The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - 338. The Epidemic That Dare Not Speak Its Name

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00:00:57.420 Hello everyone. I'm here today talking to Mr. Stephen J. Shaw.

00:01:13.900 Stephen is a British national who has studied and lived on three continents.

00:01:17.860 He trained as a computer engineer and then as a data scientist before starting his first film project, Birth Gap, at age 49.

00:01:28.580 He maintains the position of president of the data analytics company he co-founded, Autometrics Analytics LLC.

00:01:37.760 Stephen holds an MBA graduate business degree from ISG in Paris, France,

00:01:43.280 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,

00:01:56.220 something that's not particularly on everyone's radar, and the issue of the invisible epidemic of unplanned childlessness.

00:02:06.660 Good to see you.

00:02:07.820 Thank you for inviting me.

00:02:09.280 Hey, thanks for agreeing to talk. So, let's start with your background.

00:02:14.460 We could walk through what you've been up to biographically, first of all, to situate it,

00:02:19.840 and then you can expand on that to the degree that you're willing and able.

00:02:26.800 Historically, for the last 20 years, I've been involved in data analytics, what we now call data science.

00:02:32.860 I'm a part statistician, part coder.

00:02:35.420 I've worked with some great academics and PhDs that we have on staff and coming up with academic models,

00:02:41.840 forecasting models for industries, mainly in the automotive sector.

00:02:46.480 We try and do short-term forecasting.

00:02:48.840 What might people purchase?

00:02:51.200 What should car companies build?

00:02:53.300 What should they market?

00:02:54.760 What should they give for incentives?

00:02:56.940 Down to a very minute level.

00:02:58.440 This is a private venture?

00:02:59.680 It is.

00:03:00.160 And so, it's a corporation that offers these services?

00:03:03.100 Yeah, it's a small niche corporation that's been offering services to the world's largest corporations for 20 years.

00:03:08.800 And how did you get involved in that?

00:03:10.540 It was a startup in London 20 years ago.

00:03:12.940 I personally moved to the U.S.

00:03:14.840 We got a contract with Nissan North America.

00:03:17.680 It took me to L.A.

00:03:18.600 And following that, yeah, I spent like 15 years following that company hands-on until around 2015.

00:03:28.560 Bizarrely, and I should explain that my lifelong learner, I'd gone, I'd got accepted into Harvard Extension School

00:03:34.800 to become a degree candidate to keep my data science skills up to date.

00:03:41.020 And I was presented with some data that I just couldn't believe on falling birth rates.

00:03:46.740 So, as someone who is involved in forecasting, albeit short-term forecasting.

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00:05:28.280 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.

00:05:42.000 I mean, that's the smallest problem in this overall.

00:05:43.940 But that was, you know, something I felt almost ashamed of.

00:05:46.820 Why do I know this?

00:05:48.220 And then you expand that to what is this going to mean for the planet?

00:05:52.620 And as a father of three, my three children were just about still teenagers then.

00:05:58.280 I felt a sense of failure that I hadn't been preparing my children for the world they were about to enter into.

00:06:06.620 You know, we all, I think, are led into the belief that, sure, that the world's population is growing perhaps exponentially still.

00:06:15.600 That's what I would have said at that time based on what I was learning.

00:06:18.980 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 flawed.

00:06:35.800 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.

00:06:47.520 South Korea.

00:06:48.420 Yeah.

00:06:49.000 Well, South Korea was just a little bit later, just a little bit later, which is interesting.

00:06:53.240 But something triggered in the early 1970s in Japan, Germany, Italy, and you can add Spain, Portugal, Switzerland, Austria, to cause a series of parallel trends.

00:07:06.560 And yet, what I was reading from experts was that these are localized problems, but Japan, it's work-life balance.

00:07:14.840 That in Germany, it's something called Rebenmutter, which is the idea that in 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.

00:07:28.240 So that might cause some people to delay parenthood.

00:07:32.280 In Spain and Italy, it was down to high unemployment among the youth.

00:07:38.460 Other areas, it was gender balance, et cetera.

00:07:40.900 So all these localized reasons were being proposed.

00:07:45.520 For me, as a data scientist, you could see clearly, and if I can give you an analogy, it's one of your own.

00:07:52.640 You were talking to Lex Friedman.

00:07:54.840 You talked about the dragon, I think, in terms of the environment context.

00:07:58.120 Someone finds a dragon, and they scream, there's a dragon.

00:08:01.480 And I love the analogy, and I since saw that you use dragons quite a lot, so I thought I might too.

00:08:06.700 And it's like you found this little dragon in Japan, and the same kind of dragon in Germany and Italy at the same time, and they're starting to get bigger.

00:08:16.640 So they're lizards to begin with.

00:08:18.540 Right.

00:08:19.200 I mean, they're tiny.

00:08:20.040 They're the size of a kitten, I think, is the analogy I saw.

00:08:23.260 And they're getting bigger, and then suddenly they're appearing in other neighboring countries, and it's growing, growing, growing from there.

00:08:30.280 So the idea that these are localized issues, to me, just did not make sense.

00:08:35.040 So why do you think you were struck to begin with by the fact that birth rates were plateauing or declining?

00:08:42.220 I mean, because the typical response to that would be either, so what?

00:08:47.340 There's too many people on the planet anyways, or actually it's a net good.

00:08:51.460 So now you said you're in a private company.

00:08:54.280 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.

00:09:05.160 And so, you know, it doesn't necessarily mean that a private data analytic company is credible, but it does mean at least that they've been able to demonstrate their credibility enough so that they have paying customers.

00:09:17.340 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, to help people plan their product development and so forth.

00:09:28.160 But you came across this data at a much broader level indicating a plateauing birth rate or population growth.

00:09:35.380 Why did that disturb you?

00:09:36.800 Why did you think that was a problem?

00:09:39.480 Because birth rates less than replacement level spiral downwards.

00:09:44.600 They never stall.

00:09:45.280 Well, if you have fewer children that are required to replace a parent's generation, once that generation grows up, they will, unless birth rates change, which they don't historically, they stay low once they're low, you're going to have fewer people again.

00:10:03.040 So you see it as a positive feedback loop.

00:10:05.520 It is.

00:10:06.000 And when you then look up, well, you want to find examples of societies coming from low birth rates going back to replacement level, and you realize there are no examples.

00:10:17.120 In fact, there's no non-historical examples anywhere.

00:10:21.780 Do we have enough of a historical track to consider that a concern?

00:10:26.460 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.

00:10:41.300 In fact, we should be very concerned.

00:10:42.700 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 young women and young families, although that's had pretty much zero impact on the outcome.

00:10:59.820 I know that Hungary has put forward a series of policy transformations on the family support front, and my belief is, from what I've read, is that they've at least stopped the birth rate decrease and increased it slightly.

00:11:16.360 So that's the only—I mean, Quebec didn't work at all.

00:11:18.940 Hungary, it looks like there's some minor—they're still way below replacement, so it hasn't rectified the problem in any sense.

00:11:25.560 What's fascinating about Hungary is what I wanted to do was look at something much deeper than the typical birth rate numbers that we see today, and I'm trying to change that.

00:11:40.140 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.

00:11:48.620 One is of societal childlessness, and the other is family structure.

00:11:55.560 So the traditional way to measure childlessness is to wait until women are 45, usually, and have some surveys, maybe a census.

00:12:05.560 So you're waiting to the end of the fertility window and counting them then.

00:12:09.820 What I wanted to see was, what is societal childlessness today if there's a reduction in the number of women starting to have families compared to what you would expect?

00:12:19.020 We should be able to track that now.

00:12:21.200 So looking at Hungary, which I've just been doing recently, was fascinating.

00:12:25.520 I mean, they're giving huge incentives for people to have three and four children.

00:12:29.380 But the family structure in Hungary is not changing at all.

00:12:33.580 At all.

00:12:34.320 What is changing, which may or may not be linked, it's associative in some way, but causal, we don't know, is the childlessness rate in Hungary does seem to be going down.

00:12:45.220 And more people look like they're starting to have families.

00:12:49.540 And what happens then is, when people start to have families, they go on, because family structure is locked in globally.

00:12:54.800 That's another finding.

00:12:56.480 And so what do you mean?

00:12:58.120 So we'll go in two directions.

00:12:59.260 What do you mean, what are you speaking about when you're talking, when you're expressing your concerns about family structure?

00:13:05.120 Well, family structure basically is the percentage of women.

00:13:08.500 We say women because we've got so much data on women, but really we should think of men and women.

00:13:15.000 The proportion of women, couples, who have one child, or two, or three, or four, or five, or more.

00:13:24.200 And if you take data for Japan, and you look at 1973, right before the fall in birth rates,

00:13:32.620 the percentages of women having one, two, three, or four are identical today as they were then.

00:13:38.780 Six percent of women in 1973 were having four or more children.

00:13:42.460 Today, it's the exact same number, six percent.

00:13:46.060 So our focus has been completely, we've been in a fog looking at overall birth rates.

00:13:53.420 What you find is in Japan in 1974, interesting year, an explosion in childlessness,

00:14:01.960 which went from three percent to six percent to 15 to 21 to 30 plus percent in a space of about four years.

00:14:09.600 The same in Italy, the same in Germany.

00:14:11.900 In four years.

00:14:12.560 In four years.

00:14:13.520 It's a shock.

00:14:14.700 It was what I call a baby shock.

00:14:16.320 And then if you look at Korea, South Korea, which you mentioned earlier, if we take South Korea,

00:14:22.240 mid-90s, right in the midst of a currency shock, you see childless rates were already maybe 15 percent there.

00:14:29.860 Suddenly, it goes up to, I believe, 30 percent, and now it's over 40 percent.

00:14:33.680 And this is childless at what age?

00:14:35.060 Well, when I estimate childlessness, I'm taking for the given population of women the number of births you'd expect to have at any age

00:14:46.780 and say, how many first-time mothers were there?

00:14:50.200 And when you count up the number of first-time mothers of any age group and look at the overall population structure,

00:14:56.380 you can see, well, wait a minute, there's a gap opening up here compared to the number you would expect.

00:15:01.900 So this is like age agnostic in a sense.

00:15:04.340 And as a measure, people may say, well, some of those women might, you know, there might be a boom in the future.

00:15:11.320 People might be just delaying.

00:15:12.880 But that doesn't happen.

00:15:13.980 There's no example of those booms ever happening.

00:15:17.220 So it seems to be we've got this cycle going on that people are pulled quite quickly into this what I call world of unplanned childlessness,

00:15:31.360 if I can, I've had to coin quite a few phrases here.

00:15:34.340 And I should explain what it might mean by unplanned childlessness.

00:15:39.540 If you look at surveys, look at research, the vast majority of people want children.

00:15:48.500 It's an aid.

00:15:50.500 And some don't.

00:15:52.400 That's clear.

00:15:53.380 What percentage do, approximately?

00:15:56.060 I'm estimating around 5% don't.

00:15:58.480 There have been Gallup polls in the U.S. done.

00:16:00.400 Does that differ between men and women?

00:16:03.080 I don't have that data.

00:16:04.200 Okay, okay.

00:16:04.860 So 5%, you figure, are out of the game?

00:16:07.840 Yes.

00:16:08.140 By voluntary choice?

00:16:09.440 Yes.

00:16:10.000 Right.

00:16:10.320 And what percentage are childless?

00:16:13.020 Well, right now we're looking at 30% to 40% in most developed nations.

00:16:16.760 So the vast majority, 80% is estimated in studies.

00:16:21.760 And I think this...

00:16:22.460 So that's that involuntary childlessness.

00:16:26.120 I've been thinking about that lately.

00:16:27.460 We have this notion for men of involuntary celibacy in cells.

00:16:31.960 We don't have a term that's as at hand for involuntary childlessness among women.

00:16:38.820 And it hasn't been recognized as a, like, what would you call it?

00:16:42.500 A universal social problem.

00:16:45.620 But you just said 5% of women don't want children, but 30% don't have them.

00:16:51.400 And so there's a huge gap there between desire and reality.

00:16:54.240 So I think, frankly, I believe it's the biggest societal problem that we have.

00:17:01.200 And it's hiding because we haven't recognized it.

00:17:04.500 And if you find people, as I did make in a documentary, people who are struggling, 30s, late 30s, women particularly, but men too, who have given up in their 40s.

00:17:17.740 And they're opening their heart to you with a level of what they call grief.

00:17:21.560 Yeah.

00:17:21.780 And in English language, grief is used for one particular context.

00:17:27.060 It's not necessarily used normally for something you never had.

00:17:30.420 Yeah.

00:17:30.580 I think in other languages, there are terms that encompass that.

00:17:35.300 But it's the same emotion.

00:17:37.220 And I have 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.

00:17:51.200 Yeah.

00:17:51.940 Starting the career path, probably.

00:17:54.480 Thinking that, well, you know what, I'm not 30 yet.

00:17:57.800 I've got time to meet a partner.

00:17:59.680 Yeah.

00:17:59.920 And then getting to the point of, well, often there is no partner.

00:18:03.860 Yeah.

00:18:04.420 Or that biology gets in the way.

00:18:06.880 Yeah.

00:18:07.100 Well, it turns out that life is shorter than people think.

00:18:09.500 You know, I've had clinical clients who.

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00:19:20.460 Followed that path, and some of them were women who had initially decided that they didn't want to have children,

00:19:29.320 and then changed their minds quite dramatically in their late 20s, which is a very common pattern,

00:19:34.640 and then couldn't have children, and it was just absolutely disastrous for them.

00:19:38.560 They were often on the artificial fertility route for 10 years with multiple miscarriages and failures on that front,

00:19:45.860 and it's a bloody dismal outcome.

00:19:47.600 Okay, so you're making a case here, you're making a psychological case in some sense at the moment in that this is a phenomenon worth attending to,

00:19:57.140 because the vast majority of people who end up childless, which is a more serious immediate problem for women because of the biological restrictions on their reproductive capacity,

00:20:08.520 the reason that's a problem is because so many women end up in that situation despite wanting children.

00:20:14.740 So that's a real psychological problem, but you could take a sociological stance and say,

00:20:19.380 well, as has been insisted upon for 60 years, there's too many people on the planet,

00:20:26.600 and it's just not a bad thing at all if we stop reproducing in this manner,

00:20:30.460 and if the price we have to pay for reduction in the number of excess mouths to feed is that there are some unhappy women,

00:20:38.160 and so be it, what do you think about this at a sociological or political or economic level?

00:20:43.880 Well, first of all, I think that's a terribly sad thing to contemplate,

00:20:48.280 that we have to somehow enforce perhaps lifelong grief and sadness on a subset of society

00:20:57.800 who were mostly unlucky enough not to have the children they wanted to have for the sake of the planet when there are other people.

00:21:06.960 For the hypothetical sake.

00:21:07.980 Hypothetical planet at some future time.

00:21:11.560 At some future time.

00:21:13.240 And to me, the first thing, my reaction, strong reaction, isn't there another way, if that's right?

00:21:20.400 And then you look at data, as it reported in Nature last year, on the overall footprint by age group.

00:21:28.580 Quite a number of scientists put their name to it, and it says very clearly that 8% of our footprint occurs when we're aged under 30.

00:21:39.580 Then it rises quite significantly between 30 and around 65, I believe, and then it falls off sharply.

00:21:46.320 Well, that means that if the world's births were to magically, well, it wouldn't be magically, drop by, say, half.

00:21:54.840 I love taking extreme situations.

00:21:56.620 So let's imagine that from tomorrow, only half of the births happen for some crazy reason.

00:22:02.280 That 8% of total emissions or footprint would go down to 4% in 30 years' time.

00:22:08.120 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.

00:22:19.720 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, I think is terribly sad.

00:22:33.360 I think it might be that, to come back, I would like to clarify that for those people who don't have the desire, I consider myself a pan-natalist.

00:22:43.800 If you don't want to have children, I will be your biggest supporter to say that's fine.

00:22:47.520 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.

00:22:58.760 Yeah, well, most people who are in that boat are being willfully blind, in my experience.

00:23:03.640 And so the idea that there are reasons to not want to have children, one reason is an overwhelming self-centered narcissism.

00:23:13.380 That's not the only reason, but it's definitely one reason.

00:23:17.020 And people talk about, you know, the interference with their personal freedom and their desire to pursue their career.

00:23:22.700 And in that, I read something like the absolute inability to ever sacrifice your own narrow self-interest.

00:23:28.720 And I do mean narrow to the, what would you say, concerns and needs of other people.

00:23:35.160 And so, you know, it's interesting to me that it's 5% that don't want children and that the rate of that kind of self-centered narcissism is about 4% to 5% too.

00:23:46.420 Now, I am not saying that everyone who decides not to have children falls into that category.

00:23:51.620 But I am saying that a fair number of people who don't want children fall into that category.

00:23:56.200 I mean, if you think about it biologically, every single one of your maternal ancestors for three and a half billion years reproduce successfully.

00:24:05.560 And it might be that you're the exception to that rule.

00:24:08.180 But, you know, if you are, you should think long and hard about why.

00:24:11.640 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.

00:24:18.760 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.

00:24:26.100 And it might be downright dreadful by the time you're, let's say, 65.

00:24:30.800 So, all right.

00:24:32.440 So, on the population front now, we talked a little bit about the psychological catastrophe of involuntary childlessness.

00:24:40.060 I'm curious, too, about the social and economic consequences.

00:24:45.340 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.

00:24:54.360 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?

00:25:12.480 To nothing?

00:25:13.540 I mean, that's what happened in Detroit.

00:25:15.500 It basically fell to nothing.

00:25:16.940 I mean, Detroit has 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.

00:25:30.760 So, what do you foresee happening on the political and economic front, given the shift towards the elderly demographically?

00:25:42.820 We're going to see it in China first, right?

00:25:44.640 Clearly.

00:25:45.620 Clearly.

00:25:46.840 Well, Japan, too.

00:25:47.780 Japan, too.

00:25:48.320 One of the reasons I moved to live in Japan is to be close to, I wanted to feel this problem.

00:25:53.620 Yeah, yeah.

00:25:54.020 I wanted to be able to see it and almost touch it, and you can there.

00:25:57.620 But you mentioned Detroit.

00:25:59.160 I spent many, many years living in the suburbs of Detroit.

00:26:03.020 And right around the time I was looking to start this project, you know, that I was able to drive around the streets of Detroit and see street after street after street of tens and tens of thousands

00:26:14.780 thousands of, you know, decaying houses.

00:26:18.000 Yeah.

00:26:18.220 Yeah.

00:26:18.400 Yeah.

00:26:18.660 I remember one day driving along and there was a house.

00:26:22.260 And these were nice houses back in the day.

00:26:25.480 Right.

00:26:25.740 Right.

00:26:25.780 And there was a young family having a picnic outside one of these houses.

00:26:31.360 And it was the perfect setting, you might say, in every context, except every other house in this street looked like they were completely vacant, dilapidated.

00:26:42.200 And around that time, listening to local Detroit news every night, it was crime.

00:26:49.160 It was street lights that weren't functioning.

00:26:51.340 It was lack of safety.

00:26:52.580 It was lack of functioning of basic utilities.

00:26:54.680 It was infrastructure and bridges that the city couldn't afford.

00:26:57.820 And of course, in 2013, it went bankrupt.

00:27:00.160 So I had this backdrop to knowing what was happening to Detroit as a city.

00:27:06.000 And you're right about property value.

00:27:07.380 Around that time, you could buy a significant property in Detroit for $10,000.

00:27:10.740 Yeah.

00:27:10.880 You probably couldn't go there to ever see it because it wasn't safe at that time.

00:27:14.380 Right, right, right.

00:27:14.940 And you're right.

00:27:15.580 Detroit has come back.

00:27:16.560 So in some ways, it is a town.

00:27:17.620 Well, they demolished huge tracts of houses.

00:27:19.940 But how do you do that when half the houses are still occupied?

00:27:23.600 You go through this period of time.

00:27:25.740 Unless you're going to say to people, everybody move three streets over now, and you do that every few years,

00:27:32.040 you can't easily go into neighborhoods and start moving things back to nature, which is what Detroit's doing.

00:27:38.940 You can individual houses, but you still have these scars of the empty spaces that were there.

00:27:45.480 And I show some of this in the documentary.

00:27:47.960 So the idea, I mean, people, I was on a podcast with Chris Williamson's recently.

00:27:54.280 It was the first time I got a sense of the comments that people make.

00:27:59.580 And many people were sharing these deep personal stories about their life to do with unplanned chalices.

00:28:05.800 Yeah.

00:28:05.980 Others were sharing concerns about whether they'd ever become grandparents, right?

00:28:12.380 So, but a lot of people were saying, well, this is just about economics.

00:28:18.840 You know, who cares?

00:28:19.460 This is just about big corporations suffering.

00:28:21.360 Who cares?

00:28:22.620 I think people need to understand this is going to impact everybody, everybody's life.

00:28:26.720 If you're living in an area where there's literally decay, dilapidation all around you,

00:28:31.800 and the taxes that you're paying to your city or your municipality aren't covering the basic infrastructure,

00:28:38.140 no one's going to escape from this.

00:28:39.860 And I think people don't understand that.

00:28:41.280 So in my case, understanding life in Detroit, and again, I really love the city, and it's great.

00:28:49.060 You know, I love the people.

00:28:50.940 I love the way it is starting to come back.

00:28:54.320 But that experience, I think, really spoke to me that we really need to think about what this means.

00:29:01.480 And you talk about the socioeconomic.

00:29:03.100 I mean, the economics, you know, go beyond the city and the property values.

00:29:06.540 It's the pension funds.

00:29:08.540 It's the social welfare funds that, you know, people think, I think I did too at the time,

00:29:13.520 that, you know, the retirement, the cost to maintain each of us in a retirement

00:29:19.620 is basically what the government or someone's been saving for when we get to that age.

00:29:24.400 Yeah, right.

00:29:24.740 It's not.

00:29:25.740 What we're paying right now—

00:29:26.960 That's a bargain with the future.

00:29:28.360 That's a bargain.

00:29:29.200 You know, you're covering the people who are retired now.

00:29:31.660 What the government has put away for us is debt.

00:29:34.420 Debt.

00:29:34.840 Yeah, yeah.

00:29:35.160 There's no savings.

00:29:36.820 And then you look at—

00:29:37.180 There's a promise.

00:29:38.300 Right.

00:29:38.900 And then the debt's a problem because—

00:29:40.720 Yes, that's for sure.

00:29:41.700 If you have a shrinking number of taxpayers, the debt's not shrinking.

00:29:45.660 So the repayment on the debt actually becomes worse and worse and worse.

00:29:50.480 Yeah, well, and hypothetically, you can remediate that with immigration,

00:29:53.580 but then that opens up another can of worms, which is no one really knows

00:29:58.660 what the maximal rate of incorporation a society can manage without imploding, right?

00:30:06.420 I mean, obviously, Canada, the U.S., the U.S. in particular is an immigrant society,

00:30:10.940 and that's worked out extremely well for the immigrants and for the society.

00:30:15.460 But the idea that there's no upper limit to our capacity to digest and integrate,

00:30:21.780 let's say, is absolutely preposterous.

00:30:24.280 So—and we don't know, but the notion that we can replenish at the rate that we're losing

00:30:30.600 on the birth rate front strikes me as—it's at least a debatable claim.

00:30:36.300 Immigration is a subject that, you know, I think we actually only look at one side of it,

00:30:42.160 and I certainly did, until I went to Nepal.

00:30:45.260 And I went and I sat down with a professor, the head of the department of population,

00:30:49.940 Professor Patak, in one of the largest universities in Asia.

00:30:53.200 And I wanted to talk about falling birth rates in Nepal,

00:30:57.420 which were just about replacement level at that time.

00:31:00.260 And all he seemed to want to talk about was the pains of migration on Nepal,

00:31:06.460 the people, the communities that are left behind.

00:31:10.040 I never for one second had thought about this dark side of immigration.

00:31:14.440 Oh, your brain drain, for example.

00:31:17.080 Community drain.

00:31:18.040 Yeah, yeah.

00:31:18.440 You're actually taking away—you're leaving the old parents there,

00:31:20.740 and you're sending, you know, remittances back, and that's seen as positive.

00:31:25.120 But those parents aren't really looking for remittances.

00:31:27.820 They're looking for people, community, their children to be there into their older age.

00:31:34.080 And, you know, we went to film some of these older people,

00:31:37.020 and, you know, the looks on their—forlorn looks on their face.

00:31:40.220 No one thinks about that.

00:31:41.460 And then you have another situation, which is often it's men who are the immigrants,

00:31:46.080 at least first.

00:31:47.500 Yeah.

00:31:47.600 And, well, okay, so maybe that seems to some a good way for it to start.

00:31:55.200 But there's another dark side to that is the woman behind are either not married yet,

00:32:01.220 or they are married, and their men have gone off elsewhere,

00:32:05.320 and they're not having children.

00:32:06.660 Right.

00:32:07.800 Or their husband's coming back for three weeks a year,

00:32:11.020 and you've got three weeks a year to try and get pregnant.

00:32:13.960 And, of course, most are not.

00:32:16.920 So you actually are propelling countries into low birth rates,

00:32:21.660 the same factor that the rest of us are going through right now.

00:32:25.400 So the immigration debate—and I'm an immigrant myself.

00:32:29.780 You know, I've been an immigrant to the U.S., to Japan now.

00:32:33.600 So I'm absolutely not against immigration at all.

00:32:37.740 As you say, it's done great service to U.S., Canada, and many other countries, too.

00:32:43.500 But the idea that—

00:32:44.780 Yeah, but that doesn't mean it's a solution to population flight replacement.

00:32:48.420 Right, right, right.

00:32:49.420 Now, you talked about Japan.

00:32:50.880 Let's talk about Japan a little bit.

00:32:52.320 How long did you live in Japan?

00:32:53.480 I still do, so I've been there for five years.

00:32:56.420 Uh-huh.

00:32:57.020 And you said you can—well, so what do you experience there

00:33:00.580 in relationship to your concerns about population decline?

00:33:04.080 Let me tell you about a community in rural Tokyo.

00:33:09.260 So this is the world's biggest city, based on some measures.

00:33:13.180 You go to the northwestern part of Tokyo,

00:33:17.200 and there's an area called Takashima Daira,

00:33:19.560 and it's featured in the documentary.

00:33:22.240 1973, the 10,000 homes in this apartment were filled with young families.

00:33:27.960 And there's old footage where you see, you know, just children everywhere.

00:33:31.720 I went back with someone who was a child in those days.

00:33:35.020 And, you know, you can hear the voices of the past.

00:33:39.280 And today, it's a ghost town, but it's not unoccupied.

00:33:44.560 In fact, 98% of the apartments are still occupied, but they're old people.

00:33:49.700 And they're mostly old women living alone.

00:33:52.580 Yes, and they're old women because men die early.

00:33:54.820 Men die early.

00:33:55.400 Right, so this is another—that's exactly right.

00:33:57.500 So one of the things that you see as young people disappear

00:34:02.340 and as the population ages is that the landscape is made up of isolated old women

00:34:08.800 who no one cares about.

00:34:12.280 Right.

00:34:12.500 A dismal destiny for all concerned.

00:34:17.700 You know, I'd love people, frankly, to watch the documentary to really sense this

00:34:21.880 because, you know, there's one scene there, and it is harrowing,

00:34:26.360 but to put it in simple terms, there's an 80-year-old woman who has no family,

00:34:32.640 who's contemplating suicide because she's nothing to live for,

00:34:38.160 no one to live for, and no one to communicate.

00:34:40.260 No, she should move to Canada.

00:34:41.660 We have a nice medically-assisted death program here that's, I think,

00:34:45.960 accounting for something like 3% to 5% of all deaths now.

00:34:49.100 So, you know, there's a solution for everyone to contemplate.

00:34:53.220 Yeah, well, I just worry—

00:34:54.420 In fact, there was a Japanese professor who came out the other day, a week ago,

00:34:57.900 suggesting that it would be morally appropriate for the older people in Japan to consider suicide as a route out

00:35:04.300 because they're a burden to society.

00:35:08.480 And now he's backtracking, saying he didn't really mean that.

00:35:11.160 But it's dangerous once you start to put that out there because there are people.

00:35:16.380 You know, I remember a conversation with a young woman in Japan and talking about her future,

00:35:23.220 and I did that with a lot of people, over 230 people I interviewed in 24 countries.

00:35:28.740 And she mentioned that her grandmother was living with her family.

00:35:33.320 But she mentioned the burden of her grandmother to the family.

00:35:38.540 And she came out with a point that I guess many might be thinking when you're that age,

00:35:43.340 why is she still here?

00:35:45.600 And when you hear that, you know, and then you meet people who are that age

00:35:52.480 who I think have still so much to give to society, they're just excluded from it.

00:35:56.920 They're not.

00:35:57.700 Well, it's hard if they're not integrated in—

00:36:00.020 well, sometimes it's hard if they are integrated into a family,

00:36:02.740 but it's definitely harder if they're not.

00:36:04.440 It's also the case that a lot of people who contemplate suicide

00:36:08.160 do that not so much because they're specifically suffering,

00:36:12.940 although that can certainly be a contributing factor,

00:36:15.100 but because they do believe that they are fundamentally best construed as a burden

00:36:20.620 and that the world, including the people around them,

00:36:23.300 would be better off if they disappeared.

00:36:24.840 So that's a very sad, what would you say, realm to inhabit in your misery and isolation.

00:36:33.240 So can we walk through the structure of the documentary?

00:36:37.600 Yes, of course.

00:36:38.160 Yeah, so it's just so everyone listening is reminded,

00:36:41.700 it's called—the name of the documentary is Birth Gap.

00:36:44.800 And so let's walk through the structure of it.

00:36:48.880 First of all, the title, Birth Gap,

00:36:50.700 if I could just explain why it's called Birth Gap.

00:36:52.620 What is a birth gap?

00:36:54.660 To me, it's what I defined as the gap between the number of old people to support in society and births.

00:37:01.000 So it's an indication of, frankly, a measure that we're not taking account of today.

00:37:06.780 What is that ratio?

00:37:08.920 So to me, to be very honest with you,

00:37:12.440 whether we hit 9 billion or maybe 10, it's trivial.

00:37:18.800 It's going to happen.

00:37:19.780 It's going to be in that ballpark.

00:37:21.760 Whether we like it or not, that's going to happen.

00:37:25.400 And what actually matters is the age structure.

00:37:29.260 So Birth Gap, the title of the movie, that's where it comes from.

00:37:32.900 Before I went on this journey, chapter one is me literally going with an iPad,

00:37:39.960 showing people data.

00:37:41.660 We started in Italy, Switzerland.

00:37:44.100 We went to Japan and just started to talk to people about what's happening in their own societies.

00:37:49.140 So how did you move into the realm of documentary filmmaking?

00:37:53.020 Well, I have to thank my second son, Adam, for that.

00:37:57.820 Because my idea at this point, I mean, I'm not a filmmaker.

00:38:02.020 It certainly wasn't then.

00:38:03.320 My thought was, this is a big problem.

00:38:07.780 I can write a book about this.

00:38:09.160 I thought just about I have the ability to write, to explain this.

00:38:13.620 And what I wanted to do, because there's other books out there,

00:38:16.160 is come up with a new way to help visualize this problem

00:38:19.700 and to use the book to kind of communicate.

00:38:22.760 And I felt, well, maps, no one's really come up with the structure of a map.

00:38:27.060 And in doing this, I was explaining to my son, Adam,

00:38:31.320 and he said, Dad, no one our age, his age, reads books anymore.

00:38:36.220 We all watch documentaries.

00:38:37.620 Right, right.

00:38:38.460 Or listen to them.

00:38:39.780 Or listen to them.

00:38:40.800 Yeah.

00:38:41.520 And for me, well, that's not me.

00:38:43.700 There's no way I could possibly do that.

00:38:45.580 And then by chance, a friend of a friend was a former videographer,

00:38:50.240 news anchor for a Washington, D.C. news network,

00:38:55.640 but was going out on her own.

00:38:57.760 And long story short, we thought, well, okay,

00:39:00.200 let's see if we can make this work.

00:39:02.160 And I brought her along for two weeks to film the first interviews,

00:39:05.800 thinking, if nothing else, this is going to be an archive for my own research.

00:39:09.440 Right, right, right.

00:39:10.100 And sent me note-taking while I'm listening to all of these people.

00:39:14.840 And as we got into it, the personal stories opened up of people

00:39:19.400 who you could see them contemplating the future of their lives.

00:39:23.580 Like one springs to mind a young elementary school teacher in Switzerland,

00:39:28.620 30 years old, a young man.

00:39:31.040 And when we walked through with him the future of elementary schools in Switzerland,

00:39:37.260 you could see the process in his mind,

00:39:39.380 realizing we're not going to need anywhere near the number of elementary school teachers

00:39:44.120 that we have now and what that might mean for him.

00:39:47.020 So the documentary starts literally with me asking people in countries,

00:39:52.660 why is this happening?

00:39:54.640 And frankly, you know, I was hoping, you know, in this entire project,

00:40:02.440 I was expecting at some point to sit down and do some form of regressive model,

00:40:06.760 you know, to find a correlation between something that would link these small dragons,

00:40:12.180 these, you know, falling birth rates in Japan, Germany, and Italy,

00:40:18.040 because they were happening at the same time and they were spreading.

00:40:21.580 I never got to that point, and I'm very grateful I didn't,

00:40:24.220 because I probably would have found something like, you know,

00:40:27.220 ice cream seals, you know, happened at the same time.

00:40:29.620 Some scurious thing would have come up.

00:40:32.000 It's very hard to identify.

00:40:34.300 Well, it seems obvious that, I mean, one of the causes, the distal causes,

00:40:39.840 I would say clearly, is the promotion of the birth control pill.

00:40:44.720 But even that is a somewhat shallow answer because there's a very specific set of social

00:40:52.520 and economic realities, zeitgeist, that even made the invention and distribution

00:40:59.520 and acceptance of the birth control possible, right?

00:41:02.660 You had to have the psychological stage set for the acceptance of that technology,

00:41:09.000 the demand for that technology before it could be developed or implemented.

00:41:12.100 And so, well, so, okay, so you started the documentary, you're in chapter one,

00:41:18.060 you're starting to ask people what's going on.

00:41:20.180 What are they telling you?

00:41:21.940 Yeah, well, no one had a clear answer.

00:41:23.700 And that, you know, maybe that was overly simplistic,

00:41:25.600 but what I was trying to do is find some common thread.

00:41:30.500 But let me just, if I can, talk about contraceptives,

00:41:34.620 because there's a wonderful counterexample.

00:41:38.260 The contraceptive pill was not legalized in Japan until 1990.

00:41:43.100 Hmm.

00:41:44.540 And it was only legalized because Viagra was legalized.

00:41:49.880 And at that point, women said, wait, you've been blocking the contraceptive pill

00:41:53.820 and now you're allowing Viagra.

00:41:55.060 And at that point, it was made accessible.

00:41:56.240 So you had the precipitous decline in birth rate.

00:41:58.820 From 73.

00:41:59.840 You had an increase in mass abortions.

00:42:03.600 So this was a societal issue with that.

00:42:06.920 So, okay, so that shows that it's something deeper than the year.

00:42:09.100 It's something deeper.

00:42:10.180 And also, if you look at other countries, particularly UK at the time, France to the US,

00:42:16.540 where you also had access to the contraceptive pill, you were not seeing falling birth rates.

00:42:21.380 And a lot of people would say, well, it's obvious it was industrialization.

00:42:26.440 It was something to do with urbanization.

00:42:30.060 But the correlations aren't there if you look at, well, why did this only happen in those three countries?

00:42:36.280 And the answer comes back to, I'd love people to see it unfold in the documentary,

00:42:40.140 but it's a sudden increase in this unplanned, involuntary childlessness happened in Germany, Italy,

00:42:48.220 those countries at the same time.

00:42:49.540 Well, it's definitely the case that as women become more educated, they have fewer children.

00:42:55.560 And that's now the precise causal pathway there isn't obvious.

00:43:02.940 One simple suggestion would be that it is a matter of accidental delay.

00:43:10.160 I mean, I've seen this in my daughter, you know, my daughter, although she had terrible health problems

00:43:15.340 and that complicated her life a lot.

00:43:17.400 She had initially thought that she might want to go be a physician, but that's like 12 years.

00:43:23.360 And she was also very oriented towards having children.

00:43:27.260 And she's managed to have one child, despite her health problems.

00:43:32.180 But that desire to pursue an intense educational pathway does exist in conflict,

00:43:39.360 certainly with an early start to family development.

00:43:44.300 If you presume that that doesn't matter because you've got time,

00:43:47.660 you're not going to find out that isn't true for 10 years in your own life.

00:43:51.640 And maybe the culture won't find out that's true for like 30 years.

00:43:54.760 You know, I mean, we still tell young women who are 19.

00:43:58.960 I made a comment that was clipped on an Instagram reel by someone

00:44:04.400 about the fact that we always lie to young women about what's going to be important in their lives.

00:44:09.120 We tell them it's going to be all career.

00:44:11.400 I said, you know, I've worked in female-dominated industries my whole life.

00:44:15.820 And what I've observed is among men and women alike that it's a very rare person

00:44:22.020 for whom career is the most important thing in their life, even if they're men.

00:44:26.800 Although it's true for more men, it's true for virtually no women by the time they hit 30.

00:44:32.680 And the amount of vitriol that comment generated was unparalleled.

00:44:36.900 And that's something because I've had plenty of vitriol generated from things I said.

00:44:41.220 And it was all young women, you know, talking about how some old white guy like me

00:44:46.540 had no right to tell young women what to do with their bodies, which I most certainly was not.

00:44:52.200 But it is, you can see a simple pathway there, right?

00:44:57.640 It's like, well, we have this avenue where we can pursue our career and our education

00:45:02.660 and everything else we want.

00:45:04.360 And then we'll be able to solve the problem of having a family.

00:45:07.300 The problem with that is, well, it's hard enough to find a mate when you're 23, 24.

00:45:13.880 By the time you're 30, it's even more difficult.

00:45:16.180 And by the time you're 35, it's starting to become well-nigh impossible to find a mate

00:45:20.020 and get pregnant and have a family, especially if you're going to have more than one kid.

00:45:24.200 And so, well, so there's a direct conflict there between the avenues that are open to women

00:45:32.480 and the need to strike while the iron's hot on the reproductive front.

00:45:39.060 Nobody really knows how to reconcile that.

00:45:41.240 I mean, it's odd, because women will live about seven years longer than men.

00:45:45.420 So it could be the case that the societal norm could be that women have their children

00:45:50.820 when they're quite young and then go back to school in their 30s.

00:45:53.280 That would actually work out.

00:45:54.920 In principle, that could work out quite nicely.

00:45:57.200 But we don't have the norms in place to make that a possibility.

00:46:00.100 But we have to start addressing exactly this, because if we don't, you know, to me, I mean,

00:46:07.380 there's so many ideas today about reproductive technology that are overstated.

00:46:13.160 Oh, yes.

00:46:13.880 Terribly.

00:46:14.760 Freeze your eggs.

00:46:15.660 Yeah, right.

00:46:16.160 At age 40, you know, if you have a partner and if you still have energy, you might then.

00:46:20.920 Yes, and everything goes well.

00:46:22.360 Yeah, if everything goes well.

00:46:23.000 And you have the money.

00:46:23.860 Yeah.

00:46:24.460 And the emotional stamina.

00:46:25.780 All of that.

00:46:26.200 So part of what I'm hoping to do through the documentary and my work after this

00:46:32.960 is to just increase awareness, particularly to women, but you need a man as well.

00:46:38.320 So it's both.

00:46:39.440 That the fertility window is much shorter, and the ability of children gets harder and harder and harder.

00:46:46.620 It's not just about getting pregnant.

00:46:47.880 It's about being able to deliver, you know, being able to see the pregnancy through, which gets exponentially harder very, very quickly.

00:46:56.340 I should mention, I interviewed five fertility doctors for the documentary itself.

00:47:01.680 And, you know, each one of them wanted to open up about the challenges, because normally they have to sell their services.

00:47:08.720 Right.

00:47:08.920 Normally you have to tell people, think positively, here's what we've done for other people.

00:47:14.480 Here's what we think we can do for you.

00:47:16.120 Yeah.

00:47:16.340 What they were telling to me openly, I'm frankly getting quite emotional about it on a couple of occasions, was it's terrible because so often it doesn't work out.

00:47:26.340 Well, 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.

00:47:38.340 Right.

00:47:38.860 So that's one in three.

00:47:39.800 And, of course, it just gets worse and worse as age creeps up.

00:47:44.580 And 30 is not that old.

00:47:46.000 And it does mean that women have a damn tight window.

00:47:49.560 It's 13 years, let's say, by the time you're 17.

00:47:53.520 By some standards, you're mature enough to consider reproduction, 17 or 18, on the extreme end.

00:48:01.660 And then, well, 35 is the other end of that distribution.

00:48:07.360 And 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 until 35.

00:48:15.880 And if you want three children, you know.

00:48:17.540 Yeah, well, right.

00:48:18.340 I'm thinking just one, you know.

00:48:19.920 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.

00:48:31.260 One is the pursuit of their own interests, including career and job.

00:48:36.360 One is their intimate relationship, and the other is their family.

00:48:40.080 And, obviously, the intimate relationship and the family are very integrally associated.

00:48:45.580 And if you miss out on one of those, you may be able to fill it by exceptional ability in the remaining domains.

00:48:55.280 But for most people, not only is that highly unlikely, it's also highly undesirable.

00:48:59.880 So, to take the point as well, here am I, you know, an older male talking about things that are very sensitive to women.

00:49:10.580 But there are a lot of women out there saying the exact same thing.

00:49:14.940 And, you know, there was one this morning I got an email from Melanie Notkin, who's written a book called Otherhood, who herself has no children.

00:49:23.240 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.

00:49:32.660 Yeah, right.

00:49:33.480 It's all linked.

00:49:34.660 Yeah, well, I think it's the same for men.

00:49:36.640 I think so, too.

00:49:37.120 You know, 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.

00:49:45.480 In fact, it's higher than that.

00:49:46.760 So, 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 cities in the U.S. are earning more than men.

00:50:00.700 I don't know if that's right or wrong, but you have this situation.

00:50:03.420 Yeah, it's right under 30.

00:50:04.820 Yeah.

00:50:05.180 So, in U.S. colleges right now, there are, I believe it's 9.5 million women and around 6.5, 7 million men.

00:50:12.400 Oh, and the women start dropping out of college, by the way, when they start to outnumber the men two to one, right?

00:50:19.300 Because a lot of the reason people go to college, you know, you've got to ask yourself, what's college for?

00:50:23.700 It's like, well, it's to get educated, to go to lectures, to be accredited.

00:50:26.900 It's like, no, probably not.

00:50:29.280 Probably the reason people go to college is to find a mate.

00:50:31.720 And there's a selected pool there, and you have a decent chance of finding someone, you know, of approximately your ability and forward-looking vision, let's say.

00:50:42.720 And the reason people are willing to shell out between $150,000 and $250,000 for four years is in no small part so that they can find a mate.

00:50:51.420 Well, and if you demolish that by, well, radically decreasing the number of available men, for example,

00:50:57.000 you're just going to blow the whole enterprise out of the water, which is already what's happening.

00:51:00.300 Absolutely.

00:51:03.400 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.

00:51:13.780 If we link that to, in some way, enabling careers later in life, which has to fundamentally happen for this to work,

00:51:20.260 we might still be left with a situation where women who, the term is hypergony,

00:51:25.860 where women tend to want to marry someone at least as educated, at least as successful, taller than they are.

00:51:32.240 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.

00:51:38.800 Oh, yeah, that's already happening, clearly.

00:51:41.400 It's very difficult for women to overcome the hypergamous instinct, because they're trying to redress the imbalance in terms of reproductive responsibility.

00:51:49.260 There's no evidence at all. You get a little bit of flattening of hypergamy in extremely egalitarian societies like Scandinavia,

00:51:56.420 but it certainly doesn't disappear. And so that's built in at a very fundamental biological level.

00:52:03.360 And I don't think any casual tinkering on the anthropological or sociological front is going to shift that a bit.

00:52:08.400 So that's a big problem.

00:52:10.820 It's a big problem.

00:52:11.600 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.

00:52:23.140 So, you know, now you can lay that at the feet of the men if you're inclined to, but in some sense it doesn't really matter,

00:52:29.800 because that's the way it is.

00:52:31.180 And so the women are unhappy and the men are threatened, and that's just not a good recipe for marital stability.

00:52:40.120 So everyone loses in this situation.

00:52:42.520 So let's talk about another country, Thailand.

00:52:45.840 So you would think, if you'd asked me how many women are in college in Thailand, I might have said 15%.

00:52:52.200 I have no idea, but it's 55%.

00:52:55.100 40% of men are in college in Thailand.

00:52:58.520 So you have a similar shift even there.

00:53:00.580 And what's happening to the men, 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.

00:53:11.120 What they did, age 16, 18, was turned to alcohol, was turned to substances, to drive taxis because they could get some cash,

00:53:19.520 because there was no point trying to compete with a woman.

00:53:21.920 So you have these deep societal problems, but yet I want to be really clear that the answer to this is not, in some way, preventing women from getting an education.

00:53:33.680 That's just not going to function.

00:53:35.500 How are you going to do that?

00:53:37.540 Well, you also lose access to half the world's brain power.

00:53:40.080 Of course, of course.

00:53:41.520 There are people who think that, and there are people who I think want to use this conversation to promote that, because I've seen comments along those lines too often.

00:53:51.960 This has to be, therefore, partly about men in some way, asking why are men excluded from society?

00:53:59.460 Why are they becoming incels?

00:54:00.640 Or in Japan, they call them otakus, you know, the young man who stays home playing his gaming systems.

00:54:07.340 See, I don't think that's the right question.

00:54:10.000 I think we almost always ask questions backwards.

00:54:13.300 Why people become useless, that's not a mystery.

00:54:18.020 It's easy to be useless.

00:54:20.120 The mystery is why that doesn't happen to everyone all the time.

00:54:23.000 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.

00:54:38.380 And when you allow those structures to collapse or work consciously to undermine them, then you get default to the default.

00:54:46.860 And the default is useless.

00:54:48.560 It's short-term gratification.

00:54:50.000 And so you'd never need an explanation for that.

00:54:53.080 It's like, well, why do people turn to short-term gratification?

00:54:55.980 Because it's gratifying in the short term.

00:54:58.840 It's easy.

00:55:00.120 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.

00:55:14.940 And we are increasingly not only failing at doing that, but punishing young men for developing, say, the virtues of ambition and, well, and even sexual desire for that matter.

00:55:30.180 So, all right.

00:55:32.020 So, chapter one, you went and interviewed a variety of people and just started to flesh out the territory.

00:55:38.220 How does it unfold after that?

00:55:39.740 Well, it comes to the point where I realize there's a moment I realize there is a connection across all these countries.

00:55:47.500 And it's to do with this structure of the family.

00:55:52.540 You know, you would expect, if you're having fewer children, you know, and some of these organizations encourage people to have fewer children, have fewer, smaller families, you would expect if they had had any success or if people were doing it, you would have a lot of families with only one child.

00:56:08.520 But actually, singletons are actually really quite rare in life.

00:56:13.420 And they're no more common today than they were 30, 40 years ago.

00:56:17.860 So, I started to discover…

00:56:20.660 So, you see people with zero children.

00:56:23.000 Right.

00:56:23.620 That's the only…

00:56:24.220 How do you get a fertility rate of less than replacement level?

00:56:27.240 It's either the number of people having one child or none.

00:56:30.380 So, connecting that allowed me to start to ask more questions about childlessness and about aspirations in life.

00:56:36.480 And that really…

00:56:37.300 I see.

00:56:37.760 So, it's not a matter of small families.

00:56:39.940 No.

00:56:40.100 It's a matter of no family.

00:56:41.480 That's right.

00:56:41.880 And then it's a matter of involuntary no family.

00:56:44.380 That's right.

00:56:44.740 Okay, got it.

00:56:45.580 And that's why I didn't end up doing any regressive analysis because it's a counting problem.

00:56:50.980 You know, we were counting this the wrong way.

00:56:52.540 You just simply need to look at the number of people having one child, two, three, four, and you find this gap.

00:56:58.400 And you find that gap getting wider and wider.

00:57:00.240 And it effectively explains the entire fall below replacement level.

00:57:07.240 But there's really good news here, too.

00:57:10.920 The best news in all of this is that if the majority or significant number of those people who are involuntarily, unplanned childlessness, as I call it, if they were having a family, they're not going to have one.

00:57:24.700 They're going to have, in the same proportions, one, two, three, four, five plus.

00:57:28.020 It's all about having that first child.

00:57:30.800 So, the documentary...

00:57:32.340 Right, well, look, the second child is pretty straightforward after the first.

00:57:36.120 And once you've got two, you're already completely screwed.

00:57:38.960 So, you might as well have three.

00:57:40.660 Well, that's...

00:57:41.620 Then the kids start to take care of each other, by the way, too, which is something that parents don't understand.

00:57:46.260 Is that, you know, you don't...

00:57:47.720 If you have eight kids, it's not like you're taking care of eight kids.

00:57:51.360 The kids start to form their own society and take care of each other.

00:57:54.720 Yeah, and there's great examples of that in the documentary.

00:57:56.780 Or, at least on my journey, you saw in Italy this mother of four children saying she educated her eldest daughter, taught her how to read, and she taught the next daughter, and she taught the next one, and the next one.

00:58:07.820 So, that's certainly true.

00:58:09.460 But the good news is here, because family structure is really locked in, once, of course, you know, if you go to some countries, as I did in Africa, you've got high birth rates because of poverty.

00:58:20.020 Somewhat access to reproductive services, but mostly that's covered now.

00:58:25.660 Mostly it is.

00:58:26.860 So, we've got poverty that people in Africa need children to go and get the water.

00:58:31.340 But a lot of good things are being done on that.

00:58:34.060 That poverty level is coming way down, and we're seeing in Africa, on average in sub-Saharan Africa, just to cover that briefly,

00:58:41.300 the average woman is having one less child every 15 years.

00:58:46.500 It's around four now.

00:58:47.860 So, in around 30 years' time, we're looking at Africa starting to get down towards replacement level.

00:58:52.380 It's on the same path.

00:58:53.320 Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:58:54.040 That's the reasonable assumption based on the data right now.

00:58:57.020 So, once you get to that point, and this is what I think the world of demography really skipped over,

00:59:04.700 is that it's not the same form.

00:59:11.020 It's not like you look at, you know, families going from four to two and then down to 1.5 and set this is the same trend.

00:59:16.900 It's not.

00:59:17.600 When you get to replacement level, when women are having pretty much the family size that they actually want,

00:59:23.840 childlessness kicks in, and it's that that pulls it down a different level.

00:59:27.900 So, the next part of the documentary is then going to people, finding out what their young people,

00:59:32.240 what their aspirations for the future was,

00:59:34.500 but then also talking to men and women who hadn't had children, why they didn't, and what it meant to their lives.

00:59:42.740 And that gets quite...

00:59:43.800 So, what do you find on the aspirational front?

00:59:45.760 Oh, you know, the majority, the significant majority of people, young people, expect or want to have children someday.

00:59:53.960 Right, right.

00:59:54.600 Now, I do have some concerns, but I have no evidence for it,

00:59:57.360 but it's just a natural concern that what we're seeing in the world today,

01:00:01.180 perhaps this over-focus on the environment is through fear.

01:00:05.380 Yeah.

01:00:05.900 Persuading people more than you would normally expect to not think of children,

01:00:10.520 but I have hope around that because it's this internal desire really does seem to kick in.

01:00:14.800 I think it's not so much fear that's interfering on that front.

01:00:17.600 I think it's actually demoralization, right?

01:00:21.000 Because this is especially true for, let's say, decent young men who would like to be moral actors.

01:00:28.880 If they're told continually which they are, that all of their male pattern behaviors, for example, in school, are disruptive,

01:00:37.780 and that their male ambition is nothing but a reflection of the tyrannical patriarchy,

01:00:43.080 and that any interest they might evoke, they might evince towards women is part of the predatory pattern of male behavior,

01:00:52.260 then it demoralizes them.

01:00:55.100 Literally, it makes them feel like their natural proclivity for ambitious striving, let's say,

01:01:01.460 and sexual desire is immoral.

01:01:04.880 And the people you hurt the most by doing that are the people who have a moral heart

01:01:11.640 because the ones who don't, don't care, and the ones who do.

01:01:15.580 I had a friend, his name was Rob Durnan,

01:01:18.900 and he was an early, he fell prey to this anti-male narrative very early in his life.

01:01:25.920 This is like 40 years ago, 50 years ago,

01:01:28.700 and he was definitely guilty about his role as a patriarchal male, let's say,

01:01:34.920 and he did everything he could to adopt a kind of nihilistic Buddhism

01:01:38.340 and just take himself out of life.

01:01:41.780 You know, he thought everything he did was,

01:01:43.580 and everything that men did in general,

01:01:45.100 was just part of the destructive force that was ravaging the world,

01:01:49.020 and he eventually committed suicide.

01:01:51.140 It was awful.

01:01:52.420 I watched that unfold for 50 years.

01:01:55.360 You know, and I would say,

01:01:57.300 you know, he had his flaws like everyone does,

01:02:00.040 and in that self-destructive pathway,

01:02:03.420 there can be a fair bit of, let's say, unconscious self-serving,

01:02:07.820 but fundamentally, he was overwhelmed by existential guilt

01:02:14.580 in relationship to being male,

01:02:16.520 and that eventually convinced him to do himself in.

01:02:20.820 It was quite the catastrophic voyage, all things considered,

01:02:25.360 and I know perfectly well that that's not rare

01:02:29.260 because I've talked to thousands of young men

01:02:32.060 who have been demoralized to the point of suicide,

01:02:34.300 and that story is, I'd say that's the archetypal story.

01:02:41.200 So, it's not fear exactly.

01:02:43.900 It's an assault.

01:02:46.460 It's a moral assault,

01:02:48.320 and it's unconscionable.

01:02:52.120 It's an unconscionable moral assault.

01:02:54.060 If your solution to saving the planet

01:02:57.340 is that you have to demoralize young people so badly

01:03:00.280 that they even abstain from sex,

01:03:03.200 then there's seriously something wrong with your worldview,

01:03:07.300 and maybe we could call out Paul Ehrlich on that front,

01:03:10.340 for example.

01:03:12.020 So, all right.

01:03:13.440 So, now you're starting to talk to people

01:03:15.580 about their aspirations.

01:03:16.620 You're finding out that young people

01:03:17.660 do want to have a family,

01:03:19.340 and that doesn't mean one child.

01:03:21.240 It means a family,

01:03:22.780 but they're not prioritizing that properly,

01:03:25.420 or they're...

01:03:27.260 What happens to the people who end up without children?

01:03:29.740 Well, there's no path to it.

01:03:32.060 Right.

01:03:32.560 The path is education, education, education, usually.

01:03:37.340 Not for everyone, but...

01:03:38.660 And then debt.

01:03:40.040 Sure, debt.

01:03:42.060 But debt's not the driver,

01:03:43.480 because education in some countries

01:03:45.200 is much lower than the U.S.

01:03:47.320 So, some people will say,

01:03:48.700 oh, debt's the problem.

01:03:49.760 Yeah.

01:03:50.000 It's not a good thing.

01:03:51.040 It can't help.

01:03:51.920 Yeah.

01:03:52.920 And that's career, career, career.

01:03:54.800 And no one is guiding people to say,

01:03:57.620 actually, there is a moment in time

01:03:59.680 when you really need to prioritize this.

01:04:02.660 So, we've left young people

01:04:05.400 to find a path on their own,

01:04:08.600 having sent them off as parents,

01:04:11.520 as societies,

01:04:15.360 to find a path in life

01:04:17.480 that will get them to where they want to be,

01:04:19.900 which everyone, I think, implicitly assumes,

01:04:22.640 for most people, not all,

01:04:24.040 will involve love

01:04:25.820 and will involve children.

01:04:27.600 Yeah.

01:04:28.800 But actually, what's happening

01:04:30.380 is when young people are getting to that point,

01:04:32.980 they're often in their 30s

01:04:34.400 because no one really is thinking

01:04:37.240 that 30 is too late at all.

01:04:41.280 Yeah.

01:04:42.080 But, I mean, just another statistic,

01:04:45.080 if you look across every country

01:04:47.240 we had data on,

01:04:48.420 the probability of becoming a parent,

01:04:52.240 a mother, rather,

01:04:53.320 it's on women again,

01:04:54.380 the probability of someone without children

01:04:57.940 at age 30 ever becoming a parent

01:04:59.560 at most, at most, is 50%.

01:05:02.700 Really?

01:05:04.000 That's just the outcome.

01:05:06.020 So, by 30?

01:05:07.320 By 30.

01:05:08.120 If you haven't had your first child by 30,

01:05:10.380 in most countries,

01:05:11.780 it's lower than that.

01:05:14.180 And why is that?

01:05:15.800 Do you know?

01:05:16.920 I mean, there must be multiple causes.

01:05:19.500 Part of that would be partnerlessness.

01:05:21.560 Part of that would be fertility difficulties.

01:05:24.680 What are the major contributors to that?

01:05:26.660 The major contributor is

01:05:28.340 not finding a partner at the right time.

01:05:30.920 Yeah, right.

01:05:31.540 Or when you do find a partner,

01:05:33.240 you have challenges.

01:05:35.220 Yeah, well, the other thing

01:05:36.040 that is painful to point out to women

01:05:38.700 is that 30-year-old women

01:05:41.040 aren't competing with

01:05:42.440 other 30-year-old women for partners.

01:05:45.220 They're competing with

01:05:46.660 18- to 35-year-old women for partners.

01:05:50.040 And so, all things considered,

01:05:53.080 if you're 30

01:05:53.920 and you're looking for a mate

01:05:55.700 and you want children,

01:05:57.200 you're putting an awful lot of pressure

01:05:59.080 one way or another

01:06:00.520 on your 30-year-old male target.

01:06:03.860 Because his option is to find

01:06:05.720 a 25-year-old woman

01:06:07.200 who, all things being equal,

01:06:11.080 is of the same value as you are,

01:06:13.440 except that you're 30.

01:06:14.900 And that means his time frame

01:06:16.380 is now shortened

01:06:17.420 in a manner that wouldn't be the case

01:06:19.040 if he married someone younger.

01:06:20.560 Plus, women tend to prefer men

01:06:24.240 who are slightly older than them.

01:06:26.000 Well, not exactly slightly.

01:06:27.260 It's actually four years

01:06:28.320 is the average internationally.

01:06:30.180 And so, the optimal target

01:06:33.000 for a 25-year-old woman

01:06:34.320 is a 29-year-old man.

01:06:35.780 And so, and it's rude

01:06:39.880 to point such things out,

01:06:42.060 but mate selection

01:06:43.500 is a very difficult problem.

01:06:45.800 And it's also exacerbated

01:06:48.220 by the fact that

01:06:49.140 this is also a terrible thing

01:06:50.480 is that because of this

01:06:51.420 hypergamous tendency of women,

01:06:53.560 as women are,

01:06:54.680 I knew a lot of very successful

01:06:57.660 young women

01:06:58.720 who worked in the legal field

01:07:00.960 and they were often

01:07:02.820 stars in their firms,

01:07:06.040 extremely able people.

01:07:07.920 And generally,

01:07:08.740 they were very vivacious,

01:07:11.780 attractive,

01:07:13.420 intelligent, educated,

01:07:15.880 and intimidating as hell

01:07:18.440 to men.

01:07:20.200 And not that interested

01:07:22.140 in someone who didn't have

01:07:23.460 the same ability

01:07:24.380 and status they did,

01:07:25.620 which was almost no one.

01:07:27.120 So then they're 30,

01:07:28.560 they're extremely choosy,

01:07:29.900 and you could say

01:07:30.680 they have a right to be.

01:07:32.000 But the problem is,

01:07:33.080 well, yeah,

01:07:33.940 you're 30

01:07:34.680 and you're extremely choosy

01:07:36.820 and your pool

01:07:37.980 of available candidates

01:07:39.180 has basically shrunk to none.

01:07:41.280 Because first of all,

01:07:42.280 a lot of men

01:07:43.000 are already snapped up

01:07:44.020 by the time they're 30.

01:07:45.160 So there's that reduction

01:07:46.440 right off the bat.

01:07:47.380 And then if you're going to reject,

01:07:49.080 women rate 80% of men

01:07:51.720 on dating sites

01:07:52.480 as below average

01:07:53.280 in attractiveness.

01:07:54.120 And that's just the baseline,

01:07:55.740 right?

01:07:56.200 For the women who are

01:07:57.420 high status

01:07:58.400 and high attractiveness,

01:07:59.900 let's say,

01:08:00.940 very able

01:08:01.980 on the career front

01:08:03.340 and the men

01:08:06.260 they're going to regard

01:08:07.040 as acceptable,

01:08:08.500 that's a vanishingly

01:08:09.760 small proportion of men.

01:08:11.400 So that's part

01:08:12.060 of the reason

01:08:12.480 why they,

01:08:14.320 what would you say,

01:08:15.740 select themselves

01:08:16.560 out of the mating market.

01:08:18.280 That's brutal, man.

01:08:19.640 It's brutal.

01:08:20.240 And I watched women

01:08:21.080 struggle with that

01:08:21.840 like mad

01:08:22.420 and certainly had

01:08:23.400 no shortage

01:08:23.880 of sympathy for them.

01:08:24.820 but

01:08:25.040 the mere fact

01:08:29.660 that you're sympathetic

01:08:30.380 to someone

01:08:30.960 doesn't mean

01:08:31.480 that the brute reality

01:08:32.560 that confronts them

01:08:33.440 has been altered

01:08:34.220 in any manner whatsoever.

01:08:35.920 A couple of points

01:08:36.700 on that.

01:08:37.260 So I agree

01:08:38.160 with all of that.

01:08:39.940 What I see

01:08:41.020 and I get to

01:08:43.100 often once or twice

01:08:45.100 a week

01:08:45.520 have a coffee

01:08:46.340 with a young person

01:08:48.220 who has reached out

01:08:49.400 and you know

01:08:51.060 when you talk

01:08:51.560 about the documentary

01:08:52.320 or friends

01:08:52.800 or friends

01:08:53.140 or friends

01:08:53.380 someone wants

01:08:53.820 to talk to you

01:08:54.320 about something personal.

01:08:56.220 A common

01:08:57.200 conversation

01:08:59.220 would be

01:09:00.560 women more than men

01:09:03.420 that have been

01:09:04.720 dating someone

01:09:05.200 for five years.

01:09:05.940 Yeah.

01:09:07.120 They think

01:09:07.860 they might want to

01:09:09.040 well different scenarios

01:09:10.300 they think

01:09:10.960 they might want

01:09:11.460 to settle down

01:09:11.880 and have a child

01:09:12.400 with them

01:09:12.620 but they've never

01:09:13.080 talked about it.

01:09:14.300 Well it's only been

01:09:15.180 five years.

01:09:16.220 Right.

01:09:17.000 Or

01:09:17.440 they've already

01:09:18.880 figured out

01:09:19.420 they probably

01:09:20.100 don't want a child

01:09:20.960 with this person.

01:09:21.940 What should they do?

01:09:23.680 Or

01:09:24.080 worst of all

01:09:25.420 they've just

01:09:25.800 broken up

01:09:26.380 because they've been

01:09:27.000 dating this guy

01:09:27.920 for seven years

01:09:28.780 and he's not got

01:09:29.660 another girlfriend

01:09:30.260 who's 25

01:09:30.980 and she's pregnant.

01:09:33.940 Yeah.

01:09:34.620 Oh my God.

01:09:35.480 Yeah.

01:09:35.640 That's a brutal situation.

01:09:37.100 Brutal.

01:09:37.900 But those are

01:09:38.720 real life stories.

01:09:39.700 Oh yeah.

01:09:40.100 That's very

01:09:40.560 all that's very common.

01:09:42.840 So the idea

01:09:43.740 of dating someone

01:09:44.560 for an extended period

01:09:45.400 my children are now

01:09:47.040 you know

01:09:47.720 27 to 20

01:09:49.580 they're getting

01:09:50.140 to that point

01:09:50.700 where

01:09:51.080 you know

01:09:52.320 to me

01:09:52.900 I'm thinking

01:09:53.220 of my own children

01:09:54.120 when I think

01:09:54.960 of these young people

01:09:55.940 and the advice

01:09:57.200 I would give them

01:09:58.340 and frankly

01:09:59.440 the advice

01:10:00.140 I usually give

01:10:01.080 and I'm not

01:10:01.780 a clinical psychologist

01:10:02.800 but you know

01:10:04.160 people are asking

01:10:04.760 for advice

01:10:05.340 and I've talked

01:10:05.800 to a lot of people

01:10:06.620 is if you're unsure

01:10:08.020 break up

01:10:09.680 because you know what

01:10:10.660 if it feels wrong

01:10:11.760 after you've broken up

01:10:12.760 you'll get back

01:10:13.860 together quickly

01:10:14.580 and I'd say

01:10:16.680 more of

01:10:17.020 The other advice too

01:10:17.780 is get the hell at it

01:10:18.920 you think you have

01:10:19.680 a long time to decide

01:10:20.760 well here's

01:10:21.500 here's a way

01:10:22.040 of thinking about it

01:10:22.940 if you're reasonably

01:10:24.820 attractive

01:10:25.500 you'll be able

01:10:28.160 to try out

01:10:29.320 five people

01:10:30.120 that's it

01:10:31.680 that's what

01:10:33.020 you've got

01:10:33.620 you know

01:10:34.400 because it takes

01:10:34.940 a while to find someone

01:10:36.140 and then it takes

01:10:37.120 a while to get

01:10:37.660 to know them

01:10:38.180 and

01:10:38.980 finding them

01:10:40.640 and getting to know

01:10:41.300 them

01:10:41.520 that's probably

01:10:42.320 something

01:10:43.540 approximating

01:10:44.300 one to two years

01:10:45.200 and if you do that

01:10:46.380 five times

01:10:47.020 that's ten years

01:10:47.800 and that's your

01:10:48.520 fertility window

01:10:49.340 and so

01:10:50.220 you think you have time

01:10:52.100 but that's a delusion

01:10:53.780 and you think

01:10:54.860 the right person

01:10:55.660 will come around

01:10:56.360 well first of all

01:10:57.040 that's a delusion

01:10:57.760 to begin with

01:10:58.340 because

01:10:58.680 you build a relationship

01:11:01.640 you don't find one

01:11:02.680 now you should have

01:11:03.540 some sense

01:11:04.060 when you pick

01:11:04.600 your partner

01:11:05.100 to the degree

01:11:06.380 that you have

01:11:06.880 the luxury

01:11:07.380 to have some sense

01:11:08.440 but

01:11:09.340 the notion that

01:11:10.680 the person

01:11:11.960 right for you

01:11:12.800 will come along

01:11:13.640 at the right time

01:11:14.520 that's just

01:11:15.340 that's just not the case

01:11:16.640 that isn't how things

01:11:17.540 work at all

01:11:18.100 and if you know

01:11:19.020 that even if you're

01:11:19.960 very attractive

01:11:21.140 that

01:11:21.980 the list of

01:11:23.180 true candidates

01:11:24.120 is probably five

01:11:25.580 and for some people

01:11:26.960 it's one

01:11:28.520 or zero

01:11:29.760 and so that's

01:11:31.580 it's hard eh

01:11:33.980 because when you're

01:11:34.520 17 or 16

01:11:35.660 especially if you're

01:11:36.600 attractive

01:11:37.020 and I would say

01:11:37.560 this is especially true

01:11:38.620 if you're an attractive

01:11:39.340 young woman

01:11:39.920 you have no shortage

01:11:41.440 generally speaking

01:11:42.600 of people who are

01:11:43.540 interested in you

01:11:44.340 and it looks like

01:11:45.500 that's sort of

01:11:46.020 a landscape of plenty

01:11:47.080 but that doesn't

01:11:48.800 mitigate

01:11:49.240 against the fact

01:11:50.400 that it still takes

01:11:51.280 a long time

01:11:51.740 to get to know people

01:11:52.620 and to find

01:11:53.540 the right person

01:11:54.280 now men have it

01:11:56.000 a bit easier

01:11:56.520 on that front

01:11:57.160 I would say

01:11:57.640 because

01:11:58.060 like I had one friend

01:11:59.860 who didn't have a child

01:12:01.040 until he was 55

01:12:01.880 you know

01:12:03.020 that can always

01:12:04.060 be the case for men

01:12:05.300 and so the pressure

01:12:06.360 isn't on in the same way

01:12:07.560 but even with men

01:12:09.020 like had I married

01:12:11.540 my wife earlier

01:12:12.220 we would have had

01:12:12.740 more kids

01:12:13.300 you know

01:12:14.480 and that didn't happen

01:12:15.620 so and we got married

01:12:17.440 comparatively early

01:12:18.380 for our

01:12:19.440 social class

01:12:20.860 say an educational

01:12:21.600 background

01:12:22.160 okay so now

01:12:24.160 you're talking to people

01:12:25.040 and you're finding out

01:12:25.660 they want to have kids

01:12:26.500 and then they find out

01:12:27.360 that they don't get to

01:12:28.340 right a little bit

01:12:29.380 too late

01:12:29.840 and so where does

01:12:30.560 the documentary

01:12:31.060 go from there

01:12:31.860 so from there

01:12:33.440 we take it

01:12:33.960 into the consequences

01:12:34.800 the consequences

01:12:36.660 well they're

01:12:39.160 partly personal

01:12:39.940 but partly economic

01:12:42.140 but everything

01:12:43.240 ultimately is personal

01:12:44.200 because everything

01:12:44.980 ultimately comes back

01:12:46.060 to you know

01:12:47.060 whether it's

01:12:48.320 you and your life

01:12:49.440 and how you live

01:12:50.200 and whether you're

01:12:50.740 lonely or not

01:12:51.660 yeah

01:12:52.160 or how much

01:12:54.080 the state can help you

01:12:55.520 particularly in your

01:12:56.400 later years

01:12:57.120 through health care

01:12:57.920 through pensions

01:12:58.840 through your city

01:13:00.120 providing basic services

01:13:01.300 like water

01:13:01.980 it all comes back

01:13:03.720 together

01:13:04.140 so we explore

01:13:05.380 a lot of those

01:13:06.040 and by the way

01:13:07.240 I sat down with

01:13:08.180 I believe about

01:13:08.680 a dozen experts

01:13:09.820 many professors

01:13:10.660 many you know

01:13:11.800 a priest

01:13:13.840 a monk

01:13:15.060 people involved

01:13:16.500 working with

01:13:16.980 government health care

01:13:17.740 programs around the world

01:13:19.100 so we hear these voices

01:13:20.260 and other than

01:13:22.120 one organization

01:13:24.000 which happens to be

01:13:25.380 the successor

01:13:26.500 to what Paul Ehrlich

01:13:27.780 set up

01:13:28.680 they were the only

01:13:30.620 organization

01:13:31.140 who took an optimistic

01:13:32.220 view

01:13:32.620 of course

01:13:33.100 they would do that

01:13:34.140 everybody else

01:13:35.280 is negative

01:13:35.820 everybody else

01:13:36.660 is worried

01:13:37.080 about the future

01:13:37.740 consequences of this

01:13:39.140 and just by the way

01:13:41.260 I should call this out

01:13:42.660 Ehrlich set up

01:13:43.680 an organization

01:13:44.620 author of the

01:13:45.940 population bomb

01:13:46.680 of course

01:13:47.160 called ZPG

01:13:48.460 which evolved

01:13:49.220 zero population growth

01:13:50.620 it evolved

01:13:51.920 into another

01:13:52.520 organization

01:13:53.280 that still

01:13:53.980 has something

01:13:54.660 like 30,000

01:13:56.000 teachers

01:13:57.120 who train

01:13:58.300 other teachers

01:13:59.120 who educate

01:14:00.300 4 million

01:14:01.040 US high school

01:14:02.400 kids

01:14:03.380 every year

01:14:04.400 and

01:14:05.860 they explain

01:14:07.140 the population

01:14:07.820 problems

01:14:08.300 usually in Africa

01:14:09.080 and their message is

01:14:10.820 please think about this

01:14:12.740 yeah well

01:14:13.460 there's nothing

01:14:13.980 there's nothing

01:14:14.640 racist about

01:14:15.420 the too many

01:14:16.020 African narrative

01:14:17.020 yeah

01:14:17.600 and when you teach

01:14:19.080 someone like

01:14:19.680 2 and 2 is 4

01:14:21.240 you don't say

01:14:21.760 think about that

01:14:22.680 but when you say

01:14:23.800 here's the problem

01:14:24.840 in Africa

01:14:25.280 and you say

01:14:25.920 to a

01:14:26.300 think about that

01:14:27.620 you're not really

01:14:28.520 saying think about

01:14:29.280 Africa

01:14:29.660 you're thinking

01:14:30.240 about you know

01:14:31.240 do you want

01:14:32.060 to have kids

01:14:32.460 or not

01:14:32.780 so

01:14:32.980 that's covered

01:14:34.580 in the documentary

01:14:35.180 as well

01:14:35.580 as part of the

01:14:36.400 narrative

01:14:36.740 as to why

01:14:37.660 we still have

01:14:38.600 this viewpoint

01:14:39.180 when frankly

01:14:39.760 we should have

01:14:40.260 known about this

01:14:41.020 decades ago

01:14:42.000 well we can also

01:14:42.780 look at the

01:14:43.620 self-evident

01:14:45.560 economic statistics

01:14:46.720 demonstrating that

01:14:47.720 since Paul Ehrlich

01:14:48.540 and his

01:14:50.440 population bomb

01:14:51.800 and the Club of Rome

01:14:52.640 etc

01:14:53.000 these anti-population

01:14:54.820 zealots

01:14:55.400 started beating

01:14:56.300 the drum back

01:14:56.920 in 1965

01:14:57.680 saying that

01:14:59.480 we're all going to

01:15:00.080 starve to death

01:15:00.620 by the year 2000

01:15:01.600 when we'll have

01:15:02.220 4 billion people

01:15:03.280 God help us

01:15:04.640 and now we have

01:15:05.760 8

01:15:06.200 and the relationship

01:15:07.920 between wealth growth

01:15:09.100 and population

01:15:10.120 has been

01:15:10.600 extremely

01:15:11.680 positive

01:15:12.300 not negative

01:15:13.120 or flat

01:15:13.740 and everyone

01:15:15.100 on the planet

01:15:15.660 virtually is richer

01:15:16.640 than well

01:15:17.500 that anyone

01:15:18.000 had ever conceived

01:15:18.920 of

01:15:19.160 and it's clearly

01:15:19.760 the case

01:15:20.160 that we could

01:15:20.640 manage this

01:15:21.200 if we had

01:15:21.720 half the will

01:15:22.620 to do it

01:15:23.160 and so

01:15:24.200 the data

01:15:25.200 are in

01:15:25.780 one of the things

01:15:27.440 I've really learned

01:15:28.160 is that

01:15:28.620 I believe the whole

01:15:30.400 idea of natural

01:15:31.120 resource

01:15:31.580 almost the whole

01:15:32.520 idea of natural

01:15:33.140 resource

01:15:33.560 is specious

01:15:34.280 in that

01:15:35.600 human beings

01:15:37.260 the wealth

01:15:38.360 of the planet

01:15:38.980 is dependent

01:15:41.040 on

01:15:41.480 the psychological

01:15:43.160 health

01:15:43.680 and the structures

01:15:44.700 of governance

01:15:45.420 that are put in

01:15:46.020 place by people

01:15:46.840 of good will

01:15:47.480 and that if we

01:15:48.180 organize ourselves

01:15:49.000 properly

01:15:49.520 and aim up

01:15:50.740 there's no

01:15:51.900 real limit

01:15:52.880 to abundance

01:15:53.920 and it's certainly

01:15:55.600 not population

01:15:56.340 dependent

01:15:56.680 we're not in a

01:15:57.720 zero-sum game

01:15:58.520 we are not yeast

01:15:59.980 in a Petri dish

01:16:01.240 we're not doomed

01:16:02.880 to a Malthusian

01:16:03.820 outcome

01:16:04.300 and the biologists

01:16:05.600 who make that claim

01:16:06.600 and say it's

01:16:07.560 scientific

01:16:07.940 are assuming

01:16:09.340 that the yeast

01:16:10.220 in the Petri dish

01:16:11.220 model of human

01:16:12.600 function

01:16:13.360 is the appropriate

01:16:14.180 biological model

01:16:15.060 and it's not

01:16:16.720 and the reason

01:16:17.880 for that is

01:16:18.420 because we can

01:16:19.000 let our ideas

01:16:19.660 die instead of us

01:16:20.700 and we can learn

01:16:21.420 and we can transform

01:16:22.500 and we're very good

01:16:23.700 at that

01:16:24.160 and

01:16:25.080 there's no

01:16:26.780 justification

01:16:28.320 whatsoever

01:16:29.080 for stating

01:16:30.660 that

01:16:30.940 it's a scientific

01:16:31.840 fact

01:16:32.520 that population

01:16:34.040 increase is going

01:16:34.740 to produce

01:16:35.080 a Malthusian

01:16:35.720 catastrophe

01:16:36.240 now it can

01:16:37.040 in limited

01:16:37.500 circumstances

01:16:38.160 but we are not

01:16:39.360 yeast in a Petri dish

01:16:40.400 that's the wrong

01:16:41.420 model

01:16:41.780 so

01:16:42.960 and I can't

01:16:44.320 disagree

01:16:44.680 I'm a data

01:16:46.020 analyst

01:16:46.540 I'm only prepared

01:16:47.960 to comment

01:16:48.460 when I've done

01:16:49.360 my own work

01:16:50.080 or I've seen

01:16:51.020 detailed work

01:16:52.060 of others

01:16:52.480 I can't imagine

01:16:53.500 how complicated

01:16:54.320 it must be

01:16:56.440 to model the

01:16:57.320 planet

01:16:57.580 I mean that's

01:16:58.240 on a level

01:16:58.780 beyond anything

01:17:00.120 any

01:17:00.860 rational statistician

01:17:03.160 could do

01:17:03.520 alone

01:17:03.960 it's models

01:17:04.720 on top of

01:17:05.200 models

01:17:05.540 on top of

01:17:06.040 models

01:17:06.540 so where I

01:17:07.920 come from

01:17:10.360 is to be honest

01:17:11.160 with you

01:17:11.520 I don't know

01:17:12.480 but I do know

01:17:13.960 that we are

01:17:14.680 adaptive

01:17:15.080 I do know

01:17:15.960 that we should

01:17:16.420 prepare

01:17:16.960 because to be

01:17:18.080 honest with you

01:17:18.760 you know

01:17:19.460 green technology

01:17:20.580 sound like

01:17:21.200 pretty cool things

01:17:22.200 when you look at

01:17:22.740 Teslas out there

01:17:23.480 they're not perfect

01:17:24.220 but they're

01:17:25.340 remember I work

01:17:26.920 with a lot of

01:17:27.420 automotive clients

01:17:28.540 but what Elon

01:17:29.140 has done

01:17:29.660 for the industry

01:17:30.420 you know

01:17:31.000 is phenomenal

01:17:31.600 and if we

01:17:33.700 come at this

01:17:34.280 from a point

01:17:34.960 of view of

01:17:35.300 positivity

01:17:35.820 what can we

01:17:36.820 do

01:17:37.100 and I look

01:17:37.680 at my own

01:17:38.140 kids

01:17:38.460 and well

01:17:39.280 their generation

01:17:40.000 and the malaise

01:17:40.680 the belief

01:17:41.800 that the world

01:17:42.280 is coming to

01:17:42.820 an end

01:17:43.180 the world

01:17:43.620 is not coming

01:17:44.340 to an end

01:17:44.960 anytime soon

01:17:46.180 because of this

01:17:46.820 we precipitated

01:17:47.760 in that direction

01:17:48.640 which we seem

01:17:49.240 to be striving

01:17:49.960 to do

01:17:50.480 with all

01:17:51.000 diligence

01:17:51.440 at the moment

01:17:52.260 well then

01:17:53.120 to bring it

01:17:53.520 back to the

01:17:54.100 documentary

01:17:55.100 at this point

01:17:55.820 we come back

01:17:57.660 to this point

01:17:58.260 of loneliness

01:17:58.680 and meet people

01:17:59.620 I mean

01:18:00.840 there's a scene

01:18:01.600 where I go

01:18:02.120 to a crematorium

01:18:02.900 in Germany

01:18:03.480 and I'm hoping

01:18:05.420 to find out

01:18:06.460 something about

01:18:07.740 what it's like

01:18:09.020 to bury

01:18:11.840 people who

01:18:12.520 have no family

01:18:13.060 I nearly got

01:18:14.800 an interview

01:18:15.240 directly with

01:18:16.640 the director

01:18:17.140 but he refused

01:18:17.760 to meet me

01:18:18.280 and an intermediary

01:18:19.460 kind of sat down

01:18:20.300 to explain why

01:18:21.220 and it's horrendous

01:18:22.880 and so this is

01:18:25.300 off camera

01:18:25.820 but I got

01:18:27.460 a long note

01:18:28.840 recently

01:18:29.320 with more information

01:18:30.360 as to what's

01:18:31.120 happening

01:18:31.500 people with no

01:18:32.720 family and care

01:18:33.740 homes

01:18:34.120 are being

01:18:35.020 effectively

01:18:35.640 mistreated

01:18:36.180 malnourished

01:18:36.920 tied to their

01:18:38.060 beds

01:18:38.380 for long

01:18:39.360 periods of time

01:18:40.040 and

01:18:41.080 we know this

01:18:42.560 or it's known

01:18:43.180 in this

01:18:43.520 crematorium

01:18:44.060 because

01:18:44.840 the bodies

01:18:46.240 that come

01:18:46.600 are I guess

01:18:47.460 white

01:18:47.900 and marked

01:18:49.020 and they

01:18:51.260 weren't prepared

01:18:51.740 to say it

01:18:52.220 because they're

01:18:52.700 fearful of the

01:18:53.360 system

01:18:53.680 so you know

01:18:54.840 someone should

01:18:55.660 make a documentary

01:18:56.300 about that

01:18:56.880 alone

01:18:57.380 but it tells

01:18:58.440 you that the

01:18:58.920 life of these

01:18:59.900 people

01:19:00.320 without family

01:19:02.360 you know

01:19:03.380 and we can't

01:19:04.540 see it because

01:19:05.160 these people

01:19:05.820 whether it be

01:19:06.300 in a suburban

01:19:06.940 Japan or

01:19:07.760 in Germany

01:19:08.160 or anywhere else

01:19:08.820 these people

01:19:09.900 are spending

01:19:10.300 their lives

01:19:10.720 in their homes

01:19:11.400 alone

01:19:11.880 hidden from

01:19:12.940 the world

01:19:13.580 so

01:19:13.840 well the thing

01:19:14.520 is in our

01:19:15.240 culture we only

01:19:16.040 seem to be able

01:19:16.720 to apprehend

01:19:17.600 life until

01:19:19.420 about 30

01:19:20.140 like that's

01:19:20.920 our vision

01:19:21.440 you know the

01:19:22.480 vision is

01:19:22.960 you're young

01:19:23.420 you're full

01:19:23.740 of promise

01:19:24.220 you get educated

01:19:25.180 you have your

01:19:25.680 career and then

01:19:26.540 you're 30

01:19:27.900 and what's

01:19:29.120 happening

01:19:29.380 well now you're

01:19:29.860 successful

01:19:30.300 it's like okay

01:19:30.980 but you got

01:19:31.620 60 years left

01:19:33.080 there

01:19:33.420 what are you

01:19:34.440 going to do

01:19:34.760 with that

01:19:35.420 well how long

01:19:37.540 is your career

01:19:38.460 going to run

01:19:39.040 you

01:19:39.180 well you

01:19:40.080 know lots

01:19:41.140 of people

01:19:41.420 think about

01:19:41.920 early retirement

01:19:42.620 and that's

01:19:43.140 particularly

01:19:43.640 perhaps the

01:19:44.380 case if

01:19:44.820 you're

01:19:45.180 successful

01:19:46.100 economically

01:19:46.700 so let's

01:19:47.280 say you

01:19:47.500 retired 50

01:19:48.220 okay fair

01:19:50.220 enough

01:19:50.560 you got 45

01:19:52.280 years left

01:19:53.040 what's your

01:19:53.440 vision for

01:19:53.880 that

01:19:54.220 well now

01:19:55.200 you're alone

01:19:55.820 you don't

01:19:56.400 have a family

01:19:56.940 you don't

01:19:57.180 have a partner

01:19:57.820 you don't

01:19:58.540 have a career

01:19:59.020 either

01:19:59.400 so what

01:20:01.440 are you planning

01:20:01.840 to do

01:20:02.360 exactly

01:20:03.200 what's your

01:20:03.980 vision

01:20:04.380 and the answer

01:20:05.240 is we don't

01:20:05.700 have a vision

01:20:06.220 for that

01:20:06.860 we don't

01:20:07.360 have a vision

01:20:07.840 for the

01:20:08.180 expanse of

01:20:08.760 our life

01:20:09.160 and so

01:20:10.300 and that's

01:20:11.300 an interesting

01:20:11.760 thing in and

01:20:12.320 of itself

01:20:12.800 I mean

01:20:13.160 you know

01:20:14.400 for a long

01:20:14.920 time

01:20:15.260 back in the

01:20:16.660 1860s

01:20:17.600 people even

01:20:18.740 in the west

01:20:19.220 were struggling

01:20:20.320 along on

01:20:21.060 less than

01:20:21.900 a dollar

01:20:22.260 fifty a day

01:20:23.040 in today's

01:20:23.600 money

01:20:23.860 and it's

01:20:24.520 not like

01:20:24.940 people had

01:20:25.980 the luxury

01:20:26.740 of developing

01:20:27.460 a lifetime

01:20:27.980 vision

01:20:28.520 they were

01:20:29.240 sort of

01:20:29.600 fending off

01:20:30.540 one disaster

01:20:31.580 after another

01:20:32.820 like people

01:20:33.440 do now

01:20:34.320 who live

01:20:34.740 in absolute

01:20:35.160 privation

01:20:35.720 there's about

01:20:36.180 800 million

01:20:37.100 people like

01:20:37.600 that still

01:20:38.060 on the

01:20:38.340 planet

01:20:38.600 and then

01:20:39.940 once you

01:20:41.080 get a little

01:20:41.380 wealthier

01:20:42.340 a little

01:20:42.740 more secure

01:20:43.300 you can start

01:20:43.880 thinking about

01:20:44.340 the future

01:20:44.820 and that's

01:20:46.260 very very

01:20:46.640 complicated

01:20:47.200 and this

01:20:48.540 luxurious wealth

01:20:49.940 we have is

01:20:50.460 new enough

01:20:50.920 so that our

01:20:51.800 capacity to

01:20:52.820 develop a

01:20:53.320 lifetime vision

01:20:53.920 hasn't developed

01:20:54.600 to a degree

01:20:56.380 that's sophisticated

01:20:56.980 enough to take

01:20:57.780 that whole

01:20:58.500 time span

01:20:58.980 into account

01:20:59.580 but this

01:21:00.600 vision of

01:21:01.740 isolated death

01:21:03.880 with no one

01:21:04.600 around you

01:21:05.040 that cares

01:21:05.560 I wouldn't

01:21:06.940 recommend that

01:21:07.880 as your

01:21:09.340 life from

01:21:09.980 70 to

01:21:10.720 95

01:21:11.200 it's pretty

01:21:13.240 damn dismal

01:21:14.020 so

01:21:14.900 Jordan

01:21:16.480 it's going

01:21:16.960 to be worse

01:21:17.660 in less

01:21:19.140 industrialized

01:21:20.060 nations

01:21:20.440 because you

01:21:21.040 go to

01:21:21.300 Brazil

01:21:21.700 and as

01:21:22.840 professors

01:21:23.300 there

01:21:23.660 I met

01:21:23.940 three of

01:21:24.340 them

01:21:24.520 the phrase

01:21:25.780 they used

01:21:26.520 was

01:21:27.220 we're getting

01:21:28.160 old before

01:21:28.840 we got rich

01:21:29.580 in Brazil

01:21:30.200 so they

01:21:31.160 can't provide

01:21:31.820 the infrastructure

01:21:32.380 resources to

01:21:33.400 the elderly

01:21:33.880 on a level

01:21:34.640 comparable

01:21:35.100 to what

01:21:35.520 we can

01:21:36.020 so the

01:21:37.100 life of

01:21:37.620 elderly

01:21:38.020 people

01:21:38.500 so I

01:21:39.380 look at

01:21:39.740 when I

01:21:40.480 look at

01:21:40.720 India

01:21:41.080 with the

01:21:41.980 birth rate

01:21:42.360 now

01:21:42.640 below

01:21:43.180 replacement

01:21:43.600 level

01:21:43.960 growing

01:21:44.780 population

01:21:45.460 because it's

01:21:45.980 so young

01:21:46.420 people are

01:21:46.860 living longer

01:21:47.340 which is a

01:21:47.800 good thing

01:21:48.340 but I'm

01:21:49.640 looking at

01:21:50.020 a future

01:21:50.340 for India

01:21:50.880 30 years

01:21:51.560 from now

01:21:51.980 where you're

01:21:52.660 going to have

01:21:53.060 so many

01:21:53.940 old people

01:21:54.600 and so few

01:21:55.760 people to

01:21:56.200 take care of

01:21:56.800 them

01:21:56.940 so this

01:21:59.040 is a

01:21:59.360 problem

01:21:59.720 that we

01:22:00.420 focus too

01:22:01.620 much on

01:22:02.200 in our

01:22:02.820 own

01:22:03.180 societies

01:22:03.720 this is a

01:22:05.100 global

01:22:05.400 humanitarian

01:22:05.900 crisis

01:22:06.440 of old

01:22:07.020 people

01:22:07.320 who are

01:22:07.780 going to

01:22:08.200 be left

01:22:08.680 by and

01:22:09.360 large

01:22:09.740 to some

01:22:10.700 extent

01:22:11.020 to fend

01:22:11.300 for themselves

01:22:11.900 and when

01:22:12.360 they're not

01:22:12.600 fending for

01:22:13.000 themselves

01:22:13.460 they're going

01:22:15.100 to be mostly

01:22:15.600 in their

01:22:15.900 homes

01:22:16.380 or alone

01:22:17.360 I find

01:22:19.080 the psychological

01:22:20.200 argument

01:22:20.880 I would say

01:22:21.560 probably

01:22:22.120 more compelling

01:22:23.340 I think

01:22:24.080 not because

01:22:25.060 I take any

01:22:25.960 issue to

01:22:26.940 your forward

01:22:27.500 looking

01:22:27.820 projections

01:22:28.360 but because

01:22:29.060 things are

01:22:30.520 so unstable

01:22:31.540 on the

01:22:32.180 technological

01:22:32.680 and economic

01:22:33.660 and political

01:22:34.160 front that

01:22:34.860 projecting

01:22:35.900 even a

01:22:36.740 decade

01:22:37.020 into the

01:22:37.480 future

01:22:37.740 seems in

01:22:38.300 some ways

01:22:38.680 like a

01:22:39.000 fool's errand

01:22:39.540 right

01:22:39.860 because

01:22:40.200 God only

01:22:41.700 knows what's

01:22:42.240 coming down

01:22:42.620 the pipelines

01:22:43.240 with regards

01:22:44.000 to new

01:22:45.260 technology

01:22:45.840 but I think

01:22:47.000 you can make

01:22:47.440 an extraordinarily

01:22:48.160 strong case

01:22:48.980 that one

01:22:50.420 of the things

01:22:50.980 you don't want

01:22:51.620 to end up

01:22:52.200 happening to

01:22:53.060 you in your

01:22:53.560 own life

01:22:54.100 is to be

01:22:55.040 involuntarily

01:22:56.580 childless

01:22:57.300 and isolated

01:22:58.100 starting at

01:22:58.940 the age of

01:22:59.460 30 going

01:23:00.180 forward

01:23:00.780 right

01:23:01.820 and so

01:23:02.320 I do

01:23:03.120 you know

01:23:04.020 I've looked

01:23:05.180 at the

01:23:05.800 situation in

01:23:06.480 China

01:23:06.760 and in

01:23:07.340 Japan

01:23:07.660 with this

01:23:09.100 what do they

01:23:09.620 call that

01:23:10.040 the inverted

01:23:10.640 pyramidal

01:23:11.260 distribution

01:23:12.120 where there's

01:23:12.860 way more

01:23:13.520 old people

01:23:13.960 than young

01:23:14.340 people

01:23:14.620 and obviously

01:23:15.460 that seems

01:23:16.020 untenable

01:23:16.480 on the

01:23:16.800 technological

01:23:17.220 or on

01:23:17.960 the economic

01:23:18.500 front

01:23:18.860 but I do

01:23:20.700 think the

01:23:21.260 psychological

01:23:22.320 issue is

01:23:23.760 much more

01:23:25.500 present

01:23:26.680 should be

01:23:27.300 much more

01:23:27.700 present for

01:23:28.180 young people

01:23:28.740 and the

01:23:29.020 warning is

01:23:29.520 don't be

01:23:30.220 thinking you've

01:23:30.660 got a lot

01:23:31.000 of time to

01:23:31.520 get your act

01:23:31.960 together because

01:23:32.440 you don't have

01:23:32.860 as much time

01:23:33.360 as you think

01:23:33.860 and you want

01:23:34.860 to get things

01:23:35.300 going sooner

01:23:37.060 than you

01:23:37.700 might find it

01:23:39.300 convenient

01:23:39.700 there's never a

01:23:40.740 convenient time

01:23:41.300 to have a

01:23:41.600 child

01:23:41.920 there's stupid

01:23:43.100 times to have

01:23:43.700 a child

01:23:44.080 for sure

01:23:44.560 but there's

01:23:45.200 never a

01:23:45.580 convenient time

01:23:46.260 and that's the

01:23:46.680 other thing

01:23:47.000 people do too

01:23:47.700 when my wife

01:23:50.080 and I

01:23:50.420 finally got

01:23:51.140 together

01:23:51.460 she was

01:23:51.840 about 28

01:23:52.420 or so

01:23:52.760 she wanted

01:23:53.100 to have

01:23:53.260 a kid

01:23:53.480 pretty much

01:23:55.720 right away

01:23:56.160 and I was

01:23:58.560 finishing off

01:23:59.020 my postdoc

01:23:59.760 and I hadn't

01:24:00.260 got a permanent

01:24:01.000 job yet

01:24:01.540 and my

01:24:01.940 sense was

01:24:03.120 well you know

01:24:04.180 everything's not

01:24:04.800 in place

01:24:05.260 and we talked

01:24:06.320 that out for

01:24:06.780 quite a while

01:24:07.240 and decided to

01:24:07.920 proceed

01:24:08.380 regardless

01:24:09.160 because

01:24:09.620 there was no

01:24:11.920 real reason

01:24:12.540 for me to be

01:24:13.220 concerned

01:24:13.600 the probability

01:24:14.320 that I was

01:24:14.780 going to be

01:24:15.140 jobless

01:24:15.580 was

01:24:15.900 barring

01:24:16.840 catastrophe

01:24:17.360 zero

01:24:17.900 and

01:24:18.840 you jump

01:24:19.900 into the

01:24:20.340 abyss

01:24:20.720 holding hands

01:24:22.260 with your

01:24:22.660 wife

01:24:23.000 you know

01:24:23.360 there's no

01:24:24.160 right time

01:24:25.000 and the

01:24:26.660 reason that's

01:24:27.260 so important

01:24:27.680 to know

01:24:28.000 is because

01:24:28.460 the clock

01:24:29.020 ticks while

01:24:29.740 you're waiting

01:24:30.300 and that's

01:24:31.160 also a

01:24:31.640 catastrophe

01:24:32.120 and then it

01:24:33.020 sneaks up

01:24:33.440 on people

01:24:33.820 unawares

01:24:34.300 as you just

01:24:34.880 described

01:24:35.440 and takes

01:24:36.360 them out

01:24:36.820 not good

01:24:37.860 okay so

01:24:38.840 now you're

01:24:39.240 talking

01:24:39.560 now you're

01:24:40.160 investigating

01:24:40.640 in the

01:24:40.980 documentary

01:24:41.440 the consequences

01:24:42.340 of this

01:24:42.920 involuntary

01:24:43.780 childlessness

01:24:44.300 and do

01:24:45.160 you progress

01:24:46.060 past that

01:24:46.780 yeah well

01:24:47.580 so the

01:24:48.140 consequences

01:24:48.680 go into

01:24:49.240 both

01:24:49.640 the economy

01:24:50.680 we go to

01:24:51.140 Detroit

01:24:51.740 we look at

01:24:52.560 what might

01:24:52.960 happen to

01:24:53.540 the future

01:24:54.160 of the world

01:24:54.840 based on

01:24:55.240 what's happened

01:24:55.640 to Detroit

01:24:56.100 yeah

01:24:56.440 we look at

01:24:58.200 briefly

01:24:59.300 future pension

01:25:01.440 systems

01:25:02.100 we look at

01:25:02.960 AI technology

01:25:04.680 but only very

01:25:05.300 briefly

01:25:05.800 it's an area

01:25:06.580 that I'm sure

01:25:07.000 many people

01:25:07.560 you mentioned

01:25:08.180 technology

01:25:08.700 just now

01:25:09.560 a comment

01:25:11.600 for me

01:25:11.960 is that

01:25:12.240 robots

01:25:12.520 don't pay

01:25:13.300 taxes

01:25:13.680 so simply

01:25:14.720 saying

01:25:15.020 they also

01:25:15.620 don't

01:25:15.920 necessarily

01:25:16.460 want to

01:25:16.900 take care

01:25:17.340 of you

01:25:17.680 so we'll

01:25:19.040 just see

01:25:19.380 how that

01:25:19.740 works out

01:25:20.340 and I think

01:25:21.280 they're going

01:25:21.500 to be

01:25:21.640 expensive

01:25:22.000 so the

01:25:22.720 idea that

01:25:23.360 AI is a

01:25:24.120 solution

01:25:24.520 just like

01:25:25.100 this

01:25:25.300 is

01:25:26.280 probably

01:25:27.940 oversimplified

01:25:28.920 possibly very

01:25:29.700 oversimplified

01:25:30.420 but of course

01:25:30.940 it has a role

01:25:31.520 technology

01:25:32.000 definitely has

01:25:32.700 a role

01:25:33.060 in this

01:25:33.400 but we can't

01:25:34.340 just turn

01:25:34.660 away from

01:25:35.040 this subject

01:25:35.460 and say

01:25:35.900 let's not

01:25:36.540 worry about

01:25:37.040 it for that

01:25:37.360 reason

01:25:37.640 the final

01:25:38.960 part of the

01:25:39.320 documentary

01:25:39.820 and I have

01:25:41.440 to credit

01:25:41.760 a friend

01:25:42.120 I thought

01:25:42.420 I was

01:25:42.700 done

01:25:43.080 after

01:25:43.420 filming

01:25:43.820 in probably

01:25:44.300 18 countries

01:25:45.220 I thought

01:25:45.600 well this is

01:25:46.040 enough now

01:25:46.600 I can see

01:25:47.400 the global

01:25:48.060 pattern

01:25:48.600 and this

01:25:50.900 friend in LA

01:25:51.600 said no you

01:25:52.120 haven't finished

01:25:52.580 you have to

01:25:53.060 go to Africa

01:25:53.600 and you have to

01:25:54.460 go to other

01:25:54.900 countries like

01:25:55.380 Bangladesh

01:25:56.040 and India

01:25:58.140 I'd already

01:25:58.460 been to but I

01:25:59.140 wanted more

01:25:59.760 filming

01:26:00.120 I wanted to

01:26:00.520 go into

01:26:00.820 we went to

01:26:01.560 slums in

01:26:02.600 Mumbai

01:26:02.860 we went to

01:26:03.520 slums in

01:26:04.900 Rio

01:26:05.600 I think

01:26:06.600 five in

01:26:07.580 Johannesburg

01:26:08.320 and I

01:26:09.840 wanted to

01:26:10.260 see what's

01:26:10.640 happening

01:26:11.080 in the

01:26:11.780 parts of

01:26:12.140 the world

01:26:12.480 that I

01:26:13.000 think to

01:26:13.520 some extent

01:26:14.020 we might

01:26:14.460 fear are

01:26:15.640 exploding

01:26:16.340 and you

01:26:18.500 have the

01:26:19.940 same fundamental

01:26:20.880 story happening

01:26:21.960 everywhere

01:26:23.020 even Nigeria

01:26:24.240 and so

01:26:26.580 Nigeria is a

01:26:28.180 good example

01:26:28.880 of a country

01:26:29.480 that's moving

01:26:31.080 towards lower

01:26:32.020 birth rates

01:26:33.160 at a much

01:26:33.660 slower pace

01:26:34.400 there'll be

01:26:34.940 more people

01:26:35.480 by the way

01:26:36.020 in Nigeria

01:26:36.600 by the year

01:26:37.760 2100 than

01:26:38.560 there are in

01:26:38.980 China for

01:26:39.540 everyone watching

01:26:40.420 and listening

01:26:40.780 that's quite the

01:26:42.020 shocking bit of

01:26:42.680 information

01:26:43.220 yeah and you

01:26:44.400 know you look

01:26:44.740 at Nigeria

01:26:45.140 and you still

01:26:45.580 have a culture

01:26:46.220 there where

01:26:47.280 the more male

01:26:48.560 children you

01:26:49.100 have it's part

01:26:49.920 of the what

01:26:50.660 you might say

01:26:51.120 that the bravado

01:26:51.940 that you have

01:26:52.540 it's like

01:26:53.100 that's that

01:26:53.660 status reward

01:26:54.580 status

01:26:54.960 yeah but you

01:26:55.820 go to Ethiopia

01:26:56.480 and you meet

01:26:57.640 people there

01:26:58.160 and you talk

01:26:58.500 to professors

01:26:58.960 there and

01:26:59.520 Ethiopia used

01:27:00.260 to be like

01:27:00.660 that but the

01:27:01.240 birth rate right

01:27:01.940 now in Ethiopia

01:27:02.560 is four it

01:27:03.320 used to be seven

01:27:03.980 or eight not

01:27:04.560 that long ago

01:27:05.200 and there's

01:27:06.100 transformation

01:27:06.740 happening

01:27:07.440 so you can

01:27:08.180 see and feel

01:27:09.300 the transformation

01:27:09.880 happening in

01:27:10.700 Africa just

01:27:11.620 like everywhere

01:27:12.240 else so I

01:27:13.000 like to think

01:27:13.500 of the analogy

01:27:14.080 that the world

01:27:14.920 is on a

01:27:15.360 roller coaster

01:27:15.940 and countries

01:27:18.100 like Japan

01:27:19.040 and Germany

01:27:19.640 and Italy

01:27:20.100 and now

01:27:21.060 South Korea

01:27:21.640 are in the

01:27:22.360 front car

01:27:22.860 you know

01:27:23.100 they're over

01:27:23.500 in terms of

01:27:24.200 the peak

01:27:24.600 population

01:27:25.340 and sure

01:27:26.500 they're aging

01:27:27.160 and people

01:27:27.640 are going to

01:27:27.940 live longer

01:27:28.460 and longer

01:27:28.760 so we're not

01:27:29.120 going to really

01:27:29.500 see the drop

01:27:31.680 for a little

01:27:32.360 while but we

01:27:33.080 know what's

01:27:33.500 coming

01:27:33.820 Africa

01:27:34.780 is in the

01:27:35.740 rear car

01:27:36.200 you know

01:27:36.600 they're still

01:27:36.980 on the way

01:27:37.340 up

01:27:37.640 but the path

01:27:38.720 is the same

01:27:39.280 here

01:27:39.600 yeah

01:27:39.940 but perhaps

01:27:41.080 the thing

01:27:41.440 that struck

01:27:42.100 me about

01:27:42.860 Africa

01:27:44.040 where I'm

01:27:44.880 planning to go

01:27:45.500 back and spend

01:27:46.040 a significant

01:27:46.520 amount of time

01:27:47.200 for my own

01:27:48.120 purposes

01:27:48.800 as much as

01:27:49.900 anything

01:27:50.220 when you go

01:27:51.160 to Africa

01:27:51.780 you go to

01:27:52.420 Malawi

01:27:52.940 which is I

01:27:54.160 believe

01:27:54.560 World Bank

01:27:55.240 dated the

01:27:55.780 12th poorest

01:27:56.600 country in the

01:27:57.640 world by GDP

01:27:58.560 per person

01:27:59.160 and you go

01:28:01.380 to a community

01:28:02.060 and people

01:28:02.900 are laughing

01:28:03.440 smiling

01:28:04.520 and you go

01:28:05.700 to kind of

01:28:06.160 an area

01:28:07.540 it's not even

01:28:08.120 a soccer pitch

01:28:08.760 it's nothing

01:28:09.120 like a soccer

01:28:09.660 pitch

01:28:09.920 but there's

01:28:10.220 a soccer

01:28:10.540 bowl there

01:28:10.960 there's no

01:28:11.540 rules

01:28:11.820 but you've

01:28:12.100 got 30

01:28:12.440 kids

01:28:12.860 running

01:28:13.560 and screaming

01:28:14.000 and laughing

01:28:14.520 and we're

01:28:15.600 there

01:28:15.960 and they

01:28:17.120 come and say

01:28:17.600 hi for a

01:28:18.080 moment

01:28:18.220 but they

01:28:18.520 want to get

01:28:18.820 back and play

01:28:19.340 soccer with

01:28:19.800 each other

01:28:20.200 and to see

01:28:21.960 that sense

01:28:22.620 of community

01:28:23.500 and that

01:28:24.660 intergenerational

01:28:25.860 community

01:28:26.560 maybe in some

01:28:28.220 ways part of

01:28:28.780 solution here

01:28:29.520 that we've

01:28:30.020 you know

01:28:30.600 I think an

01:28:31.020 argument for me

01:28:31.520 is that we've

01:28:32.200 lost a sense

01:28:32.780 of community

01:28:33.280 for one reason

01:28:34.120 or another

01:28:34.620 and so

01:28:36.920 you know

01:28:37.740 that's

01:28:38.380 you know

01:28:38.980 something that

01:28:39.920 surprised me

01:28:41.040 actually

01:28:41.360 how similar

01:28:42.700 really we

01:28:44.060 all are

01:28:45.140 and we're just

01:28:45.840 at different

01:28:46.300 parts of

01:28:47.320 that cycle

01:28:48.780 so

01:28:50.420 you've

01:28:51.540 laid out

01:28:52.700 this documentary

01:28:53.480 and you've

01:28:54.540 documented

01:28:55.060 a problem

01:28:56.300 that is not

01:28:57.200 being attended

01:28:58.120 to

01:28:58.460 much

01:28:59.220 that's a

01:29:00.580 very

01:29:00.760 pervasive

01:29:01.260 problem

01:29:01.820 and that's

01:29:02.840 going to

01:29:03.160 affect

01:29:03.560 virtually

01:29:04.940 everyone

01:29:05.560 personally

01:29:06.160 and

01:29:06.680 sociologically

01:29:07.780 we talked

01:29:09.040 a little

01:29:09.320 bit

01:29:09.620 about

01:29:10.420 pathways

01:29:11.300 you know

01:29:12.460 I mean

01:29:12.960 it's one

01:29:13.360 thing obviously

01:29:13.940 to diagnose

01:29:14.560 a problem

01:29:15.060 and that's

01:29:15.760 not a

01:29:16.060 straightforward

01:29:16.340 thing to

01:29:16.900 do

01:29:17.100 to see

01:29:17.620 the problem

01:29:18.040 and then

01:29:18.280 to diagnose

01:29:18.840 it

01:29:19.040 it's a

01:29:20.240 completely

01:29:20.640 different

01:29:21.000 order of

01:29:21.460 things

01:29:21.700 to start

01:29:22.260 thinking

01:29:22.580 about

01:29:22.940 what might

01:29:23.920 constitute

01:29:24.460 an

01:29:24.700 acceptable

01:29:25.120 alternative

01:29:25.620 so in

01:29:26.100 Hungary

01:29:26.440 what they've

01:29:27.120 done

01:29:27.320 you probably

01:29:27.920 know this

01:29:28.400 is that

01:29:28.820 if you're

01:29:30.300 a mother

01:29:30.840 in Hungary

01:29:31.400 and you have

01:29:32.340 one child

01:29:32.900 you're now

01:29:34.220 exempt from

01:29:34.880 income tax

01:29:35.400 at the federal

01:29:35.900 level for the

01:29:36.540 rest of your

01:29:36.860 life

01:29:37.080 25%

01:29:38.240 and then

01:29:39.080 that scales

01:29:39.580 up to

01:29:39.940 100%

01:29:40.780 for four

01:29:41.700 children

01:29:42.000 and the idea

01:29:43.000 there was

01:29:43.480 both practical

01:29:44.360 and cultural

01:29:45.240 so the cultural

01:29:46.120 idea was

01:29:46.820 we need to

01:29:48.480 signal that we

01:29:49.440 value motherhood

01:29:50.500 and children

01:29:50.960 and one

01:29:52.460 of the

01:29:52.680 more powerful

01:29:53.300 signals

01:29:53.780 that

01:29:54.560 society

01:29:56.140 has access

01:29:56.660 to is

01:29:57.020 economic

01:29:58.440 signals

01:29:59.020 and the

01:29:59.700 Hungarians

01:30:00.040 have stopped

01:30:00.820 the decline

01:30:01.440 in their birth

01:30:01.960 rate and

01:30:02.280 tapped it up

01:30:02.740 slightly

01:30:03.060 they've

01:30:03.640 increased

01:30:03.960 female

01:30:04.320 participation

01:30:04.960 in the

01:30:05.240 workforce

01:30:05.520 by the

01:30:05.980 way

01:30:06.200 13%

01:30:07.400 so the

01:30:08.620 feminists

01:30:09.080 had objected

01:30:09.720 or some

01:30:10.060 of them

01:30:10.280 that the

01:30:11.520 Hungarian

01:30:11.860 government

01:30:12.220 was just

01:30:12.660 turning women

01:30:13.140 into baby

01:30:13.660 making factories

01:30:14.440 which is

01:30:14.920 a hell of

01:30:15.660 a nasty

01:30:17.560 epithet

01:30:18.080 I might

01:30:18.460 add

01:30:18.820 but

01:30:19.560 what's

01:30:20.780 happened

01:30:21.000 is the

01:30:21.260 reverse

01:30:21.620 is more

01:30:22.060 women

01:30:22.340 are working

01:30:22.820 now than

01:30:23.200 before

01:30:23.560 and I

01:30:23.880 suppose

01:30:24.100 that's

01:30:24.380 because

01:30:24.560 they get

01:30:24.860 to keep

01:30:25.140 more of

01:30:25.460 their money

01:30:25.840 and they

01:30:27.720 can make

01:30:28.000 child care

01:30:28.400 arrangements

01:30:28.800 more

01:30:29.220 straightforwardly

01:30:29.900 and all

01:30:30.120 of that

01:30:30.440 they've

01:30:31.040 knocked

01:30:31.280 the divorce

01:30:31.780 rate

01:30:32.080 down

01:30:32.520 substantially

01:30:33.300 they've

01:30:34.080 increased

01:30:34.380 the marriage

01:30:34.820 rate

01:30:35.160 they've

01:30:35.720 knocked

01:30:35.900 the abortion

01:30:36.460 rate

01:30:36.840 down

01:30:37.140 40%

01:30:37.960 38%

01:30:38.820 with no

01:30:39.420 compulsion

01:30:39.920 it's not

01:30:41.000 as easy

01:30:41.760 to get

01:30:42.060 an abortion

01:30:42.600 in Hungary

01:30:43.100 as it is

01:30:43.580 in the US

01:30:44.100 or Canada

01:30:44.660 and the

01:30:46.620 legal limits

01:30:47.520 there is

01:30:47.880 12 weeks

01:30:48.580 instead of

01:30:49.720 the 16

01:30:50.260 weeks

01:30:50.580 which is

01:30:51.040 about

01:30:51.300 what

01:30:51.620 Americans

01:30:52.060 think

01:30:52.360 it should

01:30:52.680 be

01:30:52.940 but

01:30:53.580 the point

01:30:54.560 is

01:30:54.740 these

01:30:54.960 alterations

01:30:55.560 in policy

01:30:56.140 have

01:30:56.560 produced

01:30:58.060 increases

01:30:59.560 in

01:31:00.020 fertility

01:31:01.280 increases

01:31:01.940 in the

01:31:02.260 marital

01:31:02.520 rate

01:31:02.840 decreases

01:31:03.280 in the

01:31:03.560 divorce

01:31:03.860 rate

01:31:04.180 decreases

01:31:04.860 in the

01:31:05.120 abortion

01:31:05.400 rate

01:31:05.700 and those

01:31:06.040 look

01:31:06.400 arguably

01:31:07.420 like

01:31:07.740 desirable

01:31:08.160 things

01:31:08.620 do you

01:31:09.560 see

01:31:09.920 and we

01:31:10.640 talked a

01:31:11.000 little bit

01:31:11.240 about the

01:31:11.540 fact that

01:31:11.900 women

01:31:12.120 live

01:31:12.620 seven

01:31:12.940 years

01:31:13.240 longer

01:31:13.620 and so

01:31:14.120 in principle

01:31:14.900 have a

01:31:15.440 time

01:31:15.860 let's say

01:31:16.740 eight years

01:31:17.500 where they

01:31:18.300 could have

01:31:18.660 children

01:31:19.000 without really

01:31:19.740 being at a

01:31:20.880 competitive

01:31:21.240 disadvantage

01:31:21.920 on the

01:31:22.340 economic

01:31:22.700 front

01:31:23.020 with men

01:31:23.540 assuming

01:31:24.060 that it

01:31:24.700 is a

01:31:25.160 competitive

01:31:25.580 landscape

01:31:26.100 and that's

01:31:26.640 also not

01:31:27.180 particularly

01:31:27.580 obvious to

01:31:28.240 me

01:31:28.460 I mean

01:31:29.220 what

01:31:30.700 have

01:31:31.320 your thoughts

01:31:32.940 turned to

01:31:33.600 what might

01:31:34.200 constitute

01:31:34.920 an appropriate

01:31:35.900 pathway

01:31:36.300 forward

01:31:36.720 for young

01:31:37.140 people

01:31:37.500 I certainly

01:31:38.820 would

01:31:40.440 quite boldly

01:31:43.260 say

01:31:43.660 what will

01:31:44.660 not work

01:31:45.140 because there's

01:31:45.620 so many

01:31:45.960 examples of

01:31:46.640 things that

01:31:46.960 have been

01:31:47.100 tried and

01:31:47.660 tried and

01:31:48.200 tried and

01:31:48.600 tried and

01:31:48.880 tried and

01:31:48.900 we'll come

01:31:49.160 back to

01:31:49.460 Hungary in

01:31:49.820 a moment

01:31:50.040 because it

01:31:50.420 is very

01:31:50.760 interesting

01:31:51.120 but if

01:31:53.680 you look

01:31:54.040 at baby

01:31:54.640 bonus

01:31:55.020 programs

01:31:55.540 globally

01:31:56.320 at best

01:31:57.800 what they

01:31:58.200 do is

01:31:58.920 temporarily

01:31:59.600 increase the

01:32:00.540 birth rate

01:32:01.000 and then

01:32:02.600 you see

01:32:03.300 a dip

01:32:03.780 and the dip

01:32:04.160 usually goes

01:32:04.600 below where

01:32:05.080 it was

01:32:05.360 before

01:32:05.660 all you've

01:32:06.140 done is

01:32:06.680 bring

01:32:06.940 forward

01:32:07.560 the

01:32:08.500 people who

01:32:09.880 would have

01:32:10.160 had kids

01:32:10.540 anyway

01:32:11.200 yeah

01:32:11.600 right

01:32:12.200 so

01:32:13.600 and you

01:32:14.700 look at

01:32:14.960 the amount

01:32:15.280 of money

01:32:15.580 in certain

01:32:16.080 Japan

01:32:16.560 certainly

01:32:16.940 South Korea

01:32:17.540 are spending

01:32:18.180 on kindergarten

01:32:19.320 yeah

01:32:19.700 that doesn't

01:32:20.380 seem to help

01:32:20.840 Quebec

01:32:21.180 it didn't

01:32:21.560 make a bit

01:32:21.900 of difference

01:32:22.400 no it isn't

01:32:23.580 it isn't

01:32:24.080 lack of

01:32:24.520 child care

01:32:25.040 that's causing

01:32:25.600 this problem

01:32:26.180 yeah

01:32:26.500 and it's

01:32:26.960 not income

01:32:27.500 either

01:32:27.780 no right

01:32:28.580 a lot of

01:32:29.420 people think

01:32:29.840 it is income

01:32:30.460 it's a natural

01:32:31.340 thing I think

01:32:31.960 for people

01:32:32.360 thinking well

01:32:32.840 if I had a

01:32:33.280 little bit

01:32:33.580 more money

01:32:34.000 at the right

01:32:34.860 time

01:32:35.280 or my

01:32:36.340 apartment's

01:32:36.860 too small

01:32:37.420 but actually

01:32:38.320 what you

01:32:39.080 find is that

01:32:39.880 when people

01:32:40.300 have more

01:32:40.560 money in

01:32:40.860 their pocket

01:32:41.340 birth rates

01:32:42.100 go down

01:32:42.560 they do

01:32:43.100 other things

01:32:43.620 it's like

01:32:44.340 not yet

01:32:44.720 we can take

01:32:45.560 this vacation

01:32:46.120 well I think

01:32:46.660 also

01:32:47.020 well I also

01:32:47.860 think that

01:32:48.340 their expectations

01:32:49.580 for what constitutes

01:32:51.100 sufficiently prepared

01:32:52.380 for children

01:32:52.940 also change

01:32:53.920 you know

01:32:55.020 like I said

01:32:55.540 when I was in

01:32:56.100 Montreal

01:32:56.420 well you know

01:32:57.160 I was already

01:32:57.700 educated

01:32:58.180 I had a job

01:32:58.980 it was clear

01:32:59.540 I was going

01:32:59.960 to get a job

01:33:00.520 but my

01:33:01.380 standard for

01:33:02.480 what was

01:33:02.900 sufficient security

01:33:03.920 and opportunity

01:33:04.560 for my

01:33:05.060 children

01:33:05.360 rose along

01:33:06.260 with my

01:33:06.780 horizon of

01:33:07.740 vision on

01:33:08.180 the economic

01:33:08.680 front

01:33:09.020 and it's

01:33:09.900 also not

01:33:10.340 the case

01:33:10.720 that more

01:33:11.260 security

01:33:11.800 makes you

01:33:12.600 liable to

01:33:13.940 take more

01:33:14.460 risks

01:33:14.920 that isn't

01:33:15.500 how life

01:33:15.940 works

01:33:16.300 you have to

01:33:16.880 jump into

01:33:17.420 children

01:33:17.800 just like

01:33:18.260 you jump

01:33:18.640 into a

01:33:19.440 marriage

01:33:19.780 or into

01:33:20.580 your life

01:33:21.620 for that

01:33:21.960 matter

01:33:22.300 I think

01:33:22.900 that's the

01:33:23.220 key point

01:33:23.680 you know

01:33:23.940 so ultimately

01:33:24.760 Hungary

01:33:26.380 aside for a

01:33:26.960 moment

01:33:27.100 and also

01:33:27.640 Russia

01:33:27.980 in the past

01:33:28.480 has had

01:33:29.040 similar

01:33:29.540 programs

01:33:30.080 where they

01:33:30.440 have put

01:33:30.820 significant

01:33:32.020 benefits

01:33:32.520 in place

01:33:32.940 that seem

01:33:33.360 to work

01:33:33.860 for a

01:33:34.240 time

01:33:34.700 but

01:33:36.100 vast

01:33:37.240 majority

01:33:37.860 of

01:33:38.580 financial

01:33:39.040 incentives

01:33:39.560 or even

01:33:40.560 societal

01:33:41.120 changes

01:33:43.080 such as

01:33:43.660 kindergartens

01:33:44.420 have very

01:33:45.520 limited

01:33:46.020 effects

01:33:46.680 very limited

01:33:47.700 indeed

01:33:48.160 if we come

01:33:49.400 back to

01:33:49.780 understand

01:33:50.260 the fundamentals

01:33:51.000 of the

01:33:51.240 problem

01:33:51.500 is this

01:33:52.040 unplanned

01:33:53.460 childlessness

01:33:54.000 issue

01:33:54.760 perhaps

01:33:56.060 what Hungary

01:33:57.420 might have

01:33:58.600 got right

01:33:59.040 and I

01:34:01.020 will never

01:34:03.100 frankly

01:34:03.740 tell someone

01:34:04.800 you should

01:34:05.300 or should

01:34:05.520 not have

01:34:05.960 an abortion

01:34:06.360 that's your

01:34:06.840 choice

01:34:07.180 that's not

01:34:07.900 something

01:34:08.120 I want

01:34:08.580 to have

01:34:08.840 any

01:34:09.180 I don't

01:34:09.600 believe

01:34:09.940 it's my

01:34:10.540 right

01:34:10.960 to say

01:34:11.500 that

01:34:11.680 that's

01:34:11.940 just my

01:34:12.520 personal

01:34:12.820 position

01:34:13.200 on it

01:34:13.560 but

01:34:14.080 what

01:34:14.940 Hungary

01:34:16.920 might have

01:34:17.500 done

01:34:17.740 and you

01:34:18.600 stated a

01:34:19.460 moment ago

01:34:19.860 is just

01:34:20.120 make it

01:34:20.560 more

01:34:21.080 positive

01:34:23.140 the idea

01:34:23.620 of parenting

01:34:24.220 something

01:34:24.680 that's

01:34:25.340 what they're

01:34:26.300 aiming at

01:34:26.960 the Hungarians

01:34:28.420 do understand

01:34:29.640 so their

01:34:30.380 president

01:34:30.820 Catalina

01:34:31.340 Novak

01:34:31.880 a young

01:34:32.780 dynamic

01:34:33.300 woman

01:34:33.640 who

01:34:34.000 is their

01:34:35.160 symbolic

01:34:35.600 head of

01:34:35.980 state

01:34:36.180 was very

01:34:36.640 much

01:34:36.900 involved

01:34:37.680 in the

01:34:38.320 formulation

01:34:38.660 of these

01:34:39.260 family

01:34:39.660 policies

01:34:40.060 and she

01:34:40.900 knew

01:34:41.080 perfectly

01:34:41.500 well

01:34:41.800 that part

01:34:42.360 of what

01:34:42.780 the goal

01:34:43.560 was

01:34:43.940 was to

01:34:44.600 culturally

01:34:46.180 elevate

01:34:46.920 the let's

01:34:47.940 call it

01:34:48.280 the sacred

01:34:48.760 significance

01:34:49.460 of motherhood

01:34:50.080 something like

01:34:50.640 that

01:34:50.840 to put

01:34:51.740 the mother

01:34:52.240 again

01:34:52.760 on something

01:34:54.540 on something

01:34:55.200 approximating the

01:34:56.120 necessary

01:34:56.760 pedestal

01:34:57.360 you see this

01:34:58.460 in Catholic

01:34:58.980 imagery

01:34:59.380 all the

01:34:59.760 time

01:35:00.040 is that

01:35:00.400 of course

01:35:01.040 in the

01:35:01.540 Christian

01:35:01.800 tradition

01:35:02.260 Christ

01:35:03.120 is obviously

01:35:03.900 the central

01:35:04.420 figure of

01:35:04.980 redemption

01:35:05.480 and divinity

01:35:06.160 but there's

01:35:07.240 strong competition

01:35:08.460 symbolically

01:35:09.380 on the part

01:35:10.380 of Mary

01:35:10.840 because it's

01:35:11.660 Mary and

01:35:12.060 the infant

01:35:12.420 and I

01:35:13.320 would say

01:35:13.660 any society

01:35:14.400 that doesn't

01:35:14.920 hold the

01:35:15.300 mother and

01:35:15.640 infant as

01:35:16.140 sacred

01:35:16.460 is doomed

01:35:17.080 for obvious

01:35:19.100 reasons

01:35:19.580 since we

01:35:20.140 all had

01:35:20.700 mothers

01:35:21.000 and we're

01:35:21.420 all infants

01:35:22.060 if you

01:35:22.380 don't value

01:35:22.940 that

01:35:23.320 whatever that

01:35:24.420 value means

01:35:25.320 and when

01:35:25.960 my wife

01:35:26.540 had little

01:35:26.940 kids

01:35:27.280 she was

01:35:28.340 treated

01:35:28.600 pretty damn

01:35:29.200 dismally

01:35:29.980 I would

01:35:30.420 say

01:35:30.640 you know

01:35:30.900 I used

01:35:31.260 to go

01:35:31.560 out to

01:35:31.980 restaurants

01:35:32.420 with her

01:35:33.100 and just

01:35:33.420 watch when

01:35:34.020 she entered

01:35:34.500 in with

01:35:34.880 the kids

01:35:35.240 and there

01:35:36.020 was a lot

01:35:36.460 of sneers

01:35:36.980 and a lot

01:35:37.540 of you

01:35:38.320 know

01:35:38.940 casual

01:35:40.260 mistreatment

01:35:41.260 there was

01:35:42.040 no

01:35:42.480 they were

01:35:43.460 a nuisance

01:35:44.020 you know

01:35:44.480 and that

01:35:44.780 was extremely

01:35:45.520 annoying

01:35:45.920 to me

01:35:46.380 to watch

01:35:46.800 because I

01:35:47.240 don't think

01:35:47.600 of kids

01:35:47.980 as kids

01:35:48.640 can be

01:35:48.980 nuisances

01:35:49.400 if they're

01:35:49.820 not well

01:35:50.200 behaved

01:35:50.560 but you

01:35:51.660 there's

01:35:52.240 something wrong

01:35:52.700 with you

01:35:53.060 if you think

01:35:53.620 children are

01:35:54.380 fundamentally

01:35:54.900 a nuisance

01:35:55.540 and it's

01:35:56.840 definitely

01:35:57.120 the case

01:35:57.600 that we

01:35:59.780 don't value

01:36:00.560 the contribution

01:36:02.480 of young

01:36:03.960 mothers in

01:36:05.240 our culture

01:36:05.840 the way

01:36:06.420 that we

01:36:06.840 would if

01:36:07.320 we were

01:36:08.060 wise

01:36:08.520 and that's

01:36:09.320 a very

01:36:09.540 difficult

01:36:09.820 problem to

01:36:10.460 solve

01:36:10.940 right

01:36:11.220 all this

01:36:12.020 emphasis

01:36:12.420 on you

01:36:13.300 know

01:36:13.420 the kind

01:36:13.840 of hedonic

01:36:14.340 freedom

01:36:14.740 that's

01:36:15.060 associated

01:36:15.600 with you

01:36:16.060 with being

01:36:16.620 a youthful

01:36:17.140 teenager

01:36:17.580 and then

01:36:18.340 that equally

01:36:19.060 sex in the

01:36:19.860 city

01:36:20.080 nonsense

01:36:20.600 about you

01:36:21.840 know

01:36:21.980 your freedom

01:36:23.440 on the

01:36:23.840 sexual front

01:36:24.420 while you're

01:36:24.860 pursuing your

01:36:25.420 career

01:36:25.640 it's a bloody

01:36:26.120 juvenile

01:36:26.540 that it's

01:36:27.020 almost

01:36:27.260 incomprehensible

01:36:28.160 but it's

01:36:28.860 not an easy

01:36:29.380 thing to

01:36:29.780 reverse

01:36:30.080 and it

01:36:30.860 isn't even

01:36:31.300 obvious that

01:36:31.900 it's the

01:36:32.280 government's

01:36:32.920 role to

01:36:33.320 reverse that

01:36:34.520 but

01:36:34.820 and the

01:36:35.700 outcomes

01:36:36.120 are

01:36:36.580 unplanned

01:36:37.480 childlessness

01:36:37.920 time and

01:36:39.220 time again

01:36:39.680 I think

01:36:40.100 it's just

01:36:42.120 clear that

01:36:42.780 people who

01:36:43.460 could

01:36:43.620 down that

01:36:44.020 path

01:36:44.400 are thinking

01:36:44.960 of what

01:36:45.320 society

01:36:45.800 tells them

01:36:46.320 they can

01:36:46.600 do in the

01:36:47.040 short term

01:36:47.520 only

01:36:47.880 that'd be a

01:36:48.460 good title

01:36:49.000 for this

01:36:49.500 this

01:36:50.120 interview

01:36:51.900 really

01:36:52.500 we should

01:36:52.820 probably call

01:36:53.320 it unplanned

01:36:53.920 childlessness

01:36:54.560 I love that

01:36:55.240 well because

01:36:55.900 that's

01:36:56.320 that is

01:36:57.160 so

01:36:57.700 it's so

01:36:58.960 interesting

01:36:59.500 that that

01:36:59.960 exists

01:37:00.440 as such

01:37:00.960 a plague

01:37:01.780 and yet

01:37:02.600 it isn't

01:37:03.020 identified

01:37:03.500 and it

01:37:03.880 doesn't

01:37:04.120 have a

01:37:04.440 name

01:37:04.880 and that's

01:37:05.680 a real

01:37:06.040 that's

01:37:06.500 a real

01:37:06.740 catastrophe

01:37:07.360 I

01:37:08.080 you know

01:37:09.360 one of the

01:37:09.680 earliest

01:37:09.960 greetings

01:37:10.300 I did

01:37:10.700 there was

01:37:11.100 a young

01:37:11.780 man

01:37:12.080 it was

01:37:12.360 in Japan

01:37:12.780 but he's

01:37:13.240 from the

01:37:13.760 US

01:37:14.160 and he

01:37:15.680 just stood

01:37:16.140 there afterwards

01:37:16.640 gazing at

01:37:17.180 the ceiling

01:37:17.520 and he's

01:37:17.840 probably

01:37:18.280 30

01:37:19.060 early

01:37:19.480 30

01:37:19.860 35

01:37:20.260 and he

01:37:21.580 said

01:37:21.740 unplanned

01:37:22.440 childlessness

01:37:23.040 and he

01:37:23.700 looked at

01:37:24.060 me

01:37:24.260 and said

01:37:24.740 that's

01:37:25.540 me

01:37:25.920 that's

01:37:28.020 me

01:37:28.340 and you

01:37:29.380 could see

01:37:29.740 it wasn't

01:37:30.480 just the

01:37:30.820 term

01:37:31.120 it was

01:37:31.460 talking

01:37:32.080 yeah right

01:37:32.680 he was

01:37:32.980 talking

01:37:33.160 the

01:37:33.320 realization

01:37:33.960 realization

01:37:34.440 you actually

01:37:35.220 have to

01:37:35.760 in some

01:37:36.200 way

01:37:36.520 have a

01:37:37.680 plan

01:37:38.080 even if

01:37:38.600 the plan

01:37:39.000 is to

01:37:39.400 do

01:37:39.640 something

01:37:40.340 not

01:37:41.240 rational

01:37:41.760 but to

01:37:42.280 take a

01:37:42.700 leap

01:37:42.980 of faith

01:37:43.780 and to

01:37:45.520 come back

01:37:45.860 to men

01:37:46.200 as well

01:37:46.620 men can

01:37:48.900 have children

01:37:49.380 age 55

01:37:50.240 you know

01:37:52.160 I divorced

01:37:53.200 sadly

01:37:53.920 you know

01:37:55.140 at around

01:37:56.700 40 I guess

01:37:57.420 and I thought

01:37:57.780 there'd be a

01:37:58.380 time where I

01:37:59.040 would meet

01:37:59.600 someone again

01:38:00.180 and have more

01:38:00.620 children

01:38:00.880 that's something

01:38:01.300 I would have

01:38:01.680 desired frankly

01:38:02.600 not to get

01:38:04.520 too personal

01:38:05.080 but it wasn't

01:38:06.160 my plan for life

01:38:07.080 to be a

01:38:07.640 divorced dad

01:38:08.640 right

01:38:08.920 and what

01:38:11.080 you find

01:38:11.960 is

01:38:12.440 that you're

01:38:13.820 competing

01:38:14.140 with younger

01:38:14.620 men

01:38:14.920 for the

01:38:15.780 same

01:38:16.020 younger

01:38:16.300 woman

01:38:16.600 easier said

01:38:16.820 than done

01:38:17.320 the fact

01:38:19.060 that you

01:38:19.320 can technically

01:38:20.180 have a child

01:38:20.880 at almost

01:38:21.440 any age

01:38:21.940 as a man

01:38:22.380 doesn't mean

01:38:23.600 that you're

01:38:23.980 going to

01:38:24.540 so the

01:38:25.100 outcome

01:38:25.680 is

01:38:25.860 what makes

01:38:26.940 you think

01:38:27.360 you're going

01:38:27.640 to be more

01:38:28.020 successful

01:38:28.520 old and

01:38:29.140 ugly

01:38:29.460 than you

01:38:29.940 had been

01:38:30.400 young and

01:38:30.840 ugly

01:38:31.180 and every

01:38:33.300 year you're

01:38:33.900 on the path

01:38:34.440 to get

01:38:34.660 older and

01:38:35.260 uglier

01:38:35.580 so

01:38:37.040 you know

01:38:38.260 it's

01:38:39.260 men and

01:38:40.120 women

01:38:40.440 in this

01:38:41.040 situation

01:38:41.560 I think

01:38:42.000 that society

01:38:42.720 needs to

01:38:43.300 make parenting

01:38:44.260 something more

01:38:45.840 valuable

01:38:46.360 but to come

01:38:47.220 back to your

01:38:47.680 point

01:38:47.880 that cannot

01:38:48.620 be the

01:38:49.560 sacrifice of

01:38:50.300 career education

01:38:51.100 options

01:38:51.500 we have to

01:38:52.620 make it

01:38:53.000 more

01:38:53.560 almost the

01:38:55.440 default option

01:38:56.420 that you

01:38:57.700 can continue

01:38:58.640 your education

01:38:59.600 I love the

01:39:00.320 idea of

01:39:00.660 lifelong learning

01:39:01.460 which is what

01:39:01.980 I'm doing

01:39:02.340 yeah

01:39:02.540 well it's

01:39:04.140 very odd

01:39:04.600 that we

01:39:04.980 orient our

01:39:05.860 educational

01:39:06.920 establishments

01:39:07.640 to people

01:39:08.040 between 18

01:39:08.680 and 22

01:39:09.180 I just

01:39:09.840 can't figure

01:39:10.240 that out

01:39:10.460 at all

01:39:10.760 I taught

01:39:11.100 at the

01:39:11.320 Harvard

01:39:11.500 Extension

01:39:11.880 School

01:39:12.200 by the

01:39:12.500 way

01:39:12.660 I had a

01:39:13.120 lot of

01:39:13.320 adult

01:39:13.620 students

01:39:14.280 and I

01:39:14.640 enjoyed

01:39:14.900 teaching

01:39:15.200 them

01:39:15.360 a lot

01:39:15.660 there's

01:39:16.300 absolutely

01:39:17.100 no reason

01:39:17.800 whatsoever

01:39:18.600 that the

01:39:19.100 university

01:39:19.520 should

01:39:19.880 specialize

01:39:20.460 in 18

01:39:21.020 to 22

01:39:21.520 year olds

01:39:21.920 that's a

01:39:23.320 hangover

01:39:24.200 from

01:39:24.620 I don't

01:39:25.780 know

01:39:25.940 God

01:39:26.240 I don't

01:39:26.680 even know

01:39:27.100 when that

01:39:27.460 was useful

01:39:28.300 and relevant

01:39:28.800 it's just

01:39:29.380 not a

01:39:29.880 smart

01:39:30.180 idea

01:39:30.600 and it's

01:39:31.420 in the

01:39:31.620 college's

01:39:32.000 interest

01:39:32.420 because

01:39:32.780 there's a

01:39:33.240 shrinking

01:39:33.520 number of

01:39:34.220 children

01:39:35.120 come through

01:39:35.780 these systems

01:39:36.420 universities

01:39:37.340 are going

01:39:37.960 to need

01:39:38.400 to diversify

01:39:39.160 and lifelong

01:39:39.700 learning is

01:39:40.320 the answer

01:39:40.700 to that

01:39:41.120 so why

01:39:42.060 it's also

01:39:43.000 the case

01:39:43.440 that in

01:39:43.740 an era

01:39:44.100 of rapid

01:39:44.540 technological

01:39:45.060 transformation

01:39:45.660 that

01:39:46.200 lifelong

01:39:47.100 learning

01:39:47.620 is

01:39:47.940 necessary

01:39:48.640 practically

01:39:49.240 but it's

01:39:49.660 also

01:39:49.960 why the

01:39:50.760 hell

01:39:50.900 wouldn't

01:39:51.140 you want

01:39:51.520 that

01:39:51.760 because

01:39:52.000 it's

01:39:52.200 part of

01:39:52.480 what

01:39:52.620 keeps

01:39:52.860 you

01:39:52.980 updated

01:39:53.420 so

01:39:54.300 I

01:39:54.780 remember

01:39:55.020 the

01:39:55.180 first

01:39:55.340 class

01:39:55.600 I

01:39:55.740 took

01:39:55.940 at

01:39:56.060 Extension

01:39:56.440 School

01:39:56.860 it was

01:39:57.600 in

01:39:57.740 statistics

01:39:58.160 that I

01:39:58.480 went to

01:39:58.800 my

01:39:58.940 first

01:39:59.140 class

01:39:59.320 probably

01:39:59.560 dressed

01:39:59.860 like I

01:40:00.180 am

01:40:00.360 now

01:40:00.580 with

01:40:00.700 a

01:40:00.800 leather

01:40:00.960 briefcase

01:40:01.560 and

01:40:02.300 everyone

01:40:03.380 else

01:40:03.760 I was

01:40:04.080 not

01:40:04.420 the

01:40:04.640 oldest

01:40:04.920 at

01:40:05.420 all

01:40:05.780 but

01:40:06.260 everyone

01:40:06.500 else

01:40:06.820 is

01:40:06.960 in

01:40:07.120 jeans

01:40:07.400 and

01:40:07.620 t-shirts

01:40:08.040 and

01:40:08.340 backpacks

01:40:09.060 and

01:40:09.320 I

01:40:10.200 haven't

01:40:11.340 dressed

01:40:11.700 like that

01:40:12.240 for

01:40:12.560 decades

01:40:13.120 but I

01:40:13.560 went

01:40:13.760 out

01:40:14.020 and

01:40:14.200 I

01:40:14.620 got

01:40:14.800 a

01:40:14.920 couple

01:40:15.040 of

01:40:15.160 t-shirts

01:40:15.560 and a

01:40:15.820 backpack

01:40:16.140 and

01:40:17.300 the

01:40:17.680 most

01:40:17.960 transformational

01:40:19.880 thing

01:40:20.200 happened

01:40:20.520 to me

01:40:21.000 first

01:40:21.860 recognition

01:40:22.500 I'm

01:40:22.860 learning

01:40:23.180 something

01:40:23.640 I

01:40:23.920 want

01:40:24.500 to

01:40:24.740 learn

01:40:24.960 I'm

01:40:25.700 fully

01:40:26.180 engaged

01:40:26.620 and

01:40:26.840 that

01:40:26.960 makes

01:40:27.180 you

01:40:27.260 the

01:40:27.400 best

01:40:27.620 kind

01:40:27.820 student

01:40:28.240 I

01:40:29.200 think

01:40:29.660 so

01:40:29.860 but

01:40:30.020 everyone

01:40:30.400 else

01:40:30.840 there

01:40:31.680 were

01:40:31.920 Harvard

01:40:32.860 college

01:40:33.300 kids

01:40:33.720 there

01:40:33.900 taking

01:40:34.260 summer

01:40:34.540 classes

01:40:34.900 and

01:40:35.160 there

01:40:35.280 were

01:40:35.340 people

01:40:35.580 older

01:40:35.780 than

01:40:35.920 me

01:40:36.100 it

01:40:36.540 didn't

01:40:36.860 matter

01:40:37.240 I

01:40:38.320 love

01:40:38.620 teaching

01:40:38.980 at

01:40:39.120 the

01:40:39.240 extension

01:40:39.540 school

01:40:39.860 I

01:40:40.040 mean

01:40:40.200 at

01:40:41.100 Harvard

01:40:41.500 the

01:40:42.260 undergraduates

01:40:43.400 in the

01:40:43.920 formal

01:40:44.400 school

01:40:44.760 were

01:40:45.060 smarter

01:40:45.480 than

01:40:45.800 the

01:40:46.100 people

01:40:46.860 on

01:40:47.180 average

01:40:47.480 in

01:40:47.640 the

01:40:47.760 extension

01:40:48.040 school

01:40:48.400 but

01:40:48.900 the

01:40:49.080 extension

01:40:49.440 school

01:40:49.780 people

01:40:50.080 were

01:40:50.320 a

01:40:50.480 lot

01:40:50.660 more

01:40:50.920 motivated

01:40:51.380 to

01:40:51.620 learn

01:40:51.880 right

01:40:52.480 there

01:40:52.980 was

01:40:53.320 no

01:40:53.580 one

01:40:53.860 not

01:40:54.220 attending

01:40:54.700 because

01:40:57.820 probably

01:40:58.040 asking

01:40:58.400 questions

01:40:59.000 that

01:40:59.220 were

01:40:59.460 I

01:40:59.680 actually

01:40:59.860 took

01:41:00.040 a

01:41:00.160 psychology

01:41:00.540 class

01:41:01.040 probably

01:41:02.660 in the

01:41:02.880 building

01:41:03.120 of

01:41:03.320 William

01:41:04.060 James

01:41:04.360 yeah

01:41:04.660 and

01:41:06.000 you know

01:41:06.900 again

01:41:07.680 I was

01:41:08.600 there

01:41:08.820 with

01:41:09.040 a lot

01:41:09.600 of

01:41:09.700 even

01:41:09.840 high

01:41:10.180 school

01:41:10.620 learners

01:41:11.500 at a

01:41:11.780 summer

01:41:11.940 school

01:41:12.140 program

01:41:12.580 but I

01:41:13.460 realized

01:41:13.720 the

01:41:13.860 professor

01:41:14.160 was

01:41:14.320 enjoying

01:41:14.620 the

01:41:14.800 questions

01:41:15.200 I

01:41:15.360 was

01:41:15.480 asking

01:41:15.780 they

01:41:16.160 were

01:41:16.220 just

01:41:16.400 different

01:41:17.140 to

01:41:17.360 the

01:41:17.480 question

01:41:17.760 yeah

01:41:17.880 they

01:41:18.220 were

01:41:18.280 serious

01:41:18.580 questions

01:41:19.040 when

01:41:20.400 were

01:41:20.560 you

01:41:20.660 there

01:41:20.920 I

01:41:22.080 started

01:41:22.360 in

01:41:22.520 2015

01:41:23.120 2016

01:41:23.860 I

01:41:24.200 would

01:41:24.320 have

01:41:24.440 taken

01:41:24.660 the

01:41:24.840 psychology

01:41:27.820 point

01:41:28.100 is

01:41:28.620 that

01:41:29.440 the

01:41:29.880 recruitment

01:41:30.380 cycle

01:41:30.960 for

01:41:32.200 many

01:41:32.860 career

01:41:33.780 options

01:41:34.160 is linked

01:41:34.660 to the

01:41:34.860 education

01:41:35.220 cycle

01:41:35.640 so you

01:41:36.280 can't

01:41:36.560 change

01:41:36.820 one

01:41:37.160 without

01:41:37.380 the

01:41:37.640 other

01:41:37.860 you

01:41:38.460 have

01:41:38.660 people

01:41:39.720 say

01:41:39.960 well it's

01:41:40.360 fine

01:41:40.840 certain

01:41:41.720 companies

01:41:42.500 allow

01:41:42.800 recruitment

01:41:43.200 later in

01:41:43.620 life

01:41:43.780 but it's

01:41:44.060 not the

01:41:44.380 normal

01:41:44.680 thing

01:41:44.980 to do

01:41:45.320 it's

01:41:45.500 a

01:41:45.640 risk

01:41:46.000 so if

01:41:47.060 you're

01:41:47.240 a

01:41:47.380 woman

01:41:47.600 or a

01:41:47.920 parent

01:41:48.180 taking

01:41:48.480 time

01:41:48.860 out

01:41:49.140 to

01:41:49.380 raise

01:41:49.540 a

01:41:49.660 family

01:41:50.000 because

01:41:50.580 you

01:41:50.720 think

01:41:50.940 you

01:41:51.120 want

01:41:51.500 to

01:41:51.660 do

01:41:52.060 that

01:41:52.260 exclusively

01:41:52.720 earlier

01:41:53.160 on

01:41:53.420 that's

01:41:54.100 a

01:41:54.300 risk

01:41:54.560 today

01:41:54.780 you

01:41:55.000 might

01:41:55.200 not

01:41:55.400 get

01:41:55.680 on

01:41:55.860 that

01:41:56.020 path

01:41:56.340 and

01:41:56.460 you

01:41:56.540 might

01:41:56.680 not

01:41:56.840 get

01:41:57.040 the

01:41:57.360 recruitment

01:41:57.640 yeah

01:41:57.800 you know

01:41:58.140 I don't

01:41:58.760 really buy

01:41:59.200 that

01:41:59.520 I don't

01:42:00.040 really buy

01:42:00.480 that

01:42:00.740 because I

01:42:01.200 had one

01:42:01.820 student

01:42:02.120 for example

01:42:02.760 Shelly

01:42:03.960 Taylor

01:42:04.280 who

01:42:05.500 no

01:42:06.260 sorry

01:42:06.760 Shelly Carson

01:42:07.600 she came

01:42:09.580 back to

01:42:10.280 Harvard

01:42:10.960 as a graduate

01:42:11.660 student

01:42:12.200 at

01:42:12.700 in her

01:42:13.380 40s

01:42:13.780 I was

01:42:14.560 younger

01:42:14.800 than her

01:42:15.160 as her

01:42:15.680 supervisor

01:42:16.360 she'd been

01:42:17.200 an airline

01:42:17.580 stewardess

01:42:18.120 pretty middle

01:42:18.900 class life

01:42:19.640 had been

01:42:20.740 out of the

01:42:21.120 academic

01:42:21.440 stream

01:42:21.820 for quite

01:42:22.180 a while

01:42:22.460 and

01:42:22.680 was

01:42:23.440 quite a

01:42:23.880 lot older

01:42:24.280 than most

01:42:24.680 of the

01:42:24.880 graduate

01:42:25.120 students

01:42:25.540 and

01:42:25.900 she

01:42:26.860 hit it

01:42:28.100 hard

01:42:28.360 and

01:42:28.680 developed

01:42:29.040 a bang

01:42:29.340 up

01:42:29.480 career

01:42:29.760 and

01:42:30.000 she's

01:42:30.380 managed

01:42:30.680 that

01:42:30.920 quite

01:42:31.140 successfully

01:42:31.700 and I

01:42:32.120 think

01:42:32.360 that

01:42:32.600 that's

01:42:33.460 not

01:42:34.120 normal

01:42:34.580 you know

01:42:34.980 it's

01:42:35.200 not

01:42:35.340 the

01:42:35.480 standard

01:42:35.700 practice

01:42:36.160 but it's

01:42:36.620 by no

01:42:36.940 means

01:42:37.160 impossible

01:42:37.620 and given

01:42:38.140 that women

01:42:38.580 do have

01:42:39.020 that

01:42:39.260 seven year

01:42:39.800 advantage

01:42:40.520 in terms

01:42:40.960 of

01:42:41.100 lifespan

01:42:41.460 there's

01:42:42.560 man

01:42:43.220 you think

01:42:44.500 you're

01:42:44.700 out of

01:42:45.000 the running

01:42:45.500 on the

01:42:46.380 education

01:42:46.880 and career

01:42:47.340 front

01:42:47.640 when you're

01:42:48.020 35

01:42:48.400 you're

01:42:49.320 out of

01:42:49.500 the running

01:42:49.800 on the

01:42:50.060 reproductive

01:42:50.440 front

01:42:50.920 you're

01:42:51.820 not

01:42:51.960 really

01:42:52.280 out of

01:42:52.540 the running

01:42:52.860 on the

01:42:53.160 education

01:42:53.540 and career

01:42:53.940 front

01:42:54.240 and I've

01:42:54.620 seen lots

01:42:55.020 of people

01:42:55.500 hit the

01:42:57.380 education

01:42:57.940 ground

01:42:58.420 running

01:42:58.900 in their

01:42:59.720 30s

01:43:00.280 mid 30s

01:43:01.260 sometimes

01:43:01.540 later

01:43:01.960 and have

01:43:03.140 a whole

01:43:03.400 new

01:43:03.620 career

01:43:03.980 I mean

01:43:04.440 Jesus

01:43:04.720 at 40

01:43:05.420 you can

01:43:06.000 still have

01:43:06.360 30 years

01:43:07.240 at your

01:43:07.620 new

01:43:07.840 career

01:43:08.260 so that's

01:43:09.760 that's a

01:43:10.140 very optimistic

01:43:10.760 way of

01:43:11.240 looking at

01:43:11.720 it

01:43:11.880 and so

01:43:12.980 alright

01:43:13.780 so well

01:43:14.260 for everybody

01:43:14.720 watching and

01:43:15.400 listening on

01:43:15.900 YouTube

01:43:16.180 and its

01:43:16.740 associated

01:43:17.260 platforms

01:43:17.860 thank you

01:43:18.880 very much

01:43:19.240 for your

01:43:19.500 time and

01:43:19.800 attention

01:43:20.160 and to

01:43:23.120 Stephen Shaw

01:43:23.780 for agreeing

01:43:24.500 to talk to

01:43:24.960 me today

01:43:25.280 about birth

01:43:25.800 gap

01:43:26.080 and about

01:43:26.500 the issue

01:43:27.560 of declining

01:43:29.200 birth rates

01:43:29.820 and population

01:43:30.860 shrinkage

01:43:31.500 bringing that

01:43:33.420 to everyone's

01:43:33.860 attention

01:43:34.200 bringing the

01:43:34.940 issue of

01:43:35.780 unplanned

01:43:36.560 childlessness

01:43:37.400 to everyone's

01:43:38.660 attention

01:43:39.040 because that's

01:43:39.780 a crucial

01:43:40.140 issue here

01:43:40.800 to note

01:43:41.780 the existence

01:43:42.440 of a problem

01:43:43.180 and to give

01:43:43.640 it a name

01:43:44.120 is to bring

01:43:44.940 it out of

01:43:45.340 the darkness

01:43:45.840 and to

01:43:46.320 unshroud it

01:43:47.060 let's say

01:43:47.560 and that's

01:43:48.640 an extremely

01:43:49.100 useful thing

01:43:49.700 to do

01:43:50.080 and I'm

01:43:51.300 going to

01:43:51.500 talk to

01:43:51.880 Stephen

01:43:52.140 for another

01:43:53.240 half an

01:43:53.600 hour on

01:43:54.020 the Daily

01:43:54.300 Wire Plus

01:43:54.740 platform

01:43:55.220 I'd like

01:43:55.960 to spend

01:43:56.920 half an

01:43:57.320 hour with

01:43:57.780 my guests

01:43:58.380 investigating

01:44:00.000 how their

01:44:01.120 pathway

01:44:02.500 through life

01:44:03.140 made it

01:44:03.520 manifest

01:44:04.040 made itself

01:44:04.580 manifest

01:44:05.540 to them

01:44:06.240 both in

01:44:06.840 terms of

01:44:07.240 the problems

01:44:07.800 that gripped

01:44:08.380 them

01:44:08.640 the concerns

01:44:10.260 they had

01:44:10.760 both voluntary

01:44:11.880 and involuntary

01:44:12.700 and the

01:44:13.020 opportunities

01:44:13.480 that presented

01:44:14.120 themselves as a

01:44:14.820 consequence

01:44:15.260 and so if

01:44:16.040 you're interested

01:44:16.480 in that

01:44:16.940 then please

01:44:18.220 head over

01:44:18.600 to the

01:44:19.020 Daily

01:44:19.220 Wire Plus

01:44:19.780 platform

01:44:20.320 you could

01:44:20.700 consider

01:44:21.080 supporting

01:44:21.520 them

01:44:21.720 in any

01:44:22.020 case

01:44:22.300 they

01:44:22.500 have

01:44:23.020 also

01:44:23.360 worked

01:44:24.240 diligently

01:44:25.080 to make

01:44:25.580 the kind

01:44:25.920 of conversations

01:44:26.500 I had

01:44:26.900 today

01:44:27.220 possible

01:44:28.280 and that's

01:44:29.040 much appreciated

01:44:29.580 to the film

01:44:30.080 crew here

01:44:30.520 in Vancouver

01:44:31.620 because that's

01:44:32.380 where I am

01:44:32.720 today

01:44:32.980 thank you

01:44:33.420 very much

01:44:33.920 and thank

01:44:35.620 you all

01:44:35.940 for your

01:44:36.240 time and

01:44:36.520 attention

01:44:36.860 good to

01:44:38.020 talk with

01:44:38.380 you

01:44:38.520 you bet

01:44:39.760 you bet

01:44:40.320 hello everyone

01:44:42.840 I would

01:44:43.500 encourage you

01:44:43.960 to continue

01:44:44.500 listening to

01:44:45.380 my conversation

01:44:46.180 with my

01:44:46.740 guest on

01:44:47.780 dailywireplus.com

01:44:49.780 you

The Jordan B. Peterson Podcast - March 09, 2023

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

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