#102 Stephen Shaw - Birth Gap with How unplanned childlessness could lead to the crumbling of civilization and our infrastructure, why are there so many childless women?

0 (0s): I think society is just not being informing people. And, and partly there are voices out there that are lying and that's clear with their own agendas because they think the environment's more important or they, whatever the reasons are, not everybody in those camps, but some are. But there's also a, a society, we've just let this go on. Challenge them. Oh, okay, maybe there are too many people and maybe we can with kids in the thirties and maybe I should just let my kids lead their career and you know, see what, see what happens. But when you tell young people about this, there's shock and horror. Like, what do you mean? I might end up childless. So I, I, I therefore am quite hopeful that this somewhat can and will change. 2 (50s): Hello everybody. You are listening or watching Chatting with Candace. I'm your host Candice Horbacz. Before we jump into the intro, make sure you hit that like and subscribe button. It helps with all the things. It helps you not miss an episode. It helps me with visibility in growing the podcast. So like, and subscribe. This week we have Stephen j Shaw joining the podcast. Stephen is a computer engineer, a data scientist, and he started his first documentary birth gap, which is tackling the very concerning issue of global decline in birthrates. And when I found that out, I was really shocked because I had always heard overpopulation, overpopulation, overpopulation. 2 (1m 30s): And quite to the contrary, the issue is actual population collapse. So this is a very, very big problem that no one is talking about. We're gonna find out why his work is incredible. I will link all of the resources below and the documentary is available on YouTube and his website. Again, all of that will be below, so definitely check that out. It is worth watching. And without further ado, please help me welcome Stephen Shaw. Stephen, thank you so much for coming on the podcast. I really appreciate it. It is very late your time. It's early my time and I'm glad we can make this happen. Me 0 (2m 8s): Too. 2 (2m 9s): So I've been just like delving into your work and I, I love how I kind of came across it. I think it was, it was like Global overpopulation day or something was the holiday and it was one of those kind of like propagandized meme channels that was kind of perpetuating this really popular narrative that there are too many people and it was talking about the climate disaster and how people should be having less kids and it's irresponsible. And then I tagged Chris Williamson and then you got, we, I either tagged you or he tagged you. And I was like, this is a topic I've been wanting to get into for a really long time because I, like a lot of people I think have, I've been told a lie about what's happening with our population. 0 (2m 52s): That's fair. I think we all have for a very long time. 2 (2m 55s): So I watched the conference that was in the beginning of your documentary with Jack Ma and Elon Musk. And at the time when they were talking about the predicted like the biggest global crisis in 20 years is going to be population collapse. And I watched that at the time and I was like, what are they talking about? This goes counter to everything that we've been told, or at least my generation's been told why? And then in the documentary it kinda like goes, it's backdated to these like really old interviews of news anchors also saying it and it somehow went under the radar. So do you know, I guess like where did this idea of a population bomb become so popularized and somehow what seems to be the indisputable truth that it's actually the opposite was under the radar for so long? 0 (3m 41s): Yeah, and as I think, you know, I came into this as, as a demographer in 2016, shocked to see falling birthrates in almost every country in Europe. We all think about Japan where I now happen to live and where I am tonight. But when I saw this is a global trend that started in the seventies and hasn't relented at all, it it's just spread and spread and spread. It was shocking to me. So you're right, like how do we have this idea that the world's population is growing on, you know, forever? That's the image this impression I had. And you start to see when you're looking at data, data is objective that the people who have controlled the narrative. 0 (4m 26s): And I think it's a variety of reasons. Maybe some people think they're doing good by controlling the narrative. Maybe they think it's good to make us all believe that the world's going to, you know, explode in a bomb, a population there has been growth. But just to explain, when you see that narrative has not changed since the seventies, it's not objective, it's a a form of ideology and it's really easy to spot because when you take someone who let's say works for a so-called population organization, every time they draw a chart of population, it usually starts in 1800 and then they do this line like this and then they stop that. That's all they do for effect. 0 (5m 7s): And when you look at the actual data, yes sure that's right, but then we know it's going to do this and this is gonna be mainly older people. Older people, and then it's going to go down and you realize they're only telling half of the story, the historical part of the story, and they're not updating their narrative. And as a data scientist, that's rather annoying because I wanna debate with objective people, but what I've seen during the documentary and after making it is there's a lot of people out there clearly with their own agendas, whatever those are. And just on your point about people saying we hear it all the time, there's too many people on the planet that's intended to be a conversation closer when people say that or when people are taught to think that way, we're supposed to not think anymore about the implications of population decline for countries like Japan and Europe and US is is is on the same path, you know, in reality, come on, let's be serious. 0 (6m 1s): There's a change about to happen. It's already well underway in many countries and we need to be talking about this if nothing else. So for me it's really calling out those people who have agendas and I, I, you know what, what frankly pleases me as they seem to be rather upset that my documentaries come out just explaining the reality and the facts. So, you know, I hope that people start to realize the reality is that population's slowing and we're about to enter a very new world. 2 (6m 29s): So as you mentioned, you have been living in Japan and that's where you currently are. Why is it, why do they seem to be so far ahead of everyone else? Because I recently had this, this man show Nia Moto on, and he's kinda like this spiritual influencer and he's based in Japan as well. And we were discussing how like the average age of of virgin male in Japan is 30 now. Like that is unprecedented. People aren't getting married, people aren't having children. And there's, I don't know, it's weird because you have this culture that for so long seemed to be more advanced as far as like spirituality and connect connection and family and like Ikigai purpose and for some reason it seems like they kind of got flipped on their head. 0 (7m 19s): Yeah, it's fascinating. I think there's a lot written about the surface of this, meaning the top level facts like the average age of a virgin in Japan. But you really got to go so much deeper than that. I wanna qualify one thing first, though. We all think certainly I did that Japan is the outlier or that Japan started first. Yeah, that's not true at all. It actually started in Germany several years before Japan in the late sixties and then Italy, Spain, many countries in Europe caught up at the same time of Japan, same time as Japan in 1974. I, I don't know why we've come to think of Japan only, maybe it just fits a narrative that Japan's different or that perhaps Europe's has focused on some immigration to kind of offset this a little bit, which has not been very effective. 0 (8m 7s): The point is this is cross culture, that this is not about Japanese culture or not Korean culture or Italian or German culture. This is a global phenomenon. But to come to your specific point about Sexlessness, yes it's certainly a, a, a thing here. I've met people, I've talked to people that, that are in that position, which I find quite incredible. But I think the same effect now has hit the us You know, I I'm reading a lot about young people who are, you know, voluntarily or otherwise, you know, checking out of, you know, the dating market or you know, just have given up in that. So it comes down to me to a case of well what's cause and what's effect. I I think certainly what I see here is a situation where younger men in particular are being yeah, and some to some extent pushed out of the daily market. 0 (9m 0s): Women's education's higher here, which is great. Education careers are, are equal right now. And I see absolutely women here going for more educated men and more educated career successful people here. And I think there's part of society just doesn't get a chance quite so much. I think men oftentimes are giving up, giving up on life, giving up in society, and giving up and dating. Now that's a huge topic in its own right and I, i I don't claim to be a complete expert on it, but I don't for, I don't believe for a second that any country's birthrates is falling because of sexlessness. I think it's the other way round, you know, I think, and it is clear this started in the early seventies here and then we have these interesting different, perhaps bizarre phenomenons coming after that. 2 (9m 46s): So do you, did you find a commonality that happened within like that time period of the 1970s? Because that was a really interesting part of the first part of the documentary is that it does seem to transcend culture and religion and country. Like there's not a lot of people might blame something like dating apps or social media or pornography or whatever, like right, we wanna find like a, a silver bullet to this. And when you see it, a, it started before a lot of these things if it was in the seventies. So this is pre-internet and then if you have something that seems to be taking place in someplace like Japan and the Middle East and also in America, like there's vast difference in the way that we, we approach life and culture and our belief systems. 2 (10m 31s): So it's like What Happened in the seventies that seemed to permeate through all of these things. 0 (10m 37s): And that's really where, you know, the documentary starts is as you mentioned, I I came here to research this, I didn't know, but no researcher had found a connection before they'd found potential reasons within Japan Japan, it was blamed on work-life, ba balance in Japan. They do work incredibly hard here, even today in Italy and Spain, it was blamed on youth unemployment. So each country had its own potential causes, but for me this happened at the same moment in time and has spread relentlessly. And what I mean by that, it's not like it was a wave that came into parts of Japan and then faded back and then kind of took off again. 0 (11m 17s): This hit Japan rural and urban areas. Well I'll tell you in the same month, this was July 74 and you can see every single prefecture in Japan, I think it's 46 at that time, 46 prefectures all had a sudden decline in fertility rates and they declined from there. So it was a momentary thing and that's wonderful, you know, as a data scientist, but you can look at that and you can quantify that and the probability of that happening natural, it is just astronomical. It's like tossing a coin 46 times and having heads turn up every single time. We see the same thing in Italy. We see the same thing anywhere. We've got data, the same trends show up. So to answer your question, the oil shock happened in October 73. 0 (11m 60s): There was a huge crisis of escalating oil prices. I vaguely remember that as a small child, but I never came here thinking that would be connected. But what happened was Japan, as the world's biggest oil importer at that time went into a form of social panic. It's all over the historical media. You can see empty shells, rising prices and from that moment there was a fall on birthrates. So that's interesting. So why was that? I really don't like talking about the average woman or the average birthrates because it really masks so many things. I think, you know, that's been one of the reasons we haven't really understood this trend because we tend to look at total fertility rate, now we need to go deeper. 0 (12m 44s): And when you do that, you find that in that moment of time, so nine months after the oil shock birth go, go down. But who is it that that that has experienced these lower, lower fertility people with one child already actually accelerated having the second child for a year or two? I think that was people thinking this might get bad economically, that we should have the second child we always wanted quite quickly. So that's interesting. Those with 2, 3, 4 plus all continued having the exact same number of children as they would've had anyway, statistically there was no change. The big change is that childlessness went from around 4% in Japan in 73, within three years it was up to 22% and then it went up to 30%. 0 (13m 27s): I mean this is an unprecedented demographic change of a mass number of young people deciding to defer parenthood. So instead of having a child at age 26, 27 very quickly, that was pushed into late twenties and early thirties. And guess what happens at that? You know, when you defer childbearing, not everybody who wants to have a child ends up having one and why fertility is a factor, but actually the biggest reason is not being in a relationship at the right time with the right person or going through a divorce or a breakup. So we find that around, you know, one third of Japanese society starting then when delayed parenthood became a thing up to today our, our, our child is an 80% or perhaps more of those, it is what they call unplanned childlessness. 0 (14m 15s): People planning to have a child in their thirties and then something goes wrong. You know, it's a, it's a, a series of factors and people get more tired in their thirties. They have breakups. Finding a partner that matches is harder, that's Japan, which, you know, we I know a lot about because they've got so much data, but you see the exact same trend in Europe at the same moment in time. So this is deferred parenthood through economic vulnerability. 2 (14m 41s): Yeah. And the frustrating part about that is I feel like women have been lied to for such a long time and you know, I think it was an overcorrection for trying to get women to have the right to be able to pursue a career and stuff and interests outside of the household. But we've been told like, you can have it all and we kind of know that everything has a trade-off. Like you can't have it all, everything is like a give and a take. And for a long time it was that. And even now if you still go on like social media, it's kind of perpetuated there. It's the myth of the biological clock. Like if you go on Reddit, that's an entire forum. And it's like, what do you mean that this is a myth? 2 (15m 21s): So we were told you can go and have your high power career and that you can postpone childbearing into your 30 like late thirties into your forties and that there's no no payoff. That it's, there's no risk that you're just as fertile that this is the patriarch and then you listen to these fertility doctors, you're like, that's, that is not the case. There is a cliff. And it, the way that I was looking at it is that the fertility for a woman is kind of like an N So you have like this really happy middle ground, which is usually into like your late twenties, early thirties. And then it quite literally is a cliff. Like it just, it tanks, it's almost like a reverse hockey stick. So once you get into your late thirties, the quality of your eggs and just like the viability, it just, it, it drops and then you, you'll you can say, oh well there's these technologies like egg freezing. 2 (16m 11s): And I always thought that that was a super safe bet. I was in my early twenties and I was single and I was like, well you know, maybe that's like an option if I don't find the right guy at the right time. And I thought that the success rate was really high and it turns out it's not at all. Like, it's actually very, very rare to have like a successful egg freeze and let alone an embryo freeze. And then that turned into a viable pregnancy. So I just think that we were told we can have it all, we can delay everything. Biology isn't real. You can be de demi more and have a baby in your forties and you don't need a man. And I just don't think that that conversation is serving women because like you were mentioning, the data suggests that there's 80% of women that didn't plan on being childless and how devastating that has to be. 0 (16m 57s): Yeah, there's a lot of lying going on and it's coming from different corners, different voices. And again, to me as you know, data scientist, I'm just looking at data and I was expecting to have open objective dialogues with people who are saying different things and to hopefully have a dialogue or even enlightened people as to reality. But some people don't wanna listen and some people are rather threatened by facts in the documentary, well first of all, I traveled to 24 countries, I met 230 people, the majority were women on my crew. We were nine people that changed depending where we were filming three, four at a time. 0 (17m 39s): But I was the only man, it was young women in particular who were drawn to this topic. 'cause they wanna know, you know, what's going on in the world. And as young women, I I I think they were drawn to understand how do people balance working careers. So, and you mentioned Fertility doctors, I sat down for long interviews with five fertility doctors and they all said exactly what you're saying and how the media distorts this. That usually when I don't know about them anymore, I don't wanna say, but usually when a celebrity gets pregnant, often it's an egg donor, so it's not their own egg or it's an embryo frozen a long time ago. And, and embryos are, you know, more likely to lead to success than, than egg freezing. 0 (18m 21s): But, and I see this even on Twitter, you know, even just, you know, commenting on some of my own data or posting that, you know, this is wrong. It's easy to have a child in their thirties. Here's a fact, and this is just a raw simple fact. And this is for every industrialized nation and beyond without exception. Well there's one exception, I beg your pardon, I'll come to that in a second. It's a small one. The probability of a woman without a child ever becoming a mother after age 30 is 50 50 at best. Most countries it's slower than at 28, 29. So if you haven't had a child by 28, 29, maybe 30, it's 50 50 whether you ever will. The exception is Israel, where it's 31, it's one year extended. 0 (19m 3s): When I asked people, I did an online quiz, it's just out of interest. And the majority of people thought that was either 35 or 40. No one was really thinking 30. And this is a side of fertility windows. It's a side of any individual factor because there's so many factors and the biggest one is simply nothing. So you're 33, you've done everything, you're ready, but you just a breakup and it's gonna take two more years to find the ex boyfriend who you find doesn't want kids or the timing's off or you're getting tired. So there's a multitude of reasons why delaying things by definition is, is riskier. I won't point on the fertility when the N cpi, I guess I see that you're, that that that's right. 0 (19m 46s): Kind of like it reaches a maximum then goes down again. But in the world of statistics, we talk about variance and variance means that, well not everybody's the same. So I think we all want to know what is the in Fertility, you know, window for me, and we look at these average numbers, but for some women it's much younger than others. Others, absolutely it's the leader. We hear people successfully having a child into their forties. It happens, but those are the exceptions, which is why we probably hear about them. So it's riskier and for any individual, you can't know what your risks are despite all the technologies and the egg freeze. Like you, when I first heard of this, I actually thought, oh, this is great, this is a, a potential solution and for some individuals it will work. 0 (20m 29s): But the more I've been talking to people, I realize that the, the kind of games we play with ourselves, I think there's a factor here that, oh, I've frozen my eggs now I can keep working for another five years. I I don't need to worry about this until I'm 40. And it's, wait, you know, again, breakups come to play. And then, then the ability to carry a pregnancy full term deteriorates so rapidly. There's a chart in the documentary, but you know, after 33, 35, I mean fetal loss, it is just going like this. 2 (21m 1s): Oof. 0 (21m 3s): And that's for one child, you know, if you want two or three, like my, my, my gosh, so you know that, and this is harsh, you know, I, I've got two sons, I've got a daughter and I support them equally in terms of their, you know, career and everything else. So this isn't easy to solve without society making it much more flexible for careers and education. But we can't be telling people, oh, it's okay, that's a lie. It's, it's not. And you know, so that, that, that irritates me greatly when I hear that. 2 (21m 35s): So it's around 33 or 35 when making it to full term becomes less likely. Yeah. 0 (21m 40s): Oh, I mean it's already going. I mean, the curve I'll do like this, it's kind of, you know, going early thirties, mid thirties, 40, and then by 50 it's, you know, having a child at 50, it's almost two-thirds likelihood you're gonna lose a child even if you were to get pregnant, you know, 45 is, is is way up there as well. So you know, it's, it's, so there's three factors here. It's the number of eggs, you know, the fertility doctors explained to me, including Dr. Andy Wang, who's Kim Kardashian's fertility doctor. He, he had this magic kind of way of describing how egg quality goes down from the age of 20, but also quantity. So you got the quantity of eggs reducing, the quality's deteriorating because a woman is born with her eggs, you don't make more eggs, they're getting older with you. 0 (22m 26s): And then the ability to carry to term successfully. So, you know, we can't say a single age because it varies by individual, but hard fact is by age 30 you have a 50 50 chance. And that's apart from Israel where it's 31. That's universal. 2 (22m 45s): And that's so shocking because I feel like this is my anecdotal experience, just like talking with people in their thirties, late twenties, and then also in your documentary, there seems to be this universal self-doubt or I'm not ready yet. Yeah. I can't imagine having a baby in my twenties, which used to be very normal and biologically speaking, that seems to be the ideal window to have a child. But we have this idea that we're not ready, we're not mature enough that we are still ourselves somehow a child or developing or, and I find that, I don't know, I found that to be really interesting. 2 (23m 26s): And then like this idea of, of control that seems to be there as well as people really, and I think this probably goes into the fertility options, is people really want to have like a hyper sense of control on everything. Well, I'm going to have my career exactly right here, I'm gonna have the perfect partner and then I'm gonna like flip on a switch and have a baby. And it's not that easy. And I think our parents would always say, there's never a perfect time, right? There's never a perfect time and they come to you and they come to you. But we are trying to like somehow fight that and have it all, and I don't know, I don't know where like that self-doubt came almost like this failure to launch where we don't have that inner belief that we can bring a child into the world. 0 (24m 9s): Yeah, there's a lot there. And you know, I agree with everything you're saying. You know, I think perhaps it's natural to delay childbearing to, you know, if it were the case, if it were that we can have whatever number of kids we want, mid thirties, you know, we, we probably wouldn't be having this conversation. You know, maybe it would be great for many people to do all the things they wanna do, but that's not the reality. What, what what I've found, the one optimistic thing having made this documentary is screening it to younger people and the reaction I'm getting from younger people, strong reactions, I can give you one, there's a student at Cambridge University, Charlie Bentley asked her, who reached out to me, she actually invited me as a student to come and screen it there, but they canceled it because some people thought it would be dangerous for women to learn about the idea of, you know, having children. 0 (25m 2s): Oh my god. But that aside, Charlie's reaction herself was one of anger, she's 24 and her belief from society was that she had 10 more years before even needing to start to think about settling down, having children. When she saw the facts from the documentary that it's 50 50 by age 31st, she described this period of anger, you know, with society. Why had she been told this? Because the reality, she had only five years to get established career-wise and everything else. And she came out with this phrase, I i I quote it a lot, but to me it's, it's so beautiful as an expression of how she felt she was haunted by the future she might not have when she saw this, the realization that she may end up childless. 0 (25m 52s): And I mean it's, it's a beautiful statement, but it's a chilling statement. And when I hear comments like that, that gives me optimism that younger people just armed with simple facts and the stories of other people who had wanted children and ended up childless and, and frankly are the, the term they, that that community uses grief. They're grieving the fact that they never had children. I think society is just not being informing people. And, and partly it, there are voices out there that are lying and that's clear with their own agendas because they think the environment's more important or they, whatever the reasons are, not everybody in those camps, but some are. 0 (26m 33s): But there's also a, a society, we've just let this go on challenge that, oh, okay, maybe there are too many people and maybe we can with kids in the thirties and maybe I should just let my kids lead their career and you know, see what, see what happens. But when you tell young people about this, there's shock and horror, like, what do you mean I might end up childless. So I I I therefore am quite hopeful that this somewhat can and will change. 2 (27m 0s): Yeah, and I think it's interesting too because we, I think modeling is really important, right? Like exposure is really important, otherwise we have, we make something a lot scarier than it might necessarily be. So that could be parenthood, that could also be aging. So when you don't have experience and seeing it firsthand, and we kind of live in this bubble now that seems to be sanitized of humanity. Like you go out and it's just like this, this happy easy group of people that you are exposed to on a daily basis. You don't see a lot of elderly people, you don't see a lot of children. We make it very inconvenient for young families to go out. 2 (27m 42s): It, we actually kind of expect them to stay home because I don't wanna be bothered by your child. You go to a bathroom and any public facility. I think this kind of like tells you how accepting we are of children. There's not one toilet that a child can reach. It makes no sense to me as a parent because we have these ADA rules where you have to have a wheelchair accessible bathroom. There are more children than there are people in wheelchairs. So why are we Accommodating one group and not the other when there are more of the children? We went to Austin recently and we went to, I forget what restaurant, but they actually had like a tiny little urinal and my son was ecstatic. He like, he felt excited and welcome to be there. 2 (28m 22s): It's like, well why isn't there one, like put it in the wheelchair bathroom. There's plenty of space for you to just put one up there. You already had to spend the money to accommodate one group of people. And I think that's awesome, right? Like they need to be able to use the restroom too, but like, what about the kids? So we don't accommodate children in our daily lives at all. We like have all these subliminal messages that say, you're actually not welcome here. So then we have these young people that aren't exposed to like how to parent. There was a part of your documentary where you can like pretend to be a parent for a day so that you can make a decision. It's like that's not even, that's not anything about what it is to be a parent. It's not your kid, it's not gonna resonate with you. But like you need to have your family that is exposed like aunts and uncles and that kind of thing. 2 (29m 6s): And then when it comes to the elderly, it's the same thing. We wanna push them off into homes because I don't wanna be faced with my own mortality or my own death. So rather than face that fact, I'm gonna shove it away into a corner and they can kind of take care of themselves, which is also not good. So it's like how do we create a society that like welcomes all of it? 0 (29m 26s): Gosh, I'm living the conversation because I I I'm just as worried about old people as I am about young people, particularly in regard to loneliness in the documentaries part two, which isn't public yet. You know, we, we go to communities in Germany and Japan Germany where older people are living alone and dying alone. And it's not pleasant at all when you hear about the last years of these people's lives. Well, and it's not just childless people, people say to me, oh, but people who have kids can be ignored too and can be lonely too. I'm, I, no, no question. But being without family doesn't help. And you know, I I can I share with you like one of the, the, the stories and please, you know, in Germany we went to a crematorium and I was planning to interview the director. 0 (30m 13s): It was the largest crematorium in southwest Germany. And he refused to take the interview in the end when he understood a little bit about the questioning about people dying alone. But he talked to me on the phone separately and I later found out the full story. So in Germany, people who are in homes, but without family, when they come to be cremated, they have an autopsy and they are evidently malnourished. They have got marks on their wrists and ankles of having been bound in their beds for extended periods of time. And this only happens to people without family. And I mean, it's scandalous. 0 (30m 53s): I mean, someone needs to make a documentary about this. And in Japan there's another scene, you know, I don't wanna kind of upset too many people, but a a woman aged 95 children took her own life just through, through, through loneliness. And I heard that this is happening on a regular basis. Now those are extreme stories per perhaps, perhaps not, but it's indicative of all days loneliness. And you don't see loneliness by definition. It happens in the home. And you don't see those old people who are going out once a week to do their shopping and the only conversation they're having is at the, you know, the cash checkout because they have nobody else to talk to. 0 (31m 33s): So you're absolutely right, we need to solve all of these problems. We need to create more of an intergenerational society because all people have a role. They absolutely have a role, especially in terms of, you know, helping young parents, you know, with childcare for example, when they're, when they're able or helping to, to teach. I think older people could, could make tremendous teachers or helping with homeworks or whatever it is in the right context. But the idea that you retire and the dream that we might have is a ssri. I can watch, you know, TV all day and I can play golf with my friends. That might happen to some people some of the time. But retirement is a very long thing for for many people. 0 (32m 14s): Luckily, I, I, I have to say, but I, I don't think we've got it right. I don't think we've got it right to kind of, you know, just let people live their lives, their later lives alone and put them in care homes. Something's fundamentally wrong about that. So everything's wrong. Everything's wrong in how we've set up to kind of enable young parents to have children if they want them, and to help people have better, you know, more healthy, you know, later lives. So 2 (32m 44s): Yeah, it almost seems like to me that we we're like Prioritizing Pleasure and enjoyment. And we don't wanna take, like we don't wanna take all all of life. We only wanna take the bits that I don't know, like serve us are enjoyable, are post able, like kind of throwing a lot of the responsibility away when I talk to a lot of women that are my age that don't have kids and are really struggling with that decision and not understanding that like again, like they've already passed the peak, but because they have the idea that they can go well into their thirties and it's the same. It's like, well I enjoy my life now and I enjoy my Netflix with my boyfriend or my husband. 2 (33m 29s): I enjoy going out to the bars. I enjoy being able to travel. And it's like the story that they tell themselves is that children are going to ruin their life. And it, to me, like that's also kind of, that is a lie because I'm like, I have two kids. We travel all of the time. We always have. Yeah, it's a, it's very different traveling with kids than without. That goes without saying your life changes entirely, but it's not worse. It's, if anything, like they have created the most indescribable amount of value. And it's not to like push women that don't want kids to have kids because if you don't want kids, you're gonna make a terrible parent, right? Like a child deserves to be wanted in this life. So I think that goes without saying, but I'll say it anyways, it's more geared towards the women that don't have like a conscious decision, right? 2 (34m 18s): Like they're letting fear make that decision for them. So out of this 80% of women that didn't plan on being childless, when did it hit them that they, they did want kids and kind of like pass that tipping point. 0 (34m 32s): I think that can vary, but I just wanna emphasize, you made the point, and I always try to do it as well, that those people, those women who don't want children, absolutely they need absolute support because no one should be coerced into having a child if they do not want children. That that would be a horrendous society. I am interviewed five WomenFor, the documentary who were in that position. They never had the desire for children and their, you know, late thirties up into fifties and they had no regrets. They were living the life that they wanted to live and no regrets. Clearly that was the right decision for them. The sense I get, and this is opinion, but it's opinion based on interviewing a lot of people, is it seems to be pretty black or white. 0 (35m 13s): The idea that there's people in the middle that are thinking, well if this happens, great, but if it doesn't happen, that's okay. Really. The, you know, maybe a few people indicated that, but once you get into conversations it's like, oh, I just had a breakup two years ago and I don't trust men anymore and you know, I I really want kids. But you know, there's, there's things going on, you know, so in other words, they do want kids, but they're kind of, it's being massed by other reasons. And if you think that you've got to late thirties, yeah, yeah, some do, but you never know. It's a huge risk to kind of put off this, this, this idea that, you know, you can just, you know, wait a couple of years to the next boyfriend and or, or girlfriend or whatever, whatever. 0 (35m 57s): So the, the whole idea of waiting I is just a simple, huge risk for anybody doing it. But I, I just want to come back to, to one thing on happiness. You mentioned earlier that people wanna be kind of happier and, you know, go to the bar and take vacations and all of those things. There's a narrative out there that surveys have shown that childless people are happier. I've heard many people tell me this because it's become like so commonplace to hear this, but if you look at those surveys, it's shocking one to be withdrawn because the researcher completely understood, understood the, the data set he was looking at. 0 (36m 37s): But the best example is one from the, the British Open University to mention briefly, it was 2013, it was a survey of couples and it asked many things about couples lives and happiness. And now remember this is couples, I, I want to come back to this. So it's not interviewing single people or it's couples and they ask people, are you happier with your partner or are you happy with your partner? And it turned out that childless people are marginally happier with, with their partner than people who have children. And that might be because children can be stressful. Sometimes it might be because in the early days of having a young child, people really don't like their partner and then it kind of gets good again. 0 (37m 24s): So the average is off in some ways. Or the child is, people break up more often, I don't know. But the research paper said it's a marginal difference. So the headlines were that childless people are happier. No, it actually said that childless people were happier with their partner, but it said something else that they skipped over the happiest group of people over all by a significant margin were mothers. So you read the survey, who's the happiest group mothers? Was that published? No. And this made the guardian and the BBC skipping over that. I mean, it's shocking in terms of any form of objective research or even journalism that you'd skip over the group that's happiest. 0 (38m 5s): You'd skip over the fact that this is a survey of people in a relationship and people who don't have kids and also are single living alone are probably much less happy. And you focus on a subset of a subset and then twist the story completely. So it's back to, I mean that's Lies that that's nothing, not the researchers. 'cause they didn't set it up that way, but the people interpreting it that way are, are lying to people. And it's shocking. 2 (38m 29s): And that's the tricky thing with data too. So as you said earlier in the episode, it's data is objective, but the interpretations are not. And I think that's where it gets really slippery because if you are someone that just reads a headline or you're following like some kind of propaganda channel, then you can see someone like twist and manipulate data to tell the story that they wanna tell. I think I saw something with that study too, and it wasn't taking into account the whole trajectory of what parenthood is. So if you're just taking a snapshot of a newborn that's very different than having, you know, a teenager or an adult child. And if you have to take the whole scope, you can't just say parenthood right now, right? 2 (39m 10s): Because it's very different. Like those are very different stories. 0 (39m 14s): A hundred percent. And I don't think we, I mean we don't measure happiness or don't use happiness for anything else. I was trying to think, well, do you ask questions about people going on vacation, whether they're happy or not, if they went to Mexico or, or, or, or if they went to, I, I don't know, California or Miami or wherever. Like, you don't see things like that that, oh, come here, people are happier out. So why are people in this topic suddenly Introducing happiness? It's only people with an agenda who are taking studies and twisting them who want to persuade younger people. Oh, it's okay, you'll be happier. So what I've come to realize, i i, is that there are voices out there that are twisting everything around us. 0 (39m 56s): And it's, and who are they affecting most is younger people making younger people think, Hey, you can wait. Hey, you're gonna be happier. Don't worry about it until, oops, it's too late. Sorry you wanted a kid. But you know, tough luck. And the message goes on decade after decade aimed at young people from school education. I mean, this, this data is in textbooks about the world's ever-growing population. There's organizations that are funded by donors who construct this information to create a narrative that gets into high school books. 2 (40m 29s): Mm. 0 (40m 30s): And they're poisoning young minds. It's, it's, it's, it's nothing less than that. 2 (40m 36s): Yeah, there was this really good quote by Jordan Peterson and he was listing the Lies that we have been telling young women, and one of them was that nothing is more important than your career. And I mean, I, I grew up with like the Spice Girls and Girl Power and right, like, that was the era that I grew up in. And it was, you don't need a man, you don't need marriage, you don't need a relationship. Like what you need to become is this high performing powerful woman and then you'll be fine. And I look back now and I'm like, there was such a time where I was living that narrative and I was miserable because I always knew I wanted kids, but for some reason that didn't seem good enough. 2 (41m 20s): Like that seemed like I was checking out and I wasn't participating and like, you are just a mom was kind of how I felt. So I would deny that I would want kids because that almost seemed embarrassing for a long time. And it wasn't until I started to get like into my, my mid twenties and like found my now husband where I was like, no, that is what I want. And that's beautiful and that's not anything to be ashamed of and that is a ton of work. So I kind of like had a flip of how I perceived like motherhood entirely. And it was against a lot of these pop culture narratives. 0 (41m 54s): I hear this a lot, you know, it's, and not everyone is as lucky, fortunate as as you are at all in the hardest interviews I did, multiple interviews were with people who had one of children. And it wasn't successful for the reason you stated, you know, they were focused on career, they didn't think it was important. They thought, you know, that it was more important to develop those things. And if motherhood happened or not, it wouldn't matter. But people find out later on, very often, not everybody, but very often and the number of women who were in tears. And men too, men don't talk about this anywhere near, near as much, but there's a scene in part two of the documentary where there's nine men in a support group talking about this. 0 (42m 40s): I think it's probably the most chilling scene for me in the whole documentary hearing men open up saying that they cannot talk to anybody about how they feel. And just one comment on, on one of the, the men from from that group, Tim from Germany, he, he and his wife just give up an IVF because IV F's not an easy thing. You know, those hor hormonal treatments are, are tough and sometimes it's wor it works, but you gotta expect to go in several cycles before, realistically it might work. Some are lucky. But Tim and his wife just gave up after I think more than 10 years of trying and wow, he was devastated. He, his comment to me when he saw the first cut of the, the documentary, the kind of draft, you know, that I created the, the rough cut, we hadn't updated the end cr rolling credits. 0 (43m 29s): And he said, Steven, can you please make sure my name's on the list because it might be the only thing left on earth after I die. That that might be my legacy, that I'm part of your documentary. And it's, I've had so many heavy conversations. That's just one example with people. And for people listening here, I, I mean we should say there are support groups that there's gateway women, which is a great resource for childless women. And through them there, there are support groups that you can find for, for men too. And I'm always reminded by this community who I've come to feel close to because I support them so much because they're a voiceless group. 0 (44m 9s): You know, you don't have childless people, you know, forming public support groups and campaigning for things that that, that they're grieving often in silence. But I am reminded that for, for there is hope for them that, you know, what they try and do is give back to society in different ways. And that, you know, for, for them it's not all over. And many do recover. And you know, to a reasonable extent, I should say that some feel that they do get over it, but you can see in the voices and the faces and the stories that it's been a hard, hard road to get to that point if they have indeed overcome it. So this is not a small thing. This is not like, you know, sh I wanted it to be a, a doctor or I wanted to be a, you know, a a an astronaut and it didn't work. 0 (44m 54s): You know, you know, you get over that not having a child, i i is it's a form of grief. I don't think it ever truly leaves you. And that is something we need to be much, much, much more aware of. 2 (45m 5s): So it seems one of the, one of like the big I I'll say mistakes that young people are probably making is picking the wrong partner or like the sunken cost fallacy. So staying in a relationship that they know isn't right for them just because they've already done the time and they don't wanna start all over again. And it's like denying very important parts of yourself and like what you want for your future because you feel like you, you'll never find someone better or you're, you're not gonna find a better match. And I think it's how do you date and, and like try to find a Mate more Effectively. And honestly, and it's funny because you'll talk to some women and they feel like they can't have the conversation of do you want children on a date because it's too much too fast and you don't wanna spook the guy away. 2 (45m 54s): But there's plenty of men that do want children and they do wanna build families. And then if you're denying, like if you're lying about what you want, right? Like you want to be a mother and then you, you might spend a lot of time with the wrong man and like that time is really precious. So it's just a really good filtration process of like, is this person my person or not? And then to move on and continue trying to find your Mate instead of investing a lot of time into the wrong person. There was a young woman in your documentary, I think it's like towards the end of part one and it showed her husband and she was like saying how she wants, you know, her husband's this great guy and she loves him, but he's just not ready for kids. 2 (46m 35s): And it showed him and I was like, someone needs to tell her that is not the guy she's supposed to be with. And it, for me on the outside perspective, it just seemed so obvious that she had chosen poorly and for some reason you don't see it's like the last person to, to discover water as a fish. So like you're just in too deep. So how can we, how can we date more Effectively like you're a parent, I'm sure you've probably had these conversations with your kids or like you try to guide them in such a way to make the best choices for themselves. 0 (47m 5s): Yeah, I do, but I try to at least. But it's, I mean this is, this is a huge, huge problem and I can give you an example from about three hours ago I was having a conversation with a young Japanese woman, 32, and I've known her for a few years. I've known her boyfriend, who's a great guy for three years. They look like a great couple, but she's just told me that he has just told her he doesn't want kids and she's just devastated after three years because they had talked about this, but it was never conclusive. I think she was just misinterpreting a little bit of his doubt that not yet, not yet. But I, when I heard that, it didn't completely surprise me. I think we all need to ask ourselves this question honestly, particularly men, do you really want kids? 0 (47m 51s): And if you're dating someone as a man, you know, every monthly cycle, you know, a woman is losing an egg and we need to be asking ourselves, are we being fair to this person? If a woman has said she wants kids and you're with her longer than six months, certainly a year you are wasting her time and you may think you're having fun, but if she wants kids, she wants kids. And I've also seen situations where, you know, you, you have people who have never talked about this. I had one couple who went through a breakup after seven years, from 25 to 32. Never once had they talked about kids, the young woman had assumed that it was good for life and of course they want kids. 0 (48m 34s): And then he said, no, they don't want kids. And now she's single, now looking, he's 32 for another boyfriend, which is never particularly easy in today's world. Certainly it, you know, so she might be 34 before she meets someone. Let's say that that might be a, an outcome and then probably she might wanna get to know that person for a year or two or three. And there's 37. So men, the responsibilities on both here, I think women can be more honest than men and men don't quite think about it the same way. We have this belief that we can have children anytime, so there's no rush, which is a fallacy. Technically we can, but we're trying to find a partner who's able to have children. So we're, we're, you know, we're competing with our younger selves to date the same pool of women who are able to have children. 0 (49m 20s): So I've also, many men who've frankly turning 40 changes things, you know, they think suddenly they're ready, right? I, I'm trying to find what they're looking for at that stage, which might be a 30 year old woman to three kids with, well 30 year woman aren't gonna be dealing 40 year old men, you know, unless you're kind of on a certain, a-list in terms of income or, or or you know, you fame. So I hear a lot of stories and I'm asked to give advice, which is hard. So many stories. A another young woman last week, final one for now, she's dating someone who already was married, already had four kids, and she persuaded herself that, oh, that's okay, he's got four kids, I don't need kids. 0 (50m 3s): But now mid thirties, she's realizing, wait a minute, I do want kids, it's not enough that he's got kids and yet he's refusing the idea of more kids. And there are two, three years I believe into her relationship time lost. So we need not for second, third, third date maybe, but you know, earlier rather than later, there's no point wasting time for anyone here. 2 (50m 28s): See, I feel I, I don't know what I'm talking about because I have been with the same man for like 13 years, so I'm so far removed from current dating and what is a faux pa and what's acceptable. But I feel like if I were in the dating pool right now, it would be like, that would be one of the first things I would have asked if I didn't have children, especially at this age. It's like I would be aware of the time and how crucial that was. So it's like, like if you haven't figured yourself out enough to where you know if you want kids or not, or if that's triggering for you, then that just shows a lack of certain maturity that I would want in a partner anyways. It's not like, do you want them with me? Obviously you don't know that yet, but like, do you, is that something that you want for your future? 2 (51m 10s): I feel like I would go in deep fast and maybe that would backfire. I have no idea. 0 (51m 14s): I think, you know, frankly, we can help make that more the norm by cursing people that it's okay to have that conversation and don't be surprised if you're a man that that conversation's gonna come up and be ready for an answer. I think just up to, it goes back to what we were talking about earlier, this idea that women can have kids anytime they want. You know, why are you gonna talk about this when you're getting to know someone you know in, in your twenties? So I'm not so worried about this longer term 'cause I, I think as people become more aware of the reality of the Fertility window being much shorter than, than expected and how unplanned childlessness can, can is a reality for 80% of, of childish women. 0 (51m 57s): I I I do believe women will get a little bit feistier the right word in dating and, and then we'll be put in the spot to kind of think about this. And so yeah, we need to be encouraging people as much as possible early in the, the dating cycle to to, to talk about this. 2 (52m 15s): Did you see Pod generation yet? 0 (52m 18s): No, 2 (52m 19s): No. It's with Amelia Clark. It's supposed to be satire. We watched like half of it and I like the first half of it, I'm just like yelling at the TV the whole time and my husband's like, this is so annoying for multiple reasons, so let's put something else on. But it's supposed to be satire, but it, it feels eely possible for that to be the future. And it's like basically women stop having Babies and all they're doing are like these Pod babies. So it's like this egg and like the egg, like you, you watch the egg get fertilized on this screen, so you don't even have sex to get pregnant. So you're watching it all happen on this screen and then they take that zygote, put it into this egg, turns into the embryo, and then you can like put your hand and just like, watch the baby in this shell. 2 (53m 7s): And it's these women that are like, they have a tablet and they're feeding the baby on the tablet and they're checking and they're very like neurotic in it. And it like, it's supposed to be out of convenience that you have this egg so that you don't miss any work, right? You can have your little Pod egg and you can still be a high performer for your company. But what I'm seeing is that it's ends up being more work because you don't, you're not letting your body and nature just do what it does. Like I don't have to think to feed my baby and my belly, my body has the, this innate intelligence and is just doing it. I don't have to check through this like hollows screen to make sure that they're moving and wiggling. One of the questions in the movie was, how do I make sure my baby's not bored in the egg? 2 (53m 50s): They're like, well, we can't have any bored babies. So you have all of these lights and music that you can play so that they're, they're never bored. And I'm like, this is so insane 0 (53m 59s): And let me guess, you've gotta pay for the upgrade to get the lights of the music, you know? 2 (54m 3s): For sure. For sure. And it's like, how dystopian is this? And at the same time you'll see these really alarming articles about artificial wounds and event and getting to a place where you have Babies that don't need a body. And I'm like, that is so the wrong direction. That is so the wrong direction. Like progress for progress is not necessarily a good thing. 0 (54m 22s): Yeah. And that's so far into the future, you know, the, when you look at the risk to a baby being in any form of artificial womb and the cost, it's not gonna, I mean, I, I, I read, you know, maybe 50 years from now that technology might be on the horizon, so it's not gonna be a solution for any young people living today, frankly. So I think we can just discount that. Thank 2 (54m 48s): God. 0 (54m 48s): Someone said to me recently, and maybe this is a good time to mention a word that I don't use often enough. I don't think we've said it here, but, but love now. This was a young woman who hadn't been thinking about a child at all, but then met someone who she fell in love with and just suddenly she wanted a baby. It was just the most natural, surprising instinct before that. I, I don't think she necessarily would've said that was going to happen anytime soon. So sometimes we can't over process these things, you know, without, when you meet that right partner and someone, okay, we're both on the same page to create a child together. I, I think something changes that, you know, we, we can't overanalyze that we can't, you know, make part of some science project in some way. 0 (55m 33s): So maybe we've lost the idea, you know, the idea today, I mean, I was just thinking about this, if, you know, people are having children, the most common age to have a child these days in most developed countries is in your early thirties. That might be your second or third child. For some, it might be the first for others, but that's the most popular period where people are having a child. And you know, for those, having a first child in the early thirties, you've been dating for 10 plus years and you've probably had several partners. So the idea, you know, going back to someone who is early twenties now, that, okay, I don't want a child yet to my thirties. Well, you got 10 years of dealing to get through. Are you gonna fall in love with someone during that time? 0 (56m 13s): Probably. But are you gonna deny yourself being in love with something someone, the idea of actually creating a child together? Well, very probably because in today's world it's not the coolest thing to do. You've got your career and you've got your education. So why even let those desires come to the surface? And then you get into your thirties and maybe you're a little bit tired of love or maybe you've had breakups and it's just not the same anymore. So, you know, this is outside my expertise, but I can clearly see how we've become detached from the concept of wanting a child from simply being in love with someone, which, you know, should I think be one of the most, you know, important reasons for, for, for happen them. 0 (56m 55s): So yeah, when I hear about artificial wounds and technology and pos and whatever else, it's like, as you say, completely the wrong direction. 2 (57m 3s): I think it's a beautiful point. We try to over intellectualize a lot of things and things that go beyond critical thinking or figuring out, like it's, it resonates on like a, a different frequency and often that's love and it's inexplicable. And there, there was this article and I think it was like a New York, was it New York Post? I dunno, it was one of those tabloids and it had like this baby make in a face and it said, R is having a baby worth it. And I'm like, well, if you're asking that, you're probably not in a position to become a parent because it's not something that you take, it's, it's like contribution and it's love and it's giving. And to like see it as a, like a justifiable means to an end was just so backwards to me. 2 (57m 49s): And I think we do that a lot. It's like, is this thing justified? Is it worth it? And it's like some things are worth doing simply because of love. 0 (57m 57s): And, and you know, I I I may forgive the journalist who wrote that because the world we live in, we hear messages like this where, you know, I've seen the cost of a child being quantified. Yeah, I've, I've had people recite that to me. You know, how do we ever get to a point of costing out a child? You know, it's, it's like, oh, if it was just, you know, a few hundred dollars less expensive, I might consider it, you know, a couple of thousand less, less. And I definitely do it. It's crazy to think this way. That's not what family life love i i is about, but it's back to, to these, well, these voices out there who simply for whatever agenda they have, are trying to persuade people to have fewer children or no children. 0 (58m 39s): And it might be the environment, it might be some form of, you know, feminism that they think, oh, this is empowerment, but they're not being direct with their argument. They're not being honest with anyone. They're trying to fool people. And one of the ways is by having a headline like that, that that children are only a commodity and the cost is too high. I mean, it's, it's, it's absurd that we've been pulled into that way of thinking, well, 2 (59m 1s): I highly recommend everyone check out your documentary, the, at least the first part that's available. It was really incredible. Do you have plans on where you're gonna distribute the second, third part and like a timeline for that? 0 (59m 13s): I'm quite excited because being in here in, in Japan only Japan, the, the major broadcaster here is airing a one hour special about it, and then it's going to cinema release in spring next year here. I'm not sure that's gonna happen everywhere. We are in conversations in a number of different countries, no one in the US yet. So if there is a distributor out there, what if said, however, is that part of the documentary will be free for educators forever. I'm not gonna sell, sell the rights to Netflix and, you know, have them take control and distribute it where they want, when they want, or frankly bury it if they want. So any educator anywhere in the world will have access to up to one hour version of this to show in their classrooms. 0 (59m 54s): That's why I did this entire project for, so that younger people can become more informed. So, you know, anyone can contact me with any thoughts on that regard, but, but otherwise, you know, part one is free and our website, birth cap.org will have more information in terms of what's happening with the other two parts. 2 (1h 0m 13s): Incredible. Is there anything else you'd like to plug? Where can people follow you? How can they support you and keep up with you? This is like your time to shamelessly plug away and then we'll make sure we link everything below as well. 0 (1h 0m 25s): Yeah, and everything I'm doing at the moment really is, you know, it's a social impact organization. The documentary is nonprofits. So I I I do appreciate support you, you can make donations there, but that's not what it's about. On birth gap dot org there's quite a community, several thousand people are on there posting comments and updating news stories from around the world and debating that. Many people might find that interesting. There's a lot of information on there. I'm, I'm on, well it's not Twitter anymore, it's X, isn't it? So you can find me Stephen Stephen Shaw. S-T-E-P-H-E-N-J. Sure, yeah. Contact me there. And if you wanna contact me personally on the birth gap dot org website, you can direct message me. I try to respond to everybody there. 2 (1h 1m 4s): Well, wonderful. I think your work is so impactful. I'm so glad you're doing it. Everyone, please go check out that documentary and thank you so much for being here. 0 (1h 1m 13s): Thank you Candace, I enjoyed it. 2 (1h 1m 15s): And that's it for this week's episode of Chatting with Candace. Before you take off, leave that five star review. If you did it and it's been a while, you can do it multiple times. Make sure you hit that like, and subscribe and support the podcast. Please check out the sponsors, affiliates, and the buy me a coffee link below. I'll see you next week. Bye everybody.