The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name | Stephen J Shaw | EP 338

should accept yourself just the way you are what does that say about who I should become is that just now off the table because I'm already good enough in every way so am I done or something get the hell up get your act together adopt some responsibility put your life together develop a vision unfold all those manifold possibilities that lurk within be a force for good in the world and that'll be the adventure of your life [Music] the world's falling birth rate isn't on the list of major threats to Life as we know it but it soon will be taxes are destined to soar pension systems will become unsustainable while our Health Care Systems won't be able to cope with the ratio of all people to take care of compared to the shrinking number of taxpayers businesses will struggle to find workers to hire school closures will accelerate while social care will continually be sliced and they say it's an economic Time Bomb I'm worried about the birth rate most people think we we have like too many people on the planet but actually this is an outdated view I think that the biggest problem the world will face in 20 years is population collapse I want to emphasize this the biggest issue in 20 years will be population collapse [Music] hello everyone I'm here today talking to Mr Stephen J Shaw Stephen is a British national who has studied and lived on three continents he trained as a commuter engineer and then as a data scientist before starting his first film Project birth Gap at age 49. he maintains the position of president of the data analytics company he co-founded automatrix analytics LLC Stephen holds an MBA graduate business degree from isg in Paris France and is continuing his studies at the Harvard Extension School looking very much forward today to delving into the issue of declining birth rates and population collapse something that's not particularly on everyone's radar and the issue of um the invisible epidemic of unplanned childlessness why are people having so few children the more I read about falling birth rates everything was negative you enter a downward spiral as you have fewer and fewer children you have fewer and fewer future mothers which in turn goes on and on and on and no Society in history has been known to come out of that spiral so I'm talking today with Stephen J Shaw who's produced a documentary birth Gap that was originally released in its first version in 2021 and later version in 2022 and he's been spending an awful lot of time delving into this particular problem and so we're going to walk through what he's learned uh good to see you thank you for inviting me hey thanks for agreeing to talk so let's start with your background we could walk through what you what you've been up to biographically first of all to situate it and then you can expand on that to the degree that you're willing and able so um historically for the last 20 years I've been involved in data analytics what we now call data science I'm a parts Devastation part coder I've worked with some grid academics some phds that we have on staff and coming up with academic models forecasting models for Industries mainly in the automotive sector we try and do short-term forecasting what might people purchase what should car companies Bill what should they Market what should they give for incentives down to a very minute level this is a private Venture it is and and so it's a corporation that offers these Services yeah it's a small Niche Corporation that's been offering services to the world's largest corporations for 20 years and how did you get involved in that it was a startup in London 20 years ago I personally moved to the U.S to we got a contract with Nissan North America took me to La and following that yeah I spent like 15 years following the company Hands-On until around 2015 uh bizarrely and I should explain I'm a lifelong learner I'd gone I got accepted into Harvard Extension school to do become a degree candidate to keep my data science skills up to date and I was presented with some data that I just couldn't believe on falling birth rates so someone who is involved in forecasting will be a short-term forecasting realizing that we've got this fundamental problem with birth rates that's ultimately going to affect well not just the number of potential car buyers I mean that's the smallest problem in this overall but that was you know something I felt almost ashamed of why do I know this and then you expand that to what is this going to mean for the planet and as a father of three all my three children were just about still teenagers then I felt sense of failure that I hadn't been preparing my children for the world they were about to enter into you know we all I think are LED into the belief that sure that the world's population is growing perhaps exponentially still that's what I would have said at that time based on what I was learning and I had no idea that the actual dynamics of everything from how work is going to be like to how Society is going to be like to how pension systems are going to be like is fundamentally fundamentally flawed and at that moment I realized something's wrong because you know what the same trend was showing up for Germany and Italy and Japan South Korea yeah well South Korea was just a little bit later just a little bit later which is interesting but something triggered the early 1970s in Japan Germany Italy and you can add Spain Portugal Switzerland Austria because apparel a series of parallel Trends and yet while I was reading from experts was that these are localized problems but Japan is work-life balance that in Germany it's something called raven mother which is the idea that parts of Germany even today for a woman to have a child and go straight back to work is really something that culturally shouldn't be done so that might cause some peoples to delay Parenthood in Spain and Italy it was down to high unemployment among among the youth other areas it was gender balance Etc so all these localized reasons were being proposed for me as a data scientist you can see clearly of if I can give you an analogy it's one of your own I I you were talking to Lex Friedman you talked about the dragon I think in terms of the environment context that someone finds a dragon and they scream there's a dragon and I love the analogy and I since saw that you use dragons quite a lot so I thought I might too and it's like you found this little dragon in Japan and the same kind of dragon in Germany Italy at the same moment in time and they're starting to get bigger and that's all so they're lizards to begin with right I mean they're tiny they're the size of a kitten I think is an analogy I saw and they're getting bigger and then suddenly they're appearing in other neighboring countries and it's growing growing growing from there so the idea that these are localized issues to me just did not make sense so why do you think you were struck to begin with by the fact that birth rates were plateauing or declining I mean because the typical response to that would be either so what there's too many people on the planet anyways or actually it's a net good so now you said you you're in a private company now I should let everybody watching and listening know that one of the markers for the trustworthiness of a data analytic company is that people will actually pay for their information and so you know it doesn't necessarily mean that a private data analytic company is uh credible but it does mean at least that they've been able to demonstrate their credibility enough so that they have paying customers and that's not an easy thing to manage and so you were doing short-term forecasting that was integrated into the capitalist economy let's say yes to help people plan their product development and so forth but you came across this data at a much broader level indicating uh plateauing birth rate our our population growth why did that disturb you why did you think that was a problem because birth rates less than replacement level spiraled onwards they never stalled if you have fewer children that are required to replace the parents generation once that generation grows up they will if unless birth rates change which they don't historically they stay low once they're low you're going to have fewer people again so you see it as a as a positive feedback loop it is and when you you then look up well what do you you want to find examples of societies coming from a low birth rates going back to replacement level and you realize there are no examples in fact there's no known his historical examples anywhere and some people do we have enough of a historical track to consider that a concern in modern times if you look at the number of countries who've Fallen to birth rates of 1.7 1.6 1.5 when you have no single example of a country going back to a replacement level we should be concerned in fact we should be very concerned right I know places like Quebec for example in Canada with very very low birth rate have tried to Institute government policies that for example make daycare in principle more accessible to to young women and in young families although that's had pretty much zero impact on the outcome I know that Hungary has put forward a series of policy Transformations on the Family Support front and my my uh belief is from what I've read is that they've at least stopped the birth rate decrease and increased it slightly so that's the only I mean Quebec didn't work at all Hungary it looks like there's some minor they're still way below replacement so it hasn't rectified the problem in any in any sense here's the deal the government keeps raising rates because it's the only tool they have to keep inflation under control and it's not working you can't spend your way out of inflation you've seen the impact on the stock market and you've seen the impact on your savings hedge inflation by owning gold whether physical gold and silver in your safe or through an IRA in Precious Metals where you can hold real gold and silver in attack sheltered retirement account buy gold and get a free safe to store it in that's right unqualifying purchases from Birch gold group now through March 31st they'll ship a free safe directly to your door just text Jordan to 989898 to get your free info kit on gold and to claim eligibility for your free safe then talk to one of their precious metals Specialists that's Jordan to 989898 today what's fascinating about Hungary um because what I wanted to do was look at something much deeper than the typical birth rate numbers of that we see today I'm trying to change that if you look deeper you can find data that if you merge together which I don't believe anyone had ever done before that gives you two measures one is of societal childlessness and the other is family structure so um the traditional way to measure is childlessness is to wait to women are 45 usually and have some surveys maybe a census so you're waiting to the to the end of the fertility window and Counting them then what I wanted to see was what a societal challenge is today if there's a reduction in the number of women starting their families compared to what you would expect we should be able to track that now so looking at Hungary which I've just been doing recently was fascinating I mean they're giving huge incentives for people to have three and four children but the family structure and hunger is not changing at all at all what is changing which may or may not be linked it's associative in some way um but causal we don't know is that is a childlessness rate and hungry does seem to be going down more people look like they're starting their families and what happens then is when people Circle families they go on because family structure is locked in globally that's another Finding and so Andrew what do you what do you mean so we'll go in two directions what do you mean what what are you speaking about when you're talking when you're expressing your concerns about family structure well family structure basically is the percentage of women we say women because we've got so much data in women but really we should think of men and women the proportion of women couples who have one child or two or three or four or five or more if you take data for Japan and you look at 1973 right before the Fallen birth rates the percentages of women having one two three four are identical today as they were then six percent of women in 1973 were having four or more children today it's exact same number six percent so the our Focus has been completely uh if you would be not a fog looking at overall birth rates what you find is in Japan in 1974 interesting year an explosion in childlessness which went from three percent to six percent to 15 to 21 to 30 plus percent in a space for like four years Sam in Italy the same in Germany four years in four years it's a shock it was a what I call a baby shock and then if you look at Korea South Korea which you mentioned earlier if we take South Korea mid 90s right in the midst of a currency shock you see Charles Ritz were already maybe 15 there suddenly it goes up to I believe 30 percent announce or 40 and this is childless at what age well when I uh estimate childlessness I'm taking the for the given population of women the number of births you'd expect to have at any age and say how many first-time mothers were there and when you kind of the number of first-time mothers of any age group and look at the overall population structure you can see well wait a minute there's a gap opening up here compared to the number you would expect so this is like age agnostic in a sense okay and as a measure the you know people say well some of those women might you know there might be a boom in future people might be just delaying but that doesn't happen there's no example of those booms ever happening so it seems to be we've got this cycle going on uh that people are pulled quite quickly into this um What I Call On World unplanned childlessness if I can I've had to coin quite a few phrases um I'll explain I should explain what what it might mean by unplanned childlessness you um look at surveys uh look at research the vast majority of people want children it's an aid and some don't that's clear what percentage do approximately I'm estimating around five percent don't they've been Gallup polls in the US Don is that different between men and women um I I don't have that data but okay so five percent you figure are are out of the game yes by voluntary Choice yes right and and what percentage are are childless well right now we're looking at 30 to 40 percent the most developed Nations so the vast majority 80 percent said its estimated in studies and I think this that's that involuntarily involuntary childlessness and I've been thinking about that lately we have this notion for men of involuntary celibacy in cells we don't have a term that's as at hand for involuntary childlessness among women and it hasn't been recognized as a like what would you call it a universal uh social problem but you just said five percent of women don't want children but 30 percent don't don't have them and so there's a huge gap there between desire and reality I think frankly I believe it's the biggest societal problem that we have and it's hiding because we haven't recognized it and if you find people as I did making a documentary um people who are struggling the 30s late 30s women particularly but men too who have given up in their 40s and they're opening their heart to you with a level of what they call grief yeah and in English language grief is used for one particular context it's not necessarily used normally for something you never had yeah I think in other languages there there are terms that that Encompass that but it's the same emotion and I've been pulled into conversations where I have frankly been brought myself to the depths of understanding the suffering from these people who thought they were going through life getting the education probably yeah starting the career path probably thinking that well you know what I'm not 30 yet I've got time to meet a partner yeah and then getting to the point of often there is no partner yes or that biology gets in the way yeah well it turns out that life is shorter than people think you know I've I've had clinical clients who have followed that path and and some of them were women who had initially decided that they didn't want to have children and then changed their minds quite dramatically in their late 20s which is very common pattern and then couldn't have children and it was just absolutely disastrous for them they were often on the you know artificial fertility route for 10 years with multiple miscarriages and failures on that front and it's a bloody dismal outcome did you want uh children sing sing [Music] my eyes [Music] only um I think if you caught me at the right day in my 20s when I was very in love or excited about a partner I would say yes but if you were to pry into that I might say oh no that seems crazy to have a kid in my 20s too late okay so you're making a case here you're making a psychological case in some sense at the moment in that this is um a phenomenon worth attending to because the vast majority of people who end up childless which is a a more serious immediate problem for women because of the biological restrictions on their reproductive capacity the reason that's a problem is because so many women end up in that situation despite wanting children so that's a real psychological problem but you could take a sociological stance and say well as we've been uh as has been insisted upon for 60 years there's too many people on the planet and it's just not a bad thing at all if we stop reproducing in this manner and if the price we have to pay for reduction in the number of excess mods to feed is that there are some unhappy women so be it what do you think about this at a sociological or political or economic level first of all I think that's a terribly sad thing to contemplate that we have to and somehow somehow enforce perhaps lifelong grief and sadness on a subset of society who were mostly unlucky enough not to have the children they wanted to have for the sake of the planet when there are other hypothetical hypothetical right yeah at some future time at some future time and to me the first thing my reaction strong reaction isn't there another way if that's right and then you look at data as a reported in nature last year on the overall footprint by each group quite a number of scientists put their name to it and it says very clearly that eight percent of our footprint occurs when we're aged under 30. then it rises quite significantly between 30 and around 65 I believe and that falls off sharply well that means that if the world's births were to magically well it wouldn't be magic dropped by say half I love taking extreme situations so let's imagine that from Tomorrow only half the birth happened for some crazy reason that eight percent of total emissions or footprint would go down to four percent in 30 years time this is going to have almost no impact for decades at a time when I think we have to find other Solutions as much as they're needed to solve problems that are out there so the idea that we're going to inflict this pain deep personal suffering pain in people and perhaps be pleased about it as I know some people are um I I think it's terrible terribly sad I I think it might be that to come back I would like to clarify that for those people who don't have a desire you know I will I consider myself a pan-natalist you don't want to have children I would be your biggest supporters to say that's fine and I think there might be a misunderstanding in society for some people who perhaps don't share that desire who perhaps can't quite understand how fundamental this desire is yeah well most people who are in that boat are being willfully blind in my experience and so the idea that there are reasons to not want to have children one reason is an overwhelming self-centered narcissism that's not the only reason but it's definitely one reason and people talk about you know the interference with their personal freedom and their desire to pursue their career and in that I read something like the absolute inability to ever sacrifice your own narrow self-interest and I do mean narrow to the to the what would you say concerns and needs of other people and so you know what's interesting to me that it's five percent that don't want children and that the the rate of that kind of self-centered narcissism is about four to five percent too now I am not saying that everyone who who decides not to have children falls into that category but I am saying that a fair number of people who don't want children fall into that category I mean if you think about it biologically every single one of your maternal ancestors for three and a half billion years reproduce successfully it might be that you're the exception to that rule but you know if you are you should think long and hard about why you also might want to think long and hard about why given that it's likely to have a pretty damn detrimental effect on your life you know it's all fine to be fancy free and Footloose when you're 30 and 35 but it's a lot less amusing when you're 50 and it might be downright Dreadful by the time you're let's say 65. so all right so on the on the population front now we talked a little bit about the psychological catastrophe of involuntary childlessness I'm curious too about the social and economic uh consequences so as you get a demographic bulge more and more older people and fewer and fewer younger people obviously you have fewer people to take care of the older people but I also have never really read anything pertaining to models of like real estate value collapse because it doesn't take very long if there are more houses than there are people for the value of real estate to fall to well to what to nothing I mean that's what happened in Detroit it basically fell to nothing I mean Detroit is recovered to some degree but we don't know at all what the world would look like if real estate values fell to virtually nothing especially because that's where most people put their retirement value so what do you see what do you foresee happening on the political and economic front given the shift towards the elderly demographically we're going to see it in China first right clearly clearly um well Japan too Japan one of the reasons I moved to live in Japan is to be close to I wanted to feel this problem yeah I wanted to be able to see it and almost touch it and you can there but you mentioned Detroit um I spent many many years living in the suburbs of Detroit and right around the time I was looking to start this project uh you know that I was able to drive around the streets of Detroit and see Street after Street of the street of tens and tens of thousands of thick you know the decaying houses yeah yeah I remember one day driving along and there was a house and these were nice houses right back in the day right still spacious and there was a young family having a picnic I'd say one of these houses and it was the perfect setting you might say in every context except every other house in history looked like they were completely vacant the dilapidated um around that time listening to local Detroit News every night it was crying it was street lights that weren't functioning yeah it was lack of safety it was like a functioning of basic utilities it was infrastructure and bridges that the City couldn't afford and of course in 2013 it went bankrupt so I had this backdrop to knowing what was happening to to Detroit the city and you write about property value around that time you could buy a significant property in Detroit for ten thousand dollars yeah you probably couldn't go there to ever see it because it wasn't safe at that time right right and you were right Detroit has come back so in some ways it is a time of a demolished huge tracks of houses but how do you do that when half the houses are still occupied you go through this period of time unless you're going to say to people everybody move three streets over now and you do that every few years not easily go into neighborhoods and start moving things back to to nature which is what Detroit's doing you you can individual houses but you know you still have these scars of the empty spaces that were there and I showed some of this in the documentary so the idea I mean people I I was on a podcast Chris Williamson's recently yeah I just it was the first time I got you know a sense of the comments that people make and many people were sharing these deep personal stories about their life to do with unplanned chalices yeah um others were sharing concerns about whether they ever become grandparents and right so but a lot of people were saying well this is just about economics you know who cares this is just about big Corporation suffering who cares I think people need to understand this is going to impact everybody everybody's life if you're living in an area where there's literally decay dilapidation all around you and the taxes that you're paying to your city or your municipality aren't covering the basic infrastructure no one's going to escape from this I think people don't understand that so in my case um understanding life in Detroit and again I really love this city it's great you know I love the people um I I love the way it is starting to come back but that experience I think really spoke to me that we really need to think about what this means now you talk about the social economic I mean the economics you know go beyond the city and the property values it's the it's a Pension funds it's a social welfare funds that you know people think I think I did too at the time that you know the retirement the cost to maintain each of us in a retirement is basically what the government or someone's been saving for when we get to that age yeah it's not what we're paying right that's a bargain with the future that's a bargain yeah you're covering the people who are retired now what the government has put away for us is debt debt yeah yeah there's no savings and then there's a promise right and then that's a problem because yes that's for sure if you have a shrinking number of taxpayers that's not shrinking so the repayment on the debt actually becomes worse and worse and worse yeah well and hypothetically you can remediate that with immigration but then that opens up another can of worms which is no one really knows what the maximal rate of incorporation a society can manage without imploding right I mean obviously Canada the US U.S in particular is an immigrant society and that's worked out extremely well for the immigrants and for this Society but the idea that there's no upper limit to our capacity to digest and integrate let's say is absolutely Preposterous so and and we don't know but the notion that we can replenish at the rate that we're losing on the birth rate front strikes me as it's at least a debatable claim we'll be right back first we wanted to give you a sneak peek at Jordan's new series Exodus so the Hebrews created history as we know it you don't get away with anything and so you might think you can bend the fabric of reality and that you can treat people instrumentally and that you can bow to the Tyrant and violate your conscience without cost you will pay the piper it's going to call you out of that slavery into Freedom even if that pulls you into the desert and we're going to see that there's something else going on here that is far more Cosmic and deeper than what you can imagine the highest [Music] Spirit to which we're beholden is presented precisely as that spirit that allies itself with the cause of Freedom against tyranny I want villains to get punished but do you want the villains to learn before they have to pay the ultimate price that's such a Christian question immigration is a subject that uh you know I think um we we actually only look at one side of it and I certainly did until I went to Nepal and I went and I sat down with a professor of the head of the department population Professor Patak in one of the largest universities in Asia and I wanted to talk about falling birth rates in the power which we're just about replacement level at that time and all he wanted seem to want to talk about was the Pains of migration on Nepal the people the communities they're left behind I'd never for one second had thought about this dark side of you know immigration oh you've had your brain drain for example Community Tree yeah you're actually taking you're leaving the old parents there and you're sending you know remittances back and that seat is positive but those parents aren't really looking for remittances they're looking for people community their children to be there to into their older age and you know we went to film some of these older people and you know the looks on their forlorn looks in their face no one thinks about that and then you have another situation which is often it's men who are the immigrants at least first yeah and well okay so maybe that seems to some a good way for it to start but there's another Dark Side to that is the the woman behind are either not married yet or they are married and there are men have gone off elsewhere and they're not having children right or their husbands coming back for three weeks a year and you've got three weeks a year to try and get pregnant and of course most are not so you actually are propelling countries into low birth rates the same factor that the rest of us are going through right now so the immigration debate and I'm an immigrant myself you know I've been an immigrant to to the U.S to Japan now um so I'm I'm absolutely not against immigration at all as you say it's done great service to U.S Canada and many other countries too um but the idea that yeah but that doesn't mean it's a solution right right right now you talked about Japan let's talk about Japan a little bit you how long did you live in Japan I still do so I've been there for five years and and you said you you can well so what do you experience there in relationship to your concerns about population decline let me tell you about the community in um rural Tokyo so this is what the world's biggest city based on some measures you go to the Northwestern part of Tokyo and there's an area called takashimadayara that's featured in the documentary 1973 the 10 000 homes in this apartment were filled with young families and there's all footies where you see you know just children everywhere I went back with someone who was a child in those days and you know you can hear the voices of the past and today it's a ghost town but it's not unoccupied 98 of the apartments are still occupied but they're old people and they're mostly old women right living alone yes and they're old women because men die early men die early right so this is another that's exactly right so one of the things that you see as young people disappear and as the population ages is that the landscape is made up of isolated old women who no one cares about right a dismal Destiny for all concerned you know I I'd love people frankly to watch the documentary to really sense this because you know there's one scene there and it's it is harrowing but uh uh to put in simple terms there's an 80 year old woman who has no family who's contemplating suicide because she's nothing to live for no one to live for and no one to communicate no she should move to Canada we have a nice medically assisted death program here that's I think accounting for something like three to five percent fall deaths now so you know yeah there's a solution for everyone to contemplate yeah well I just worry in fact it was a Japanese Professor who came out the other day a week ago suggesting that it would be uh morally appropriate for the older people in Japan to consider suicide as a root out because they're a burden to the but they're a burden to society and now he's backtracking saying he didn't really mean that but but it's dangerous once you start to put that out there because there are people you know I remember a conversation with a young woman in Japan and uh or talking about her future and I did that with a lot of people over 230 people I interviewed in 24 countries and she mentioned that her grandmother was living with her family but she mentioned the burden of her grandmother to the family and she came out with the point that I guess many might be thinking when you're that age why is she still here and when you hear that you know and then you meet people who are that age who I think of still so much to give to society I mean they're just excluded from it they're not well it's hard if they're not integrated in anything well sometimes it's hard if they are integrated into a family but it's definitely harder if they're not it's also the case that a lot of people who contemplate suicide do that not so much because they're specifically suffering although that can certainly be a contributing factor but because they do believe that they are fundamentally best construed as a burden and that the world including the people around them would be better off if they disappeared so that's a that's a very sad uh what would you say realm to inhabit in your misery and isolation so can can we can we walk through the structure of the documentary yes of course yeah so it's just so everyone listening is reminded it's called the name of the documentary is birth Gap and so let's walk through the structure of it the um first of all the title birth Gap I could just explained why is it called birth Gap what is a birth Gap to me it's what I defined as the gap between the number of old people to support in society and births so it's it's an indication of frankly a measure that we're not taking account of today what is that ratio so to me to be very honest with you you know whether we hit 9 billion or maybe 10 um is it's trivial you know it's going to happen it's going to be in that ballpark whether we like it or not that's going to happen yeah and um what actually matters is the age structure so birth Gap the title of the movie that's where it comes from um before I went on this journey chapter one is me literally going with an iPad showing people data uh we started in Italy Switzerland we went to Japan and just started to talk to people about what's happening in their own societies so how did you move into the realm of documentary filmmaking well I have to thank my my second son Adam for that because my idea at this point I mean I'm not a filmmaker uh certainly wasn't then my thought was this is a big problem I can write a book about this I thought just about I have the ability to write to explain this and what I wanted to do because there's other books out there has come up with a new way to help visualize this problem and to use the book to kind of communicate and I thought well Maps no one's really come up with the structure of a map and in doing this I was explaining to my son Adam and he um said that no one our age his age reads books anymore we all watch documentaries right right or listen to them or listen to them yeah and for me you know well that's not me there's no way I could possibly do that and then by chance a friend of a friend who's a former videographer news anchor for a Washington DC uh News Network um but was going out in her own and long story short we well okay let's see if we can make this work and it brought her along for two weeks to film the first interviews thinking of nothing else this is going to be an archive right for my own research right right right um save me note taking while I'm listening to all of these people and as we got into it the personal stories opened up of people who you could see them contemplating the future of their lives like one Springs to mind a Young Elementary School teacher in Switzerland 30 years old a young man and when we walk through with him the future of elementary schools in Switzerland you could see the process in his mind realizing we're not going to need anywhere near the number of elementary school teachers that we have now and what that might mean for him um so the documentary starts literally with me asking people in countries why is this happening and um frankly you know I was hoping um you know in this entire project I was expecting at some point to sit down and do some form of regressive model you know to find a correlation between something that would link uh these small dragons these uh you know uh falling birth rates in Japan Germany and elated because they were happening at the same time and they were spreading I never got to that point and I'm very grateful I didn't because I probably would have found something like you know ice cream sales you know happened at the same time some serious thing with it it's very hard to to identify the well it seems obvious that I mean one of the causes the distal causes I would say clearly is the promotion of the birth control pill but even that is a somewhat shallow answer because there's a very specific set of Social and economic realities Zeitgeist that even made the invention and distribution and acceptance of the birth control possible Right you had to have the psychological stage set for the acceptance of that technology the demand for that technology before it could be developed or implemented and so well so okay so you you started the documentary you're in chapter one you're starting to ask people what's going on what are they telling you yeah well no one had a clear answer and that you know maybe that was overly simplistic but what I was trying to do is find some common thread but let me just if I can talk about contraceptives because there's a wonderful culture example the contraceptive pill was not legalized in Japan until 1990. hmm and it was only legalized because Viagra was legalized and at that point women said wait you've been blocking the contraceptive pill and now you're allowing Viagra and at that point was so you had the precipitous decline in birth rate from 73. you had an increase in Mass abortions so this was a societal issue with or without so okay so that shows that it's something deeper than this feel deeper and also if you look at other countries particularly UK at the time France to the US where you also had access to the contraceptive pill you were not seeing falling birth rates and a lot of people um would say well it's obvious it was industrialization it was something to do with urbanization but the correlations aren't there if you look at well why did this only happen in those three countries and the answer comes back to a lot of people to see unfold in the documentary but it's a sudden increase in this unplanned involuntary childlessness happened in Germany Italy those countries at the same time that's definitely the case that as women become more educated they have fewer children and that that's now the precise causal pathway there isn't obvious one simple suggestion would be that it is a matter of accidental delay I mean by I've seen this in my daughter you know my daughter although she had terrible health problems and that complicated your life a lot she had initially thought that she might want to go be a physician but that's like 12 years and she was also very oriented towards having children and she's managed to have one child despite her health problems but that desire to pursue an intense educational pathway does exist in Conflict certainly with an early start to to family development if you presume that that doesn't matter because you've got time you're not going to find out that isn't true for 10 years in your own life and maybe the culture won't find out that's true for like 30 years you know I mean we still tell y'all young women who are 19. I made a comment on that was clipped on an Instagram reel by someone about the fact that we always lie to young women about what's going to be important in their lives we tell them it's going to be all career he said you know I've worked in female dominated Industries my whole life and what I've observed is among men and women alike that it's a very rare person for whom career is the most important thing in their life even if they're men although it's true for more men it's true for virtually no women by the time they hit 30 and the amount of vitriol that comment generated was unparalleled and that's something because I've had plenty of vitriol generated from things I said but that was and it was all young women you know talking about how some old white guy like me had no right to tell young women what to do with their bodies which I most certainly was not but but it is you can see a simple pathway there right it's like well we have this Avenue where we can pursue our career in our education and everything else we want and then we'll be able to solve the problem of having a family the problem with that is well it's hard enough to find a mate when you're 23 24 by the time you're 30 it's even more difficult and by the time you're 35 it's starting to become well nigh impossible to find a mate and get pregnant and have a family especially if you're going to have more than one kid and so well so there's a there's a direct conflict there uh between The Avenues that are open to women and they the need to to strike while the Iron's heart on the reproductive front nobody really knows how to reconcile that I mean it's all Audi because women will live about seven years longer than men so it could be the case that the societal Norm could be that women have their children when they're quite young and then go back to school in their 30s that would actually work out in principle that could work out quite nicely but we don't have the Norms in place to make that a possibility but we have to start addressing exactly this because if we don't you know uh to me I mean there's so many ideas today about reproductive technology that are oh yeah overstated yes freeze your eggs yeah age 40. you know if you have a partner and if you still have energy that you might then yes and everything goes well yeah if everything and you have the money yeah and you add the emotional stamina all of that so part of what I'm um hoping to do through the documentary in my work after this is to just increase awareness particularly to women but you need a man as well so it's both that the fertility window is much shorter and the ability of children gets harder and harder and it's not just about getting pregnant it's about being able to deliver you know and be able to see the pregnancy through to which gets exponentially harder very very quickly I should mention I interviewed five fertility doctors for the documentary itself um and you know each one of them wanted to open up about the challenges because normally they have to sell their services right normally you have to tell people think possibly here's what we've done for other people here we think we can do it for you yeah what they were telling to me openly I'm frankly getting quite emotional about it on a couple occasions was it terrible because so often it doesn't work out but one in three couples by the age of 30 have pronounced fertility problems defined as inability to conceive within a year of embarking on the Endeavor consciously right so that's one in three and of course it just gets worse and worse as as age creeps up and 30 is not that old and it does mean that women have a damn tight window it's it's 13 years let's say by the time you're 17 by some standards you're mature enough to consider reproduction 17 or 18 and on that on the extreme end and and then well 35 is the other end of that distribution and uh you're playing with fire by the time you're delaying especially if you don't have a partner by the time you're delaying till till 35. especially if you want three children you know yeah well right I'm thinking just one you know and and it's also the case I think if you're a reasonable Observer of human nature you see that people have three sources of fundamental gratification in their lives one is their the pursuit of their own interests including career and job one is their intimate relationship and the other is their family and obviously the intimate relationship and the family are very integrally Associated and if you miss out on one of those you may be able to fill it by exceptional ability in the remaining domains but for most people not only is that highly unlikely it's also highly undesirable so to come because to take the point as well here am I you know an older uh male talking about things that are very sensitive to women but there there are a lot of women out there saying the exact same thing and you know there was one this morning I got got an email from Melanie notkin who's written a book called other Hood um who herself has no children and she put it succinctly that in her words women are going through the education path the career path to try to ultimately fall in love and have a family yeah right it's all linked yeah well I think it's the same for men I think so no well half the reason half it's more than that half the reason that men strive for Career Success is to impress women and attract them in fact it's higher than that so but but maybe that point is the heart of the problem we have today because today if you look at who's at college and who's actually earning more right now I read this morning women in in cities in the US are earning more than men I don't know if that's right or wrong but you have this situation that's right under 30. yeah so in U.S colleges right now they're I believe it's 9.5 million women and Iran 6.57 million men oh and the women start dropping out of college by the way when the when they when the when they start out remember the man two to one right because a lot of the reason people go to college you know you've got to ask yourself what's college for it's like well let's get educated to go to lectures to be accredited it's like no probably not probably the reason people go to college is to find a bait and there's a selected pool there and you have a decent chance of finding someone you know of approximately your ability and and uh forward-looking Vision let's say and the reason people are willing to Shell out between 150 and 250 000 for four years is in no small part so they can find a mate well if you demolish that by well radically decreasing the number of available men for example you're just going to blow the whole Enterprise out of the water which is already what's happening and absolutely um and this is perhaps my greatest concern because I think if we make young people more aware of fertility the fertility window they might want to have children earlier if we link that to in some way enabling careers later in life yeah which has to fundamentally happen this to work we might still be left with a situation where women who the term is hypergenic where people women we want to marry someone at least as educated at least as successful taller than they are yeah but if we're in a situation where there's so few men getting the same level of Education we might be left with this imbalance oh yeah so that's already happening clearly yeah it's very difficult for women to overcome the hypergamous uh Instinct because they're trying to redress the imbalance in terms of reproductive responsibility there's no evidence at all you get a little bit of flattening of hypergamy and extremely egalitarian societies like Scandinavia but it certainly doesn't disappear and so that's that's built in at a very fundamental biological level and I don't think any casual tinkering on the anthropological or sociological front is going to shift that a bit so that's a big problem it's a big problem it's also the case too that if marriages where the wife out earns or out statuses the husband tend to be comparatively unstable and violent so you know now you can lay that at the feet of the man if you're inclined to but it does but in some sense it doesn't really matter because that's the way it is and so the women are unhappy and the men are threatened and that's just not a good rip that's not a good uh recipe for marital stability so everyone loses in this situation and so let's talk about another country Thailand so you you would think if you'd ask me how many women are in college in Thailand I might have said 15 I have no idea but no it's 55 percent 40 percent of men are in college in Thailand so you have a similar shift even there on what's happening to the man the documentary we went to a temple where monks are trying to rehabilitate young men who fell out of college or didn't go to college moreover yeah what they did it's 1618 was turned to alcohol it was turned to substances yeah to drive taxis because they could get some cash because there was no point trying to compete with the one yeah so you have these deep societal problems but yet they are want to be really clear that the the answer to this is not um in some way preventing women from getting an education that's just not going to function you know how are you going to do that you know well you always lose access to half the world's brain power of course of course and you know there are people who think then there are people who I think want to use this conversation to promote that because I've seen comments along the those lines too often this has to be there for partly about um men in some way asking why are men excluded from society why are they becoming in cells or in Japan they call them octocus you know the young man who stays home playing his gaming systems and mayor see I don't I don't think that's the right question I think we almost always ask questions backwards why people become useless that's not a mystery it's easy to be useless the mystery is why that doesn't happen to everyone all the time and the answer is because we build up extremely careful structures of societal discipline to encourage people to adopt mature long-term responsibility and to reward them judiciously for doing so and when you allow those structures to collapse or work consciously to undermine them then you get default to the default and the default is useless it's short-term gratification and so you never need an explanation for that it's like well why do people turn to short-term gratification because it's gratifying in the short term it's easy now you know getting men encouraging men to shed their Peter Pan persona juvenile Peter Pan Persona and to adopt mature responsibility that's a real challenge for every society and we are increasingly not only failing at doing that but punishing young men for developing say the virtues of ambition and and uh well and even sexual desire for that matter so all right so chapter one you went interviewed a variety of people and and and and just started to flesh out the territory how does it unfold after that well it comes to the point where I realize there's a moment I realize there is a connection across all these countries and it's to do with this structure of the family you know you would expect if you're having fewer children you know on some of these organizations encourage people to fewer children have fewer smaller families you would expect if they had had an a success or if people were doing it you would have a lot of families with only one child but actually Singletons are actually really quite rare in life and they're no more common today than they were 30 40 years ago so I started to discover you see people with zero children right that's the only how do you get a fertility rate of less than replacement levels either the number of people having one child are none so connecting that allowed me to start to ask more questions about childlessness and about aspirations in life they're not really emotions so it's not a matter of small families no it's a matter of no family that's right and then it's a matter of involuntary known families right okay got it and that's why I didn't end up doing any regressive analysis because it's it's a counting problem you know we were counting this the wrong way you just simply need to look at uh the number of people having one child two three four and you find this Gap and you find that getting wider and wider and they effectively expands it effectively explains the entire fall below replacement level but there's really seriously there's really good news here too um the best news in all of this is that if the majority are significant number of those people who are involuntarily unplanned jealousness as I call it if they were having a family they're not going to have one they're going to have in the same proportions one two three four five plus it's all about having a first child so in documentary right well the pre look the second child is pretty straightforward after the first and once you've got two you're already completely screwed so you might as well have three well that's then the kids start to take care of each other by the way too which is something that parents don't understand is that yeah you know you don't if you have eight kids it's not like you're taking care of eight kids the kids start to form their own society and take care of each other yeah current examples of that in the documentary or at least on my journey of you saw in Italy this mother of four children saying she educated her eldest daughter taught her how to read she taught the next story right she told the next one the next one so that's certainly true but the good news is here because family structure is really locked in once of course um you know if you go to some countries as I did in Africa You've Got High birth rates because of poverty yeah yeah some more access to reproductive you know services but mostly that's covered now mostly it is so we got poverty that people in Africa need children to go and get the water but a lot of good things are being done on that that poverty level is coming way down and we're seeing in Africa on average and sub-Saharan Africa just to cover that briefly um the average woman is having one less child every 15 years it's around four now so around 30 years time we're looking at Africa starting to get down towards replacement level it's on the same path yeah yeah that's the reasonable assumption based on the data right now so once you get to that point and this is what I think the world of demography really skipped over um is that it's not the same um form it's not like you look at your families going from four to two and then down to 1.5 and said this is the same Trend it's not when you get to replacement level when women are having pretty much the family size that they actually want childlessness kicks in and it it's that that pulls it down a different level so the next part of the documentary then going to people finding out what their young people with their aspirations for the future was then also talking to men and women who hadn't had children why they didn't or what it meant to their lives and that that gets quiet what do you find on the aspirational front and oh you know the the majority the significant majority of people young people expect or want of children someday right right now I do have some concerns but no evidence for it but it's just a natural concern that what we're seeing in the world today uh perhaps is over focus on the environment is through fear yeah persuading people more than you would normally expect to not think of children but have hope around that because it's this internal desire it's not so much fear that's interfering on that front I think it's actually demoralization right because this is especially true for let's say decent young men who would like to be moral actors if they're told continually which they are that all of their male pattern behaviors for example in school are disruptive and that their male ambition is nothing but a reflection of the tyrannical patriarchy and that any interest they might evoke they might events towards women is part of the predatory pattern of male Behavior then it demoralizes them literally it makes them feel like they're natural proclivity for ambitious striving let's say and sexual desire is immoral and the people you hurt the most by doing that are the people who have a moral heart because the ones who don't don't care and the ones who do I had a friend uh his name was Rob dernin and uh he was an early he fell prey to this anti-male narrative very early in his life this is like 40 years ago 50 years ago and he was definitely guilty about his role as a patriarchal male let's say and he did everything he could to adopt a kind of nihilistic Buddhism and just take himself out of life you know he thought everything he did was and everything that men did in general was just part of the destructive force that was ravaging the world and he eventually committed suicide it was awful I watched that unfold for 50 years you know and I would say you know he had his flaws like everyone does and in that self-destructive pathway there can be a fair bit of let's say unconscious self-serving but fundamentally he was overwhelmed by existential guilt in relationship to being male and that eventually convinced him to do himself in it was quite the catastrophic Voyage All Things Considered and I I know perfectly well that that's not rare because I've talked to thousands of young men who have been demoralized to the point of suicide and that story is I'd say that's the archetypal story so it's not fear exactly it's it's an assault it's a moral assault and it's on unconscionable it's an unconscionable moral assault if you're a solution to saving the planet is that you have to demoralize young people so badly that they even abstain from sex then there's seriously something wrong with your world view and maybe we can call out Paul Ehrlich on that front for example so all right so now you're starting to talk to people about their aspirations you're finding out young people do want to have a family and that doesn't mean one child it means a family and but they're not prioritizing that properly or they're they're what happens to the people who end up without children well there's no path to it right the path is education education education usually not for everyone but and then get sure that yeah um but that's not the driver because education in some countries is much lower than the U.S so some people will say oh that's the problem yeah it's not a good thing it can't help yeah um and that's career career career right is guiding people to say actually there is a moment in time when you really need to prioritize this so that we've left young people to find a path on their own having sent them off as parents as as as societies find a path of life that will get them to where they want to be which everyone I think implicitly assumes for most people not all will involve love and will involve children yeah but actually what's happening is when young people are getting to that point they're often in their 30s because no one really is is thinking um that 30 is too late yeah at all yeah but I mean just another statistic if you look across every country we had data on probability of becoming a parent a mother rather it's on woman again the probability of someone without children age 30 ever becoming a parent at most at most is 50 percent really that's just the outcome so by 30 by 30. if you haven't had your first child by 30 in most countries it's lower than that and and why is that is it is do you know I mean there must be multiple causes part of that would be partnerlessness part of that would be fertility difficulties um what are the major contributors to that the major contributor is not finding a partner yeah at the right time yeah right or when you do find a partner it's you have challenges yeah so the other thing that that is painful to point out to women is that 30 year old women aren't competing with other 30 year old women for partners they're competing with 18 to 35 year old women for partners and so all things considered if you're 30 and you're looking for a mate and you want children you're putting an awful lot of pressure one way or another on your 30 year old male Target because his option is to find a 25 year old woman who all things being equal is of the same value as you are except that you're 30 and that means his time frame is now shortened in a manner that wouldn't be the case if he married someone younger Plus women tend to prefer men who are slightly older than them well not exactly slightly it's actually four years is the average internationally and so the optimal Target for a 25 year old woman is a 29 year old man and so and it's it's it's it's it's rude to point such things out but mate selection is a very difficult problem and it's also exacerbated by the fact that this is also a terrible thing is that because of this hypergamous tendency of women as women are I knew a lot of very successful young women who worked in the legal field and they were often stars in their firms extremely able people and generally they were very vivacious attractive intelligent educated and intimidating as hell to men and not that interested in someone who didn't have the same ability and Status they did which was almost no one so then there are 30 they're extremely choosy and you could say they have a right to be but the problem is well yeah you're 30 and you're extremely choosy and you're pool of available candidates has basically shrunk To None because first of all a lot of men are already snapped up by the time they're 30. so there's that reduction right off the bat and then if you're going to reject eight women rate 80 percent of men on dating sites is below average in attractiveness and that's just the Baseline right for the women who are high status and high attraction attractive let's say very able on the career front and uh they're the men they're going to regard as acceptable that's a vanishingly small proportion of man so that's part of the reason why they what would you say select themselves out of the mating Market that's that's brutal man it's brutal and I watched women struggle with that like mad and certainly had no shortage of sympathy for them but the mere fact that you're sympathetic to someone doesn't mean that the brute reality that confronts them has been altered in any manner whatsoever points on that so I agree with all of that what I see and I I get to often once or twice a week have a coffee with a young person who has reached out and you you know when you talk about the documentary or friends or friends or friends someone wants to talk to you about something personal a common um conversation would be more women more than men they've been dating someone for five years yeah they think they might want to well different scenarios they think they might want to settle down and have a child with them but they've never talked about it well it's only been five years right or that they've already figured out they probably don't want a child with this person what you can't do or worst of all they've just broken up because they've been dating this guy for seven years and he's not got another girlfriend who's 25 yeah and she's pregnant yeah oh my God yeah that's a brutal situation brutal but those are real life oh yeah yeah that's very yeah all that's very common so the idea of dating someone for an extended period my children are now you know you know 27 to 20 you know they're getting to that point where you know to me I'm thinking of my own children what I think of these young people and the advice I I would give them and frankly the advice I usually give and I'm not a clinical psychologist but um you know people are asking for advice and I've talked to a lot of people is if you're unsure break up because you know what if it feels wrong after you've broken up you'll get back together quickly and I'd say more other advice too is get the hell out of it you think you have a long time to decide well here's here's a way of thinking about it if you're reasonably attractive you'll be able to try out five people that's it that's what you've got you know because it takes a while to find someone and then it takes a while to get to know them and finding them and getting to know them that's probably something approximating one to two years and if you do that five times that's ten years and that's your fertility window and so you think you have time but that's a delusion and you think the right person will come around well first of all that's a delusion to begin with because you build a relationship you don't find one now you should have some sense when you pick your partner to the degree that you have the luxury to have some sense but the notion that the person right for you will come along at the right time that's just that's just not the case that isn't how things work at all and if you know that even if you're very attractive that the list of true candidates is probably five and four some people it's one or zero and so that's it's hard eh because when you're 17 you're 16 especially if you're attractive and I would say this is especially true if you're an attractive young woman you have no shortage generally speaking of people who are interested in you and it looks like that sort of a landscape of Plenty but that doesn't mitigate against the fact that it still takes a long time to get to know people and to find the right person now men have it a bit easier on that front I would say because like I had one friend who didn't have a child until he was 55. you know that can always be the case for men and and so the pressure isn't on in the same way but even with men like how I married my wife earlier we would have had more kids you know and that didn't happen so and we got married comparatively early for our social class an educational background okay so now you're talking to people and you're finding out they want to have kids and then they find out that they don't get to right a little bit too late and so where does the documentary go from there so from there we take it into the consequences the consequences um well they're partly personal um but partly economic but everything ultimately is personal because everything ultimately comes back to you know whether it's you and your life and how you live and whether you're lonely or not yeah or how much the state can help you particularly in your later years through Healthcare through pensions through your city providing basic services like water it all comes back together so we explore a lot of those and by the way I I sat down with I believe about a dozen experts many professors many you know a priest a monk uh people are involved working with government Healthcare programs around the world so we hear these voices and other than uh one organization which happens to be the successor to what polar like set up um they were the only organization who took an optimistic view of course she would they would do that everybody else is negative everybody else is worried about the future consequences of this um and just by the way I I should call this out Ehrlich set up an organization uh author of the population bomb of course called zpg which evolved into your population growth yeah it evolved into another organization that still has something like 30 000 teachers who train other teachers who educate 4 million U.S high school kids every year and they explain the population problems usually in Africa and their message is please think about this yeah well there's nothing there's nothing racist about the Too Many African narrative yeah when you teach someone like two and two is four you don't say think about that but when you say here's the problem in Africa and you say to a think about that you're not really saying think about Africa you're thinking about you know do you want the kids or not sir that's covered in the documentary as well as part of the narrative as to why we still have this Viewpoint when frankly we should have known about this you know decades ago yeah we can also look at the self-evident economic statistics demonstrating that since Paul Ehrlich and his population bomb in the club of Rome Etc these anti-population zealots started beating the drum back in 1965. saying that we were all going to starve to death by the year 2000 when we'll have four billion people God help us and now have eight and the relationship between wealth growth and population has been extremely positive not negative or flat and everyone on the planet virtually is richer than well that anyone had ever conceived of and it's clearly the case that we could manage this if we had half the will to do it so the data are in one of the things I've really learned is that I believe the whole idea of natural resource almost the whole idea of natural resource is specious in that human beings the wealth of the planet is dependent on the psychological health and the structures of governance that are put in place by people of Good Will and that if we organize ourselves properly and aim up there's no real limit to abundance and it's certainly not population dependent we're not in a zero-sum game we are not yeast in a petri dish we're not doomed to a malthusian outcome and the biologists who make that claim and say it's scientific are assuming that the yeast in the petri dish model of human function is the appropriate biological model and it's not and the reason for that is because we can let our ideas die instead of us and we can learn and we can transform and we're very good at that and there's no justification whatsoever for stating that it's a scientific fact that population increase is going to produce a malthusian catastrophe now it can in limited circumstances but we are not East in a Petri dish that's the wrong model so and I can't disagree I mean I'm a data analyst I I'm only prepared to comment when I've done my own work or I've seen detailed work of others I can't imagine how complicated it must be to model the planet I mean that's on a level beyond anything any you know rational statistician could do alone it's models on top of models on top of models yeah so where I Tower of Babel so where I come from is look to be honest with you I don't know but I do know that we are adaptive I do know that we should prepare because to be honest with you you know green technologies sound like pretty cool things when you look at Teslas out there they're not perfect but they're remembering I work with a lot of the bottom of clients but what Elon has done for the industry you know is phenomenal and if we come at this from a point of view of positivity what can we do and I look at my own kids and well their generation the malays the the belief that the world is coming to an end the world is not coming to an end in that direction which we seem to be striving to do with all diligence at the moment well then to bring it back to the the documentary at this point we we come back to this point of loneliness and meet people and and I mean there's a scene where I go to a crematorium in Germany and I'm hoping to find out something about what it's like to bury people who have no family I nearly got an interview uh directly with the director but he refused to meet me on an intermediary kind of sat down to explain why and it's horrendous and so this is off camera um but I got a a long note recently with more information as to what's happening people with no family and Care Homes are being effectively mistreated malnourished yes tied to their beds for long periods of time and we know this so it's known in this crematorium because the bodies that come are I guess right marked yeah and they weren't prepared to say because they're fearful of the system so you know that's someone should make a documentary about that alone but it tells you that the life of these people without family you know and we can't see it because these people whether it be in that suburb in Japan or in Germany or anywhere else these people are spending their lives in their homes alone hidden from from the world so well the thing is in our culture we only seem to be able to apprehend life until about 30. like that's our vision you know the vision is you're young you're full of promise you get educated you have your career and then you're 30. and what's happening well now you're successful it's like okay but you got 60 years left there what are you gonna do with that well how long is your career going to run you well you know lots of people think about early retirement and that's particularly perhaps the case if you're successful economically so let's say you retire at 50. okay fair enough you got 45 years left what's your vision for that well now you're alone you don't have a family you don't have a partner you don't have a career either so um what are you planning to do exactly what's your vision and the answer is we don't have a vision for that we don't have a vision for the expanse of our life and so and that's an interesting thing in and of itself I mean you know for a long time back in the 1860s people even in the west were struggling along on less than a dollar fifty a day in today's money and it's not like people had the luxury of developing a lifetime Vision they were sort of fending off one disaster disaster after another like people do now who live in absolute privation there's about 800 million people like that still on the planet and then once you get a little wealthier a little more secure you can start thinking about the future and but that's very very complicated and this luxurious wealth we have is new enough so that our capacity to develop a lifetime Vision hasn't developed to a degree that's sophisticated enough to take that whole time span into account but this vision of isolated death with no one around you that cares that's I wouldn't recommend that as your life from 70 to 95. it's pretty damn dismal so Jordan it's going to be worse in less industrialized nations because you go to Brazil and as professors there I met three of them the freeze they used was we're getting old before we got rich in Brazil right so they can't provide the infrastructure resources to the elderly on a level comparable to what we can so the life of elderly people so I look at when I look at India with the birth rate now below replacement level growing population because it's so young people are living longer which is a good thing but I'm looking at a future for India 30 years from now where you're going to have so many old people and so few people to take care of them so this is a problem that we focus too much on in our own societies this is a global humanitarian crisis of old people who are going to be left by and large to some extent offend for themselves and when they're not fending for themselves you know it they're going to be mostly in their homes or alone and you know I find that I find the psychological argument I would say probably more compelling I I think not because I take any issue to your forward-looking projections but because things are so unstable on the technological and economic and political front that projecting even a decade into the future seems in some ways like a Fool's errand right because God only knows what's coming down the pipelines with regards to new technology but I think you can make an extraordinary strong case that one of the things you don't want to end up happening to you in your own life is to be involuntarily childless and isolated starting at the age of 30 going forward right and so I do you know I I've I've looked at the situation in China and in Japan with this what do they call that the inverted pyramidal distribution where there's way more old people than young people and obviously that seems untenable on the technological or on the economic front but um I do think the the psychological issue is much more present should be much more present for young people and the warning is don't be thinking you've got a lot of time to get your act together because you don't have as much time as you think and you want to get things going sooner than you might find it convenient there's never a convenient time to have a child there's stupid times to have a child for sure but there's never a convenient time and that's the other thing people do too you know um when my wife and I finally got together she was about 28 or so she wanted to have a kid pretty you know pretty much right away and uh I was finishing off my postdoc and I hadn't got a permanent job yet and my sense was well you know everything's not in place and we talked that out for quite a while and decided to proceed regardless because there was no real reason for me to be concerned the probability that I was going to be jobless was barring catastrophe zero and you jump into the abyss holding hands with your wife you know it there's no right time and the reason that's so important to know is because the clock ticks while you're waiting and that's also a catastrophe and then it sneaks up on people unawares as you just described and takes them out not good okay so now you're talking now you're investigating in the documentary the consequences of this involuntary childlessness and do you progress past that yeah well so the consequences go into both Detroit we look at what might happen to the future of the world based on what's happened to Detroit yeah yeah we look at briefly um future pension systems we look at AI technology but only very briefly it's an area that I'm sure many people like you mentioned technology just now but you know a comment for me is that robots don't pay taxes so simply saying there's something else you don't necessarily want to take care of you so we'll just see how that works out and I think they're going to be expensive so the idea that AI is a solution just like this yeah yeah is probably oversimplified possibly very oversimplified but of course it has a role technology definitely has a role in this but we can't just turn away from this subject and say let's not worry about it for that reason the final part of the documentary and I have to credit a friend I thought it was done after filming in probably 18 countries I thought well this is enough now kind of I can see the global pattern and uh this friend in La said no you haven't finished you have to go to Africa and you have to go to other countries like Bangladesh and India had already been to but I wanted to more filming I wanted to go into we went to slums in Mumbai we went to slums in uh Rio uh I think five in Johannesburg um and I wanted to see what's happening in the parts of the world that I think to some extent we might fear are exploding and you have the same fundamental story happening everywhere even Nigeria um so Nigeria is a good example of a country that's moving towards lower birth rates at a much slower Pace there'll be more people by the way in Nigeria by the year 2100 than there are in China for everyone watching and listen that's quite the shocking bit of information yeah and you know you look at Nigeria you still have a culture there where the more male children you have it's part of a what you might say that the bravado that yeah yeah it's like that's that status reward status yeah but you go to Ethiopia and you meet people there and you talk professors there and Ethiopia used to be like that but the birth rate right now in Ethiopia is four it needs to be seven or eight not that long ago and there's a transformation happening so you can see and feel the transformation happening in Africa just like everywhere else so I like to think of the analogy that the world is on a roller coaster and countries like Japan and Germany and Italy and now South Korea are in the front car you know they're over in terms of the peak population and sure they're aging and people are going to live longer and longer so we're not going to really see the the drop for a little while but we know what's coming Africa is in the rare car you know they're still on the way up but the path is the same here yeah but perhaps the thing that struck me about Africa where I'm planning to go back and spend a significant amount of time for my own purposes as much as anything when you go to Africa you go to Malawi which is I believe World Bank did the 12th poorest country in the world by GDP per person and you go to community and people are laughing smiling and you go to kind of a an area it's not even a soccer pitch it's nothing like a soccer pitch but there's a soccer ball there yeah there's no rules but you got 30 kids running and screaming and laughing yeah and we're there you know and you know they come and say hi for a moment but they want to get back and play soccer with each other and to see that sense of community and that intergenerational Community you know maybe in some ways part of a solution here that we've you know I think an argument for me is that we've lost a sense of community for one reason or another and uh so you know that that's you know something that surprised me actually how similar really we all are and we're just of different parts of this of that cycle right um so so you've you've laid out this documentary and you've documented a problem that is not being attended to much that's a very pervasive problem and that's going to affect virtually everyone personally and sociologically we talked a little bit about pathways you know I mean it's one thing obviously to diagnose a problem and that's not a straightforward thing to do to see the problem and then to diagnose it it's a completely different order of things to start thinking about what might constitute an acceptable alternative so in Hungary what they've done you probably know this is that if you're a mother in Hungary you have one child you're now exempt from income tax at the federal level for the rest of your life it's 25 and then that scales up to 100 percent for four children and the idea there was both practical and cultural so the cultural idea was we need to signal that we value motherhood and children and one of the more powerful signals that that Society has acts to is access to his economic signals and the hungarians have stopped the decline in their birth rate and tapped it up slightly they've increased female participation in the workforce by the way 13 percent so the feminists had objected or some of them that the Hungarian government was just turning women into baby making factories which is hell of a you know nasty epithet I might add but um what's happened is the reverse is more women are working now than before and I suppose that's because they get to keep more of their money you know and uh they can make Child Care Arrangements more straightforwardly and all of that they've knocked a divorce rate down substantively they've increased the marriage rate they've knocked the abortion rate down 40 38 with no compulsion right it's not as easy to get an abortion and Hungary as it is in the U.S or Canada and the legal limits there is 12 weeks instead of the 16 weeks which is about what Americans think it should be but the point is these alterations in policy have produced increases in fertility increases in the marital rate decreases in the divorce rate decreases in the abortion rate and those look arguably like desirable things do you see and we talked a little bit about the fact that women live seven years longer and so in principle have a time let's say eight years where they could have children without really being at a competitive disadvantage on the economic front with men assuming that it is a competitive landscape and that's also not particularly obvious to me I mean what have you have have your thoughts turned to what might constitute an appropriate pathway forward for young people well I certainly um would uh quite boldly say what will not work because there's so many examples of things have been tried and tried and tried and tried now we'll come back to Hungary in a moment yes it is very interesting um but if you look at baby bonus programs yeah globally I that's what they do is temporarily increases the birth rate and then you see a dip and the dip usually goes below where it was before all you've done is bring forward the the people who would have had kids anyway yeah yeah right right right so we and you look at the amount of money in certain Japan certainly South Korea are spending on kindergarten yeah yeah that doesn't seem to help Quebec it didn't make a bit of difference yeah yeah no it isn't it isn't lack of child care that's causing this problem yeah and it's not income either no right A lot of people think it is incumbent it's a natural thing I think for people thinking well if I had a little bit more money or you know at the right time you know or my apartment's too small but actually what what you find is that when people have more money in their pocket birth rates go down yeah right they do other things yeah it's like not yet not you know we can take this vacation well I think also well I also think that their expert expectations for what constitutes sufficiently prepared for children also change you know like I said when I was in Montreal well you know I was already educated I had a job it was clear I was going to get a job but my standard for what was sufficient security and opportunity for my children Rose along with my Horizon of Vision on the economic front and it's also not the case that more security makes you likable to take more risks that isn't how life works you have to jump into children just like you jump into a marriage or into into your life for that matter I think that's the key point you know so ultimately Uh Hungry aside for a moment I'm also Russia in the past has had similar programs where they have put significant benefits in places that seem to have worked for a time um but vast majority of financial incentives or even societal changes such as kindergartens yeah have very limited effects very limited indeed if we come back to understand the fundamentals of the problem is this unplanned childlessness issue perhaps what Hungary might have got right and you know I you know I will never frankly tell someone you sure should not have an abortion that's your choice that's not something I want to have any so I don't believe it's my right to say that that's just my personal position on it but what hungering might have done it and you you still a moment ago just make it more positive the idea of parenting yeah that's what they're aiming at yeah the hungarians do understand so they're president cattle and Novak uh young Dynamic woman who who is their symbolic head of state was very much involved in the formulation of these family policies and she knew perfectly well that part of what the goal was was to culturally Elevate the let's call it the sacred significance of motherhood something like that to to put the mother again on something on something approximating the necessary pedestal you know you see this in Catholic imagery all the time is that of course in the Christian tradition Christ is obviously the central figure of redemption and Divinity but there's strong competition symbolically on the part of Mary because it's Mary and the infant and I would say any society that doesn't hold the mother and infant as sacred is doomed for obvious reasons since we all had mothers and we're all infants if you don't value that whatever that value means and when my wife had little kids she was treated pretty damn dismally I would say you know I used to go out to restaurants with her and just watch when she entered in with the kids and there was a lot of sneers and a lot of you know Miss casual mistreatment there was no they were a nuisance you know and that was extremely annoying to me to watch because I don't think of kids as kids can be nuisances if they're not well behaved but you there's something wrong with you if you think children are fundamentally a nuisance and and it's definitely the case that we don't value the contribution of young mothers in our culture the way that we would if we were wise and that's a very difficult problem to solve right all this emphasis on you know the kind of hedonic Freedom that's associated with you with being a youthful teenager and then that equally Sex in the City nonsense about you know the your your freedom on the sexual front while you're pursuing your career it's a bloody juvenile that it's almost incomprehensible but it's not an easy thing to reverse and it isn't even obvious that it's the government's rule to re reverse that but and the outcomes are unplanned childlessness right time and time again I think you know it's just clear that people who could on that path are thinking of what Society tells them they can do in the short term only and that'd be a good title for this this uh this interview really we should probably call it unplanned childlessness I love that well because that's that is so it's so interesting that that exists as such a plague and yet it isn't identified and it doesn't have a name and that's a real that's a real catastrophe I um you know one of the earliest greetings I did there was a young man it was in Japan but he was he's from the US and he just stood there afterwards gazing the ceiling and he's probably 30 early 30 35. and he said unplanned childlessness and he looked at me and said that that's me huh yeah that's me and you could see it it wasn't just the term it was talking yeah right he was talking the realization realization you actually have to in some way have a plan even if the plan is to do something not a rational but to take a leap of faith of faith and to come back to man as well in this men can't have children aged 55. um you know I divorced sadly um you know at around 40 I guess and I thought there'd be a time where I would meet someone again and have more children that's something I would have desired frankly um not to get too personal but I it wasn't my plan for life to be a divorced dad right right and uh what what you find is um that you're competing with younger men yeah right for the same younger you said that done Easier Said Yes the fact that you can technically have a child in almost any age as a man doesn't mean that you're going to so the outcome is I don't know what makes you think you're going to be more successful old and ugly than you had been young and ugly right so yeah yeah and every year you're on the path to get older I'm uglier um so so you know it it's man and woman in this situation I think that Society needs to make parenting something more valuable but to come back to your point that cannot be the sacrifice of Career Education options we have to make it more almost the default option that you can continue your education I love the idea of lifelong learning which is what I'm doing yeah yeah well it's very odd that we Orient our our educational establishments to people between 18 and 22. I just can't figure that at all I taught at the Harvard Extension school by the way I had a lot of adult students and I enjoyed teaching them a lot there's absolutely no reason whatsoever that the university should specialize in 18 to 22 year olds I do that's a that's a hangover from well I don't know God I don't even know when that was useful and relevant it's just not a smart idea and it's in the college's interest because that's a shrinking number of children come through these systems universities are going to need to diverse yeah lifelong learning is the answer to that so why but it's also the case that in an era of Rapid technological transformation that lifelong learning is necessary practically but it's also why the hell wouldn't you want that because it's part of what keeps you updated so I remember the first class I took at the extension school it was in statistics that I went to my first class probably dressed like I am now at the leather briefcase and uh everyone else I was not the oldest at all yeah but everyone else is in jeans and t-shirts and you know backpacks and yeah I haven't dressed like that for for decades but I went out and you know I got a couple of t-shirts and a backpack and you know the most uh transformational thing happened to me first recognition I'm learning something I want to learn yeah right I'm fully engaged and that makes you the best kind of student too I think so but everyone else there were Harvard College kids there taking somebody yeah and there were people older than me it didn't matter yeah yeah I love teaching at the extension school I mean at Harvard the undergraduates in the formal School were smarter than the people on average in the extension school but the extension school people were a lot more motivated to learn right there there was no one not attending right because they were there because they wanted to be there right so I'm probably asking questions that were I actually took a psychology class uh um probably in the building William James yeah William James yeah yeah and uh you know you know again I was there with a lot of even high school learners at a summer school program but I realized the professor was enjoying the questions I was asking yeah they're just different to the question yeah yeah they're serious questions right yeah so when were you there uh that I started in 2015 2016 I would have taken the psychology probably 101 of course but you know the point is that the recruitment cycle for many career options is linked to the education cycle so you can't change one without the other yeah yeah you have enough people say well it's fine certain companies a lot of recruitment later in life but it's not the normal thing to do it's a risk so if you're a woman or a parent taking time out to raise a family because you think you want to do that exclusively earlier on that's a risk today you might not get on that path and you might not get the recruit yeah you know I don't really buy that I don't really buy that because I had one student for example Shelly Taylor who uh no sorry Shelly Carson um she came back to Harvard as a graduate student out in her 40s I was younger than her as her supervisor she'd been an airline stewardess pretty middle class life had been out of the academic extreme for quite a while and was quite a lot older than most of the graduate students and she hit it hard and developed a bang-up career and she's managed that quite successfully and I think that that's not normal you know it's not the standard practice but it's by no means impossible and given that women do have that seven year advantage in terms of lifespan there's man you think you're out of the running on the education and career front when you're 35 you're out of the running on the reproductive front yeah you're not really out of the running on the education and career front and I've seen lots of people hit the education ground running in their 30s mid-30s sometimes later and have a whole new career I mean Jesus at 40. you can still have 30 years at your new career so that's that's a very optimistic way of looking at it and yeah and so all right so well for everybody watching and listening on YouTube and its Associated platforms thank you very much for your time and attention and uh to Stephen Shaw for agreeing to talk to me today about birth Gap and about the issue of uh declining birth rates and and population shrinkage um bringing that to everyone's attention bringing the issue of unplanned childlessness to everyone's attention because that's a crucial issue here to note the existence of a problem and to give it a name is to bring it out of the darkness and to unshroud it let's say and that's an extremely useful thing to do and I'm going to talk to Stephen for another half an hour on the daily wire plus platform I'd like to spend half an hour with my guests investigating how their pathway through life made it manifest made itself manifest to them both in terms of the problems that grip them the concerns they had both voluntary and involuntary and the opportunities that presented themselves as a consequence and so if you're interested in that then please head over to the Daily Word plus platform you could consider supporting them in any case they have also worked diligently to make the kind of conversations I had today uh possible and that's much appreciated to the film crew here in Vancouver because that's where I am today thank you very much and uh thank you all for your time and attention good to talk with you yeah yep you bet you bet hello everyone I would encourage you to continue listening to my conversation with my guests on dailywireplus.com

Channel: Jordan B Peterson

Views: 1,864,439

Keywords: Jordan Peterson, Jordan B Peterson, psychology, psychoanalysis, existentialism, maps of meaning, free speech, freedom of speech, personality lectures, personality and transformations, Jordan perterson, Dr Peterson

Id: Qrg8t34yXRs

Length: 106min 29sec (6389 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 09 2023