Episode #120. Navigating Unplanned Childlessness with Stephen Shaw documentary. Birthgap, the population collapse out of view.

Navigating Unplanned Childlessness. Birthgap, the population collapse out of view.

For many people, the idea of having children is deeply ingrained in their life plans. From a young age, we are taught to aspire to find a partner, settle down, and start a family. But for some, life has a different plan. Stephen Shaw joins us  to discuss unexpected findings that there is a 30 per cent increase in people becoming childless without meaning to.

Most think people choose to be childless, it is certainly the case for some and medical issues for others, however, unexpected childlessness affects 80% of people that find themselves in this situation and it leads to difficult and painful realities. This number has escalated in recent decades and is one of the reasons that birth rates are falling across the industrialised World in the documentary film called Birth gap, childless world. It was featured in The New York Chelsea Film Festival and we are going to be talking all about that.

Stephen J Shaw is the creator of the term "Birthgap," which is also the title of his new documentary. Through this work, Shaw explores the complex and largely unnoticed causes behind what he believes to be the most critical issue facing the Western world in the coming decades. Specifically, the documentary delves into the potential consequences of a declining birth rate coupled with an increasing number of elderly citizens living longer. In the worst-case scenario, this could lead to a total collapse of society.

Shaw is a British citizen who has lived and studied on three different continents. He began his career as a computer engineer and data scientist but later turned his attention to filmmaking, producing his first film project, "Birthgap," at the age of 49. He is also the president and co-founder of Autometrics Analytics LLC, a data analytics company. Shaw holds an MBA from ISG in Paris, France, and is currently pursuing further studies at Harvard Extension School.

So, how can you navigate a childless life? We explore this on an important and shocking episode of the Thriving Minds podcast. If you find yourself navigating a childless life, know that you are not alone. According to Stephen Shaw, the reasons for childlessness vary, and the emotional toll can be similar.

Here are some tips to help you cope with and change the future so it is not unexpected: become aware of the fertility window and its impact on delayed childbearing. Many individuals and couples are choosing to delay having children until later in life. While this can be a conscious choice, it can also lead to unintended childlessness because fertility declines with age.

Learn more here: https://www.birthgap.org/feed
Watch the documentary here:
https://www.birthgap.org/spaces/10215679/page

Transcript

Unknown: 0:02

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the thriving minds Podcast. I'm Professor Selena Bartlett. Today we're joined by Stephen Shore. He is the founder of birth gap.org. It's a social enterprise. And it's got a very specific mission to support communities around the world with the birth gap crisis. Why birth rates falling and falling at different rates across the industrialised World Documentary film is called Birth gap, childless world. And its was featured in The New York Chelsea Film Festival in 2021. So today, we're going to be talking all about that. So thank you, Steven, for joining us on the thriving minds podcast. Thank you very much. It's a real pleasure to be here. Tell us a little bit about your story, Steven? Well, it was a very strange moment for me because I seven years ago, I was looking at data and that's what I normally do, I simply look at data and I for my client for my business, which is a business which looks forwards we do predictive modelling forecasting for the future for different industries around the world. I saw some data about falling birth rates that I wasn't aware of. And I decided to look at more data for more countries and more countries. And I saw similar trends almost everywhere, in the industrialised world, and hence of it and other countries too. And it was shocking, it was it was shocking on every level one being the I didn't know about it, it's something you had heard about, I had heard about for maybe Japan is a famous case where Japan has had low birth rates since the 70s. Many people may know that. I also knew a little bit about Spain and Italy being like that. But when I saw this for Germany and Switzerland, and Austria and Canada, even starting in the US, and also Australia, my curiosity was piqued to the point of not only wanting to understand the reason for this for my own sanity, almost. But for my kids generation, they're all just but still in their teens. At that point, I realised that my children are being brought up without being taught or being made aware that the world is going to change quite fundamentally through this. It's not like we're going to shrink down slowly and barely notice, we're all going to notice, tell everyone about the aha moment and tell them that let's let's go straight to that moment, because I had it too listening to you was a really like we just stopped, looked at each other and went, that is not what we've been thinking about we all and then you pass this information to people that go, Well, we're having a population explosion, we need less people. Well, the aha moment, I mean, I remember where I was sitting, it was probably 18 months into the project. I'd been travelling and filming in Europe and Japan at the time and trying to find out what was common between these countries, there had to be a common connection yet no one could kneel as to what that might be. In Japan, it was work life balance in Europe, it was youth unemployment, etc, etc. But there was a moment when I merged together two datasets from the UN. I don't think it's ever been done before. And it's part of an academic paper. I'm writing myself now to documenting it all. But it looks at family structure, family sizes, across the decades the number of children people are having. And from that what I was able to deduce was societal childlessness. And that was that aha moment because what I realised that had happened in all of these countries. at the exact moment, birth rates fell, an explosion and childlessness occurred down to the month almost, it was just one of the most striking trends you could ever imagine. And the other side of the equation is that family structure has barely changed at all. So that what they mean is that the number of when we talk of mothers, because we have a lot of data on Mothers, its parents, really, but just to talk about, from a data point of view, the pores of mothers who are having two children might be typically 40 50%. in the country, that hasn't changed for decades, nor has a number having one two, well, 12345 even in Japan, I don't know the statistic at hand. But going back to the 70s, the proportion of mother's having 10 Children, it was always small, but it's the same today as it was 50 years ago. So the only thing that's changed the significance was the number of women number of people having no children at all. And so that was quite shocking. And you show this really clearly through graph in your documentary after a lot of research. Well, it was a strange moment for me because I'm And that was a moment I and I felt I understood what's been happening up until that point. I mean, I signed a documentary that I couldn't sleep, but actually mean that I mean, I was waking up in the middle of the night, thinking, why would humanity? Why would our species, all of them, starting at the same time, in not just Japan, but it was an early 70s, Japan, Italy, Spain, Germany, suddenly have this trend of low birth rates, yet they got different cultures, no one's ever connected them? And then why would it slowly spread to country after country after country? Right up to the present day. And you know, that doesn't happen for other species, it's something fundamental would have had to cause that. And every single idea, of course, there's many ideas that people have and for their own personal lives, they may well be true. But if I can just cover off one, a lot of people today make comments is because of finance that people today have, you know, less money than before less disposable income, perhaps. And I know that for many, finance is a challenge. But when you look at the data, what actually people earn more, they don't start having more children, they perhaps do other things, or what usually happens is that people just delay things further. So you cannot say that this is caused by people having less less funds available, even though that may be a very real thing for many people or indeed things like gardens many people have and governments have tried to solve this by offering more kindergarten options. That's a good thing. I'm sure these but when you look at the data, when you increase the number of kindergartens, the birth rate doesn't go up. So when I therefore saw childlessness, it gave me my first opportunity to start thinking, okay, now I know what's what the reason is, why have we got a trend and childlessness? And that really has been, you know, I guess my that's become my my passion, unexpectedly since since that time. So as you nailed it, the the kind of guiding principle is why is this happening all over the world? Not because whenever you mentioned this, people always say Japan, and that's an outlier case, or that's the instant reaction you get when you mention this information. And then they might say, and then you'll talk about Germany, and then you'll talk about Spain, because they're also in Italy, that they're more in the press. But what's been your guiding principle as to the kind of global phenomenon of this unintended childlessness? Yeah, just by the way, the term I'm starting to use, is unplanned childlessness. It's unintended as exactly right. But I think there's something about calling this unplanned childlessness, because it implies that we need to make some planning well, that without planning, there's an academic called a professor ENSCO Kaiser who has written a vast amount of information about this general topic of childlessness. And what she explains is that it's the word, that word that she doesn't like is the word choice. Meaning that there's no real moment in time when people choose to become parents, you're hoping that certain events happen at a certain moment in time. So rarely is a case of okay, I'm going to make that choice when 32 or 29. First you need to have the right partner you lots of things in your life need to line up. So what usually ends up happening for people who do become childless. And among in a moment that we'll talk about people who do do choose not to be childless, that's different. But for the people, the majority of people who are looking to become parents who don't, it's just the case of life drifts off. And that moment never happens at the right time, or when we get to that moment. Fertility challenges have kicked in. And this is this is where you get into deeply harrowing. Areas where, you know, I was pulled into conversation after conversation with women and men who are still trying to come to terms with the fact that, you know, this unplanned eventuality that this outcome for their life, trying to reflect and how did that happen? How is it that that life just went that way? So the good back, I think, to your question as to, you know, why is this happening in so many countries starting in Japan, Italy, Germany, you know, in the early 1970s. There's certain lifestyle changes that I think have occurred in that time. And I want to be really clear, we cannot go backwards to a time when we take away women's education or women's careers. Absolutely. I will kind of be the strongest defender of all of those things. What I think think has happened, though, is that we've pushed, we're, we're pushing people more and more towards the end of their fertility window women men, of course, we've simply made it more challenging for, for women to get the education, the training that they want to get it to a certain point in the career path. And on a societal level, that there's this effect. There's a famous economist whose name I forget, you know, set up very succinctly some time ago, just as a general motivation, we tend to do what everybody else is doing as success as a society. So if our friends are not having kids are not thinking of it until another two or three years, it seems that that becomes the right thing for us to do too, because it becomes a societal norm. And whatever it is, you can certainly see, I'm not give away the full details of the documentary, there's a lot of people to explore, to experience the story themselves. But certain things were happening in Japan and Italy and Germany around that time, there's financial instability at that time, that I think cause people to think, Okay, well, let's work for a few more years, let's defer having a child a little bit, we can always do that later, let's focus on work, because that seems the right thing to do, on what you've just done, that is reinvent society where that becomes a societal norm now. or so? Well, when you think about German English, not English, but language, and how we develop as a species around language, it is completely fluid through the mirror neuron system, what you're describing there. So how birds flock together, fly together, they learned together, like as simple concepts. It is really, like it is really like that it's an exponential, it can start out small. And then people start to see things good about this phenomena, and then they and then it literally is like an energetic change that can happen. And it can spread in an exponential way. Just like if you look at my mums, and dads era, everyone was having, they had a small family having four children, where we were most people had, between in a small country town had between seven and 12. That's who I grew up with. But me I'm a lot of their friends have four or five kids. And I look at all my friends, the next generation, we have between two and three, and anyone that has four is considered having a large family. And now I look at my children that are Annie had to yeah, there's my daughter and my son. And so you can see what you're saying is really is a social phenomenon, in some sense, as well. And, you know, a lot of people, myself included, talk about the future economic impact of that. And that can be a little bit cold, frankly, because you know, in some ways, certainly, you would have got pushback when people say, Oh, this is just about government's just the more money or corporations, the more consumers. But it's, it's it's so much more than that, in terms of how it will affect pensions and the ability to take care of the elderly, and provide enough health care and welfare for them. But if you move all that to one side, important as it is, it comes back to a reality that most of our industrialised economies today, somewhere around 30% of people are ending up childless. And the vast majority of those it was not by choice, it was unplanned. And when you look at for many of those people, how traumatic that is to accept, I know there'll be people listening to this podcast, and it may be a subject that is very difficult to listen to. Because a society's we've, this is a hidden problem. And we're not aware of just what level of suffering rays for many, many people. So if you're looking for me at what you're saying there, but birds flocking together gives me hope and a sense that we can in some way reverse this just by starting to understand, to talk to each other more about the reality that for many people who want children life will just follow its course if we don't reengineer things in some way. And that this is a good thing, because not only will it help people who to fulfil their lives, what they wanted to do, as well as helping the elderly people who need support through, you know, the growth of our economies in some way. So this is a subject that touches so many different areas. Yeah, well touches all of us, doesn't it. So let's just have some of these difficult conversations now about the topic that really put people in two camps in some way. Because obviously, I've reflected all of these conversations immediately to appeal in Miami. It circle added between 20 and 32. And then outwards for friends, family, etc. And the push back straightaway, which I know you get all the time. And this is close people. So we have a population explosion, this is a really good thing. Because these, this generation care a lot about the environment and the environment is going to end the world anyway. So why would we want to bring more children into this? Into this, you know, kind of new world? Don't you think this is a really good thing. So that would be one of the biggest push backs, I would say, in the generation in my children's generation, for example. Yeah, you know, there's so many ways I could start this conversation. But let me put something out there. First of all, we cannot scale populations. It's not like being in an aeroplane where you're at a certain altitude. And you know, the captain says, we're a little bit too high, we're gonna go down by 10,000 feet, and that is all smooth and you barely notice, population trends don't behave that way. You either spiral upwards, you stay about the same, or you spiral downwards. And what is about to happen, because it starts slowly, it takes decades to actually know this is a downward spiral. And in this case, the unfortunate thing is, when we're in that downward spiral, there's no rules as to how to stop it. No one knows actually how we assist societies ever go back to replacement level average of around two surviving for a woman. So we better start thinking about this now, because someone has to figure out at some point, some future generation is going to have to stabilise birth rates. So the idea that we can just go lie down without thinking about it just mathematically is not right. Now, are there too many people in the planet? Some people say yes, some people say no. Do we have environmental challenges? Of course, I'm absolutely on that side. But I, you know, in terms of what those challenges are, and what the solutions are, if you're to think that a solution might be having less people, it's going to take an exceptionally long time to ever have an impact. And the impact will be almost like a rounding error. So let me explain. Consumption today is based on a report published in Nature last year by seminary professors, if you look at the age groups that consume most that have the largest footprint that's between 30 and 65, people under 30, are responsible for around 8% of our footprint. So if you're talking to people today, in their 20s, who are probably thinking of having a family, you know, 10 years out, let's say it would be another 30 years beyond that, before you get to the 8% point. So we're looking at a 40 year window. Now, that would be 8%, you'd only reduce by 8%. If there are no children anymore, if there's no children in the world, that print would go on for another 40 years, I will be a supporter for everyone to simply have the life that they want. I think what we have underestimated, though, however, is that I think the assumption for most people would have been certainly for me is that most people who don't have children, for life, either chose it, that that's what they wanted, or they had some medical problems. It turns out both those things are actually the minority significant minority. Professor Kaiser and her research has estimated something like 80% people without children actually had plant of children. There's a bit of a grey area around that where some people How can you say, through trying to not have descendants kind of just move on and forget about that. But I've seen a two cases of talking to a woman 40s and 50s, who initially told me that they hadn't wanted children and the up breaking down and remembering that they had wanted children and they've been kind of develop some coping mechanism. And maybe that's fine. In many, many cases. This is more your expertise than mine. But what I could see, I think at a societal level, we have to understand that actually, the vast majority people it's surveys would suggest it's around 95% of us have some innate desire to have a family. Yeah. There's a couple of things that are that come through my mind from the modern wisdom podcast that I'd love to touch on here. It's such an important conversation because for so long women have had zero power in terms of leadership and development and education. And many societies actually got rid of women or value men over women in their culture. But now they're asking for women to step up and fix the problem again. But what you're saying is what we have to do is recognise that it's not against women being educated, that will solve this problem. It's about understanding that we're all in this together. And that we can read, make our organisation like, even still, if you're pregnant now and you're in a workplace, it's really difficult to get promoted. Still, I know it's a lot better. And we talk about more women being educated at universities. But the reality is, as me being a woman professor in science, you can imagine what I faced in the 90s, just to become a professor, it's very unusual. You know, it was very difficult. Put it that way. So what you're saying is, we're going to have to rethink how we work together. To write it's not just, if we want to have more children or allow people to could want to have kids work and be successful in their careers, it has to be an acceptance and an embracing of people having children, because that doesn't exist right now, in most organisations, still, I'm telling you, as someone that's can see it, they're trying, they say it, but in reality, we don't share equally the work of the home, we don't share equally, anything, really. But we're expected to bring the children into the world. So I think that whole conversation around what we can do to empower the society to think differently around gender and diversity is probably one of the big conversations that we would be able to have to this point, a documentary where I am one of the the crew asked me off off camera, you know, is this really a problem? And, you know, how do we cope with it? I, I know I say that there has to be a fundamental change. It's isn't about making some small tweaks to things, it's got to be something major. And what you're hinting on there is just changing some corporate policies to or increasing maternity leave, or paternity leave. Those only be good things, but they're not going to solve this this crisis. Well, I haven't so far I have. Where I get hope, though, is if you put there's a backdrop here that we all are living longer, and much as many of us would like to continue to retire in our mid 60s, perhaps is the norm these days. You know, for younger people today, if you're college age, now, the idea of retirement in mid 60s will be just unrealistic, almost laughable, because the societies will not be able to sustain the length of retirement and no two, three decades after that. And I don't think people will want to live those lives, because I think those decades are going to become more and more challenging. For the reasons we've said. So careers, I think need to be spread over longer periods of time. They need to ultimately morph into I think, second careers, or maybe third careers careers that I've heard of programmes. And I don't know, if we separate actually, I'm based in Japan, I moved to Tokyo and live here partly through this project. And this partly to understand, you know, how Japan is coping with this crisis. But, you know, I heard of programmes here where people in their 80s can do a few hours work a day in their homes, and still add value and give back to societies. And so let's just start the podcast in her 80s in the Bay Area, for example. Right. And I think it's a great thing on every level, I think to have continued purpose, and also continued community to help break down the barriers of loneliness later in life, if you're still interacting and producing something for society. I think that's overall good. But to come back to the point down about the when's the right time to have children, I think we should make it much easier to have career gaps, to you know, a lot of mothers, fathers too, I shouldn't just talk about mothers, it's too easy to do that. But people I think, should be given the opportunities to spend more time raising a family at a younger age, and then come back to their career not compromised in any way. And one of the ways that this can be done, I believe is allowing younger people to effectively start their main career in their early 30s. The idea of going into corporations having recruitment drives for people he's 32 to start their career. It happens but it's unusual. It's not the normal thing to do. It's a risky thing to plan on right now. might work out a few might not have your thinking that way, but on a societal level for that to be the norm that you do some work in your 20s you find your way. You try different educational paths to find the one you want, you might have a family or start a family. And he's 32. Because you still might be working on that same career for the next 40 years, 50 years, you still have enough time to develop and succeeded a career. And this makes me think about how the older generation also have to recognise that they have to change to embrace these new concepts of work for young people. Because when you get older, you get really stuck in new routines and your understanding of what a career is, and you think that should apply for many generations before you. So this is where the lifelong learning, changing your mindset to embrace these, this new way of thinking is so important to across the lifespan? You know, that's hard, isn't it? As you get older to think that all those young people let you know, by this age, I had kids by this age, I had achieved this. So why aren't they doing that? as well? I think we're going through a transition. Now I think in the past, generations were more similar in terms of focusing on one thing for a certain period of time. And that's just not working anymore. But you can see other you know, the gig economy, for example, is another reality that actually probably helps here that, you know, people I think are going to be more used to the idea of not depending on one career, certainly not one employer for life, I think that's ultimately to our benefit to allow us to effectively remain more flexible. And just just one point out and back to loneliness in this context. Again, I saw some data recently in the amount of time elderly people spend alone, even if they have families. You know, I think people imagine I've had to comment, oh, well, I'm, when I'm in my 80s. If I don't have children, I'll still my friends, if you look at data, in your alternative, spending very much time with friends at all. And so the medical issues really start over at is what I've discovered quickly and fasts more than I wanted to. And all the research now, one in two people over 80 Fall, which then D conditions their medical health, basically. And that's partly why they can't get out and about as much as they think they'd be able to. And we can't predict that either. And none of us know exactly what state of health so to assume that's dangerous. But to link that back to the extension of careers, you know, until loneliness, therefore, if we do engineer society that allows older people to have some career might not be the right word, but some jobs, some way of communicating with people. You I think it's it's Win win all around. Yes. So I just want to touch on one last point around this issue. And I remember. So I'm kind of your target audience, even though a generation older than, you know, others, I was a career person in science in the 90s, when not many people were but in Australia. And I remember this moment when my mother interfered and said, because I've been married, actually, for a long time. And we've been together 10 years, and I was 31, too. And at Christmas time, she gave me an outfit for Christmas. And inside the outfit was a little blue crocheted babies outfit. And basically, she said to me, it's time, and it honestly had not occurred to me. And fortunately, I was able to be conceiving four days after that moment that my mother instilled in me something without even knowing was going to happen. And I often look back at that moment and reflect on what you're talking about here. And that was really me too. I just got lucky, in some sense, because I was able to fall pregnant and have two children under 40, between 32 and 40. And, and maintain my career, which is really, really difficult. But, but I can see exactly what you're talking about, because I was one of your subjects, that fortunately, I ended up having children, but I could see equally now reflecting back, that that could have easily happened. And that would have been very sad. If that didn't happen for me, so I can see how it happens. Why it happens, and fixing it or changing it is a is a multiple gendered issue. It's not just women needing to delay their careers. It's also it's a rejigging of the whole thing. As you said, it's men and women delaying their careers. It's men doing more at home. It's more because as my friend who's a professor at Berkeley, went through the same thing didn't have a baby till she was 40. She said to me, Celine, and nothing's going to change in this world until men are doing the work at home as well. And that's so true. And I never agreed with her at the time because I was doing it all at home and at work, because that was my generation. But what you're seeing is a whole reframing really of how we think about how we work together towards solving this solution. There are a lot of ways issues that we need to solve. And maybe we should just talk about man a little bit here in this context. You know, I think there's a belief among men that we can wait for as long as we want, you know, the biological clock is almost infinite. And certainly, there's a feeling that you can wait until your 40s to then find that that partner, more and more I, I'm hearing this is quite a common thing. But there was an aha moment for me in this because I'm a divorced dad, I divorced just before his 43 kids. So like you, I feel very fortunate that life worked out that way. For me not so fortunate, we're divorced. But I think in my 40s, I also thought it might be quite easy to find someone and start a family again, but it doesn't get easier. You're older, and you're competing with men 10 years younger than you, for the women that are able to have children. So, you know, there's a shrinking pool of women because like, by early 30s, quite a lot of women are already in relationships, whether they're having children or not. So the idea is a man that you can just wait and choose your own time to find the right woman just isn't true at all. And it turns out, there's more childless men and childless women overall, because some men end up having two families with different woman more than women to the the converse. So, you know, actually, men are clearly just as important and women in this in terms because it needs a match. And it needs many things. I'm sure like you're saying in terms of being more balanced in terms of housework, etc. I can't deny that. But I think men first have to understand that there is a clock ticking as well and may not be a biological one. No, no, I was going to interrupt there. And it is a biological one. So there's I just there's amazing work now coming out around transgenerational epigenetics. And so they've shown that older men, because sperm has a big role to play and in childbirth, and say, ageing, sperm can lead to far more ADHD autism in in their offspring. So the end end, because basically, you're passing along, you know, lots of different information. So that just that's just coming out now that research and it's around the RNA. So not the DNA, which is your blueprint that you think of is stable, it actually gets influenced by RNA, and that and you're ageing, your ageing out of having fit sperm, so to speak. So yeah, so it all plays out for both of us. So that's why potentially if you think about evolution, and survival of the fittest, if we just go to straight biological terms, women could be looking for fit sperm, like outside, you know, like, I know, that's really base base way of thinking about it, but that it's also there to Yes, part of I guess evolutionary psychology might be the term now as to why which we did. And it's a fascinating area and learn more about that role, beholden to the history that have gone back to make us who we are today, I think, to come back to them fertility and the documentary I interview for fertility doctors, including Kardashians, fertility doctor or wine, he's got a wonderful way of explaining just what happens to you know, woman's eggs as they age. And I think there's a an awareness gap here that the it's not just about the quantity of eggs, the quality of women's eggs deteriorate really, quite sharply into the 30s, much sharper than I think most women might be aware of. And as well as that you have a very sad reality that throughout 30s The woman's ability to carry baby to term becomes more and more challenged. So we all do here you've mentioned friends having children in their, you know, in their 40s You know, my own sister gave birth at 41. But those are rarities I remember my sister was told the probability of her getting pregnant at that age was a belief 15% One five. Yeah, so the stories we hear about success stories wonderful as they are, are very much more the exception than the rule. My think that's the bit we want to point out I'm I'm talking about being lucky, but I do know that and I think about this a lot now. Even before your I've found you on the podcast I was thinking about this, even for my own kids is like no one ever talks about the fertility window in relationship to the Korea window. And I think that's something that if you do want to have children, that's something just like all facts. It's good to know And then then at least you know, you're making a choice in some sense, or you may not be too because other people may want to put it off. And so matching up to the right person, and the time window is actually quite tricky, because that's why, you know, people that used to have kids a lot younger, and they didn't live as long either. So it's very complicated scenario, without knowing that you need to know the facts. To come back to data. One piece of information that came out was that in all the societies, we looked at the chance of a woman turning 30, without a child, ever becoming a mother, is at most 50%. So I call, it's overly simplified, but it's a toss of a coin, if you don't already have your first child, only half of woman. And this goes across every nation that we've got data for. So I think there's a big overestimation partly because the career cycles, but also very significantly, because the lack of information like you say that people just don't know this. I didn't, I didn't pay attention to it when I was in the middle of my career, just doing a postdoc, and you're immersed in that environment, and you're just trying to achieve the goals. And you're not really honestly thinking about your age, and I was married. So well, there's a number of points. So everything has to line up, doesn't it? You know, it's not only that, it has to be the right moment for you. But you need to have the right partner at the right time. And there's some organisations out there providing information, there's been books written on this topic support groups, a lot of people just either don't have the partner at the right time they've gone through a breakup, they're you know, they people predict me woman from what I'm hearing from from women and women that want to compromise, you're looking for love first, you know that that often is that most important thing to them build a family around. So just one thing, if I can say birth cup.org, thank you for the introduction earlier, the documentary was the first step. The second step is creating education materials and creating awareness programmes so that people around the world, particularly educators, and any educator, please reach out to me we're putting together like education packs, with information with visuals, links, the documentary that can be used in teaching environments, just to make people more aware of these realities. And thank you so much for everything you've done in this space. I mean, it started as a interesting question. And now it's become a huge phenomena, hasn't it? The timing is interesting. When I first started out, I thought, I was able to step back from running my business enough to take a few months to do the first, we ended up going to 24 countries, by the way, and I interviewed 230 people, but I thought it would take a year, I thought I'd go to Europe for a couple of weeks a week in Japan. And that would be enough, but the project kept pulling me into it because I realised the problems bigger, and there are more problems here than I ever realised. And people are opening up to tell me deeply personal stories that they've never told anybody else, not even in their family or communities. So it was almost a sense of responsibility. They felt they just need to exist and has just taken over my life. Now my business is still there, but I'm very much passive in it and can't maybe I'm an example of someone changing career partway through just finding a new passion, for whatever reason, and then getting an extra if you look at the peak time when most people are when people consume most, it's between 830 and 65. So it's 30 years, before we get to a point where significant consumption takes place. And just to put a number in that Nature magazine came out with a paper last year with seven or eight professors who articulated that each under 30 People are responsible for around 8% of global emissions footprint, so only a percent. If you were to tell people today to have less children, and they were thinking of having children in the next 10 years or so and thought, well, maybe they won't or they'll have less children. That will be 10 years before they start plus 30 years to get out of before you got to a time of significant emissions. If you bring the world's population down by 10 20%, you're talking about a delay of 40 years before you even really see any significant movement at all. And even then it's only a very small amount. So population is a very inefficient way to try to deal with our environmental problems to the point that we may as put Well put that energy or that thought process into other ideas, other green technologies, other ways to, of conservation and helping with biodiversity things that can have immediate or near immediate effect population takes decades. Yes. And so the one fact that really struck me to give a visual to people is and this is work of Gosling. Rosling sorry, as well, where you have an inverted pyramid happening. So, so we're going to top out his his estimates and yours around 10 11 billion people. And that's right now. And that's, it might even be less. Yes. And I'm glad you reminded reminded me to make that point that we reached what Professor Rosling calls peak child about 20 years ago, it was just after the year 2000, that the world's number of children being born every year hit hit its peak, and it's been hovering around the same and it will start going down quite quite soon. So the reason the world's population is growing, we hit a billion last November. The reason for that is nothing to do with children, as that happened is to do with the fact that there's so many young people who are surviving, you know, life longevity, but also countries, for example, in Asia, Africa, who would have died at a very young age before they could have had families of their own. child survival has increased significantly. So we got a very young population to parts of the world, and those people will live out their lives. And all of the growth is a little bit counterintuitive. All of the growth we're seeing now is simply because the number of people who are passing on is so low, given that the plants so young, and we cannot therefore do anything about it. And yes, I think 10 Billions are realistic maximum, it might hit 11. Others think it'll barely touch nine, but I would choose 10 as the most likely number. Yeah. The next piece of this, that isn't so evident, but I've also experienced firsthand in the last couple of months, is the loneliness factor through ageing. And it's I mean, I'm not saying that it's up to the young people to solve this. But it requires engineering new solutions. As you mentioned, that's what this is all about is helping people see that this is not good or bad. It's just is what it is. These are the facts. So let's work out solutions around the new world that we're facing. So, you know, you talk a lot about in your documentary in Japan, where schools are closed. Yeah, preschools are closing, but older people are some of them jumping out of buildings, etc. You talk about Germany, where people are being buried without anyone there, I experiences in a very small way, watching people in hospital or older people not having visitors, people being photographed and removed from their beds after passing away etc, with no one there. These are very significant concerns for for anyone, all of us are going to be ageing and heading in that direction at some point. So we'd like to be surrounded by people that we'd love in some sense. So that's an unintended consequence that most people certainly I was not aware of. Yeah. And this going back to how I started the project, my my, my goal was simply to understand why birth rates have been falling around the world. But all these related topics opened up and I had no expectation I would be pulled in to people's lives the way I have been, particularly in the area of loneliness, and it is absolutely an older age issue of crisis. But it's also a crisis for those people who don't have children and, you know, in their adult years, where they're expecting to, and also the possibility that those people end up single as well. So I'm seeing loneliness throughout society and a level that, you know, is unprecedented, compared to, you know, a generation or two ago when just extended families were bigger, you know, you'd more siblings, you're more cousins, nephews and nieces, to help support you and yeah, what do you look to there in terms of people jumping off buildings in Tokyo? I mean, it's horrendous. This is one community where if you go back 4050 years you can see black and white photographs of children being everywhere. I mean, just everywhere. And you go there now and it's like a ghost community. The term I came up with in the documentary is yester lands, new places that were built for yesterday that today you know, are not well either they have high rates of how houses apartments with nobody living there. dilapidation. You've got no, I heard noxee Japan someone was telling me two or three days ago in a very nice suburb of two Oak Hill House had been unoccupied for some years. And what had happened was some patients had got into it, and, and various other vermin, and no one knew about this for a significant period of time. And now the entire street has got this problem, you know, with sort of living in an area where you've got falling populations with a lot of people living alone is, it's not easy to conceptualise, because in most people's daily lives, we gravitate towards communities that are more lively, usually, we don't see that side of it. But that's going to creep up closer and closer and closer to all of us. And in fact, and your core point, I think, was loneliness of the elderly. When I realised in that one community in Tokyo, where I spent a lot of time how many people there were in their 80s, you find that if you went early morning to visit, you'd see older people on on the bench a little bit, if the weather was nice to come out early in the morning, and they would sit and they might talk to you and you'd see them talking to each other a little bit. Not many. But the rest of the day, they would go back to their apartments. And it was it was back to like being a ghost town. And I couldn't believe when I heard that, in this apartment complex, maybe 30 different buildings all built together, there are 10,000 people living and occupancy is 90%. It's no I thought this was an area where every other apartment was vacant. But no, it's old people living alone, and mainly women living along because women typically outlive men. So you could just get the flavour of what life might be like their one little morning walk maybe a couple of times a week, and the rest of the time being spent alone in their apartments with with really no family and no one to talk to. It's around this. i One thought that came through my mind thinking about like, I don't know, if you've watched the documentary film to noble. I David Attenborough. So he starts out in the film, because they had that nuclear accident there, as you remember. And he starts out the film, how it is now it's like covered in nature. But there's absolutely no people there because it's not livable. So I often think about when I think about where we're heading, I often think about nature always wins in the end. So it's like a homeostatic system that if you over indulge on something, there's a force that brings you back to the natural, natural world in a way, and nature always wins in the sense. And I think, you know, to come back to your point about people who would want there to be less pressure on the environment, which is desirable, you know, nature may well win in future here, there may well clearly slipping, like there's going to be a lot less of us in future. But the journey to get to that point is going to be pretty unpleasant for humanity, and especially if we're not prepared for it. So you know, for all the problems we're talking about here, I think awareness of them can minimise the situation. And I am hopeful that to come back to young people, because I don't want to forget to mention that those people who are intending to have children who maybe are hearing this and hearing other commentators just talk about the challenges of having children, particularly for women in their 30s. I think the education system and the recruitment systems need to become much, much more flexible, so that people can spread their education over a longer period of time, we're going to be living longer working longer anyway. So why do all of our education before age 22 I'm a lifelong learner, and I love going back to take classes occasionally, but on things I want to learn to keep up to date on are relevant to me. And I think the idea that we kind of forced people into this high, pressured educational environment, training environment early in life, and then clearly incentivize people to focus on developing their career first, that needs to be rethought through. So I think there will be ways to people's lives happier to make communities happier, but we cannot stop what's already started. It's going to have some level of impact whether we like it or not, yes, I think that's the piece like you, you bring it to life in the film through Detroit as a really stark example. In America, for example, when they lost half their population. It became a very dangerous place to live because I was living in America during this period. I was in the Bay Area, but it was always in the news, what was happening in Detroit and even during the 2008. Crash financial crash their their houses went to$5,000. For example, And I remember I mean, a lot of houses went down. But I remember this example very clearly because there were people in Australia being sold the houses in Detroit. And because I'm from Australia, as well as thinking they don't understand what they're buying, for example, yeah, and I actually spent a lot of time in Detroit is where my business is based. So I think it's another reason, you know, I became so passionate about this project, because I could see Detroit and what happened to it. And you're right, oh, eight, those years, it was on the Daily News, not just about crying, but the streets had no street lights, and the council's weren't prepared to go out with wasn't safe enough to go to change the light bulbs, that there was vermin. These vermin problem, again, was overtaking the city, there were just random fires, because there's the fire services didn't have enough resources from the taxes of the people who were living there. And they didn't want to go to certain areas. That's right. So you could buy houses, I certainly heard of one selling for $10,000. But But you couldn't actually go there. Even if you lived in the area, people were buying those, but it wasn't safe to the private equity firms. Were selling them in bunches to people in like, as investments. Basically, during that time, you know how people always look for opportunity in these moments. But as this anyway, what I found interesting was the recovery process that you described to how it's a lot smaller, but people have somehow reinvented parts of the story there. Yeah. And then it's actually a great success story. So the Fallen population, Detroit happened, nothing to do with birth rates, but to do with the automotive industry workers effectively. Factories be moved to other locations across America and Mexico, etc. And there was an exodus. But you have the same problem. You're left with too few people. It was actually I think it was 63% reduction in population. And one of the facts is that the, the city of Paris could fit inside the vacant areas of Detroit. You know, this was a bass City, it was America's fourth largest, I think, third fourth wealthiest city, when it was in its heyday, you know, going back 6070 years ago. So the transformation is quite incredible. But what happened, there was a stabilisation of the population a certain moment in time. And there was the big moment in 2013, when they say declared bankruptcy, it just couldn't pay its debts. And for a city, you know, like Detroit, that gave it hope the population was stabilised, and enough of the streets and facilities were completely vacant by this point in time that they could raise them to the ground, they could bring back Parkland wetlands. So suddenly, there was a change in Detroit. I think because of a the the low cost property, a lot of artists moved to this city. There's some beautiful buildings with some beautiful light, and you find artists, you find musicians moving there. So I do remember, you know, just after 2013, being downtown Detroit, and the very first thing, Whole Foods opening there, there were there had been no grocery stores of any kind in downtown Detroit for maybe two decades. And suddenly, there was one store. And then after that you had like music being played at lunchtime for the worker, and it just suddenly this buzz started. So you can see how revitalization can absolutely happen. But the key point in this story is that happened once population stabilised. You they got to a point of staying around I think is 700,000 population thinks we're static. Again, the economy was rebuilt around that static population. And it was able to plan its future. The problem for all our economies with falling birth rates is, well, we're never going to get to that point until birth rates go back up to around 2.0. So that's the frightening thing. We're always going to be downsizing. What I came up with the term retro nomics really having to retrofit our economies, for you know, it based on the fact that there's just fewer taxpayers, there's fewer people to support the society. So Detroit turns out to be a great example of what it went through the challenges, how to cope with it, and what the possibilities are for future for us all, but a few people if I could just clarify, a few people think that our birth rate staying around 1.6, that stays at 1.6. That's stable, it is not stable. That means basically, you're nosediving at a constant rate, you're still going down to pull over your nosedive that needs to go back to what close to 2.0. So as we think one thing that we want to talk about here is that some women, like there's quite a lot of women that listen to this particular podcast as well. And me too. We're not trying to make Take out, the women have to go out and have lots of children to make up and look, after all the old people that have created the environment that we currently have. What we're saying is that we want to be eliminating the facts. And this is not an anti women or going backwards moment in our society. It's a recognition that we have created a better society through education of women and giving them a place in the world. It's about how do we work towards integrating all this knowledge to create solutions around the situation that we're now facing? That's something that you want to say very clearly, that's who you are as a person. Yeah, it's so important. I'm describing myself now as a pan natalist. panellist, meaning someone who will support people who wants to have children passionately, but also support people who do not want children passionately. This is not about encouraging, coercing telling people who just don't want to become parents that they have to do. So. That's just a backward step. And there are some nations there are some regimes that today can be seen doing that, more through coercion. Examples? Well, one example will be around right now where vasectomy is have been made illegal for example. Well to know about that. Yeah. So it's creeping into many, many. And I think we've got to be on the watch for this, I think we've got to be aware that there will be movements and politicians who, you know, support this, and they may dress it up in a certain way that it sounds appealing, but no boost of enthusiasm for it. So as we close out the podcast, Stephen, let's give the audience some hope. You're living in Japan to see how they can help solve some of these problems, because they're at the leading edge as you save the birth gap crisis. Can you see any glimmers of hope of how people are addressing this problem, even if it's at a really local level, there is hope. And I didn't expect a many times to come to this conclusion, but tell you that the greatest hope I have is when else screen the documentary to groups of young people, students. The reactions from young people, which is usually shock, on awareness, had no idea that, you know, the these things are issues that they have to confront earlier in life. And from one young Japanese college student. To me, she said it all she said, watching this documentary changed her life. And she didn't say any more than that. But I think I knew what she meant that she understood now that there is a balance, you can't have everything, or that young people in some way need to re engineer career work life balance to enable all of these things to happen. But in a different sequence to now. So I believe that young people will solve this. And I believe that that's where that's where it will start. That's, that's a great way to finish. Because I've learned a lot about this, too. I used to think that it was up to the older people to know, but I've come to see and lead through Gavin McCormick. He started 15 schools in India, and he was teaching young people how to help the older people in the farms get better at farming. And then they actually followed them. So and I've learned from other people, too, since that end in Canada, actually where there's people in foster care. And they're actually helping to teach other kids about adverse childhood experiences. And it's helped them heal four generations of adversity by reuniting with their great grandmother, for example, who had to give up the kids to foster care, because they had she'd lost her husband in the war, and thought the system would do better at raising her kids. And those young people are between 16 and 20, educating other young people in the world about how to break the transmission of multi generations of adversity. So I'm thinking, well, so maybe you're right, and maybe this is where to start making the biggest difference. I believe, just enclosing the nature of this problem is that there will be fewer and fewer young people and they're going to be a hot demand for careers, you know, they're going to be able to call the shots. And I think young people are going to be able to tell them lawyers, the kind of career work life balance that they need. And I think corporations will be forced to change to accommodate that more and for many, that should enable them to have children during a fertility window better than than today. So there really is hope here and if you don't mind me saying The first part of the documentary is on YouTube. Anyone, please let everyone know how to join and subscribe to what you're doing because I miss ascribe to it. Yes, for a nominal fee, we are encouraging members at birth CAPTA. Org, we are continuing our own research. You know, they The plan is to make workup to org significant more significant organisation with research in many countries around the world so, and the philanthropist who wants to talk to us about helping scale that would also be very interesting to us. But the main thing is that we want to keep all of the materials education materials, core parts of the documentary free for anyone to watch. So you know that that's something I'm passionate about. But you have anyone listening, I'd love to have you join, you can join birth cap.org for free, there's no cost or and or you can choose to make a small donation to Yes. So thank you so much for sharing your wisdom with us today on the thriving minds podcast. So many interesting new revelations for me and really changed my thinking to about the next kind of 40 years. So thank you so much. Thank you. Enjoy