Why Population Collapse is Closer Than You Think - Stephen J. Shaw - #996

**Chris Williamson** (0:00)
Nearly three years ago, since we last spoke, I want to start afresh. What is the big question that you're tackling?

**Stephen J. Shaw** (0:11)
The reason for global birthrate decline. It's what's kept me awake for nine years and continues to do so. The difference now is I feel I know the answer. It's the answer that keeps me awake.
That's why I came to Austin after nearly three years to share what it is that the data is revealing. Frankly, I feel a sense of responsibility. I feel a sense of awareness of what has to happen to societies for us to have a chance of combating this. Just a reminder, if I can, Chris, no nation history has been known to recover from long-term low birth rates. We don't have an example. Sometimes it's felt over these years whilst, can I just say when we last talked, almost no one was talking about low birth rates. I think frankly, the conversations we had then were part of a catalyst. In fact, I know they were because people tell me that.

**Chris Williamson** (1:20)
That was basically the launch of BirthGap, the first documentary you did. I was pretty much the first pod that you've done.

**Stephen J. Shaw** (1:26)
My gosh. At that time, you embarrassed me in your introduction. You mentioned that I had only 5,000 views. I thought, this is going to go badly. Obviously, it got up to close to a million. I think I had 13 followers on X at the time. Really, it was a different world for me then. But more to the point, if you take the one-liner from that podcast, that I think is quoted more often than anything else, we covered a lot, but now this is important. At most, people forget that, at most a woman turning 30 without a child has a 50-50% chance of ever becoming a mother.
My gosh, I know that's hit a lot of people. Young people, especially young women, who are frankly shocked that by age 30, but it's at most 30 I'll come back to that a little bit later if I can. But at that time, I think that resonated with a lot of people thinking, well, why don't we know this? Why is it that we are educating our young people? It's great. Telling them to get established on the career ladder, great. But we're completely silent on the fact that by the way, you very well might run out of time if you want a child. And if I could just say, one of the most moving moments to me in the past week was a dear Charlie Kirk, just a video of the first one I saw after the tragedy popping up in my feed. And there was Charlie Kirk repeating that exact fact to someone in a debate at the university, that a woman turning 30 without a child isn't 50-50 percent. I don't know if you watched the documentary, but I know that fact got out there. And so that was important. You and I have kept in touch since then. And I know a year ago I sent you a message or two that, okay, I think I found something, and you were curious, but I wasn't ready. And today I'm ready to share a little bit more on what it is that's causing this.

**Chris Williamson** (3:25)
It's a big reveal. Yeah, look, I got interested in this conversation around about the time that we spoke, and that really was kind of like a cognitive hammer blow, I think, the conversation that we had. It is very stark, and since then, it's been something that I've really struggled to get my mind off. I'm not an ardent campaigner for tons of stuff. You know, climate change, I think, is a big deal, but it's not something that I'm sort of furiously fighting for. AGI, bioweapons, engineered pandemics, natural pandemics, nuclear risk, all existential risks I got into for a good while.
I'm worried, but I'm not actively campaigning for. And population decline is the strangest kind of risk. Not a true existential risk, permanent, unrecoverable collapse, but it's really not good because it's the sort of thing that creeps up on us year after year. There's no smoke in the sky. There's no increasing wildfires. It's just this slow and then increasingly rapid decline. And we've both taken a good bit of stick over the last couple of years basically for that one conversation, which is strange for me because if I am fucking patient zero for like the horrible get women out of the boardroom and back into the kitchen person, I really think that that shows how much work needs to be done in order to be able to get this conversation to move forward and to get people to understand the genuine, compassionate, progressive justifications for why this is not a good thing individually, relationally, culturally, economically, socially, politically. Every different thing that you care about, whether you're on left or right, pretty much gets impacted by a reduction in the population size.