Not loving your AT&T or T Mobile Bill? Yeah, we've been hearing that a lot. Good news. Bring your AT&T or T mobile bill to Verizon and we'll give you a better deal.

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