The Depopulation Bomb： Stephen J. Shaw
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 7 minutes
Words per Minute
181.86194
Summary
In this episode, Francis Foster and Constantine Kissinger talk to Stephen Jay Shaw, creator of the film 'Birth Gap' and author of the book 'The Birth Gap' about the declining population. They discuss the reasons why more and more people are choosing not to have kids, and why this is a problem.
Transcript
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How can the world's population be collapsing if we're still growing?
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That's the conundrum. It really is counterintuitive.
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Last year, there were only 700,000 babies being born.
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I don't know why we're being told this absolute nonsense
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about population explosions when that was a thing of the past.
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What clearly occurred was a deferring of parenthood.
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Actually, more childless men than childless women.
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And this is a show for you if you want honest conversations
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Our brilliant guest today is a data scientist, demographer,
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and the creator of a very, very good and important film
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Oh, it's a great pleasure to have you on the show.
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You are talking about an issue that I genuinely think
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will be the biggest conversation over the next five to 10 years,
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that all of Western societies and actually, frankly,
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societies outside the West are going to be having
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and seeing as crucial to their survival, frankly.
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Before we get into all of that, though, who are you?
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How do you find yourself sitting here talking to us?
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My background is, first of all, in engineering, computer coding.
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For 20 years, I've run a data analytics company out of the US
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doing forecasting and data predictions for industries
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And seven years ago, I saw some data that basically pointed
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to the world's population collapsing that shocked me so much
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that I decided I needed to write a book about it.
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I thought, well, there's no way I'm ever going to do that.
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That's the end of this story for me, until I came across someone who was in that world.
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And seven years later, yeah, the Birth Gap Chalice World documentary, yeah, it is out.
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You should have made it a TikTok documentary if you really want to reach the young people,
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But Birth Gap, I've had a chance to watch part of it.
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Explain to everybody, look, we all know, right, that the population of the world is exploding.
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You know, we're going to be on nine billion people by whenever.
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We've got 12 good harvests left and all of that.
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So how can the world's population be collapsing if we're still growing?
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The reason the world's population is still growing is only because people are living
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In fact, in the case of countries like India, for example, like parts of Africa,
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where many people would have died in childhood, that didn't happen 30, 40 years ago.
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So as a planet, we've got a lot of young people who will simply live through their lives.
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And that's a good thing, but that's not going to go on forever.
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We know we will max out at no more than 11 billion, possibly a little bit less,
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And if you look at the total number of babies being born on the planet,
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we hit a maximum around 2014 of 143 million babies being born that year.
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It's never been higher and they don't think it will be as high again.
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So we're basically 10 million down already in 10 years compared to what we were in 2014.
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If you look at countries like where I live, Japan, it's just frightening.
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And frankly, the rest of the world is on the same path.
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What I'm getting at, though, Stephen, is to people who are not familiar with the issue that we're talking about,
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which is the fact that we're not having enough kids, basically, to put it simply.
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The narrative has been for many, many years, for decades, actually, that there's a population bomb.
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There was a book of that name that had a huge impact on how people thought about this.
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That the expanding population of human beings on the planet was a fundamental threat to the people who were already alive,
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And what you're saying is the opposite of that, which is we're not having enough children.
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So how does one reconcile that if it's the first time they've encountered your data and your information?
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Well, the data, the information we're being given is wrong, vastly outdated.
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We already knew back in the 70s that the world's population was going to peak.
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We already knew it was going to peak at around what we are now.
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And because we saw falling birth rates everywhere at that time, almost everywhere.
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But these voices have been there and they've infuriated me.
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I think that's one of the reasons I made the documentary, because I thought,
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There were teenagers at that time to prepare for the future.
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Not only that, the clients I have, including some pretty senior executives in industries around the world,
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who I'm talking to about planning and forecasting,
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no one in those corporations is talking about what we're talking about here, population decline and collapse.
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Why is it that we, through education systems, through the media,
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are bombarding us with this utter nonsense about population explosions?
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But the underlying trend, which is what we need to be focused on, is downwards.
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So, you know, something's become institutionalized to educate us.
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I'm not sure it's brainwashing, but I wonder, frankly.
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But we're being educated with information, using charts,
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where people start telling us the population in the year 1800 was down here, one billion.
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And these curves go up like this and they say, this is where we are now.
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And what they might even do is look upwards, implying that we're going up forever.
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I'm sure it's what my kids thought because the textbooks they use, they showed me, that's what they showed.
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But we know that we're going to plateau because there's so few babies being born now.
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So anybody who wants to talk honestly about population will be telling you, yes, we went through this.
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But we know it's going to maximize, going to plateau.
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We're then going to become a much older planet with people, frankly, who are going to be, you know, in need of care.
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And will not probably have the care that they need because workforces are going to shrink.
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And for many nations, another problem I have, frankly, is when people talk about total population.
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What matters to you and me are our own countries, predominantly, or the countries we'd like to visit,
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or our own communities, in fact, taking the total population of the planet.
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But we also need to be looking at what's happening under our own noses.
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And for the UK, if I can just share with you something.
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In the UK right now, there are around 900,000 people aged exactly 50.
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I like that number because 50-year-olds will retire in about 20 years, so 900,000.
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Last year, there were only 700,000 babies being born.
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So there's a 22% drop already in the UK in terms of that ratio.
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Now, in 20 years' time, whenever 50-year-olds go to retire, newborns will be the ones who are
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finishing school just about to take the jobs in the workforce.
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So, you know, when I look at that, you realize that life is going to change for so many countries,
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Like, I don't know why we're being told this absolute nonsense about population explosions
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You've touched very briefly on why this is not a good thing.
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Whether it's a good thing or a bad thing, we need to prepare for it.
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Now, let's say someone says it's good, someone says it's bad.
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And I think anyone surely would want to know how the world's going to change.
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I assumed that I was educating my kids for a future that was going to be similar to my generation.
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You know, so putting them on the same path, the same education, same career path.
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I would have expected a similar, hopefully, retirement path.
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But when you realize that the structure of societies where typically there's been a much smaller number
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of older people and a much larger size of workforce, that that is shifting to become what I call an inverted world,
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where there's so many old people to take care of and a shrinking workforce, what does that mean?
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First of all, taxes are going to increase significantly if we're going to be able to keep the same level of healthcare for older people.
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Something like I believe two thirds of all healthcare costs are devoted to older people.
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I don't know how the NHS is going to cope with that in the UK, never mind health services elsewhere.
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Most people think, I did too, that the money we take as pensioners, I'm not quite there yet,
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but the money we will get is the money that we were paying while we were working.
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The money we pay in towards pension systems in most countries today goes to pay for current retirees.
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So any generation is expecting or needing to appoint younger generations to keep paying in to support those pensions.
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So this is just an idea of the changes that we're going to be looking at.
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So Francis, I'm not saying that the world's population is too small, too big.
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And this change will last for the rest of the century.
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It's going to be a very long, slow, and I think quite painful change.
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So I just wanted people to understand that the world is not going to be the same for, you know, much of the rest of the century.
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Whenever I started my research, I couldn't understand why no one had really been able to explain why birth rates have been falling in many nations at almost the exact same rate, starting at almost the exact same time.
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So if you take Japan, around 1973, 74, there was a very sharp fall in birth rates.
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Many people have theories that, oh, in Japan, it's work-life balance.
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But I couldn't believe that this was a big coincidence.
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In fact, if you look at this trend, it started in these places at the same time and it spread throughout those regions.
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It just spread across now the entire more developed industrialized world and now far into the developing world.
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So the idea that there wasn't a common explanation was, to me, almost an impossibility.
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So I set out to see if I could find a connection.
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And it took a year and a half before I was even able to come up with an hypothesis.
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And that hypothesis finally formed in a bar in Tokyo.
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There's not many scientific hypotheses formed in the bars in Tokyo.
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After a year and a half, I noticed something strange.
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I couldn't find all that many people who had no brothers and sisters.
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And to have birth rates below, on average, two children per woman,
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you have to have a lot of people either with no children or with only one child or a mix thereof.
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And in this particular bar this night, I was there with some friends and there's other people coming.
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And I said to myself, okay, tonight, I'm going to try and ask at least 10 people if they're brothers
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and sisters. And if it's not more than one or two, you know, I think there's a thesis here.
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I ended up asking 15 Japanese people. And I think one didn't have any brothers and sisters.
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All the rest were two, three, four, one even had seven.
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And okay, I felt at that moment, I have to find a way to analyze childlessness in a way it hadn't
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been done before. Usually the way we measure childlessness is waiting to people are 45 years old.
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And that means there's a long lag and the analysis is a lot more difficult to do.
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So that was my challenge then. And that's the one thing I was able to identify. Be clear.
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I will say this, and please keep this in the edit. I will support 100% anybody who decides they do
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not want children. I will be the biggest supporter. This is not about trying to coerce people to have
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But those people are the minority compared to, if you look in countries like Japan,
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Europe, where this trend has been in place for many decades, less so in the US and other
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countries that are still transitioning. But what you end up with in countries with very high
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childlessness. So for example, right now in Japan, you have childlessness running around 35%.
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In Italy, it's 40%. Around 80% of those people had planned to have children. So four out of five
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people have planned to have a child and life took its course. And that's why I ended up calling it
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unplanned childlessness. So the reason is unplanned childlessness. And then the question is,
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why do people in the end not have the families they want to have? But that's your show.
00:15:16.560
Well, we'll get into that in a second. But let's first of all, just if we stick with the chronological
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order of it, the initial triggers, which you're talking about, and Germany, it's the late 60s,
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and other countries, it's the mid-70s. And you've talked, you talk in Birth Gap in the film about
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economic triggers. So it's the oil shock of the 70s, and so on. Is that your contention,
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that this is economically driven? Triggered. Triggered. Economically triggered.
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Yes. I suppose the obvious question from where I'm sitting then is, I mean, I'm not much of a
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historian, but I have studied some history. Like the oil shock of the 70s was not the worst thing
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that's ever happened to humanity. You know, and human beings had went on and had children after
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the Great Depression, they went on and had children after World War II, and during World War II, and all of
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the terrible experiences that human beings have always had, they've always, we've always bounced
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back. We've never had this issue as far as I'm aware of before. So why is essentially economic
00:16:17.360
disruption, why did that have such a huge triggering effect on this particular issue?
00:16:23.360
So it's a great question. And I don't cover this in a documentary, so let me go a little bit deeper.
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And just to explain, I've lived in Japan for six years, but I've employed a researcher,
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I've worked with academics there to look into the history of Japan around this time.
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If you look at the early 70s in Japan, what was happening was many people were moving into cities,
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getting new jobs, working for the car companies, electronic companies, things were looking good.
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And around that time, things started to get more expensive. Rents started to go up.
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More and more women were looking to work, but there are few kindergarten spaces. So there's tensions
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in communities trying to balance affordability of apartments, along with finding enough kindergarten
00:17:05.920
spaces. But still, birth rates were relatively high. Then the oil shock hits suddenly. And Japan was the
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largest oil importer in the world at the time. So their entire growth required oil. At that moment,
00:17:21.600
prices went up even more. Commodities you see in the documentary, shelves that were empty. This was a
00:17:28.160
stressed society anyway. Then something happened. And what clearly occurred was a deferring of parenthood.
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It wasn't that people suddenly decided, okay, well, I'm not going to have children. It was more that people
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decided, well, I'm not going to do it now. He's 25, 27. I'm going to wait till I'm 30. And that's the pattern.
00:17:50.800
So when we look at America, well, many countries actually, but to take the mortgage crisis of 07, 08,
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you can look at America, you can look at Canada, Malaysia, Netherlands, even New Zealand. Around that
00:18:04.560
time, childlessness was hovering around 15%. So let me explain a little bit, if I can, on this as quickly.
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What you see with childlessness are waves. Waves that happened when going back to the UK in the 1960s,
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the most common age to have children was age 20 to 24. Thirty years later in the 90s, that had shifted
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to 25 to 29. So it became natural to have children a little bit later. You wind the clock forward to
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now, and that's 30 to 34 in the UK is the most common age for women to have a child. You then interject
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some form of economic shock into that. And you're causing further delays into women's 30s, into women's
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late 30s, that mean, frankly, women aren't able to have the children they want to have. So just to come
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back to your point that, yes, during famines and wars, you're absolutely right. Those times in the past have
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been times when basically societies delay having children, but because it was normal to have children
00:19:04.720
younger, at the end of the war, at the end of the pandemic, at the end of the crisis, women were
00:19:09.520
generally still young enough to be able to have the families they want to have. Today that's changed.
00:19:15.840
And look, and let's be really honest about this. We're not, women are being sold a lie.
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They're being sold a lie of, you know, you can have it all. You can go out and work and
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have a career and do all of this and then have kids later on in your 30s.
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And the reality is, you're going to be far less fertile in your late 30s than you will be if you
00:19:35.520
have children in your early 20s. That question is going to make such a great
00:19:39.200
little Twitter short, mate. Just you go, the reality is, women have been sold down to the world.
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And I have to be a little bit cautious here because...
00:19:50.000
Come on, it's called trigonometry. Just let it rip.
00:20:00.720
Keep the distance away from your inflammatory language.
00:20:07.520
You're not 100% wrong. You're not. You're not at all. But the way I see,
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I don't think anyone's doing the selling. And I hope it's going to be easy to kind of
00:20:17.920
explain the reality that has not been shared up until now for whatever reason.
00:20:21.680
I think if you look at younger... I have three children who are now in their 20s. I think
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young people have, and their parents, frankly, are of the belief mostly that if you get an
00:20:35.520
education or training, it's then a good thing, clearly, to get a job, to get a career, build on
00:20:42.720
that to a point of stability. And then maybe in your 30s, why not? What we're not aware of for whatever
00:20:48.800
reason is that women's fertility, A, falls much faster than expected. There's a lot of variability
00:20:55.200
in it. Some people, some women are very fertile to 40 or older. Some lose their fertility by age 30.
00:21:01.200
So, we don't know about that variation. They're there for the risk. Also, we don't know that the
00:21:06.320
quality of a woman's eggs. A woman is born with all of the eggs she will ever have in her life.
00:21:11.280
Women do not make new eggs. So, two things happened during that time, and it's covered in a documentary
00:21:16.720
of Kim Kardashian's fertility doctor included to explain how this happens. You lose both the count
00:21:24.560
of eggs, but you also lose the quality of eggs. And then a third thing happens, which is the ability
00:21:30.080
to carry a baby to term. The risks associated with that go up. So, to be honest with you, and you'll see
00:21:37.760
it in part two of the documentary, which is not quite out yet, a little bit in part one,
00:21:42.320
where I started asking women in their 40s and 50s without children, had they intended to have
00:21:47.840
children? And it was a very delicate subject. And I have to be, I have to say, people watching this
00:21:52.320
and the situation, these are people internally grieving the fact that they had never families.
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And you see deeply emotional scenes. And it's heartbreaking. It's absolutely heartbreaking.
00:22:05.680
It's something that I think we should know more about as a society, just the fact that we've got
00:22:13.920
to be sensitive to people. So, just to give you an example, some people, perhaps many,
00:22:23.200
who don't have children in the workplace will see a colleague bringing their child to work or talking
00:22:29.280
about their children. Many of these people go to pieces when this happens. They'll go to the restroom,
00:22:34.320
they'll go to the toilet and just stay there. They'll go and have a walk. We don't realize,
00:22:40.080
certainly I didn't, the internal anguish that happens. So, to your point, society, I agree,
00:22:46.480
is not informing people, men or women, because men are trying to partner with women if they want kids
00:22:52.160
who are able to have children. Men also are in the dark here. And so, the question why that's happening,
00:22:59.120
I don't know. It's remarkable. We teach people so much about biology in schools, but we don't cover
00:23:07.360
Well, you're right. I think that, and this is, I said it on Twitter a while back, and people got
00:23:13.040
annoyed with me, as they do whenever anyone brings this up. But we've got to a position where a lot of
00:23:17.840
people, but particularly in this case women, are going to end up in a position when they're not happy.
00:23:23.360
They're not happy with where they've ended up. And I'm curious, I mean, the economics of this,
00:23:28.960
I imagine, are significant because, you know, my wife, for example, right now, she's not back to
00:23:35.360
full-time work by any stretch of the imagination. And our son is a year old, and I don't think she'll
00:23:39.680
be back to full-time work for a long time. And she doesn't want to be back to full-time work for a
00:23:43.760
long time. But for a lot of people, that is not a position that they can afford. They can't afford to,
00:23:50.800
especially if, you know, both parents have a high-paying job, and they need that money
00:23:56.400
to maintain the lifestyle that they wish to have and that they're used to.
00:24:01.360
That's an economic difficulty that I think didn't exist in the past, when 40, 50 years ago,
00:24:07.760
a family of four could live on one person's income. Typically, the dad would go out to work,
00:24:12.160
the mom wouldn't, and they could live on that comfortably. And it wasn't as big a deal. Now,
00:24:17.120
economically, that's not viable, but also societally, that's not quite viable either. Like,
00:24:23.680
the choice of giving up a lot of money to stay home with the kids doesn't seem like
00:24:28.640
a very appealing option to a lot of people as well.
00:24:30.880
I think partly, I have to say again, that people don't want to have children. We have to just
00:24:37.040
accept that. I think the challenge is the conflict, then, for those who do want to
00:24:41.200
and are trying to find the right time. I think the best way for me to answer this is to say,
00:24:47.840
if we're going to find a solution to this problem, we've got to make it more flexible for people to
00:24:52.640
have what I'm calling educational pathways and career pathways that make it easier to do things
00:24:59.600
at the same time or to take breaks from one or the other. Why are we cramming all of our education
00:25:04.640
into the first three, four years? I still take classes, college level classes, because I like
00:25:10.400
to keep up to date with things. And it's refreshing to study something that you want to learn at the
00:25:16.720
time you want to learn it that's relevant to you. I think we need to make education more flexible so
00:25:22.560
that people are able to have children younger. And why not have people start their careers for the
00:25:28.080
first time age 30 or 35? We're living longer now. The idea of retirement, I don't know what the
00:25:34.560
French are thinking about right now, but retirement at age 63, is it 65? Yeah.
00:25:39.040
Yeah, it's going to be 75. The young people today watching this, you're not going to retire until
00:25:45.600
Yeah. So why not start careers age 30 or 35 if you're going to have a 40, 50 year career anyway?
00:25:53.040
So I don't have all of the answers here, but I know the current structures that we have are
00:26:00.400
for sure not helping or are hindering many, many people.
00:26:03.600
And also the thing that we don't talk about as well is that women like to partner with people who
00:26:11.280
are, if not a similar level to them, education wise and earning wise, they prefer it if they're
00:26:17.600
higher. But then what happens if you get women who go to university? And by the way,
00:26:23.440
there are people, I'm in favour of women going to university and, you know, educating themselves.
00:26:29.440
Stephen, they're just jokes, right? You look so tense. Just jokes, mate.
00:26:32.960
Right. So, you know, so women going to, you know, education, they have, they come out,
00:26:37.520
they have this amazing career, they have this amazing job, and then they want a partner.
00:26:42.720
And then they realise that the partner that they want comes from a very, very small pool
00:26:47.600
in which a lot of women are competing for that small pool of men.
00:26:51.600
Well, that's right. So this is called hypergamy. It's, it's, it's absolutely true that women do
00:26:59.840
cross-culturally prefer to partner with men who are at least as successful, whatever that means,
00:27:06.400
as they are. And that's not going to change because that's part of who we are as a species.
00:27:12.240
Men don't mind. Men will marry down, but actually prefer less women who are more educated,
00:27:18.960
it seems to be. We've got to accept that that's a reality. Now, your point is absolutely right,
00:27:25.120
because if you look at colleges in the US right now, almost two thirds of people at US colleges
00:27:30.080
are women. Even in Thailand, it's 60%. It's, it's a global trend that women are focusing more
00:27:36.160
on education. This is a problem. I don't have an answer to this. In some ways, I have to say that,
00:27:41.440
you know, men need to be studying harder, you know, or not dropping out of colleges. I mean,
00:27:45.120
I heard recently the dropout rate for men at US colleges is much, much higher than women.
00:27:51.680
So this is another problem we have to confront. Maybe if you personalize it, you would say if,
00:27:57.760
if a woman wants to be sure of finding someone, you know, don't leave it until you're 35 and through
00:28:02.880
all your, your graduate education, et cetera, because you're right at that point in time,
00:28:06.160
there will be a very small pool of people who you might feel you want to partner.
00:28:10.400
Yeah, because that's the real challenge. And you know, you have to feel really sorry for these
00:28:15.360
women, particularly, you know, I have relatives of mine who are doctors. You, you work really hard
00:28:22.160
at school, you then go to university, then you then have to go through medical school,
00:28:26.480
you have to qualify. And by the time you've done all of your exams, you're in your early 30s,
00:28:30.960
mid 30s, and you've pretty much just started your career. And then you have to go,
00:28:35.040
oh, right, now I have to think about kids. It's, it's huge. It's huge. And you wonder,
00:28:42.560
what are we going to do to be able to actually overcome this challenge? And do we just need to
00:28:48.720
start talking more honestly about female biology? One of the interviews that we did was a young
00:28:56.560
German medical student. It didn't make the final cut of the documentary, but I will be including her
00:29:01.600
in some future coverage. I think she was 23, 24. And she had decided to take a year out of medical
00:29:09.920
school to have a child. And she was laughing with us. Yes, it's a struggle, but you know,
00:29:17.040
you should see what it's like to be a doctor and have a child. And she had decided that if she didn't
00:29:21.760
make that the right time for her, she'd probably end up being childless because she saw so many
00:29:26.960
older doctors who were childless. And she was making, she made it work. To be honest with you,
00:29:32.800
she was one of the happiest positive energy people. And of course, when you're 22, 23, 24,
00:29:38.080
you do have more energy for things like that. And again, I have to say, I don't want to pressure
00:29:42.080
people to have children younger than they want, but we have to make societies more flexible so that
00:29:47.440
those who might consider this are better able to do so. Well, look, none of us wants to force,
00:29:53.760
this is kind of, I think, part of the reason that we can't have this conversation the way we need to
00:29:59.920
is, you and us, to some extent, are very tense about coming across as telling other people what
00:30:06.480
to do. None of us, just to be clear, none of the three of us wants to tell women or any other human
00:30:12.640
beings how they should live their lives. However, we are also starting to see that some of the ways we've
00:30:18.880
been living as a society are not, generally speaking, creating the highest amount of
00:30:23.920
fulfillment, meaning, purpose, and happiness for people, right? And so we should be able to
00:30:29.120
acknowledge both of those at the same time. I think that's really, really important, actually.
00:30:32.800
And, you know, we make all the jokes about it to diffuse the tension, but I know exactly why you are
00:30:38.560
very careful about this, because it's a very difficult issue to talk about. And we'll come back
00:30:43.280
to talk about the issue itself in a second, but one of the ways that this difficulty of this issue
00:30:47.600
showed up recently is your experiences at Cambridge University. Tell us about that.
00:30:56.320
So I was invited by a student at Cambridge University to give a presentation, to show the
00:31:01.600
documentary in a Q&A, and I was greatly honored. And any students who want to invite me to universities
00:31:06.480
anywhere, I'll try and be there. The student's name was Charlie Bentley Astor, who I didn't know at that
00:31:12.880
time, but I've got to know her quite well since. And she explained that at Cambridge University these
00:31:18.560
days, it seemed to be quite a thing to protest. And that she warned me, we might have some people
00:31:26.080
who were upset by the documentary. Well, when I first heard that, to be clear, I've screened the
00:31:32.560
documentary 40, 50 times, including to universities, international students, from various podcasts.
00:31:39.360
I think there's now over 15,000 comments that have been written about the documentary.
00:31:46.080
Not one of those comments or one of those prior events would have ever given me any reason to
00:31:51.040
think that anyone would want to cancel my documentary. Why? It's about life. It's about
00:31:54.960
people. It's people's voices. I don't even come up with a conclusion in it. I simply say, here is the
00:31:59.920
world and here is data, hard data, real people. And most of the people I interview are women. In fact,
00:32:07.040
the entire crew, other than me, there's about nine of us involved in making the documentary.
00:32:11.200
They were all women, except me. And it wasn't, I went out to try and find women to make this
00:32:15.440
documentary. Women gravitated towards this project because they want to also hear answers from other
00:32:20.880
people. So when Charlie told me there might be a few protesters, that was, well, okay. My first thought
00:32:27.600
was, I'd like to meet them. I'd like to sit down with them. I'd like to talk to them about why they're
00:32:30.800
protesting and talk to them about their lives and how the world's going to change.
00:32:35.920
What actually happened was on another scale. There were protesters in the street a week before
00:32:41.680
the event took place. Varsity Magazine wrote a hit piece on me challenging the documentary,
00:32:50.320
but giving no reason for it whatsoever. Yet no one ever contacted me. No protester said,
00:32:54.960
hey, Stephen, can you explain this data? They didn't even watch the full documentary. They only
00:33:07.120
Well, the reason it was actually cancelled was St. John's College felt that there'd be too much
00:33:11.520
noise protest during exam time. So that was the excuse.
00:33:14.880
Well, that's the heckler's veto. But why are they heckling in the first place? What's wrong with
00:33:19.440
talking about this issue? They've called me anti-feminist, misogynist, bigoted, racist.
00:33:32.800
Welcome to the club. That's what we all are now. Why? Okay, look, anti-feminist and misogynist,
00:33:42.400
I'm not saying you are, obviously you're not, but I can see how people can add two plus two and get
00:33:47.120
about 75, right? What does it have to do with racism?
00:33:51.200
It's ridiculous. I mean, clearly, people are just trying to use terms. As Charlie put it,
00:33:56.640
they're trying to intimidate other students and academics from attending this event. So by throwing
00:34:02.400
out these words, act or they're not, it's just a warning to stay away. So the question there goes,
00:34:07.760
these people don't know me. They don't know the documentary. There's something in the subject
00:34:11.760
matter they don't like. And I hear it might be to do with the definition of a woman. I think putting
00:34:17.280
the term mother and woman in the same sentence today is provocative to some people, perhaps.
00:34:22.000
That's what's been explained to me. So I'm a data scientist. For me, it wasn't just a cancellation
00:34:30.640
of the documentary. It was an attempt to cancel UN data. I mean, the data I gather is purely from
00:34:37.520
government sources. And it's an attempt to cancel the voices of the world, mostly from women.
00:34:42.320
And something's clearly very, very wrong in society. When universities were places where
00:34:48.240
people go to absorb new ideas and to reject them or accept them or change them, that even now in
00:34:55.680
universities, at least of all, Cambridge. So I'm actually going back next week. We're going to try
00:35:01.760
one more time before the end of the semester to screen it. I think I've been told if it's canceled
00:35:06.560
again, I'll become the most canceled person ever at Cambridge University because everyone else who
00:35:12.080
got canceled eventually went back and were able to kind of do their speech or whatever.
00:35:19.680
So I didn't know this part of it. I thought the reason that they were upset with your documentary
00:35:25.360
is, you know, you were telling women to get back in the kitchen. That was their interpretation.
00:35:29.760
But it's not. It's the mere idea that mothers are women, essentially.
00:35:36.000
To be honest with you, no one's given me a specific reason. I mean, even if you read farcely,
00:35:40.640
there's no specific reason why this documentary is in any way upsetting to anybody. So the interpretation
00:35:48.400
I've just given you is what I've been told that the group of people, the 90 people who were due to
00:35:54.720
come and protest, often protest against trans-related issues. And that's very sad. I mean,
00:36:00.320
these are people I actually want to reach out to, to sit down with, to talk about their lives.
00:36:07.360
That's because you haven't met them. Anyway, I'm just kidding.
00:36:10.000
But Stephen, moving on, there was this part of this, which I feel we're not talking about,
00:36:16.240
which is fertility levels are also dropping as well. So I was reading about certain studies
00:36:21.920
that were looking at male fertility and saying the quality of sperm in, I think it's something
00:36:27.760
like men in their twenties, is inferior to quality of sperm of men in their fifties.
00:36:34.240
And how much of an effect is that having on this particular?
00:36:37.440
This comes up quite a lot. And the answer is, if it is having an effect, we haven't really seen it
00:36:45.840
yet. It may be starting to be part of the data. We'll see in future. But one thing I'm very sure
00:36:52.960
of, that is not the reason for the start of this trend. This trend started in the late 60s and 70s,
00:36:58.800
and has basically been on a continuum since then. So applying modern or more recent
00:37:06.080
possible explanations doesn't work out. I get perhaps the most amusing one. I got a comment on
00:37:12.960
one of the sites that they thought Ronald Reagan was the reason for this whole problem when it started
00:37:19.520
in Japan in the 1970s. So people are often taking things that they hear that are more recent and
00:37:24.960
implying. I get this a lot. But now you have to find a reason that can explain this going all the
00:37:30.880
way back to the 70s, and to explain why it started in some countries before others. Only then can you
00:37:37.360
Well, I feel like we still haven't quite got there in terms of our conversation here,
00:37:41.440
because we talked about the economic shocks that people experienced in those countries,
00:37:44.960
and that those societies that have seen a reduction in the ratio between earnings and the cost of
00:37:52.160
living essentially, right? It's become harder for a family to survive economically.
00:37:58.480
But I still feel like there's got to be some kind of cultural stroke psychological dimension to this
00:38:05.360
where we have become more risk averse. And I think we see that in other areas of life as cultures
00:38:10.560
generally. And I certainly would posit at least that the way we talk about climate change and the way we
00:38:17.760
talk about the future of the planet has an impact on how people feel. Do you know, the number of times
00:38:22.320
I've talked to young people, and probably at one point thought myself prior to really educating myself
00:38:28.240
about these issues properly, you know, that there is this sort of human beings are the virus narrative
00:38:33.920
that's going around. Do you know what I mean? Like, there's too many of us, we're causing too much
00:38:38.080
of a strain on the planet. Why would we bring another person into this world that's about to collapse
00:38:42.720
anyway? Like that is definitely out there as well. Do you think that's a contributing factor here?
00:38:47.600
I worry that that will be a contributing factor in the decade or two ahead, because I do hear that
00:38:54.240
more and more from younger people today. Frankly, birth rates are already so low, if that, you know,
00:39:00.720
that could put us really over the age if that becomes the case. And it's sad because, you know,
00:39:05.760
first of all, I don't think we should be ranking our crises. I'm as concerned about the planet as the next
00:39:10.640
person. The dialogue that we have around the environment, you know, frustrates me, frankly,
00:39:15.440
because we only seem to talk about certain aspects of it rather than, for example, technical solutions
00:39:20.560
that we should be talking about. We should be talking about everything if we're genuinely worried
00:39:25.440
about it. So, but the idea that whatever you think in terms of the environment, that someone can
00:39:33.600
say to somebody else, do not have children. That's morally wrong. You might want to say,
00:39:38.960
be careful how you raise your children, you know, in terms of consumption. Maybe that's okay.
00:39:43.600
But I've heard of situations, I've heard of professors in universities in the US telling
00:39:48.560
the classes they should not have children. And that's just shocking. That's beyond immoral to me.
00:39:54.560
If you were to say, let me bring in one of the other points about my findings. In all of these
00:40:00.800
countries, once a person, once a woman becomes a mother, family structure has not changed in decades.
00:40:08.080
So back to the US in the 80s, back to Japan in the 70s, the proportion of women in Japan having
00:40:14.080
four or more children was 6% in the 1970s. Today, it's exactly the same. Now, that was quite a shock
00:40:21.120
to me to find out, actually, once a woman has her first child, she's typically going on to have as
00:40:26.000
many children as it looks like she will want to have, because that structure just does not change.
00:40:31.840
But as a new father, just to interject briefly, that makes total sense to me. Because once you
00:40:36.160
have your first, it's like Pringles, once you pop, you can't stop. Like, you're going to have as many
00:40:40.640
as you're going to have, because they're great. You know what I mean? For the vast majority of
00:40:44.640
people, it's just the experience transforms you. But it's getting people over that line is what you're
00:40:49.360
talking about. So the reason we are where we are is not that families have become smaller,
00:40:54.720
it's just there's way more people not having children at all. Yes. Right. So, but I still feel
00:41:01.120
like we haven't quite got to why that, my sense is my cultural and climate related explanation,
00:41:07.440
you feel is much more forward facing. But in terms of why we have dealt with these economic shocks and
00:41:14.000
the cost of living issue in the way that we have, do we have any sort of sense of why it is that for the
00:41:21.040
first time in probably human history, we're whittling down our own society. Do we have an
00:41:27.520
idea of what that is? Well, to go back to these triggers, the oil shock, the mortgage shock, etc.,
00:41:33.040
also in Korea, the currency crisis of the mid-90s, there's multiple examples of this. What you find
00:41:40.000
is a very quick transition to high childlessness, but it never goes back. It locks in. So the question,
00:41:45.520
to talk about the culture around this, societal norms change in some way that lock in a new
00:41:54.400
pattern. And that pattern is one where people have children later. So I think what's happened is, frankly,
00:42:02.880
as societies, and this is cross-cultural, I mean, you look at Japan as a culture, you look at Europe,
00:42:08.480
different parts of Europe, the US, even Brazil is suffering from the exact same problem, even Russia
00:42:13.040
Russia, and Ukraine. So you look at all of these places, and you find that across all these cultures,
00:42:22.080
once people start delaying parenthood, it gets locked in. And I equate this a little bit. In Japan,
00:42:30.080
we have words for this. The person who was hired a year or two before you is called Senpai. So
00:42:38.240
everyone has a Senpai, and Senpai has a Senpai. And then the people below you are like Kohai.
00:42:43.600
So it helps me with this terminology. If you are particularly a woman, and you've just turned 30,
00:42:49.120
and you're Senpai, and Senpai, Senpai have not had a child yet, you're feeling as well,
00:42:54.320
it's probably not my time yet, because I might be perceived as, you know, so you're not even thinking
00:42:59.520
of it. And what you might be thinking is, well, when Senpai, Senpai, boss's boss, has a child,
00:43:06.480
then there'll be a promotion opportunity. So I'm going to wait for that. So I think the way, you know,
00:43:11.120
the world kind of welcomes people to kind of delay parenthood around this. So it becomes a cultural
00:43:19.120
phenomenon, but yet it's cross-cultural, if that makes sense.
00:43:23.120
That makes perfect sense. So essentially, once you've had the transition from having children
00:43:30.560
young to not having children young, it becomes a locked-in cultural phenomenon that people
00:43:35.200
essentially memetically take on from others around them. And then you add to that the economic
00:43:40.240
rationale for, well, I'll get my career sorted first, then we'll have kids. And because of that,
00:43:45.600
as you say, 80% of the women who end up being childless did not intend to be childless.
00:43:50.480
In countries that have gone through the full transition. So in the US, there's a lot of
00:43:55.600
women right now hoping to become a mother who are aged, you know, 35 to early 40s. And just
00:44:02.960
statistically, you just look at the chances are not high. I mean, that's one other fact, just I
00:44:08.720
love sharing if I can, that in every country except one, and the one is Israel, I'll talk about in a
00:44:15.440
moment. In every country I've looked at, women turning 30 without a child only have a 50-50
00:44:21.840
chance of ever becoming a mother. 30. In Israel, it's 31. It's just a little bit older. And when I
00:44:30.960
ask people on a survey, what age do you think it's 50-50? 40 was the most common answer. So again,
00:44:37.920
we have this mismatch about what is possible. We talked about fertility, but fertility is not the
00:44:43.120
biggest reason people aren't becoming parents. It's because they're not with a partner at that
00:44:48.480
right time. So they're working on their career, 32, 33. Maybe they do have a partner at that time.
00:44:54.000
Now everything's good for one of them, but maybe the other partner isn't quite ready.
00:44:57.840
Or maybe there's a breakup or a divorce, or maybe you actually don't have a boyfriend-girlfriend
00:45:02.000
partner at that time. Not having a partner at the right time is the biggest reason. And that's
00:45:07.360
what I wanted to tell people at Cambridge was that, you know, one of the comments in I think
00:45:12.800
Varsity Magazine from one student, a medical student, was that they don't need to be told
00:45:16.880
whether they want to have children or not. What I want to tell them is actually it takes two to have
00:45:21.280
a child. And finding a partner at the right time is therefore really important, and most people skip
00:45:25.600
over that. And it's also the fact as well, you know, we're talking about the 60s and population
00:45:33.040
collapse. I mean, the pill must play a massive part in this, surely?
00:45:41.840
So you would say so. And the counter argument to this is that in Japan, the pill was not made
00:45:52.800
Really. And do you know, even today in Japan, only 3% of women take the pill. Three.
00:46:01.520
It's incredible. I didn't know that to quite recently.
00:46:06.240
But let's go back. So the pill, I guess late 60s, 70s became commonplace across much of the
00:46:12.160
industrialized world. And we, like you, many people, me too, I'm sure in the past would have
00:46:17.040
said, oh, the pill has enabled women to... Well, in Japan, there was no pill. What happened is there
00:46:22.560
was a huge increase in abortions there. So with or without the pill, women were able to decide
00:46:28.160
whether they want to have children or not. So you have to put that... And by the way, I have to say
00:46:32.000
again, a caveat. I do not want to have any say on whether a woman wants to have an abortion or not.
00:46:37.280
That's her choice. Not my business. So the fact that there's the pill alone, you know,
00:46:44.240
that's what I said no to. But for sure, women have a lot more control over their biology.
00:46:50.320
But unfortunately, we are not educating women well or men on how short fertility cycles can be.
00:46:58.640
And it's also as well that now women are being fed this, you know,
00:47:03.120
this story that... And look, it works for some women as well, where they go,
00:47:07.440
well, you know, technology is getting better and better. You can freeze your eggs. I've heard
00:47:11.920
certain companies say to female executives, oh, we will freeze your eggs and we will pay for it,
00:47:18.560
which you think sounds great. And you're going, hang on, that's really dystopian.
00:47:22.720
And it's not just executives. It's young recruits, young women being brought from university
00:47:27.360
are being sold this as a benefit. And when I first heard of egg freezing,
00:47:31.920
I thought this was a great idea. I thought this is part of the solution.
00:47:34.560
Um, but the more I thought about it, when I realized that people are just delaying parenthood
00:47:39.280
until they don't have a partner or they don't have energy. Um, in a way, I love the way you
00:47:44.240
pointed at me. I haven't slept for a year. I haven't looked as good for a year. Don't point at me when
00:47:50.080
you say they haven't got energy. So I've got 40 year old dad energy. That's what I've got.
00:47:56.640
I'm sure you do. Um, I, you know, um, now I've lost my track.
00:48:03.200
No, I'm so sorry. You were talking about, uh, egg freezing. Yeah.
00:48:06.800
People delaying parenthood to a point where they're old like me.
00:48:10.960
Well, I think it's dangerous to assume that egg freezing will, will on mass solve this problem.
00:48:16.800
It may solve it in a very few cases. And that's wonderful. Um, I've got a fertility doctor in Tokyo
00:48:21.680
who's just, you know, working with me right now to say, how can we let people know that that's really
00:48:27.360
might be a last hope resort that may or may not work. So I think we have to put everything in
00:48:31.920
perspective and, um, you know, if technologies get better and people are able to have children
00:48:36.640
later in life, well, that's great, but we're just certainly not there yet.
00:48:39.440
Steven. So your, your key takeaway message and correct me if any of this is incorrect
00:48:44.160
is you don't have as much time as you think. Yes.
00:48:49.120
And if you get to 30 and you haven't got kids, your chances, statistically speaking,
00:48:54.880
of having kids at 50, 50, at that point, my wife and I, we had our first son at 39,
00:49:00.080
very late, probably have another one. Uh, just I, my, my wife comes from a family,
00:49:04.320
like her granddad was born as like the 15th child and his mom was like 58 at the time.
00:49:09.680
So she's maybe got genetically, uh, in a better position, but you don't have as much time as you
00:49:15.440
think you don't, right. You don't have as much time as you think. So if you want to have children,
00:49:19.600
basically you need to find a partner and try and make it work by around that time.
00:49:23.680
If you haven't already, if you want to be a mother or if you want to be a parent,
00:49:27.440
it's about prioritization. It's what's important to you. And if someone decides, you know what,
00:49:31.760
I'll take the risk. I'm going to, you know, that's fine. So I don't want to force people.
00:49:35.360
I don't know if they're saying that. But that's not what I was saying.
00:49:37.520
Yeah, right. I was saying, if you want to be a parent, that's kind of the strategy you want to follow.
00:49:42.240
Now, societally, uh, the question for me is we, we touched on some of the impacts earlier,
00:49:48.800
but I actually think we didn't quite go as deep as we could because when you talk in,
00:49:53.120
in the movie, one of the stats you gave, which I was like, whoa, you said there are more adult
00:50:00.480
diapers being sold in Japan than baby diapers already.
00:50:04.560
Already? Yes. It's been like that for quite a while, actually.
00:50:08.080
That is terrifying, isn't it? Yes. Um, so, you know, I live in Japan and the reason I'm there is
00:50:16.240
because I'm passionate about this issue. I'm actually passionate about trying to help save
00:50:20.720
Japan. Uh, one of the great things there is that everyone in Japan intensely knows about this topic.
00:50:27.440
Um, it's on the media every day, the government are, you know, making, uh, regular, you know,
00:50:34.560
policy changes to try and address it. So it's a place where I hope if anywhere in the world can
00:50:38.640
solve it, it might be Japan first. Um, because you're right. And another statistic, um, in Japan,
00:50:48.000
this data goes back a few years, but within the last five to 10 years, the average number of people
00:50:54.240
waiting for a care home was around 400,000 people. Uh, when you get to an age in Japan
00:51:01.120
of needing a care home, you can't take care of yourself. You're living alone.
00:51:04.800
That is the moment you can put yourself on the list to wait for a care home. So you need a care home,
00:51:09.440
but you can't be on the list until you need it. Why? Because there aren't enough care home spaces.
00:51:13.760
The average time I think from then to wait on a care home place is three years. So you've got people
00:51:19.040
who literally are unable to take care of themselves and able to address themselves and able to do
00:51:23.200
anything living for three years before that place in the care home opens up. Japan is a template for
00:51:29.200
much of Europe. Um, can I say, let me say it here. I haven't said this before, but, um, you know,
00:51:35.200
I'm from the UK originally. I didn't have a vote here, but, um, because I don't live here, but I am pro
00:51:42.160
Brexit. And at the time of Brexit, um, I, you know, contacted some newspapers here to say, look, I think we
00:51:50.320
should do a, an article using some of the maps I've created to show how grim the situation is in
00:51:55.760
Germany, Italy, Spain, much of Europe, because people need to know just how fast Europe's going
00:52:00.320
down the hill economically, as well as in terms of the care of the elderly there. And, uh, I, I,
00:52:06.800
I used the slogan, if you like, I was using the term, it's safer to be out because of what's going to
00:52:12.000
happen in Europe with this rapid aging of old people that that's already well underway. And, um,
00:52:18.720
so it's not just Japan, it's on, it's on our, you know, or on your shores here in the UK. Um,
00:52:24.720
and it's catching up so much, so fast in so many parts of the world.
00:52:29.280
And I think what people probably haven't been able to quantify, but it's undoubtedly the case,
00:52:34.640
is an aging society changes, uh, everything. It changes whether people start businesses or not.
00:52:41.840
It changes whether there's innovation in, in society, because as we all know that once you
00:52:46.000
get to a certain age, you, you become less flexible and less willing to take a risk. I mean, that's why
00:52:51.360
young people are much more risk hungry because that's the time you're supposed to be trying things
00:52:56.800
because you've got time to fail. You've got time to make a mistake. You've got time to do that.
00:53:00.960
Economically, militarily. I mean, it just seems to me that this is a huge issue, as I said to you at
00:53:08.000
the beginning, that people don't even understand the implications of, let alone the implications of
00:53:13.440
the implications, the second order, third order, fourth order consequences.
00:53:17.280
Yeah. We haven't gone into too many of those, but just a very obvious one is that we're going to have
00:53:22.560
too much housing for the number of people in our societies. And today in the UK, that's probably
00:53:28.160
hard to understand because there's seen, it seemed to be the other way around at the moment, but that
00:53:33.040
will change. And, you know, these are societies therefore that will have decaying communities
00:53:38.560
where houses will become desolate, where communities will become desolate. I feel young people will
00:53:45.920
mostly move away from those communities. I think certain towns will become what I call magnet towns that
00:53:51.200
people gravitate towards, mostly younger people, which become quite expensive. The older people will be
00:53:56.320
left in the decaying towns without enough health care. Taxes are going to go up for everybody. And then
00:54:02.000
you take national debts. So most countries, Japan certainly, all countries, I want to say, have got
00:54:08.160
significant national debts. And these tend to get larger rather than smaller. Well, if you have a
00:54:14.240
shrinking workforce to pay the interest on those, I mean, you're going to have a real pressure on the younger
00:54:20.080
people to continue to have anything like the quality of lifestyle that we've had before.
00:54:26.640
So communities are going to look different. And yeah, I really worry about loneliness and all of
00:54:35.680
this. You know, we haven't used that word yet, but that is a core word that I think that we need to
00:54:40.960
apply. It's not the right word. People who don't find a partner, people who don't have children when
00:54:49.520
they wanted to have children are likely to face a level of loneliness. And there's many support groups
00:54:55.920
online already for this. You can see, you can read the stories, you can even read the stories. I
00:55:00.640
imagine after this podcast, you'll see comments coming up of people in this situation who, you know,
00:55:06.160
who left it too late dealing with a level of loneliness. But then you take older people.
00:55:11.200
So there's a community in Japan where I visited where 50 years ago, it was filled with younger
00:55:16.720
families. And today it's only older people, but it's mainly older women living there alone because
00:55:21.440
partners, men tend to die younger. So you have this situation where we went to the local grocery store
00:55:28.480
and we hear that these women come out maybe once a week to do the shopping and they're spending
00:55:32.720
forever talking while they're paying for their groceries, because that's the only person they're
00:55:37.120
getting to talk to weekly. And we've got to do something about this. Clearly, we can't let people
00:55:42.080
remain in their apartments without a sense of community. But we're going to have to think about
00:55:46.880
so many issues, so many problems that come out of this that we're not scratching the surface of yet.
00:55:51.840
And Stephen, is there, sorry Francis, just I wanted to ask this one other question on this.
00:55:56.880
Other than sub-Saharan Africa, where people are very happily breeding away and enjoying big
00:56:01.920
families and all of that. And there's fewer childless women, I think. Am I saying anything
00:56:07.120
that's incorrect? Yeah, but I don't think they're enjoying having bigger families.
00:56:10.000
If you, the reason people have large families is typically because of extreme poverty. Yes.
00:56:18.640
Once you put in running water and opportunities for education, that changes completely. Right.
00:56:24.400
So what you can say is in sub-Saharan Africa, where people are having fewer children year by year,
00:56:30.240
it's quite significant. But still there, you have extreme poverty in many areas and that's causing
00:56:35.440
larger families. I think it's a better way to put it. Okay, that's a more accurate way of putting it.
00:56:39.760
Is there an antidote? I've spoken to some people from Israel recently and they're telling me,
00:56:44.240
you know, Jerusalem is the best place, there's kids everywhere, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:56:48.240
Is Israel, does Israel offer some kind of solution? Like where can we look to for some answers to this?
00:56:54.960
So there's two places that are interesting. One's Israel, one's Hungary. Israel is a very stratified
00:57:01.120
society. I've never been there. I hope to go this year, but I can see from the data very clearly,
00:57:05.520
you have quite high childlessness and rising childlessness. It's about 20% there now,
00:57:11.600
but you have 15% of mothers having six or more children. Right. The Orthodox, I imagine.
00:57:19.280
People tell me that. Yeah. But there is something interesting in Israel. The most
00:57:25.840
common family size in Israel is three children. And that's quite rare. Usually it's two.
00:57:32.640
So is there a learning there? Perhaps, again, I don't ever want to tell someone to have more
00:57:37.360
children than they naturally want, but I don't think we're going to get 15% of mothers in other
00:57:41.920
countries having six or more children. That's just not realistic. Hungary is the other one where they have
00:57:46.320
a lot of policies. For example, in Hungary, if you're a young couple, you can get a loan to buy a house
00:57:54.320
and the loan will increase depending on how many children you effectively commit to up to four.
00:58:01.600
So you're going to get a bigger loan to get by a bigger house without even having had your first
00:58:07.440
child. If you don't have four children, well, you have to pay some of the money back. So you only,
00:58:14.240
you actually, you only get the benefit of this loan when you actually have children.
00:58:19.520
Now the interest, and I'm not saying that maybe that's coercive, but what is interesting about it
00:58:23.840
is the actual structure of family size and Hungary has not changed at all. Like everywhere else,
00:58:27.760
you don't have any more people than before and wants to become a parent having one, two,
00:58:32.320
three, four children, but you do see a significant reduction in childlessness.
00:58:39.280
Quite significant. And it's too early yet to say that this is causal,
00:58:44.240
but it's certainly something I think we should look at. Is there a way to, you know, through loans,
00:58:49.440
encourage people to take away economic vulnerability, which is there for people to say, look, okay,
00:58:54.640
if you do have the children you think you're going to have, you know, here's this and you have to pay
00:58:58.000
back some of it if you don't. Again, I don't want to comment necessarily on what's good or bad here
00:59:02.800
and specific policies, but those are two countries. I could talk about Russia very briefly if you
00:59:08.240
wanted to. Of course. Because Russia is also sided with us having policies that have somewhat
00:59:14.000
successfully encouraged people to have more children. And Russia's birth rate did dip very low
00:59:18.160
and then did go back up. But if you look underneath this, up until 95, the most common family size in
00:59:26.000
Russia was one child. Over half of families were having only one child. And I don't know why that
00:59:34.640
is. But from 95 onwards, that started to normalize, normal mean become more similar to other countries,
00:59:41.760
where two was the most popular and the number of people having only one child fell sharply.
00:59:46.400
So it wasn't really an increase in overall birth rates. It was a reduction in people only having
00:59:51.040
one child. Whereas right now in Russia, birth rates are just falling through through the roof
00:59:55.520
since around 2015, I believe it is. Births, I think, are down. It might be 30%. So, you know,
01:00:01.760
all of these countries that people look at and go, oh, Russia did something good here. It's never as easy
01:00:06.320
as that, or it's rarely as simple as that. And do you think as well, part of this problem is,
01:00:10.800
and Constantine has actually mentioned it more in passing than anything else is society,
01:00:15.840
particularly Western society is very anti-natal. So whenever I hear you talk about South Korea,
01:00:22.480
you talk about, and correct me if I'm wrong, 0.8 is a replacement rate in South Korea.
01:00:29.040
I was reading about South Korea the other day when I was researching for this interview.
01:00:34.080
They have child-free zones in, you know, I think it's in an island in South Korea.
01:00:42.000
And they say, you know, children are allowed in coffee shops, restaurants, et cetera, et cetera.
01:00:46.880
And then you go, and then you wonder why people don't want kids.
01:00:52.400
South Korea, I did film there with several people from Korea up here. It's a culture where there are
01:00:59.280
issues, work-life balance. And, you know, women do get paid less than men. There are certain cultural
01:01:04.720
issues you would point to. The term that's used in the media is birth strike, but none of the women I
01:01:10.640
actually talked to in Korea were saying, well, I'm on strike. So I think that's a cute media term.
01:01:18.800
The reality is women in Korea are starting families very late, much later than other countries. And
01:01:24.400
they're not achieving the same family size as other countries would do. And Spain's very similar as
01:01:31.760
well, by the way, in terms of the number of people starting families really late. So in those countries,
01:01:36.000
you find very high proportions of families with only one child again. I hadn't heard of the child-free
01:01:41.680
island. I must research that, but it sounds horrendous. And you know, the anti-natalism,
01:01:45.600
it is out there. I, you know. Oh, 100% it's out there. Yeah. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. You meet so
01:01:51.520
many people. I'll be honest with you. I used to be like that. Before we had our son, I used to find
01:01:57.520
kids annoying. I do. And I think the fewer of them are around, actually, the more annoying you find them,
01:02:02.880
because they become the anomaly. It's like almost everybody's had experience of getting on a plane,
01:02:08.160
seeing a baby, going, oh, for fuck's sake, I'm not going to get any rest. I'm not going to get any
01:02:12.160
sleep. Whereas I think if everyone was having kids around you, it would be a whole different
01:02:18.160
experience because it's like, well, it's just part, like you get on a plane, there's going to be some
01:02:21.760
kids on there because there's going to be some men and some women. It's like part of the thing.
01:02:25.280
Do you know what I mean? Yeah. So I think there's an awful amount of it around.
01:02:29.920
Do you know the thing that irritates me most? There's a term used a lot, and we haven't used
01:02:36.880
it here. I don't want to ever use it, but it's putting the word child and free in the same,
01:02:43.120
yeah, I call it the CF word. And the CF word is used commonly in the media. It's used in some
01:02:49.520
academia. But the word free means free from something harmful. And the idea that children
01:02:55.920
are harmful. So you put the word free after disease free, germ free, debt free, mortgage
01:03:01.920
free, things that are universally negative, not something that you want and you don't want,
01:03:08.960
not a selective thing. So the idea that there's people out there who would use the CF term,
01:03:16.120
you know, as a parent, I find it offensive. The idea that I might want to be free from my children.
01:03:20.860
Or if a teacher in school was saying to my children, when they're younger, that they are
01:03:29.500
child free, what would that do to a child hearing from a teacher? Oh, maybe my parents also want to
01:03:34.700
be free of me. I mean, it's damaging to children. So this is where I see this, well, not exactly
01:03:41.000
subtle, quite obvious, antinatalism creeping in everywhere. And I think that term just has to
01:03:47.040
be called out for what it is. Well, I think on a more positive level, I always try and talk about
01:03:53.600
how much I enjoy being a parent just to get the idea out there that it's actually a lot of fun.
01:03:58.560
It's not something you want to be free from. It's something for if it's right for you, like you want
01:04:03.120
to make that happen. So we're going to go to our supporters only questions in a second on Locals.
01:04:08.960
And they've got a bunch of great questions for you. But before we do, just so wrapping it up,
01:04:13.980
if I'm watching this, I'm 23 years old, I'm a young woman, I want to be a parent. I do want to
01:04:21.500
be a parent at some point. What are you telling me? Start thinking from now about how that's going
01:04:29.340
to best happen for you. Don't wait until you're 28, 32, 35. And be aware that you will have to make
01:04:37.980
compromises, almost certainly. Something will have to give. And if you don't make a decision for
01:04:43.960
yourself to have a child, unplanned childlessness will be the consequence. You may have your career,
01:04:48.540
and that might be fine. You may have friends, other extended family, that's fine. But the thing
01:04:53.280
that is most likely to give is family, if you don't in some way start to consider it from age 23.
01:04:59.120
And if I'm a policymaker listening to this, because there are some of those too,
01:05:03.440
what are you telling me? Show this documentary in all your schools.
01:05:07.040
Or start education about this in schools. Because people need to know about fertility
01:05:13.780
challenges from high school age. They need to know that there's only a 50-50% chance of becoming
01:05:19.080
a mother. And men that's only a little bit older too. People need to know that when they're planning
01:05:23.980
their lives. Policymakers spending more money on enabling people to have children may be a good
01:05:31.080
idea. More kindergartens, that might be good, but those things don't fix the problem. They never have,
01:05:35.280
and I don't think they ever will. It's about information.
01:05:38.300
It's been an absolute pleasure having you on. Before we move to locals, our final question is
01:05:44.000
always the same. What's the one thing we're not talking about that we really should be?
01:05:47.820
Well, unplanned childlessness. I know I've already said it. But I'll say unplanned childlessness in a
01:05:56.040
broader context here. We've talked a lot about women becoming unplanned childlessness, but it happens
01:06:01.140
to men too. And how it happens to men is we think we can wait and wait and wait, because technically,
01:06:08.100
mostly, we're able to have children later than women. But do you know what happens? Age 45, you're
01:06:13.960
competing with a 35-year-old version of yourself to find the same woman who's able to have children.
01:06:19.460
So there are actually more childless men than childless women. And I think men need to understand
01:06:25.220
that this applies to them just as much. That makes a lot of sense. Stephen, where can people watch
01:06:31.000
The Birth Gap? So birthgap.org is a website we have. Part one of the documentary is on there. The other
01:06:38.740
parts are available for members only because we're working with some streaming services right now to
01:06:44.340
look at possibly having them brought out later this year. Part one is also on YouTube. I caught it on
01:06:49.680
YouTube and I thought it was absolutely fantastic. So I recommend everybody check it out there and continue
01:06:54.540
to follow it. And we will go over to locals. Join us there. He says, I agree with David Attenborough when
01:07:02.080
he says all our environmental problems become easier to solve with fewer people and harder and
01:07:07.520
ultimately impossible to solve with even more people.