#868 - Mads Larsen - The Hidden Truth About Our Collapsing Birth Rates

28:28But a lot of that migrant Islam taxation cost of living COVID jab, you know, this is very specific to the country and yet we're seeing birth rates across the world change. So can you just square square the circle of the dynamics for me of what is universally happening? that's causing this to occur because presumably the intersexual dynamics and the sex ratios in different countries are all at different levels and yet we seem to have this sort of universal degradation of birth rate. Yeah, so let's line this up along the these bottlenecks that I talked about. So I like to view this as something that happens in three steps.

29:12First, you have to be able define a partner. You have to date, you have to find someone, you have to read that, you're a couple. And that has become increasingly challenging. The next step is that you have to decide to have a children and there there are different hindrances and then you have to be able to make one. Now the latter one is not, it seems not to be that big of a deal as you're aware, sperm quality has decreased 40 % among men, but according to the experts, it's still more than good enough for making children. So it's not that we're not able to. Now then there are some problems for women because they postpone having children but women aren't, their fecundity has not decreased in all likelihood at the early ages.

29:55So the latter bottle seems not to be a real issue. And then you have to say just to step in there, you mentioned at the early ages, but obviously if the first and the second one, finding a partner, getting a partner, then push you Yeah, third one, the third one can then become right. I've jumped out of the building. But yeah, yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. So the issue that there hasn't been changes in for quantity for quantity seems to be the same or better than before. So it's not that we're not able to have children, but yeah, when women start very late, then it becomes more problematic. But that is not more problematic than it used to be.

30:28It's just that women are starting later. So then we have to look at the world. So we're and so we're in the world, we're birth rates, where people are still reproducing and growing, or in countries where female equality is not a very high value. And this is an important factor. This is a result of the empowerment and liberation and equality afforded to women in the process that has been ongoing in the West's in for like 800 years. In here, it's very important for me to state that I am an enormous supporter of equality for women. I am such a big supporter of that that I would like also women in the future have the same rights and opportunities that women have today.

31:09If we continue down the path we are now and just self eradicate, those populations that are left are not champions of women's freedoms. So when we go into this and we talk about what has happened with women over the past, say, particularly 150 years, that explains much of the first bottleneck. But describing these mechanisms and this process is not, doesn't mean that I'm against it. I'm just describing these are the mechanisms that are at play. This is how human nature plays out in certain environments and I wish it wasn't that way, but it really seems to be that way. So this is what I will be describing.

31:53So what we talked about last year is that our lineage over the, yeah, it's interesting to look at the last six million years. We became as pair bonding species around four million years ago. And women only evolved an attraction to men that motivated sufficient pair bonding and reproduction in really impoverished environments. So men, as we talked about, because their promiscuous attraction system is so generous, there are a lot more willing to have sex with women and engage with women than what were a lot many different kinds of women than what women are. So if a man activates her pair -bonding attraction system, that can be a man with similar mate value as she has.

32:42They fall in love, they have sex, they have a child. But if you have an environment like you have now that appeals predominantly to a great extent to the promiscuous attraction system, which is what Tinder does, etc, then women will be a lot more selected. So I have a few things that have happened here. Women have been empowered to have their own jobs, make their own money, be free and importantly to choose their own partners for the first time in human history. The result of that has been that the better women are doing, the more they exclude the lowest value men from their potential pool of partners.

33:21And with prosperity and with a permissive mating machine like we have now or that is a lot more permissive than before. Female mating psychology seems to channel the attention to higher value men to avoid the deception of similar value men. That's something that happens when there's high promiscuity. While lower value men in a environment like we have today, even though they are receiving less mating attraction and having less opportunities and we see the number of sex partners going down. They will have increased expectations for promiscuity. So you get more and more dysfunction, the further away from this third sexual revolution of the 1960s, we get.

34:11This is only getting worse. So the problem with creating relationships now, and this has been something that's been in the debate in Norway to an enormous extent. What women are, what very many women have said in this debate, I don't know how representative this, but their main point, talking point is that men are good enough, and if men do not become better, women simply don't want to partner with them and certainly not have children. What do you think they mean when they say better? It's, it's quite predictable. Women, of course because they have a because of our evolutionary past, they have a lower desire for partner variety.

34:50Well, men because by having promised to sex, they would leave a larger genetic legacy, they have a higher desire for partner. So one of the reasons one study showed that Norwegian women won five lifetime sex partners and Norwegian men won 25. So this is a question of how markets work. When you have a high demand of female sexuality and a low supply, women will have the power on the short -term mating market. So as we know if you as a woman go on Tinder now, you will get access to thousands and tens of thousands of men and you will have men that have much higher mate value, give you a lot of attention and try really hard to get a date with you and then get you to bed.

35:29So when you have that kind of enormous choice, that kind of power, it's very natural that you increase your standards. Now if women understood better and do understand it, many understand it very well and some understand it some extent, but this isn't, this isn't a cultural script that we're raised with. We're not offered this information or we grow up. It's just not a part of our culture because it's meeting with she is so new, but it's, it's a big difference between a short and a long -term mating market. So if many women confuse the power they have on the short -term mating market with the long -term mating market, where men and women are more equal.

36:04So the short -term, their experiences on the short -term making market motivates women to increase their partner demands, which then when they, when, which they can do under short -term aid markets, no limits to how many attractive men they can have there. But if they want a boyfriend, then they have to go on dates with men that have similar mating value with them because in monogamous regime, our species mates, sort of tivly. People would similar value find each other. And this makes it harder and harder for women to find partners. And the funny thing in the debate that's been in Norway is that so many said that, oh my god, we really, those men need to start telling women to lower their standards.

36:46The problem isn't that we have high demands and then they go and list 10 things that men have to do to get better. So this environment that we're living out, it just motivates women to, Number one, they don't need men anymore. They used to need men. And those emotions that a traction women have for men evolved in a much more empowered environment where having a man was, could be of existential importance. And now they don't need them. Women cannot wonderful lives without men. For many women, the type of men that they would have access to simply isn't good enough to justify not longer being single.

37:23And on an individual level that is perfectly fine and I support it 100%. So what women are doing on the short and long -term medium market, I have no issue on that. As individuals, I lay no blame. But our society will disappear if we don't do anything about this. And the thing is, this is a brand new system that no human community has succeeded with them. We've been doing this for 50 years. And these processes, these changing between different mating regimes can take centuries. Some of them, the older ones, took much longer even. So that we after 50 years haven't found a way to reconcile individual and social needs, it's no wonder.

38:01But now that we see the effect that our inability to find partners, the leads to self -provideication, we need to talk about it, we need to agree that this is a problem and that it's an existential problem and we have to start experimenting. Not by forcing women to marry in cells, but to try to find if we can create new dating arenas if we can increase the knowledge around this, if we can change people's approach to dating and mating, then I am naively positive. I mean, I've studied human or hominin mating over six million years with these tremendous challenges. And our ancestors saw every single one of them.

38:42And the 21st century's reproductive crisis, it's not the biggest one. I think we can make changes and these fertility researches that I've talked with, they don't have much of an historical perspective. They look at today and they see this is a problem that don't understand what's happening and then they give up and a lot of them say we just need to embrace low fertility. We've solved problems like this so many times. Yeah go ahead. But how do you know that it's women's standards being too high and not the standard of men decreasing?

39:22Because it's relative. I mean, men are men and women are women. Going out and saying men, you have to get better. I mean, who would go out and say, sumalis need to get better? or people with downs in room have to get better. We don't talk like that to groups. We don't say they're not good enough and tell them to better themselves. One, because it's inhumane and two, it doesn't work. You can't tell groups to pull themselves together. So yeah, maybe men have gotten worse and worse. Maybe women have gotten better and better, right? But I think it's more. It's a change in that women, we had patriarchal societies where women were subservient and dependent on men.

40:06If they didn't find a partner, they would be sanctioned socially hard, they would live in poverty many times. So now that we've created these wonderful new societies, that innate biological attraction that women had to men that motivated sufficient reproduction in the past, it's no longer strong enough. Life is too good. And given that, We have to look for new solutions. I can see why somebody that wanted to find potential holes or headlines to pick in your argument would be replete with options because a mean characterization of some of the points that you're putting forward would be something like.

40:51So the argument is women should get into relationships with guys who either aren't good enough therefore that they don't fundamentally like, that bringing back a patriarchal or enforced monogamy style, socially enforced monogamy, not handmade style, socially enforced monogamy style society is better, that equality and women's financial and socio -economic independence is anathema to having a flourishing society. Therefore, all of the things that we have done should be rolled back and the more that we roll them back, the more that we then get the birth rate to be able to flourish again. So, I mean, we've spoken about this, I've spoken about this hundreds of times, but it's a difficult circle to square to say that something which was good and that everybody is in support of, women getting their socioeconomic independence, women having equal access to the things that they should, women not being under the boot of their father or their brother or stuff like that.

41:53These things are good in a developed society. And yet they can also have this externality which is what's misaligned with mating psychology and downstream from that what you end up with is this really difficult situation. And to the women that are listening to, especially the ones that are struggling to find a guide that they think is good enough, there's no... And this is where we get into interventions a little bit later on, but I Think it's very difficult to say hey girls lower your standards like what does that mean? What does that mean in in the same way as telling guys that you need to do better like what does that mean?

42:35Especially at a group level, you know the individual level what you're asking is kind of like What's a tragedy of the commons type thing a god's eye view coordination, you individual man, you should work harder so that you can help the birth rate or you individual woman, you should lower your standards so that you can help the birth rate. Like not for you, you take a personal cost, you pay a personal cost in order to supply a public benefit. And yeah, it's fascinating. So okay, we've got a couple of other things here. When women say men do better and they've got a list of things, what are the main areas?

43:23Because presumably one of the places that we should be looking at for intervention is how do we make men more attractive to women in this new environment? That has to be one of the roots that you lay out. It would be stupid to not give that information out to guys because there will be a subset of men that go, hey, just give me the cheek. What What is it that they're looking for again? And if you just give me that, and I'll just tick tick tick tick tick and I'll be sweet. So what are the areas that women say men are lacking in? Well these lists that that has spread, they're not terribly insightful or helpful I think, but it reflects the experiences that women have had with men.

44:00Don't be so interested in hunting and fishing and cars. Don't talk about yourself. Give me the right emotional support. Don't brag about things. It's this minutiae that they say that men in general suffer from. And it's not men in general. There's a normal distribution among men. You have a few men at the top that are phenomenal, and a few men at the bottom that are terrible, and then you have just a bunch of normal guys. And women are right. In today's environment, men are good enough for women. But then we have to ask, what are we going to do about that? And I don't know a single person. I don't even know if I've met a single person who wants to go back to the dark ages and put women under the boot of the patriarchy.

44:50But if we really love female freedoms as highly as many proclaim and I certainly do, Then we owe ourselves to start experimenting and trying new things to see if we can have societies that exist in the future where women also are free. I mean, the stakes couldn't be higher. So this misplaced fair that if we talk about low fertility, women will suddenly live in oppressive patriarchy the day after tomorrow or 10 years down the line or 50 years down the line. I mean, I understand the fair because nobody wants to go back. women don't want to be unfree again. But what I've done in my research and in other projects, also I've studied the cultural changes over the last thousand years to see how what is it that made modernity emerged.

45:39And we never go backwards. We have these really deep cultural changes intermittently and they're terrible and we're living through one now. And in those cases, we have to start entertaining new thoughts, new norms and new values. And different communities should try different solutions based on what is salient to them based on their cultural legacy. And I think Norway is in a unique position here. We've been spearheading new gender relations for 150 years. We've been in the forefront of female equality. And we in Scandinavia, we have really good culture for this. We have cohesive populations. We have a the lively national debate, or we're willing to find an experiment with new things and find solutions.

46:24And I think we can do it here also. And I think all nations should do that, build on their cultural legacies and try new things. And I mean, in Norway, it would be so anathema for I think the risk of us going back to the dark ages is very small. And I'd be willing to suggest a suicide pact on this. I mean, we're stirring towards self -evadication. Let's just agree if I understand women's fair of this. So let's agree. Female freedoms at the level of 2024 can never be threatened. Let's have that as our starting point. Let's experiment with new ways of dating and mating, but never ever anything that would involve jeopardizing women's freedoms.

47:05And if those means that we come up with are unable to help us increase fertility, then we'll die together. We'll disappear. We'll just dwindle until there's no one left. And that will be the Norwegian way. And then I'm sure some other countries in the world will experiment with more handmade tail -like means for racing fertility, but that won't be us. And that is the key to success. We have all these different communities, all these different cultural legacies that make different means salient to us. We need to start experimenting. We need to do something because we're all disappearing in this part of the world.

47:42Yeah, I just kind of play the other side and so much of what I was learning about over the last few years to do with, you know, the increasing socioeconomic success of women over the last 50 years, particularly the tall -girl problem, as I've come to say, that if you stand on the top of your own status hierarchy, it's very difficult to find someone above and across on the other one. And, you know, 50 years ago when Title IX came in and the gap between women and men in university was smaller than the gap between men and women now, men are now further behind in terms of their university attendance than women were when Title IX, a policy that was brought in to precisely help raise up what was at the time an under performing minority, right, or an under performing group, perhaps not a minority.

48:37And I'm just trying to think about where that energy is to help raise up under performing men. You know, if we do have, if this is true, let's say, let's take the sort of public proclaimments as accurate that men are not being of a high enough standard in order for women to date them. That would be like saying, well, women aren't of a high enough intellect in order to go to university. What do you do? You spend billions and billions in taxpayer funded money to create councils and research initiatives and social change campaigns and you help to change norms and you raise up the group which is falling behind.

49:20But even more so in this one, the death of appropriate and eligible male partners directly impacts the well -being of the life of the single women who don't have anybody to date. You could say that kind of in a roundabout way, more smart people, including women going to university, makes for a smarter and more prosperous world because there's people doing innovation and stuff like that. But it's a much less direct route, right? Then if you spend a lot of money helping men to become better, which I'm sure that the men aren't going to have a problem with, it's like, hey man, like his free gym membership and mindfulness training and blah, blah, blah, or looking at the socioeconomic problems, which is, well why aren't men flourishing?

50:03Why aren't they going to university? Why is it to women for every one man doing a four -year US college degree? Why do women outermen between 21 and 29 by over a thousand pounds a year, the age during which the socioeconomic success of your partner is probably going to be more indicative of your mating success when men and women are more likely to be available and trying to find potential partners where their for -cundity is highest. So you're going to be able to get the best bang for your book, so to speak, out of your mating efforts at stage two of the bottleneck, and we'll get on to. I just get the sense that But the really is very little sort of charitability being paid.

50:39You know, even the word insell, William Costello, Andrew Thomas was on very recently talking about it. The word insell just sort of conjures up all manner of, of, of, maybe it needs to be rebranded, you know, unfortunately, it's a very great term that was used and sort of spread to widely as a meme. But like, who wants that? Who wants there to be people who wants to do a thing and can't do the thing and sort of clawing and desperate and trying and don't get that. Like that's not, they'll be like saying like a in intellect or something, oh, involuntarily stupid or something. That's the reason that women aren't going to universe.

51:17It's like, no, no one said that, no one thought that. But because we are dealing with men who traditionally have been in a preferential position in society, and because we're talking about women's bodies, which is a very fraught topic that nobody wants to come in and feel like they're starting to mandate anything. Yeah, if you talk about situations that sort of raise up men and men standards, that feels like kind of manipulating the market. In a way, men should raise themselves up. They should try. They should want to do it. If you loved me, you'd know why I'm mad at you kind of argument. And then on the other side, if you say, well, what about women's standards being too?

52:02How do you say you want me to get into a relationship with somebody that I don't like? That I don't love that isn't good enough for me? We've spent all of this time building up a socio -economic success, finally getting a gallitarian access to all of the things that we need. And you're telling me that now I have to row back my financial independence to like some weird, old and worldy, 1 ,800, 1 ,800, Victorian England version of mating mentality, just so that I can feel remotely satisfied with a partner that I don't think meets my standard. And that's not gonna happen. So I mean, this is like a, I mean, you seem to think it's a tractable problem, but to me, it's like a spaghetti junction of cables that every time you try and pull on them, but today, we between the two of us, there's been like 20 absolutely unspeakable things that one of us has said, right?

52:50Like that this area of discussion is so non -typically done in a manner that isn't used as a cudgel to hit people over the head with or to try and get some sort of nefarious campaign across that you don't... Nobody uses what's called the Oxford Manor, right? The ability to play gracefully with ideas. That's not allowed. But yeah, anyway, just to kind of fight the other side of this, when women had a problem, we said, what can we do to fix society? But now that men have a problem, we say, what is it that men are doing where they can't fix themselves? Yeah, we don't tell, but that's it's certainly not in Scandinavia.

53:29That's not what we tell poor people. Just pull yourself up by the bootstraps that more of an American strategy. What you said about the in -sell term is very interesting. Unfortunately, that coin was termed or at least it spread into the mainstream with these terrorist attacks of the 2010s. And what this has cost, it's very unfortunate. I mean, in sales, it's arguably the most or one of the most marginalized groups in society. On some level, it is the most marginalized group. These are men that are being deprived of life opportunities. You're just suffering in solitaire. And one op at Norway where I said, there's a reason why you don't know the name of a single Norwegian in -sell.

54:10I speak up about these matters and I'm in a position to endure the hatred and the attacks that come and they have become increasingly grave. Could you imagine what happened if a regular guy and in cell spoke up and said, I have never had any mating opportunities. Let me tell you how this destroys my life. First, he wouldn't be compassionate, he'd be villainized, he'd be seen as a misogynist and a potential terrorist. So we've created the culture where these men that are the most marginalized and you could say oppressed aren't even allowed to speak up about how terrible their lives have become.

54:52So we don't hear anyone bear witness to this modernization. Women spoke up loudly and proudly about what the patriarchy were doing to them and they succeeded with liberating themselves from that. It's very difficult to see in the short to to mid -range how these men can be a part of the public conversation because the costs that we impose of them are so enormous. And to that other thing you said about how can we race up? Meanwhile, that's what you could call one of the Scandinavian paradoxes. In racing up women, as I again, I think that I mentioned to you last year, the Norwegian welfare state men pay more into it in taxes than they receive from it.

55:39Women receive more than $1 .2 million from the welfare state over their lifetime than they pay in in taxes. And $1 .2 million, that's still pretty good money. And I think that is one of the linchpin of our society. The reason why North, according to the UN almost every year is the best society living in the world is precisely because we transfer these resources from men to women. And that allows, and there's a variety of reasons why that creates a better society. But then a negative aspect of that is that men lose these resources and women gain them which is good for society, good for the women and the children they bear.

56:22But it makes men relatively less attractive because number one, women to a much lesser extent need the resources of a partner and men have lost these resources that in previous times would make them more attractive to women. And that's a that's a very bad externality. So we created the perhaps the greatest society in human history. And because of the way we did that, we're now striving towards self eradication, because we created society where men actually aren't good enough to entice women's attraction systems so that women are are want to have sex with them and pair bond with them and have children with them.

57:02And that is unfortunate. And like you said, that is spaghetti. What about the second bottleneck? Let's say that we've managed to weave our way through the first one. We've managed to find a partner. We're happy with them. We're ready to settle down, get married, and the question comes up, are we going to make babies? Yeah, so that has to do about cultural ideology. This is what recovered the last time over an hour and I've recently published a book called Stories of Love from Vikings to Tinder, where I take the reader through 800 year journey of Western ideologies of love to show how we ended up where we are today and how that explains our dating dysfunction and the demographic collapse.

57:47So we now live in a world with the mating ideology that's called Confluent Love. of confluence means to come together. So we're supposed to come together and as long as that's beneficial, we're supposed to stay together when it's not move on. So we have serial pair bonding, interspersed with optimistic short -term relationships. So we sleep around when we're single and I'm preferably not when we're hitched up and then relationship lasts for as long as they last. And this, the values of this mating regime is convenience, reward, and individualistic self -realization. So we're supposed to do whatever works for us as individuals.

58:27And to modern ideology, that makes a lot of sense. And we've wanted, we wanted to do that for a good while, but we weren't pros, personas, but now we are, and now we implemented this regime. A symbolically from 1968. Before that, to give an example of another ideology of love from the early 1800s until 1986, we had the ideology or romantic love, where cultures imposed on people, they indoctrinated them, they cultureated them, socialized them, however you wanna put it into thinking that a man and a woman as individuals, they're only half a person. So you're supposed to find that other soul that matches yours and then you're supposed to merge in a pair bond, underpin by very strong, true love and this love lasts a lifetime.

59:12And then you self -realize as a couple through the breadwinner housewife model. So from our perspective, that sounds a little bit silly, but imposing those beliefs on people, push them together and made them have children to a sufficient extent. Well, you could say maybe to a too high extent, because they were in the population growth during that period was enormous. So in that second bottle, when it comes to having children in earlier times, in all earlier times, I'm sure there were exceptions there in there, but maybe those weren't too functional. Societies imposed on people that they had to pair bond and have children.

59:52If not, you would dissection, ostracize, or maybe you'd be a monk or go to war or work the fields. And we don't do that anymore. And we only, and here's an important part, contraception. We only, we didn't evolve to have this incredible desire to be parents. We have a desire for it, but as we see now, it's not strong enough for our current environment. Evolution works in a way that it implants proxies for it. You're sexually attracted to someone. You do these things and then in some, at least, is sufficient reproduction. But now that we've detached compilation from reproduction through effective contraceptives, those adaptations that we evolved for the previous mating regimes don't work as well.

1:00:38And we also have this ideology where not having children as become quite voluntary. I mean, there's still some pressure, but you'll define without, in some millions, it's even seen as heroic not to have children. You have environmentalists that think having children is wrong. You have all kinds of different anti -natalist beliefs. And this reduces the pressure that in previous times push people toward reproduction. So that's when people do manage repair bond and they have to decide whether children you have those ideological differences from earlier times and then you have other environmental pressures such as the cost of having children difficulties, the time pressure, etc.

1:01:21So, you have all these factors to play in there and what politicians and fertility researchers have drawn to are those more mundane environmental factors. So Norway probably has the best social regime in the world for having children. We give incredible benefits to parents and children. There's probably never existed an environment in the history of humanity where it's more beneficial to have children than in Norway and still we're not doing it. So what this birth rate committee is probably going to do is suggest we throw another hundred dollar there another thousand dollars there But we know from research that's not gonna work So if if we're gonna work on this second bottle neck It's about cultural change And evolving towards a new ideology of love and that sounds very inappropriate from modern minds We're not we're supposed to live individuals alone a lot of people have said in the debate in order that it's inappropriate for politicians to engage but I mean, if we're sharing towards self eradication, nothing is more important than the question of existence versus non -existence.

1:02:24So we really should be open to experimenting and trying to question even our most sacred values. In a lot of the studies, I think, that I've seen lots of the survey data, GSS data, and a few others come back. And some of the highest rated reasons for why people haven't had kids is not ready yet, still working on myself, don't have the money in a insufficiently financially secure. What do you make of the sort of cost of living and self -actualization ideologies, sort of slash thought pattern when it comes to its contribution? because at least in terms of self -reports, haven't found somebody I'm sufficiently attracted to.

1:03:13Wow, didn't mean to do that. Haven't found somebody that I'm sufficiently attracted to to be able to have a partner with. He's very low down the list, very low. Yeah, yeah. Well, we don't know. That is the thing about this. We experts actually do not know what the precise factors are that have created the situation. They don't understand why people aren't had. They know that urbanization is a factor, individualization, but how they play in, how much they affect things, it's still a puzzle. And especially, why do these factors could be a minimal to policy? What is it we have to do? What kind of society do we have to move towards to make people again having children?

1:04:00It's been very under researched. That is among other things I'm part of a group of researchers that are applying for funds now. And we want to actually find this out. We want to study a female and male mating site, reproductive psychology, and see what are the actual factors. Not what people say are the factors, but through longitudinal studies to uncover what the actual elements are that motivate or demotivate reproduction. And it's especially within evolution of psychology. This has been so under research over the last few decades. There's been so many valuable contributions on dating and relationships and parental investment partner preferences, sex, everything within mating except its ultimate function which is to reproduce.

1:04:48That's been enormously under research, which is puzzling. And now it's become existential important to understand these mechanisms. I suppose you hinted at it before the difference between proximate and ultimate reasons. You know, proximate reasons, sex feels good, ultimate reason, it makes babies. Looking at the ultimate justification, it's a much more direct intervention to just get straight to the proximate because you know exactly how that works. You can manipulate it more directly getting in and sort of the ultimate is usually the unspoken thing. It's the thing behind the thing. But I do wonder, I was having a conversation with a friend who was telling me that he held his sister's newborn baby for the first time.

1:05:36And this is the first member of his kin that's been like newborn, his first family newborn. He held it in his hands. And as he was doing it, immediately he had these sort of classic visions of a warrior man going to protect this child. His child, but he's pretty close, right? You know, he's an uncle. And we had a conversation, I think, there's an odd, maybe sort of mimetic child desire that goes on, that increasingly atomized non -pan generational living where people are in their their own houses, they move away from home at 18, they don't get to see their brothers and sisters and potentially their children quite so much anymore.

1:06:19Everyone's in their own silo. On top of that, declining birthright means that there are fewer children around to show people who don't yet have children, the children are a thing that you can have. How much have you considered this, this kind of one of the big impacts of being around children is that it perhaps encourages you to have children and by that having fewer children big gets reduction in the incentive to or the drive to have children. Yeah, that's why the leading research in this belief that this unfortunately is a self -reinforcing process. Like I mentioned, Norwegian women want to have 2 .4 children, but they have 1 .4.

1:07:01Now that it's fell to 1 .4, the next generation will probably want to have quite a bit fewer than 2 .4 and we see in this through the generations. So we're not able to fulfill our fertility ideals and this puts us in a spiral that just entails us as society circling the drain until there's no one left unless we're able to turn this around. Yeah, the fertility. Yeah, so that's why that's why it's a moving target. Yeah, no, that's why I mentioned at the beginning of our conversation how unfortunate it is that the main or region researchers around this, they're just waiting for women around 40 to have an unprecedented number of baby because I mean, deleting international experts are pretty uniform.

1:07:44They're never all agree, but they're pretty uniform. This isn't turning around. They say that it's more likely that it continues to decline than that it tapers off or goes up again. So if we don't turn this around, likely it will only get worse and this circling of the drain is just going to go faster and faster from cellar society's collapse. Didn't someone say that the best you can do is for the fertility rates to just resign and relax? Yeah, that was the commentator and always biggest newspaper. She thought 1 .4 was just, that was just a, a number that captured the moment. And she also, so she talked to this expert and they said, yeah, I don't know, regional women will start having maybe soon in their 40s.

1:08:31So this is going to go up again. So yeah, she actually wrote that the best thing we could do for that to increase the facilitators to resign and relax. And if we do that, we disappear. And then Norway's ex -sexiest woman of the year said that men were whining. And then a gay guy said that men are trying to cry their way into women's Yeah, there's been and I'm grateful that they chime in. I haven't responded to almost any of them. I'm just glad that people are participating in this debate and if they want to smear men or want to attack my credentials or my intentions or call me a fascist, that's just how these debates work.

1:09:17And hopefully this is the first face of the debate. And then if we're able to get past it, we can agree that this is an existential challenge. And after that, we can start talking about experiments and then executing them. And maybe we can have more research on this. And we can have a national movement to try to turn this around. Like I said, I think, especially as getting Navy nations are the best situated nations for doing something about this, we should spare her this, we should be in the forefront. We're so rich and wealthy and we have such good national conversations and we're so far ahead in general, we've been doing this for so long, why can't we like cease?

1:09:59This is the biggest problem with faced, at least in a very long time. Let's try to solve it, let's not resign and give up. What happened at your university when they found out that you were researching fertility rates?

1:10:16Well, there too I am very understanding. I was working at a center of environmentalists and they need to have their profile and I respect that. And when they found out that I was going to research declining populations from a negative perspective, they didn't want to have anything to do with it. But I found a different university that I'm applying for research funds for them. So I'm okay. but well it's people don't understand that 1 .4 means that our societies will disappear. They don't see the problems with it and they don't see how this can work against solving climate crisis. Collapsing societies aren't going to develop new technology.

1:10:57They're not going to be cooperative. They're probably not going to recycle too much either. I mean it's we want functioning societies, stable functioning societies for the next generation so we can fix the climate crisis. And this is a new situation before this summer, they're hard to maybe one or two off the year in leading newspapers where people said that we'll be fine. 1 .4 isn't a big of a deal. And one op -ed wrote that this for sure won't be as bad as the black that will be okay, which is a pretty little bar. So yeah, I understand, especially from environmentalists, it's hard to wrap your head around how a declining population could be a negative thing.

1:11:44So I try to be understanding, but yeah, it wasn't too cool. I applaud your patience. I really do. It's, you know, when you're, I had this really great conversation with Richard Reeves. I'll send it to you once we're done because I think the political psychology side of science communication activism, talking about topics that are kind of on the edge of the Overton window. I think it really might be good framing for you, given that he's the founder of the American Institute for Boys and Men, so he's having a similarly unpopular discussion. And we spoke about that and he had this really interesting insight like where he said that people who talk about unpopular topics and feel scapegoated or castigated or insulted when they do it, what they do is they become increasingly aggressive with their tone because they're more and more frustrated that they get sort of labeled as this really nasty thing.

1:12:48So, you know, you see, a lot of, I think men's rights activists, probably a good chunk of them get thrown into this bucket because they've been fighting about family court or divorce law or, you know, male suicide or whatever it is for a long time. And because they've either been ignored or insulted, what they do is they just keep ramping the rhetoric up. I think you could see this with the climate movement too, right? No, you don't understand if we get past however many parts per million in CO2, it's going to be a problem. So I'm going to throw paint over a, throw, throw soup over a painting.

1:13:22I'm going to glue myself to the M25 and I'm going to do, you know, big, big, big, all bigger, bigger, bigger. And as Richard said, the problem you have when you do that is that you become less and less acceptable to be understood, especially in an arena that's increasingly in flammetry because you are more inflammatory. The way that you communicate these ideas becomes more aggressive, which is the exact opposite of the impact that you wanted it to have. So at the very time when you need to be as peaceful and gentle as possible, you're putting the strong argument forward, but you're doing it from a place of sort of rationality and realism as opposed to one of like just steaming in.

1:14:01It's all emotion because it's much easier to dismiss the arguments of somebody saying something you don't want to believe that is already unpopular if they do it laid in with emotion as opposed to if they come in and they say, hey, interesting, I'm just gonna put some facts forward for you here. Here's some things that you should consider. And they go, what a reasonable, nothing that anybody can say is that you haven't been reasonable with the way that you put your points forward. And I never thought about that before. It was really interesting. I've never been an activist really for anything.

1:14:34I've got interests and stuff. But I've certainly felt that distaste sometimes when I've been talking about stuff to do with men's mental health or whatever. And I, you know, the rhetoric does get a little bit more agitated. It does get a little bit more fiery. You think, is it actually effective? What am I doing? Am I using this as a punching bag opportunity to vent about my own internal frustration at nobody listening? Or am I doing this to try and make as big of an impact as I can in the world? Because those two things often are actually countered to each other. No, you asked her earlier if I saw myself with some kind of firebrand.

1:15:15I wish I wasn't in the position. I want to jump over these next two phases and jump to the one where we start researching this in the ducking experiments and try to turn things around. I don't enjoy being the object of hatred and derision and having. Well, if at least they attacked something that was actually my position, but so far it's been exclusively strawmen. And it's, of course, it's tiresome. It sucks my department lied to a newspaper that I was no longer connected to them. I have a contract out the air and they just didn't want to be associated with me. The reason why I'm sitting here is because my university would no longer let me use the podcast studio, which are just I'm like, just, what is this?

1:16:06It's so odd. That's how these things work. Yeah, was it a dinner a couple of weeks ago with a member of the birth rate committee of a reasonable person? And then he said, they haven't been able to create debate about this. This summer, I was able to do that. And that noise will help them. So now we're working through that phase where people are just arguing and bickering and saying, this isn't a problem and hopefully we can get to the point where we can have a recent discussion about this and that's when the birth rate committee will put forward their findings however useful, unusable they are I don't know it we'll have to see but then after that something else will come I mean this isn't a one -year conversation we're going to be talking about this for generations unless we're able to turn this around this, recycle the drain.

1:16:57I mean it's going to become more and more apparent how devastating how disastrous the consequences will be of losing a third of your generation or two thirds of your generational size per generations. This discussion is not over. It has just started. And thank you for pushing this and not just inviting me, but so many others to talk about this. You're one of those who really are spearheading this in the international marketplace of ideas, and that's really valuable. I appreciate that. Thank you. Yeah. It's such an odd type of existential risk because some of them wildfires start, you feel the heat.

1:17:39There's black plumes of smoke in the air or there's smoke on the ground or people die in a pandemic. But demographic collapse is this sort of really unique class of... We've never faced this problem before. Yeah. No, I mean, it's an ascended enemy at us. Guess it's immediately going to know exactly what to do. Our neighbor comes, go to war against us. We're going to ban together. We're going to forget all the bickering and we're going to unite and we're going to draw our best to survive and beat them and murder them and win. That's in our nature. When we're now self eradicating, we're just what?

1:18:19We've had low fertility before, but we never had this kind of increasingly global phenomenon that just isn't stopping. It's just a continuing decline. So our cultural intuitions, our cultural legacies, we have almost nothing to build on. We have to think a new, we have to analyze and understand something that is really complex, and then we have to come up with completely novel solutions probably, and that is hell of a challenge. We have very little to go on here. This is a brand new environment. Well, I know that you've only just published your last book, which was awesome, but I mean, you've got a hell of a topic for the next one and jumping in with two feet and doing whatever it is that you need to do.

1:19:01Do they appreciate you? I really do. I very much appreciate you sort of sticking your neck out as we would say in the UK and doing this work. It'll be interesting to see how you and Leif and the rest of the guys get on. I loved when we met at HBS last year and it's been interesting to see where people end up. So I really hope that you sort of make it through. If people want to keep up to date with what's happening from your side of the world, your data, your research and stuff like that, where's best to go? Well, maybe under the YouTube video, you can put a link to my store, so I'll have a back in st.

1:19:33Tinder. It's open access. So it's free to download. If you want to see what I've published, you can go to my Google scholar. Yeah. Thank you. You can go to my Google scholar page and just type in my name and then you'll see my publications there. Also, research gate is good, there are different ways to find it. Unreal. Matt, until next time mate. I'll see you. Thank you so much Chris, it was a pleasure talking to you again. Take care.